Suspicionless ChatControl must be taboo in a state governed by the rule of law (digitalcourage.social)

Germany’s federal justice minister publicly rejected “suspicionless” ChatControl, saying indiscriminate scanning of private communications must be taboo in a rule-of-law state and that Germany will not back such EU proposals. The statement feeds into ongoing debates over client-side scanning (CSS), backdoors and lawful‑intercept capabilities — techniques that would inspect messages or metadata (often on-device) to flag illicit content. Industry pushback is already visible: Apple resisted French backdoor requests and Signal plans legal action against EU measures, while critics warn that even if blanket scanning is rejected, pressure to build surveillance-capable features could persist. For the AI/ML community this matters because proposed ChatControl designs frequently rely on ML running on endpoints (on‑device classifiers, hash matching, or federated detection) or require weakening end‑to‑end encryption — changes that alter threat models, increase attack surface, and undermine user trust in secure data flows used for model training and inference. Practitioners should watch EU legislative language for mandated detection capabilities, prepare privacy-preserving alternatives (federated learning, secure enclaves, differential privacy), and assess how requirements for lawful‑intercept hooks would affect system design, cryptographic guarantees, and long‑term security assumptions.