Good news, at least for now:
Following the migration decision, the same parliamentary majority struck again against one of Berlin and Brussels’ favorite political projects. They also rejected the push for comprehensive private chat surveillance. This means the proposed EU regulation for so-called end-to-end encryption, which could have decrypted massive messaging content, is temporarily off the table.
The EU thought that if the opens their borders that these people would to an extent assimilate into their culture and understand their values. That was not the case at all and like you said this is a good first step to try to fix the issue.
You misunderstand the open border directive. Did you fly into the EU at any time?
Fun fact: for about a year, the only Schengen country that was doing structural border control checks against the mandate.... was Germany. Many a person felt prosecuted, for crossing a non-existing border. I've been lined up, interrogated, sniffed, searched, you name it, all for some hypothetical "security" that really was about re-asserting an authority that was treatied away.
So I don't know what all this is but there's a load of self-elevating German pride in there that should maybe be ignored. Because they're all fucking liars.
For example: I'm quite sure that the "open border" vision came from the Benelux, not Germany. Germany was 2 countries with strict separation during the 29 years the former union was having a freedom of movement treaty. The whole Benelux thing was envisioned in 1944 London, by governments in exile from the German occupation, of all things.
So fuck these guys. They all lie, meddle, manipulate and conspire... to stay in power. The best we can do is ignore them and harden our lives to depend less.
This is the third time the EU Parliament has killed some version of chat scanning since the original "Chat Control" proposal in 2022. The pattern is always the same: the Commission pushes client-side scanning as a compromise that "preserves" encryption, Parliament eventually recognizes that scanning before encryption is mathematically identical to breaking encryption, and the proposal dies.
What's interesting is the technical mechanism they kept proposing. The last draft required messaging apps to run a perceptual hash classifier on every image before encrypting it. Apple actually built and then abandoned this exact system (CSAM NeuralHash) in 2021 after researchers demonstrated collision attacks within 48 hours of the hash function leaking. You could craft a completely innocent image that matched a flagged hash. False positive rate was orders of magnitude worse than advertised.
The thing to watch now is whether the Council tries to resurrect this through the "going dark" working group that Europol has been pushing. They've been shopping the idea of mandating "lawful access by design" which is just key escrow with better branding. The EU Fundamental Rights Agency already flagged that approach as incompatible with Article 7 of the Charter, but that hasn't stopped them before.
Good win for now. But these proposals are like zombies. They keep coming back with new names.