The European Parliament spent time earlier this year dismantling Europe’s mass scanning of private messages, but on Tuesday it voted to hand that same regime a second life.
By approving an urgent procedure requested by the European People’s Party, the chamber cleared the path for a decisive vote on Thursday, the final sitting day before the summer recess, when attendance thins and the arithmetic tilts toward the people who want your chats scanned.
At this late stage of the file, known as second reading, the Council’s text can only be amended or thrown out if an absolute majority of all sitting members, 361 votes, lines up against it. Fall short of that and the law passes automatically, with no affirmative endorsement required. What Parliament rejected outright in March would return not because a majority backed it, but because too any members had left early for summer break.
Parliament had not been shy about it the first time. Members tried to salvage the rules with tight limits, demanding judicial authorization and confining any scanning to actual suspects, then watched trilogue talks collapse when national governments refused the safeguards. The extension went down 311 votes to 228, and the ePrivacy derogation expired on April 4. US companies including Meta, Google, and Microsoft lost their legal cover to comb through the private messages of Europeans at will.
Reviving a defeated file is not how this normally works, which is why diplomats reached for the word “unprecedented.” The reopening traces back to Parliament’s own president, Roberta Metsola, who urged EU leaders in June to press ahead despite her chamber’s stated position and her own political group’s vote against the text. Her party now justifies the rush by pointing to a “legal gap” left behind by the expired regulation.
That gap turns out to be thinner than advertised. Germany has recorded no unusual drop in abuse reports since the derogation lapsed, and companies have kept scanning voluntarily, exactly as they said they would.
By the EU’s own count, more than 60 percent of reports come from public posts and cloud storage, categories the old regulation never covered. The fight is really about private, person-to-person messages, the part of your digital life where the expectation of confidentiality is strongest and the case for automated inspection weakest.
The Council’s own members are talking out of both sides. Italy filed an official statement this week warning against exactly this kind of mass surveillance by private providers and its threat to encryption. Then it voted for the text anyway. “How absurd this process has become is evident in Italy’s behavior in the Council,” said Patrick Breyer, the former Pirate Party member who has tracked the file for years, in a press release sent to Reclaim The Net.
Even the lawmaker formally steering the file has refused to play along. Birgit Sippel, the Socialist rapporteur, called the governments’ move an unfair maneuver and drew a line under it. “As rapporteur, I will not support an extension on the Member States’ terms,” she said, warning that reopening the interim question endangers the slow progress toward a permanent framework.
Over the weekend, two cybersecurity researchers reminded members that the technical case has not budged. Carmela Troncoso of the Max Planck Institute and Bart Preneel of KU Leuven wrote urging a no vote on the fast track, citing detection tools whose error rates stay unacceptably high and pointing to far more targeted methods that already exist. They noted that over 800 researchers had signed earlier warnings, a level of agreement that rarely forms around one proposal.
Some members tried to stop the procedure on the floor. Martin Sonneborn demanded that Metsola rule the urgent motion inadmissible under Parliament’s own rules, brandishing a printed copy of the rulebook. “I tried to stop the Chat Control today,” he wrote afterward.
The procedural fight hides a bigger cost. Parliament has been pushing a genuinely different approach to protecting children online, one built on detection orders aimed at suspects instead of blanket scanning left to industry’s discretion, a dedicated center to pull known abuse material off the public web, and security requirements.
Keeping the old voluntary regime alive drains the pressure that might move governments toward it. Prolonging the status quo does not protect children better. It lets the least effective and most invasive method coast along because no one has to defend it on the merits.
That is the decision facing the chamber on Thursday. Rejecting the text requires 361 members to appear and vote no. Silence or absence counts as consent.
The regime at stake once let hundreds of millions of Europeans send a message without a machine reading it first, and the same setup that flags a suspected image can be repointed at a nationality, a demographic, or a political affiliation without any change to the underlying tools. Parliament reached that conclusion clearly in March, and whether it holds through a half-empty Thursday afternoon is what the vote will settle.
