Tomorrow, Thursday 9 July, around noon in Strasbourg, the European Parliament will vote on bringing back Chat Control 1.0, the law that lets tech companies scan your private messages and emails without any suspicion, any warrant or any court.
The vote is rigged by design
Parliament already killed this law. Twice. In March, MEPs rejected the extension and the regulation expired in April. That should have been the end of it.
Instead, the Council and the EPP dressed the same text up as a "new" law and pushed it through an urgent procedure on Tuesday, 331 votes to 304. Because the file is now at second reading, the rules flip. The law does not need a majority to pass. It needs an absolute majority of all 720 MEPs, that is 361 votes to be stopped or amended.
Every MEP who is absent tomorrow counts automatically as a yes. And they scheduled the vote on the last day before summer recess, when half the chamber has traditionally already left for vacation.
Think about that for a second. A law that Parliament explicitly rejected will come back into force not because a majority supports it, but because enough elected representatives were at the airport. Empty chairs voting on behalf of 450 million people. This should not be a legal way to pass legislation in a democracy, yet here we are.
It does not even work
Chat Control 1.0 allows companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft to run AI scanners over the unencrypted messages of everyone, all the time, hunting for child abuse material. Over 800 cybersecurity researchers have signed warnings that these tools have unacceptably high error rates.
Real people, innocent people, get flagged over baby photos sent to grandma and teenagers' consensual pictures, while actual criminals moved to encrypted or underground channels years ago. They do not communicate through Gmail.
Meanwhile, the tools that actually work, targeted investigations against actual suspects with judicial oversight, get starved of attention and resources. Scanning everyone protects no one. It just normalizes reading everyone's mail.
Chat Control 2.0 is next
Tomorrow's vote is not the end. It is the opening move.
The permanent law, Chat Control 2.0, is being written right now, behind closed doors. Parliament had exactly one card in those talks: the old scanning regime was dead, and governments needed Parliament to bring it back. Pass tomorrow's vote and that card is gone. Scanning everyone becomes normal again, and the permanent law simply locks it in.
And 2.0 goes further. It is designed to pressure apps into scanning messages on your own phone, before encryption even happens or risk liability. Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, all of it. That is the quiet end of private messaging in Europe. And once governments learn that Parliament's "no" can just be steamrolled, why would they ever take a red line seriously again?
What you can (and absolutely should) do right now
There is one honest scenario where tomorrow goes differently: MEPs feel enough pressure tonight to actually show up and vote no. That has happened before. The March vote was won by margins this thin.
If you are in the EU, do this today, not tomorrow morning:
- Go to fightchatcontrol.eu. It has a ready-made tool to email and call your MEPs in minutes. Calling works best, mail is second best.
- Tell them directly next: Be present in Strasbourg on Thursday, vote to reject the Chat Control extension. Absence is a yes vote.
- Share this with anyone you know in the EU.
Yes, calling a politician feels awkward. Do it anyway. It takes ten minutes and it worked previously. Don't give up.