EPP Forces Repeat Vote on EU Mass Surveillance
Two weeks after lawmakers banned indiscriminate scanning of private messages, the European People's Party is forcing a revote despite overwhelming evidence of the surveillance system's failure.
Just two weeks after European lawmakers voted decisively to end mass scanning of private messages, the European People's Party is forcing a do-over vote today — not because new evidence emerged, but because democracy got in the way.
The EPP, the European Parliament's largest political bloc, launched an unprecedented parliamentary maneuver to overturn a decisive 458-103 vote from March 11 that banned indiscriminate surveillance of private digital communications. The forced revote, scheduled for March 26, attempts to resurrect a failed surveillance regime that the EU's own data shows produces 99 percent false positives and violates fundamental rights.
This vote matters now because it reveals whether elected officials will honor the will of constituents or bow to corporate lobbying pressure. The stakes extend beyond Brussels — millions of European citizens face the prospect of their private conversations subjected to algorithmic scrutiny with no judicial oversight.
On March 11, 458 MEPs backed Amendment 5, which requires any scanning of private communications be strictly limited to individuals under judicial suspicion of child sexual abuse material involvement. The vote represented a direct rebuke to the European Commission's original mass surveillance plan and excluded encrypted communications from scanning.
The surveillance system's documented failure provides stark context for the EPP's maneuver. Ninety-nine percent of chat reports come from a single U.S. company, Meta, according to the EU Commission's own report. Forty-eight percent of flagged chats prove criminally irrelevant based on German federal police data, while AI classifiers show error rates up to 20 percent. The Commission report found no measurable link between mass surveillance and actual convictions, with only 0.0000027 percent of billions of scanned messages yielding actual illegal material.
When a democratic decision is put to a vote repeatedly until the desired outcome is achieved, Parliament itself is devalued, said digital rights advocate and former MEP Patrick Breyer. This approach sets a dangerous precedent. It undermines the reliability of democratic processes and sends the signal that majorities only count when they are politically convenient.
The EPP's motive centers on preserving a lucrative surveillance infrastructure owned by U.S. firms like Thorn, which spends hundreds of thousands of euros annually on EU lobbying. The organization Thorn and lobbying alliance ECLAG, supported by tech corporations and non-European foundations, push for continued scanning despite overwhelming evidence of ineffectiveness.
The institutional betrayal became clear on March 25 when the Greens attempted to block the repeat vote through a parliamentary motion. The motion failed, proving the EPP has sufficient votes to override the will of the majority established just two weeks earlier.
Legal authorities have repeatedly condemned the surveillance approach. The Council Legal Service warned in 2023 that the detection regime entails a serious risk that it would be found to compromise the essence of the rights to privacy and data protection enshrined in Article 7 and 8 of the Charter. The EU Data Protection Supervisor stated any solution must be targeted and not indiscriminate.
Indiscriminate Chat Control is like trying to mop up water while the faucet is still running, Breyer said. It is technologically obsolete and a proven failure in criminal justice terms. Flooding our police forces each year with hundreds of thousands of hits from unreliable U.S. algorithms — most of them either false positives or long-known duplicates — does not rescue a single child from ongoing abuse.
CEPIS President Luis Fernandez-Sanz stated, The protection of children must go hand in hand with the protection of fundamental rights. Untargeted scanning is not only ineffective; it is incompatible with the core values of a democratic, rights-based Europe.
As the revote unfolds today, European citizens watch to see whether their representatives will defend civil liberties against corporate interests and bureaucratic overreach. The outcome may determine whether private conversations remain private or become fodder for an unaccountable surveillance apparatus.