The European Parliament’s rapporteur on the regulation on the removal of online child sexual abuse material, Javier Zarzalejos (EPP, Spanish), sent his draft report to MEPs on Wednesday 19 April, in which he proposed adding “voluntary detection orders” for child sexual abuse material to hosts and content providers, using specific technologies that they can choose.
This voluntary ‘monitoring’ is in addition to the mandatory orders for the detection of child sexual abuse material, which may be issued by the competent authorities, as provided for in the Regulation; however, this measure should remain a “last resort”.
While the German government is particularly concerned about the implications of the European Commission regulation (see EUROPE 12950/5) regarding confidentiality of private communications and end-to-end encryption, the rapporteur insists that nothing in this regulation should call into question this encryption.
“End-to-end encryption is an important tool to guarantee the security and confidentiality of the communications of users, including those of children. Any weakening of the end-to-end encryption could potentially be abused by malicious third parties. Nothing in this Regulation should therefore be interpreted as prohibiting or weakening end-to-end encryption”.
However, the rapporteur states that “to the extent strictly necessary and proportionate to mitigate the risk of misuse of their services for the purpose of online child sexual abuse, providers should be authorised by the competent judicial authority or another independent administrative authority to process metadata that can detect suspicious patterns of behaviour without having access to the content of the encrypted communication”.
The rapporteur also proposes to further target the ‘monitoring’ that is required of providers and hosts with a requirement to limit the detection order to an identifiable component or element of a service, such as channels or “precisely identified groups of users for whom a significant risk has been identified”. For the Greens/EFA MEP Patrick Breyer (German), this nuance is moving “in the right direction”, he said in a statement.
Like the Council of the EU, the rapporteur also proposes to include online search engines in the regulation, which will be able to receive orders to dereference sites, which is an ineffective measure according to MEP Patrick Breyer since the material “is not removed at source”.
Link to the report: https://aeur.eu/f/6el (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)