European Parliament President Roberta Metsola is attempting an unprecedented power play to resurrect the Chat Control 1.0 mass scanning regulation, ignoring the fact that the Parliament clearly rejected it in March and called on the Commission to withdraw the proposal. A leaked schedule confirms the Council meets this Friday to adopt a first-reading position, hoping to force the expired regime back into law without a proper democratic vote.
Meanwhile, the final trilogue negotiations on the permanent Chat Control 2.0 regulation (2022/0155) are set for Monday, June 29. The Parliament is rushing a new mandate on detection and scanning Monday morning, then heading straight into closed-door talks with the Council later that day. Civil liberties activist Dr. Patrick Breyer calls this a “double-attack” on secure messaging — and the technical community should pay close attention, because the concessions on the table would break encrypted communications for 450 million Europeans.
Metsola’s Power Play: Bypassing Democracy to Revive an Expired Scanning Regime
The original Chat Control 1.0 regulation was a temporary mass scanning mandate that expired after the Parliament voted it down in its first reading. Rather than respecting that clear democratic rejection, Metsola is now trying to ram it through via a backroom Council agreement. Her own EPP group voted against the proposal, yet she’s engineering a path to override the Parliament’s will. The Council’s own legal service reiterated earlier this month that such moves violate the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and prior EU Court of Justice rulings.
This isn't a fringe concern. Breyer notes that “voluntary” mass scanning under the new text could effectively become mandatory as an enforceable “risk mitigation” measure — meaning every messaging provider would be pressured to scan all private content. For technical readers: that means client-side scanning, broken end-to-end encryption, or both.
Monday’s Trilogue: The Permanent Threat to Encryption and Anonymous Communication
Monday’s trilogue on Chat Control 2.0 goes far beyond the expired regime. Three specific concessions are reportedly in play that would fundamentally alter how secure messaging works in Europe.
First, warrantless detection orders — not effectively targeted at criminal suspects and not requiring a prior court order — could be mandated. Second, “voluntary” mass scanning could be resurrected, making algorithmic content analysis the default for all private messages. Third, mandatory age verification for hosting and communications services could be agreed, effectively ending the right to communicate anonymously. Any one of these would be a major erosion of privacy; together they represent a direct attack on the technical foundation of secure, anonymous communication.
Civil society has relaunched fightchatcontrol.eu to target both member states and Parliament negotiators with a concrete email campaign. The tool provides an email template summarizing the legal and technical flaws — highlighting that genuine child protection is possible without destroying privacy, using targeted investigations, security-by-design, and proactive deletion of material on the darknet rather than error-prone scanning algorithms that criminalize innocent family photos.
If these concessions pass, every encrypted message in Europe becomes subject to algorithmic scanning without judicial oversight — a technical and legal precedent that will be impossible to unwind.
Source: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors
Domain: patrick-breyer.de
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