A campaign opposing European Union chat-scanning proposals has relaunched ahead of two meetings that former European Parliament member Patrick Breyer says could reshape the confidentiality of online communications. Breyer’s account describes separate activity around a temporary regulation and the longer-term Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, while urging supporters to contact national governments and parliamentary negotiators.
The first dispute concerns the temporary measure known by critics as “Chat Control 1.0.” Breyer said a leaked document indicated that the Council would seek a first-reading position after the European Parliament had rejected the measure in March and called for the proposal to be withdrawn. He accused Parliament President Roberta Metsola of attempting to revive the arrangement despite that earlier vote. The supplied evidence contains Breyer’s characterization, not responses from Metsola, the Council or supporters of the measure.
A second set of negotiations concerned the permanent regulation, procedure 2022/0155. Breyer said a final trilogue was scheduled for Monday, June 29, following an effort to establish a new Parliament mandate on detection and scanning earlier that day. Trilogue talks bring representatives of the Parliament, Council and Commission together to seek a common text. Any outcome would depend on the final negotiated language rather than the campaign’s description of possible concessions.
Breyer framed the two tracks as a combined threat to secure messaging and anonymous communication. He argued that generalized scanning would be error-prone and inconsistent with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and decisions of the Court of Justice. He instead called for targeted investigations, security-by-design measures and proactive removal of abusive material hosted on hidden services. Those are advocacy positions, not findings established by the source packet.
In response, the fightchatcontrol.eu website was updated to provide email templates aimed at member-state representatives and Parliament negotiators. The campaign says its messages summarize legal and technical objections and ask officials to follow fundamental-rights standards.
The debate turns on a difficult policy boundary: authorities seek more effective tools against child sexual abuse material, while security researchers and civil-liberties advocates warn that systems capable of inspecting private messages can weaken confidentiality for all users. Breyer’s post documents the opposition campaign’s view and the meetings it expected, but it does not include the draft texts, institutional explanations or results of the negotiations. Its strongest supported claim is therefore procedural: activists mobilized against two contemporaneous EU tracks they believed could expand message scanning. A balanced assessment also requires the institutions’ stated safeguards and child-protection rationale, which were absent from the packet. The post establishes the timing and opposition case, but not that the campaign’s predicted worst-case text would be adopted.
