EU revives twice-rejected Chat Control in a closed-door trilogue, on a Monday morning

What a Monday-morning trilogue does that a floor vote can't

Former MEP Patrick Breyer's alert lays out two parallel moves squeezed into one weekend. On Friday, the Council was set to revive Chat Control 1.0 — the lapsed temporary scanning regulation the European Parliament rejected in March — by adopting a first-reading position. On Monday, June 29, the final trilogue on the permanent Chat Control 2.0 (the CSAR regulation) was scheduled, with a fresh scanning mandate pushed that same morning. Breyer's warning is about the concessions on the table: 'voluntary' mass scanning recast as an enforceable risk-mitigation measure, detection orders that are 'not effectively targeted and limited to criminal suspects,' and mandatory age verification that ends anonymous communication. He points readers to fightchatcontrol.eu to email lawmakers before the deal is struck. The stakes he names: private messaging for 450 million people.

A bill that never gets debated and never gets rejected

The thread's most useful voice didn't argue ethics — it explained the plumbing. A participant who works on committee filings spelled out why this keeps coming back:

"For Americans, this process is called a trilogue. It is analogous to … a group of House and Senate members meeting in private to negotiate a bill, with most related documents being heavily redacted. … The bill never gets debated, and the bill never gets rejected, so the commission can keep trying until it gets passed" — a commenter who works on committee filings

That procedural read reframes the repetition several people flagged: this version was voted down earlier this year, and a similar one years before. A linked HN discussion — *European Commission's Metsola Overrides MEPs to Force Through Chat Control* — documents the same override pattern.

"Everyone will just use Signal" meets the actual targeting question

The technical objection in the thread is that scanning can't catch the people it names. One commenter laid out why the architecture defeats the goal:

"anyone can open an encrypted tcp connection from an ip to another, and the global traffic is too massive to be scrutinized … this will create further privacy for criminals … and mass espionage for the common man" — a commenter on the mechanics of bulk scanning

A former attorney pushed the same point at the protocol level, asking whether they would ban encrypted email next, since a chat UI riding plain email protocol would look like nothing but more encrypted mail on the wire:

"So are they going to ban encrypted email? … all that ISPs would see is yet more encrypted email going back and forth" — a former attorney and IT/IP consultant

Not everyone read it as a clean assault. One participant cautioned that the website conflates milder measures with the genuine e2ee-breaking monstrosities, and another noted that some opposing positions only defend the bad CC1.0 status quo while fighting the more totalitarian 2.0 — a distinction worth keeping straight rather than flattening into a single villain.

The recurring complaint underneath the procedure: the people steering the high-level surveillance group are themselves still anonymous, and politicians have repeatedly written exemptions for their own communications into the same proposals. A scanning regime sold as universal that quietly excludes its authors is the detail that turns a child-safety debate into a trust problem — and trust, not encryption math, is what a closed-door Monday vote spends.