Chat Control Legislation Is an Own Goal for Democracy
A new law, popularly referred to as “Chat Control 1.0,” has been passed by the European Parliament authorising Big Tech companies to scan citizens’ private chats. The law passed on a second reading despite the fact that it had been voted down by MEPs in the first vote and was oppposed by a majority of MEPs present for the second vote.
The Commission invoked a procedural loophole to get the law through immediately before summer recess, taking advantage of the fact that it was a difficult time for opponents to rally an absolute majority (a majority of all sitting MEPs).
It is not surprising that a law like this failed to secure majority support in the European Parliament. Though the pretext for the law, child protection, seems noble, the measure proposed - allowing private companies to scan citizens’ online chats - is a very troubling precedent from the perspective of citizens’ right to privacy.
Perhaps some good may come from such a law. Maybe some child predators will be put behind bars because of measures like this. Who knows? But the ability to achieve some good is not an appropriate test for a sound law; rather, we must assess the principles it instantiates and its overall effect on the social and legal order.
There is a reason why there is a robust legal barrier against surveillance of citizens’ communications. If one cannot speak in public and share one’s opinions and arguments without incurring the risk of being snooped on or having one’s voice silenced by more powerful citizens, democracy is a dead letter. Once the barrier against indiscriminate surveillance is broken down a little bit, it will be easier to find new pretexts to expand the scope for digital surveillance in the future.
Sadly, Chat Control is by no means an anomaly. On the contrary, there is an overwhelming tendency spearheaded by governments in the U.K, Australia, and Europe, to expand the scope of government surveillance - whether direct or by “proxy” - over citizens’ digital communications.
We see this tendency manifest in the EU’s Digital Services Act, which seeks to make Big Tech companies censor social media on behalf of the European Commission. We see it in new requirements to self-identify before going online, in the name of excluding children from social media useage. And we see it in the investigation of “non-crime hate incidents” in the U.K, that diverts valuable police resources to investigating politically incorrect speech.
The paradox is that people are using democratic procedures like parliamentary legislation to build a powerful infrastructure that can be easily leveraged for spying on citizens and putting a stranglehold around the public sphere.
Is this “democracy”? If democracy is vote-counting, then perhaps it is. But if democracy is a system of governance in which citizens can speak to each other on an equal footing, without fear of being arrested or intimidated for offending the powers that be, then these assaults on privacy and freedom of speech are assaults on democracy itself.
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