Chat Control: EU states want to legalize comprehensive mass scans indirectly

Leaked EU documents reveal that Member States are pushing to legalize widespread scanning of private messages by creating so-called search plans that would let national judicial or independent administrative authorities grant providers temporary blanket authorizations to scan message content. The move aims to codify and expand current voluntary practices by major platforms such as Facebook and Google - often dubbed "chat control 1.0" - so that companies must not fall short of existing scanning. Civil liberties campaigners warn this would amount to indiscriminate mass surveillance of millions of innocent users; the Council’s Legal Service has already warned such blanket scanning is likely to breach EU law and risk being overturned by the European Court of Justice. The leak comes just ahead of crucial trilogue negotiations and exposes a strategy that could bake in pervasive monitoring under administrative cover.

If negotiations fail to include private chats, the Irish Council Presidency’s plan B would explicitly exclude them from the regulation, effectively leaving voluntary mass scans as a permanent loophole. The European Parliament favors a different approach: targeted, suspicion-based orders subject to judicial review, stronger privacy-by-default protections, and a dedicated EU center to proactively search publicly accessible content for known abuse material. Critics note high false-positive rates - about 75% of reported chats are legally irrelevant, with many German cases involving consensual adolescent sexting - arguing that mass scans would waste investigative resources and perform security theater rather than deliver legally sound child protection.