If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Europe’s governments lost a fight over surveillance three months ago, and now they want a rematch on their own terms. EU ambassadors agreed on Friday to advance a temporary extension of the framework that lets platforms like WhatsApp and Messenger scan users’ private communications. They say it’s all about stopping child sexual abuse material, reviving a regime the European Parliament voted to bury in March. The proposal comes from the Cypriot presidency of the Council, and pushing it forward would be unprecedented because Parliament has already rejected the Commission’s plan and would normally have the final word. In a note circulated this week, the Cypriot presidency invited member states to “carefully consider adopting a first reading position by the Council, even if this would be without precedent in the present circumstances where the European Parliament has rejected the Commission’s proposal.” When the question reached the full chamber, 311 lawmakers voted against prolonging the derogation, and the legal basis for voluntary scanning lapsed in April. The objection has held for years because reading the private messages of 450 million people to catch a tiny fraction of offenders treats the entire population as suspects. A European Parliament study found no way to scan for this material without error rates high enough to catch large volumes of lawful communication and the Council’s own legal service has flagged the same proposal as a problem for the right to privacy. Reported error rates for some of the detection tools run between 13 and 20 percent, (with some having as high as nearly 50% in one German study), while the share of scanned content actually confirmed as abuse material has been vanishingly small. The push to override the March vote is being led by Roberta Metsola, the President of the European Parliament. At the European Council on June 18, Metsola urged EU leaders to drive the interim file forward, even though her own chamber had refused it and even though her own political group, the center-right European People’s Party, opposed it in the final vote. The timing turns this into a two-front week for private communication in Europe. The Council’s Friday maneuver runs alongside the permanent CSAM regulation, the long-term law called “chat control,” whose negotiators meet again on Monday. The contested part of that law would reach into end-to-end encrypted services, the technology that keeps a message readable only by sender and recipient. The worst-case version still on the table would let governments order detection that is not limited to actual suspects and does not require a judge’s approval first. It would pair that with mandatory age verification across hosting and communications services. The negotiators meet on Monday morning. By the end of it, Europeans may need to prove who they are before they can send a private message. We’ll keep you updated. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Brussels Could Reopen the Fight to Scan Your Private Chats appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.