A politician’s rant about the EU’s sensational regulation: “The government is walking over the parliament”

The government’s new positive position on the CSAM regulation does not follow the unanimous position of the Transport and Communications Committee from September last year, says the chairman of the committee, representative of the opposition party Center Jouni Ovaska (central) in its announcement.

The government’s EU ministerial committee has taken a positive position on the regulation, which would enable the scanning of pictures on people’s phones in order to combat child abuse material. The regulation would oblige social media and instant messaging services to block exploitative material on their platforms.

In the statement of the Transport and Communications Committee last September, it is stated that the committee “takes a very critical view of the fact that the regulation seems to require, in practice, the restriction of the use of strong encryption, which would weaken the level of data security of communication and communication-related services, and that it takes a very critical view of the possibility of enabling general monitoring of communication also in such in situations where general supervision does not apply to the entire population or all possible communication services”.

“The government walking over the parliament”

Ovaska considers that the government is now “walking over the parliament’s previous position”. Finland’s position on the CSAM regulation will be outlined in a large committee on Wednesday.

“The large committee must change and refine the Government’s policy. Finland cannot accept Hungary’s compromise proposal. If we now start to weaken the level of information security of communication services, the threshold to do the same in the future will be lowered. The activities of criminals must be dealt with, but not in such a way that ordinary citizens have to fear mass surveillance and the control typical of authoritarian states,” says Ovaska in the press release.

This is what the Constitutional Law Committee said

In October of last year, the decree also went through the Constitutional Law Committee with a statement. At that time, problematic points were raised about the regulation, such as the identification order issued by the courts, which would not require an individualized criminal suspicion. The identification regulations would target certain types of content of certain services and would be limited in time, according to the Commission’s proposal will survive.

“In the committee’s opinion, the proposed regulation regarding the identification order should not be accepted in its current form, but the Government should actively work in the further preparation to change the proposal to meet the requirements set by basic and human rights,” the Constitutional Law Committee’s statement read.

A new compromise is under consideration

Now, Hungary, the country holding the EU presidency, has reached a compromise on the matter, which, from the government’s point of view, sufficiently limits the authorities’ right to intervene in encrypted communications. To report on it Helsingin Sanomat according to this, messaging applications would have a feature that could identify the material even before sending and encrypting the message.

Several instant messaging services, such as WhatsApp, use strong end-to-end encryption, which prevents authorities from accessing messages. Instead, for example, the police can investigate the sending of text messages using telemonitoring data.

In the fall of last year, the Transport and Communications Committee and the Grand Committee considered it very important that the regulation does not lead to a weakening of end-to-end encryption or other information security measures.

“The obligation to decrypt communications would have far-reaching and principled effects on the protection of the secrecy of confidential messages and the realization of other fundamental rights online,” the committee’s press release said.

The processing of the case continues on Wednesday in a large committee, when a special expert will be heard as experts Pekka Vasara from the Ministry of the Interior and the Director of Police Hannele Taavilaa from the Ministry of the Interior.