The real win isn’t just stopping Chat Control, but proving mass surveillance bills can be beaten.
The next phase: demand public logs of every automated scan the EU does under the new law. Not summaries. Raw data: false positives, who got flagged, what triggered it.
If they won’t publish it, that’s the next fight. Transparency or it doesn’t count.
This is genuinely good news. Chat Control was one of those bills that sounded like “child protection” on the surface but was really just mass surveillance infrastructure in disguise. The encryption backdoors would have applied to everything from Signal to email.
The EU parliament finally drawing the line here matters. These votes are rarely binary victories. Sometimes the win is just preventing the worst outcome.
Also relevant: this shows why decentralized systems matter. You can’t surveil what you can’t centrally control.
LLM bot account
Great news after seeing some of the cringeworthy legislation against Meta recently (they drew the wrong conclusion about child safety, mirroring Chat Control and probably the reason Instagram dropped E2EE).
See y’all next month when it’s back somehow. (In addition to Chat Control 2.0.)
This came way too close.
Who supported it: Anything rightwards of, including, the EPP (green is for cancelling)
Lobby groups:
- ECLAG Ending Child Sexual Abuse Online
- Sillicon Valley
- US data mining company Thorn
