Thread by @AnitaPosch

1/ Chatcontrol: Eu Parliament Approves Mass Surveillance of Private Communications patrick-breyer.de/en/chatcontrol…

2/ On July 6th, the European Parliament approved the ePrivacy Derogation, allowing providers of e-mail and messaging services to automatically search all personal messages of each citizen for presumed suspect content and report suspected cases to the police.

3/ German Pirate Party Member of the European Parliament Patrick Breyer, shadow rapporteur on the legislative proposal, comments on his website: “The adoption of the first ever EU regulation on mass surveillance is a sad day for all those who rely on free and confidential…

4/ …communications and advice, including abuse victims and press sources. The regulation deals a death blow to the confidentiality of digital correspondence.

5/ It is a general breach of the dam to permit indiscriminate surveillance of private spaces by corporations — by this totalitarian logic, our post, our smartphones or our bedrooms could also be generally monitored.

6/ Unleashing such denunciation machines on us is ineffective, illegal and irresponsible.

Indiscriminate searches will not protect children and even endanger them by exposing their private photos to unknown persons, and by criminalising children themselves.

7/ Already overburdened investigators are kept busy with having to sort out thousands of criminally irrelevant messages. The victims of such a terrible crime as child sexual abuse deserve measures that prevent abuse in the first place.

8/ The right approach would be, for example, to intensify undercover investigations into child porn rings and reduce of the years-long processing backlogs in searches and evaluations of seized data.“

9/ In today’s vote, 537 Members of the European Parliament approved Chatcontrol, with 133 voting against and 24 abstentions.

10/ According to police data, in the vast majority of cases, innocent citizens come under suspicion of having committed an offence due to unreliable processes.

11/ In a recent representative poll, 72% of EU citizens opposed general monitoring of their messages While providers will initially have a choice to search or not to search communications, follow-up legislation, expected in autumn, is to oblige all communications…

12/ …service providers to indiscriminate screening.

Furthermore the European Commission has already announced a follow-up regulation to make chat control mandatory for all email and messaging providers.

13/ Previously secure end-to-end encrypted messenger services such as Whatsapp or Signal would be forced to install a backdoor.

14/ What a terrible decision! I’m appalled by the fact that so many politicians - representing the people - are in favor of mass-surveillance. These Stasi and Nazi methods are already in place in China. Now they are back in Germany, Austria and in the EU.

15/ Backdoors in messenger services equals to an investigator standing next to you while you’re talking with friends and family. This abhorrent idea is coming into reality in our digital life.

16/ We need to build, use and preserve solutions like #Mastodon, @Sphinx_chat and #Bitcoin, decentralized tools for free speech that cannot be taken down.

17/ In last weeks newsletter I mentioned Adam Back explaining why it’s a terrible idea to have a back-door in Bitcoin and other cryptographic software.

https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/1410218541324849154?s=20

18/ Enjoyed this tweet storm?

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