Chat Control and the bureaucratic war of attrition
Under the guise of child safety, the EU Council wages a bureaucratic war of attrition to force through mass surveillance and break end-to-end encryption.
By Ida Vann
Sparked by EU Council forces Chat Control via fast-track · discussion
In the final April plenary session, just as MEPs were packing their bags and looking toward the election recess, the EU Parliament quietly pushed through a piece of legislation under the guise of an end-of-term urgency. I have spent the last few mornings drinking far too much coffee while scrolling through the European Parliament's official communications, attempting to map the exact procedural pathway they used to bypass standard debate. While the official press releases framed this specific legislative extension as a heroic necessity to prevent a legal vacuum, the Council is actually executing a calculated, bureaucratic war of attrition, weaponizing our collective exhaustion by repeatedly rebranding and fast-tracking legislation before recesses until we simply give up.
We can universally agree that keeping children safe online is a non-negotiable imperative, and tackling the proliferation of child sexual abuse material requires serious, dedicated coordination among platforms and law enforcement. The core desire to protect the vulnerable is entirely unassailable. But the EU Council is cynically exploiting that unassailable premise to launder a dystopian surveillance apparatus. Under the proposed rules, every private message, photo, and file you send would be algorithmically searched by a black box before it ever leaves your phone. It is a wholesale breaking of end-to-end encryption.
They are counting on us to log off, give up, and let the sheer bureaucratic boredom of 'upload moderation' win out over our fundamental rights to privacy. We can prove them wrong. Go to fightchatcontrol.eu. Bother your MEPs. Because caring isn't naive, and being exhausted isn't an excuse to surrender the internet.