The EU could be scanning your chats by October 2025

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Status of the proposal and political process

  • The article overstates certainty: October 2025 is described as a key deliberation point, not a firm start date.
  • The scheme (“Chat Control”) has returned multiple times and been narrowly blocked by a minority of member states; it’s not a one-off Danish idea.
  • Germany’s position is seen as pivotal; past German governments helped block it, but the new government’s stance is unclear.
  • Some argue “nothing will come of it” because of likely court challenges and German resistance; others insist “it only needs to pass once” and will keep coming back until it does.

Democracy, EU institutions, and legitimacy

  • Long subthread debates whether the Commission is “unelected” and how democratic the EU really is.
  • One side: commissioners are indirectly appointed by elected governments and constrained by Parliament and courts.
  • Other side: Parliament cannot initiate laws, the Commission is shaped by opaque backroom deals, and EU-level decision-makers are weakly accountable to voters.
  • Several note that national elections, coalitions, and party politics (e.g., in Poland, Denmark, Germany) strongly shape the EU line on surveillance.

Privacy, surveillance, and authoritarian drift

  • Many see repeated attempts as evidence of an authoritarian trend in Europe, driven by fear of extremism, immigration, and unrest.
  • Concerns include chilling effects on speech, self‑censorship, and asymmetry: ordinary citizens are monitored while politicians delete or hide their own messages.
  • Some compare the EU unfavorably to the US or UK; others argue the US is already worse on surveillance and abuses.

Child protection rationale and CSAM scanning

  • Politicians and law enforcement are reported to frame scanning as necessary to combat CSAM and grooming.
  • Discussion distinguishes existing cloud CSAM scanning (hash matching of known material) from client‑side scanning and mandated backdoors.
  • One view: CSAM hash systems are narrowly scoped, heavily procedurally controlled, and already widely used.
  • Counterview: once the infrastructure exists, the hash list can silently expand (copyright, dissent, “extremism”), and independent oversight is effectively impossible.

Effectiveness, proportionality, and unintended use

  • Many argue serious criminals will simply move to “real” encryption, steganography, side‑channels, or offline methods.
  • Skeptics see the real targets as “ordinary people” and political dissent, not hardened criminals.
  • Others note law enforcement resource limits: more data won’t equal more prevention, but will enable more abuse of power.

Circumvention and alternative technologies

  • Participants discuss Signal, Matrix, XMPP, SimpleX, email-based chat, MQTT/ntfy/Gotify, SSH + talk, and mesh/LoRa systems (Meshtastic, Reticulum) as potential workarounds.
  • There’s pessimism that future laws could criminalize strong encryption or OSS tools themselves, especially for EU-based developers.

Activism, media, and “crying wolf”

  • Some fear overexposure breeds numbness (“crying wolf”); others say recurring alarm is exactly why past attempts failed.
  • Grassroots pressure, technical education (“backdoored encryption is no encryption”), and court challenges (ECJ, ECHR) are seen as the main defenses.