Eurobloat #0136 • August 2021
August is when Brussels packs up for the beach, so naturally it chose the quiet weeks to bring its private-message-scanning regulation into force, watch Kabul fall, and discover that its borders only matter when someone else is paying for them.
Folly of the Month: The summer your inbox became a search warrant
On 2 August the temporary ePrivacy derogation, Regulation (EU) 2021/1232, entered into force, handing webmail and messaging providers a fresh legal blessing to comb through your private communications for forbidden content. It was sold as a narrow, temporary, voluntary measure to protect children, which is precisely the phrasing every permanent surveillance regime begins with. The word "voluntary" does a great deal of heavy lifting here, given that the same Commission was already drafting the follow-up that would make the scanning compulsory. A continent that cannot agree on a common plug socket found perfect unanimity on the principle that your messages are Brussels' business.
→ edri.org
1. Apple volunteers to do Brussels' homework
On 5 August Apple announced on-device scanning of users' photos against a hash database, the exact client-side surveillance Brussels had spent the summer normalising, prompting cryptographers to call it the most sophisticated mass-surveillance machinery deployed outside China. Even Apple eventually flinched and shelved it; the EU, by contrast, took notes.
→ tuta.com
2. Kabul falls, and Brussels asks the Afghans to stay put
At an extraordinary Council on 31 August the EU's interior ministers responded to the Taliban takeover with a stirring message of solidarity: please remain in the region, and we shall pay your neighbours to keep you there. Having spent years sermonising about open doors, the bloc rediscovered the Turkey playbook the instant the doors faced its own capitals.
3. A border the EU will guard but not pay for
As Lukashenko funnelled migrants at Lithuania's frontier, Vilnius approved a 550-kilometre fence costing some 150 million euros, whereupon Brussels announced it would fund cameras, officers, asylum centres and almost anything except the fence itself. Apparently a wall is an affront to European values, but a wall with an EU logo and a consultancy contract is "integrated border management".
4. Brussels arrives at the fire with a press release
On 4 August the Commission proudly mobilised its Civil Protection Mechanism to help Italy, Greece, Albania and North Macedonia fight devastating wildfires, deploying borrowed aircraft from member states. It is touching that the EU's chief contribution to a continental emergency is to coordinate the lending of equipment that the member states already owned.
5. The voluntary scanning that lawyers warned was not so voluntary
Privacy lawyers spent August explaining that the shiny new derogation did not merely permit scanning but laid the political track for the mandatory "Chat Control" to come, end-to-end encryption included. The Commission's idea of safeguarding fundamental rights is to suspend a few of them on a strictly temporary basis, renewable indefinitely.
→ edri.org
6. Frontex rushes in, the fence-builders foot the bill
Brussels boasted of its rapid border intervention for Lithuania, dispatching Frontex officers, vehicles and helicopters, plus tens of millions in emergency asylum money. The message to Vilnius was clear: the EU will happily fund the paperwork of the crisis, just not the thing that actually stops people walking across.
→ ecre.org
7. The debt machine warms up for the holidays
August saw the Commission grinding on with its NextGenerationEU borrowing programme, issuing bonds in the EU's own name to fund the 800-billion-euro recovery scheme it now manages on behalf of the members. Nothing says "temporary, one-off emergency tool" quite like a thirty-year bond and a brand new Brussels revenue stream.
8. Brussels sets a homework deadline for a sovereign court
By 16 August Poland had to tell the Commission how it would obey a Luxembourg order to dismantle its own Supreme Court disciplinary chamber, on pain of the daily fines the Commission duly set about demanding. The lesson for member states is plain: write your constitution however you like, so long as Brussels approves the final draft.
9. Sermons on press freedom from the rotating chair
The Slovenian presidency spent the summer mired in a row over media freedom, with Brussels institutions tut-tutting about the rule of law while the bloc's own Council was chaired by a government accused of harassing journalists. The EU loves nothing more than grading its members' values, provided it never has to grade itself.
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