It is legislation that, if approved and with the excuse of preventing and combating sexual abuse of minors, “would end the secrecy of communications in the European Union.” And our country plays a prominent role in this proposal, “since it is proposed to approve this law during the Spanish presidency of the EU,” say the detractors of the initiative.
Few European-level regulations have raised as much dust as the one caused by this initiative, which proposes controlling audio, written, photo and video messages exchanged in messaging applications and spread through the Internet. The excuse for that data monitoring? Hunt pedophiles “online” when they exchange that material.
The speaker of the project, Francisco Javier Zarzalejos (PPE), with whom the socialists have aligned themselves in this case, accuses the project’s detractors of distorting its meaning. And he insists, like the Interior Commissioner, Ylva Johanson, that we are not talking about privacy here, but about children’s rights.
And when the issue of encrypted messaging (Whatsapp or Telegram) is addressed, the promoters of the initiative emphasize that the scanning of the device would always be selective under a court order or a national authority. The intention is, with these channels, to use technology that is as least intrusive as possible to privacy.
On this issue, the Government of Spain has aligned itself with conservative countries in terms of civil liberties, such as Hungary or Italy. At the opposite pole are countries like Germany or the Netherlands.
And it is surprising, as published by the Wire portal that had access to a leak of the position of the 20 countries that make up the European Union with this proposal, that the majority do not hide being in favor of the total decryption of the content of encrypted channels. From a police point of view – this is not lost on anyone – this transparency would be of great help.
Nobody disputes the intentions, but there are many who question the forms. And even more so when combating and preventing sexual abuse of minors “only appears in the header of the proposal,” says Simona Levi, founder of Xnet and member of the Stop Chat Control coalition (there are 16 Spanish companies and organizations, joined by others dozens from the rest of Europe) all opposed to that regulation.
“If you read the proposal, the conclusion is clear: this is not about protecting minors, nor about ‘hunting’ pedophiles; The proposal is hidden behind that laudable fight to achieve total control of communications between citizens in messaging channels,” Levi denounces.
What is proposed, they repeat from Stop Chat Control, is the same as if it were proposed to eliminate roads to put an end to traffic deaths or to put cameras in all homes to discover the perpetrators of sexist violence.
Levi considers that trying to fight against the sexual abuse of minors only from the field of dissemination, exchange and storage, without worrying about how this material is produced or allocating resources to education and prevention, is clearly going, with a law, against the more democratic internet; an excuse to monopolize that world by the big actors who control this universe.
Stop Chat Control starts from a basic premise in its campaign against this rule: “Having a private conversation is a basic human right.” This also goes for the internet. And that breaks with the proposed law, as the rule “obliges all hosting services and interpersonal communications providers to scan all content and then decide what to hand over to law enforcement.”
What will happen if this becomes a European norm? “Well, there will be a real avalanche of false alarms,” Levi responds, which the promoters of the project deny, trusting that the system will be able to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Levi does not see it so clearly and gives an example: “a father who sends, for example, photos of his children in the bathtub to the mother will be marked by the system as a child abuser,” warns the founder of Xnet.
Or in other words, if the EU gives the green light to this law, “personal photos and intimate conversations could be collected and stored, which is an unprecedented violation of privacy,” denounces the Stop Chat Control coalition.
And he adds: “all this information will remain in the hands of private companies and the EU, with the risk that this material will be exposed if there is a leak or a computer attack.” those contrary to the norm warn.
Who would benefit the most from a law as global as this? Simona Levi is clear: “the large companies that will create or have already developed these control programs with artificial intelligence.”
And there are many defenders of freedom in the cyber universe who denounce the “modus operandi” of these firms: “First they make an effort to denounce and warn of the serious problem of the behavior of pedophiles ‘online’ and when everyone worry about that, they present themselves as the saviors with technical solutions to the problem.”