DiEM25 opposes the EU Commission’s Chat Control plan that would allow for the powers that be to monitor private communications through supposed protection of minors. The EU claims to stand for freedom and democracy but, behind closed doors, it has hatched another scheme for mandatory mass-surveillance. The total surveillance of 450 million EU citizens’ private communications is not an effective means to better protect children from being abused. Rather, children are being politically exploited to introduce new ways for mass surveillance made possible by the advent of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Surveillance will go hand-in-hand with feeding AI information – in Israel, for example, it is used to plan kill lists for Gaza. For the first time in human history, automated speech recognition, transcription and translation programmes will enable an Orwellian dictatorship to come to life. 

Reading the strategy of Europol AI-assisted mass surveillance is part of the plan, for example, to gather enough data for predictive policing. With the introduction of the next generation of mobile communications, 6G, the intelligence services are promising a big step forward, which will take AI surveillance to a new level. The alternative to this would be reining in Europol, rolling back surveillance powers and banning the use of machine learning and AI for police surveillance, military use and development of autonomous weapons.

No perfect technology

Thanks to technology, it is possible to automatically record, summarise and analyse every phone call, email and chat. But as anyone who has tried ChatGPT knows, the machines make mistakes – often in the double-digit percentage range. For example, there have been several documented cases of language models accusing court reporters of child abuse simply because they had reported on such cases. Given the error rates of automated systems, mass surveillance threatens to turn tens of millions of people living in the EU  into false positives, while real perpetrators could go undetected as false negatives.

We call on all residents  across EU countries to build up resistance and public pressure on governments, their interior/justice ministers and demand the abolition of the whole Chat Control plan – clearly demanding that there is no place for mass-surveillance in Europe.

In line with DiEM25’s Technological Vision, data belongs to the citizens, people are not a product to enrich Big Tech oligarchs, and AI-based weapons need to be banned worldwide.

Read more about ChatControl regulation here

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