According to the latest draft text of the controversial EU Child Sexual Abuse Regulation proposal leaked by the French news organisation Contexte, EU interior ministers want to exempt professional accounts of staff of intelligence agencies, police and military from the envisaged scanning of chats and messages (Article 1 (2a)). The regulation should also not apply to ‘confidential information’ such as professional secrets (Article 1 (2b)). The EU governments reject the idea that the new EU Child Protection Centre should support them in the prevention of child sexual abuse and develop best practices for prevention initiatives (Article 43(8)), writes Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer.
I already commented this on another post about chat control but I still stand by what I said before so imma be a dick and put the original comment here as well:
Imagine there’s one phone type with one security level. And now they introduce a second phone. It has less security. Now everyone has to switch to the weaker phone.
Soooo, now who gets the stronger phones? Government employees? The military? Politicians? Agencies?
The less the strong phones you give out, the more authoritarian the measure. But the more the strong phones you give out, the higher the chance of misuse or mishandling. You will now have a black market for secure phones, giving them out to criminals. You will now have people with strong phones having a higher right of privacy, giving them more protection against the state itself.
Now let’s add more factors. Someone loses their stronger phone. We now have a potentially untraceable strong phone. The government is losing control over those. Now you have 5 different tiers of secure phones. But people are people and the more complicated, the more things can go wrong. Now let’s add in slightly more authoritarian states like Hungary. There’s a good chance they will instantly start spying on journalists. Or give opposition parties the weaker phones by accident.
Now add in foreign agencies. China’s digital government agencies are very efficient. Imagine they get the keys to the weaker phones. Great, now China can effectively monitor 99% of the EU. And now even if an EU member has a strong phone, they just listen in his wife’s phone, and they get the information anyway. Now what about if a spy from North Korea gets the keys and starts finding bank information on the stronger phones? They now have new super annoying ways of stealing billions of dollars from the EU and covertly as well if they do it right.
As you can see, making some people’s security weaker on purpose is a lose lose game. It never works. There’s way too many cooks in the kitchen in the EU for this kind of stuff to stay in line, and there WILL be misuse, one way or the other.