More from the same article if anyone is interested:
The main argument of the opposition is the principle that the state should not monitor citizens who are not suspected of committing a crime.
“In Poland, we have had bad experiences when it comes to violating people’s private correspondence. The proposal does not provide 100% protection against general scanning being misused for other reasons,” said Poland’s then Minister of Justice Tomasz Siemoniak in December last year, when ministers took a position on an earlier bill, similar to the one now on the table.
A common objection is that it will be a slippery slope. If the state is allowed to scan for child pornography, it could later be extended to other areas.
"Suppose there is a new, severe terrorist attack. Wouldn’t it then be downright unethical not to scan for discussions related to terrorism? says Karl Emil Nikka, an IT security consultant and opinion leader against the EU law.
The sceptical EU governments argue not only on principle but also pragmatically.
Time and again, the Council of Ministers’ own lawyers have sounded the alarm: the European Court of Justice has already ruled that general scanning, without suspicion of crime, constitutes illegal mass surveillance.
‘Therefore, we do not believe that this will stand up in court,’ said the legal service during a hearing on the law this summer, as reported in Swedish diplomatic correspondence.
Today, popular messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal are fully end-to-end encrypted. This means that only the sender and recipient can read the message, not the intermediary, i.e. the company behind the service.
Under the Danish chat control proposal, companies must build in a backdoor so that messages can be scanned before they are encrypted.
Critics believe that this would introduce a risk that does not currently exist: that chats could be hacked and countries or criminal groups could spy on defence or industry.
Karl Emil Nikka believes that EU politicians are naive if they think they can demand that American and Chinese companies build in backdoors but then only scan the content that the EU has decided on.
There are still many obstacles before the scanning of digital chats in the EU becomes a reality.
Even if the EU countries finally agree, it will still only be their negotiating position in upcoming talks with the European Parliament. The Parliament’s position has been clear for a long time, and it has completely removed the requirements for general scanning and added explicit protection for encrypted services.
If the Council of Ministers nevertheless manages to get the European Parliament on its side and pass a final law, it will likely face a challenge in the European Court of Justice.
It therefore looks as if the Swedish government and a dozen other governments in the EU are fighting a virtually impossible battle. Why are they so stubborn?
‘One of the reasons they continue to push this proposal is that it slowly but surely promotes acceptance of mass surveillance,’ believes Karl Emil Nikka.
