EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

Mass surveillance vs. crime prevention

• Many argue Chat Control is primarily mass surveillance, not a serious tool to catch criminals.
• Others say the intent is crime-fighting, but the effect is disproportionate: scanning everyone to find a tiny fraction of offenders.
• Statistical arguments highlight that, even with optimistic assumptions, false positives would massively outnumber true positives, overwhelming police and harming innocents.

False positives, classifiers, and real-world harm

• Some note you can tune detection systems to reduce false positives, but others counter that real deployments consistently err on the side of over-reporting.
• Examples are cited where automated CSAM detection flagged benign family or medical photos, nearly resulting in prosecutions.

From targeted wiretaps to permanent mass scanning

• Critics stress that traditional wiretaps required probable cause, court orders, were labor-intensive, and not retroactive.
• Chat Control is framed as “wiretapping everyone all the time,” automated, proactive, and capable of creating long-lived records.
• Breaking or bypassing end-to-end encryption is seen as introducing major security and economic risks.

Authoritarian drift and historical context

• German history (Third Reich, Stasi) is invoked as a warning; some express disbelief Germany is not leading opposition.
• Others argue that such powers will inevitably be used on everyone, and can easily be repurposed for political repression or “wrongthink.”

EU law, constitutions, and fundamental rights

• Debate over whether EU law can override national constitutions and privacy guarantees is intense and unresolved in the thread.
• The EU Charter’s privacy rights are noted as having broad law-enforcement carve‑outs, prompting doubts about their real protective value.

Democracy, accountability, and repeated pushes

• Many see repeated attempts to pass similar measures as “p‑hacking democracy” — keep trying until it passes.
• Others respond that politicians are elected and this is therefore formally democratic; if people cared, they’d vote differently.
• There’s frustration with the European Commission’s agenda-setting role and the difficulty of “voting out” key actors.

Country roles and precedents

• Denmark is repeatedly mentioned as a strong proponent; Germany’s wavering is seen as decisive for the Council blocking minority.
• The UK’s Online Safety Act is cited as a functional analogue: scanning is already law there, only paused as “not yet technically feasible.”

Proposal details and double standards

• A proposed exemption for state, military, and law‑enforcement accounts is viewed as a red flag: if the system is so safe, why exclude those most sensitive users?
• This is taken as evidence of both insecurity (new attack surface) and expectation of false positives that would be intolerable for officials.
• Limited 6‑month retention of flagged material is still seen as a dangerous “paper trail,” especially in future political turmoil.

Effectiveness and easy circumvention

• Many point out that serious criminals can trivially evade scanning (alternative apps, custom tools, extra encryption layers, encrypted archives).
• The likely outcome, in this view: ordinary citizens are surveilled; sophisticated offenders move elsewhere.

Broader surveillance‑state pessimism and EU skepticism

• Some believe the surveillance state is now inevitable, driven by both governments and large tech platforms.
• The controversy fuels rising Euroscepticism and even calls for exiting the EU, though others counter that without the EU, such laws might spread even faster at national level.