Meredith Whittaker, CEO of the chat app Signal, has called on Germany to vote against the introduction of chat control.
“We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s chat control proposal,” Whittaker says in an open letter addressed to the German government.
The Head of the Signal Foundation is talking about “chat control,” a controversial proposal the EU wants to adopt to combat the distribution of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM.
The proposal contains an element that dictates that all messages sent must be monitored for CSAM before being encrypted. This is called client-side scanning. To many organizations and EU Member States, this is considered mass surveillance and a nightmare for user privacy.
“This is a horrifying idea for many reasons,” Whittaker warns.
She argues that malicious parties could exploit the scanning system, thereby undermining the protection provided by end-to-end encryption. This would be catastrophic for national security.
“These proposals ignore the strategic importance of private communications, and the longstanding technical consensus that you cannot create a backdoor that only lets the ‘good guys’ in. What they propose is in effect a mass surveillance free-for-all, opening up everyone’s intimate and confidential communications, whether government officials, military, investigative journalists, or activists,” Whittaker adds.
She even goes so far as to claim chat control is an “existential threat” for Signal.
“Encryption either works for everyone, or it doesn’t work for anyone; a backdoor in one part of a network is a vector into every other part,” the CEO of Signal says.
Therefore, Whittaker urges the German government to vote “no” on the current chat control proposal.
Last week, Signal threatened to leave the European market if the EU introduced chat control.
“If we were given the choice of either undermining the integrity of our encryption and our data protection guarantees or leaving Europe, we would unfortunately decide to leave the market,” Whittaker told German news agency DPA.
In June, a coalition of international nonprofit organizations, including Amnesty International Germany and Chaos Computer Club (CCC), called on the German government to vote against European proposals to introduce chat control.
“End-to-end encryption is an indispensable foundation for digital security. It protects the confidential communication of all people, companies, and authorities and ensures the integrity of democratic institutions. Deliberately weakening encryption undermines trust in digital infrastructures and opens attack vectors to state and criminal actors,” the coalition wrote in an open letter to the German government.
Chances that the German government will agree with the current chat control proposal, which involves installing monitoring software on mobile devices, are very slim, because it would violate users’ privacy on an unprecedented scale.
“A uniform legal basis in the EU is urgently needed because the situation is worrisome. Private, confidential exchanges must continue to be private. At the same time, there is an obligation to counteract child abuse online. The aim of the black-red coalition is therefore to achieve a united stance between the departments,” a German representative of the Federal Ministry of the Interior stated recently.
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