Days before what are expected to be the decisive trilogue talks on the EU's child sexual abuse regulation on Tuesday, leaked internal documents from the Council of Ministers show member states trying to establish blanket surveillance of private communication through a device of their own invention: "search plans".
The mechanism is the story. Rather than legislating mass scanning directly, the plan would let national judicial or independent administrative authorities issue providers of chat and email services with time-limited blanket authorisations to inspect message content. For parts of a service, critics say, that still amounts to scanning millions of users without any suspicion at all. The Council insists that a permanent law must deliver no less than the providers' existing scans — the interim arrangement, known as "chat control 1.0", under which Facebook, Google and others may "voluntarily" search for abuse material.
Patrick Breyer, a former MEP turned civil-liberties campaigner, calls the plan what it is: a relabelling of mass surveillance. His analogy is a floor being frantically mopped while the tap keeps running. He points to the error rates — roughly 75 percent of reported chats are criminally irrelevant — and to Germany, where a large share of investigations into youth pornography target adolescents themselves, including consensual sexting, tying up investigative capacity.
What makes the leak notable is that the Council is pushing a course its own lawyers warned against. The Council's Legal Service cautioned early that scanning an entire service, or parts of it, would very likely breach EU law, since the Court of Justice would probably classify it as general and indiscriminate surveillance. Breyer accuses member states of knowingly risking a predictable defeat in Luxembourg; if the regulation is struck down after years of debate, investigators would be left with nothing.
The leaked papers also reveal a fallback from the Irish Council presidency. If negotiators cannot agree on scanning private chats, private chats could be excluded from the regulation entirely — which would leave the temporary chat control 1.0 regime standing as a permanent loophole for voluntary mass scanning.
The European Parliament continues to back a different approach, built on targeted investigations and prevention. Its mandate foresees security standards such as stricter privacy defaults to block unsolicited contact, monitoring orders for private communication only under judicial review and on concrete suspicion against specific people or groups, and a new EU centre that proactively searches publicly accessible content for known abuse material. Breyer's ask of MEPs is blunt: reject a permanent regime as long as the transitional one remains in place.
