Three hundred and fourteen European lawmakers sat in Strasbourg and voted to kill warrantless scanning of private messages. Two hundred and seventy-six voted to keep it, and seventeen abstained. The no side had a thirty-eight vote lead, and the warrantless scanning of your inbox became law anyway.
That permission is back on the books across the European Union until April 2028. Your DMs and your personal email, with no warrant and no reason to suspect you. Empty chairs in the hall counted as a yes.
The 361 Rule
The European People's Party put Chat Control 1.0 back on the floor. In March this same Parliament had killed the scanning derogation 311 to 228 under simple majority rules. The temporary law expired on April 3. Parliament President Roberta Metsola went to EU leaders in June and told them to keep pushing anyway. She asked the Council to adopt a first-reading position on a bill her own chamber had already voted down, a step diplomats called without precedent. The Council sent it back, and the EPP forced an urgency procedure so the file skipped committee and landed on the last sitting day before the summer break. At second reading, killing the text took 361 votes: an absolute majority of the entire 720-seat house, counted whether a member was sitting in Strasbourg or already gone for recess.
Here's the thing. Strasbourg thinned out. The 314 who stayed to reject the scans came 47 short of 361. Every empty seat made the Council's version easier to keep.
A separate amendment tried to limit the scans to people a court had already named as suspects. That one also won the floor, 322 to 255, and died on the same 361 wall. What survived lets those companies treat every unencrypted inbox as an open file, with no court naming a suspect first.
Your Inbox Was the File
This is the filter they put back over Instagram DMs and Gmail. Discord, Snapchat, Skype, Xbox chats, and iCloud mail sit on the same list. Public posts and cloud files were already scannable without this law. Users can still report a message, and a judge can still sign a wiretap. The only authority that dropped off the books in April was the right of US platforms to run those filters through private, unencrypted messages with no suspect and no warrant. That is the power the Council and the Commission fought to restore.
They sold the rush as a protection gap. Scanning private chats produced 36 percent of the EU's abuse reports in 2024. Public posts and cloud storage produced the rest, and those were never in danger. Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office counted what the US tip mill actually delivered that year: 99,375 of 205,728 reports forwarded by NCMEC were not criminally relevant. That is 48.3 percent of the pile. The Commission has not produced evidence that suspicionless scanning raised convictions or pulled one extra child out of harm. That is the ecosystem they just reopened over your mail.
The Exemption They Already Had
Parliament voted through an amendment that keeps end-to-end encrypted chats outside the mandate. Providers were not scanning those chats under the voluntary system, and European messaging services never ran this machine. You can utilize a Signal thread and stay outside this particular filter. The unencrypted inbox is the one they wanted back.
Dr. Patrick Breyer, the former MEP who stayed on this file through both votes, called suspicionless mass surveillance a smokescreen that overwhelms police with false alarms. German crime statistics put about 40 percent of the resulting investigations on minors themselves. Alexander Hanff used confidential channels to tell his story and help convict the people who abused him and twenty-seven other schoolboys. He said survivors lose their voice without that privacy, and that this scan was never built to protect children.
The Window They Locked Open
The Council finished its written procedure on July 23, 2026, and adopted the act. Hungary voted no and Belgium abstained. France consented, welcomed the voluntary detection window through April 2028, and still objected that the encryption carveout is too broad. Negotiations on the permanent replacement, Chat Control 2.0, pick up again in September. Member governments will try to lock in permanent, suspicionless scanning. Breyer has been blunt about the incentive: as long as they can keep this temporary scan alive through a procedural gap, they have no reason to accept a law that only goes after actual suspects.
I will take the 314 who stayed in the hall. The 361 rule still counts the empty chairs against them, so the Council does not have to win your DMs in a vote. They only have to schedule the next sitting when the chamber is thin and keep this window open until the permanent file is ready.
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