Delighted to be proved wrong

A European justice minister who does have principles!

The EU “chat control” proposal I wrote about the other day has been scuppered by Germany’s justice ministry saying forcefully that it will never support this particular form of mass surveillance. Here’s what their minister, Dr. Stefanie Hubig, had to say:

“Chat control without cause must be taboo in a state governed by the rule of law. Private communication must never be under general suspicion. The state must also not force messengers to scan messages en masse for suspicious content before sending them. Germany will not agree to such proposals at EU level. We must also make progress at EU level in the fight against child pornography. That’s what I’m committed to. But even the worst crimes do not justify the surrender of basic civil rights. This has been insisted on for months in the votes of the federal government. And that’s how it will stay.”

Brief context; at the beginning of this week it was rumoured that Germany was wavering on its opposition to pre-emptive and permanent scanning of everyone’s phones. Purportedly, the European Commission DG HOME proposal was ‘just’ to identify child sexual abuse materials, but as anyone (ok yours truly) who’s been fighting surveillance for close to three decades can tell you, blanket surveillance starts with a justification of ‘serious crime’, and quickly becomes used for trivial issues and against all perceived enemies of those in power. So, when organisations including Signal raised the alarm, lots of people swung into action, again, to let the German justice ministry know that this would not go quietly for them. The statement above is Dr Hubig saying they never wobbled at all. I’m pretty certain they did, but who knows, maybe someone in her office sent up the bat signal so people in the movement I’m part of to go to the barricades on this issue one last time. It’s certainly a play I’ve seen before.

I’ve been doing this for close to 30 years (thought tbf had v. little involvement in this particular campaign). The stakes have never been higher. Even many ‘normies’ now get how these powers will be abused and that this time it might not just be against others. It could happen to them. It hits different, as they say, when you’re staring down the barrel of a government run by AfD or the Front National.

But creating coalitions again and again to fight off stupid, dangerous nonsense is hard. Civil society and real movement politics, as so many of CT’s enduring readers know, is hard fucking work. I’m glad that we do it and that we have deep knowledge and experience of it, but I’m also exhausted. Again and again I find myself wondering, if we didn’t have to expend most our energies saying ‘No’ to this stupid, ghastly shit, and saying ‘No’ to the stupid, ghastly shit of the tech oligarchs, what might we have built instead? How productively and joyfully could we be spending our lives? Actually growing good things? Showing what can and must be done for us to live decent lives for our own purposes and in service of others, and not repeatedly campaigning so that a few less lives will be wrecked?

Don’t get me wrong. Plenty of us – indeed, growing numbers – are working on the alternatives. But if feels like we lost twenty years just trying to get tech policy and tech firms to kill fewer people, to be just a bit less egregious, and that is time we’ll never get back. Time we needed to be building and growing the technology infrastructure and human networks, capabilities and structures of feeling we so desperately need for what comes next.