Do you know who you are playing into the hands of? It is one of the most common rhetorical tricks. Do you have a comment on a statue? You know who else commented? Racists. Would you like to be part of that? Do you criticize compulsory vaccination? The conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxers who visit the minister with torches are overjoyed with you.
And do you think it is important that your privacy is protected? Do you know who else thinks that’s important? Terrorists and pedophiles. They make good use of the encryption of private messages that takes place on WhatsApp and other tech platforms. The fact that no one can see your private messages is of course quite important, given the digital data collection frenzy, the leaks and accidents and the IT companies that like to drag nets through our digital living room.
This form of privacy is now threatened by new EU legislation. The European Commission is preparing a law requiring tech platforms to screen all messages for suspicious content before they are encrypted. When they match a ‘hit list’ of images and words, they are reported to the police. Your phone will be programmed to perform those scans. But don’t worry about that at all. The only innocent by-catch, a photo of a naked child in a bath that you app to your mother, simply means that your innocent private message is briefly viewed by an anonymous gentleman or madam. Don’t worry about it any further. It’s for sure. You don’t want pedophiles to go free, do you?
This piece of policy has so many aspects that are exemplary of what goes wrong with contemporary policy. Are we really going to outsource dragnet surveillance to an algorithm? Is that a self-learning algorithm? Do we have an idea of what such a robot will automatically label as suspicious as he/she/them gains more experience with detective work? We have seen algorithms that are racist, that focus on nationality, language or postal code and against whose insinuations you as a simple citizen can hardly defend yourself. What could go wrong with that?
Meanwhile, Minister Dilan Yesilgöz-Zegerius (Justice and Security, VVD) dismisses all talk about the threat to privacy as fake news. The encryption remains, she promises. But when you read the comments of insiders, it is striking how inimitable the Dutch position in Europe is on this dossier. They do indeed stick to the encryption of the messages, but simply shift the dragnet to the moment you put the letter in the envelope. A cosmetic distinction.
You think: the House of Representatives must be busy, with parliamentary inquiries and endless crisis consultations. But no, the House of Representatives had paid close attention here. A motion by D66 MP Lisa van Ginneken calling on the minister to vote against a European regulation that would simply monitor everyone’s messages, received a large majority. Last week, the minister announced that she would disregard the motion. A passed parliamentary motion is apparently just an opinion.
The minister wants the Netherlands to have a “positive contribution” contributes to the reduction of child pornography. She just didn’t mention the terrorists directly. What threatens is that we are now again confronted with a political fait accompli. The law is being prepared in relative leeway in Brussels without too much clamor from civil rights movements and attention from journalists. Only some niche websites write about it. And then it becomes the status quo in the Netherlands, despite the fact that there is no majority for whether the House of Representatives can still influence it. In the words from Pieter Omtzigt: “Then [dit parlement] a talking club, a debating club. Then the decisions are made elsewhere.”
What should you do if you are faced with such a fallacy? Do you really have to distance yourself from terrorists and pedophiles? Let me do it this time, and ask the minister to just catch crooks. There are exactly zero people with the police, the Public Prosecution Service or the judiciary who have time to start scanning these kinds of messages. There are already ready-made investigations that remain on the shelf due to a lack of judicial capacity to schedule a hearing. This is not a problem that needs ethically questionable artificial intelligence, this problem needs real flesh and blood human beings.
Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist.
A version of this article also appeared in the July 8, 2023 newspaper.