Germany Blocks EU Chat Control Proposal, Noting That Mass Surveillance Of Encrypted Messages Must Not Be Allowed

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the thank-you-germany dept

Just days after we wrote about the EU’s renewed push for chat control, Germany has delivered a very important “no” vote. During discussions with EU countries last Wednesday, Germany’s opposition was decisive enough to kill the proposal’s momentum and remove it from this week’s agenda for EU justice ministers.

But it wasn’t just a procedural objection—Germany’s Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig delivered a statement that drew a very clear and very important line regarding encryption:

“Private communication must never be under general suspicion,” she said, adding that “the state must also not force messengers to scan messages en-masse for suspicious content before sending them.”

This is exactly the kind of clear-eyed recognition of fundamental rights that’s been missing from much of the chat control debate. Hubig didn’t mince words about the broader principle at stake, calling chat control something that “must be a taboo in a state governed by the rule of law.”

The proposal that Germany torpedoed would have required messaging services like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal to scan messages and check for images, videos, and URLs that might contain child abuse content—including scanning through end-to-end encrypted communications.

Basically: government mandated spyware. You can understand why a country like Germany, with its history, might be quick to push back on such a thing.

The Netherlands joined Germany in opposition, so it wasn’t just Germany standing up on its own:

The Dutch government said in a letter to parliament late September that the current proposal failed to address its concerns about the protection of fundamental rights at stake, “particularly in the areas of privacy and the confidentiality of correspondence and telecommunications, and the security of the digital domain.”

What’s encouraging here isn’t just that the proposal failed—it’s how it failed. Rather than getting bogged down in technical debates about implementation details or carved-out exceptions, Germany and other opponents focused on the core principle: mass surveillance of private communications is incompatible with fundamental rights, full stop.

This stands in sharp contrast to the usual policy dance where politicians try to thread impossible needles, claiming they can somehow protect both privacy and enable mass scanning. Germany’s position recognizes what anyone with any knowledge of how encryption works has been saying for years: you can’t have secure communications and government backdoors at the same time.

Hopefully, that means countries will continue to take a hard line against chat control and other similar proposals that attack encryption.

The proposal isn’t dead—Denmark could put forward a revised version, and supporters like Bulgaria, France, Hungary and Ireland haven’t given up (it’s kind of amazing how bad France tends to be on this stuff). But Germany’s principled stance, backed actually understanding what this would mean for privacy, makes it much harder for chat control advocates to claim they’re just fine-tuning the details.

Germany’s opposition sends a clear message: some lines shouldn’t be crossed, even with good intentions. Here’s hoping other EU countries are paying attention.

Filed Under: chat control, denmark, encryption, eu, germany, netherlands, privacy