EU Aims to Counter CSAM By Monitoring Private Communications

The announcement came after Euractiv.com released a report announcing that working drafts of the rule were leaked to the news outlet. As of May 12, the European Commission — the European Union’s (EU) chief executive body — announced that it has put forth new legislation aimed at countering the endemic spread of CSAM on the web in a way that invades illegal and legal private communications overtly and in the open. 

“The Commission is proposing new EU legislation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse online,” notes a press release from the Commission. “The proposed rules will oblige providers to detect, report and remove child sexual abuse material on their services. Providers will need to assess and mitigate the risk of misuse of their services and the measures taken must be proportionate to that risk and subject to robust conditions and safeguards.”

Mike Masnick wrote at TechDirt.com that the proposed bill is essentially the EU’s version of the EARN IT Act — a controversial proposal in the United States Senate that encourages government authorities to authorize and mandate a private communication monitoring regime under the guise of child protection and safety. 

The EARN IT Act has staunch opposition across the political spectrum. The conservative libertarian group Americans for Prosperity partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union to issue a joint statement and muster a coalition of other civil society groups to speak out against the EARN IT Act and present the measure for what it is: an attempt to limit civil liberties by conflating public safety mantras with fear mongering. YNOT has reported extensively on the EARN IT Act, and the adult entertainment industry’s opposition to it. 

The measure before the EU is quite invasive. 

“The commission’s new demands would require regular plain-text access to users’ private messages, from email to texting to social media,” notes Joe Mullin, a senior policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in response to the EU proposal. 

“The new proposal is overbroad, not proportionate, and hurts everyone’s privacy and safety,” Mullin adds. “By damaging encryption, it could actually make the problem of child safety worse, not better, for some minors. Abused minors, as much as anyone, need private channels to report what is happening to them. The scanning requirements are subject to safeguards, but they aren’t strong enough to prevent the privacy-intrusive actions that platforms will be required to undertake.”

Following the Euractiv.com leak, well-known cryptographer Matthew Green tweeted that the proposed EU bill is “the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen.” Green went on to explain that the so-called detection of CSAM is actually more like the detection of what the European Commission views as “grooming.”