Investigation: some stakeholders, like AI firms selling CSAM scanning tech, funded lobbying efforts for EU Commissioner Ylva Johansson's CSAM scanning proposal
the best follow the money reporting on who's behind the global attack on digital privacy yet. — TLDR: it's law enforcement x AI companies posing as NGOs w a commercial interest in selling scammy mass scanning tech. Deeply cynical, deeply shady. — https://balkaninsight.com/... @jaromil@mastodon.social : The proposed EU regulation “against child sexual abuse” will break basic #privacy rights beyond repair,and is “influenced by companies pretending to be NGOs but acting more like tech companies”. “Groups like Thorn use everything they can to put this legislation forward, not just because they want to combat child sexual abuse, but also because they have a commercial interest in doing so.” … Felix Reda / @senficon@ohai.social : Who would have thought the #chatcontrol proposal is being pushed for by the AI industry? Great investigative piece into the lobbying effort to break encryption and to roll out unprecedented surveillance of private communications in the name of protecting children. https://balkaninsight.com/... Maxim / @maxim@chaos.social : Journalists dug into the lobbyism behind chatcontrol. It seems to be mostly a Foundation, “Oak”, which is massively funding different child support orgs, with over 24 Million US$ spent in the last 4 years on organisations dedicated to supporting the proposal. … X: Meredith Whittaker / @mer__edith : SO good — the best follow the money reporting on who's behind the global attack on digital privacy yet. TLDR: it's law enforcement x AI companies posing as NGOs w a commercial interest in selling scammy mass scanning tech. Deeply cynical, deeply shady. https://balkaninsight.com/... Mitja Kolsek / @mkolsek : This explains the frequent “98% of your fellow citizens think protecting children is more important than privacy” ads on my timeline lately. Framing these two as alternatives is a logical fallacy aimed at tricking people into accepting mass surveillance. Matthew Green / @matthew_d_green : Everyone keeps talking about AI and how in the future it's going to have unintended consequences. But the future is already here. Witness the huge amounts of money trying to pass laws that put “content scanning” into your phone. https://balkaninsight.com/... @arthurb : @matthew_d_green @dystopiabreaker Ah, the CEO of Heat Initiative works for Thorn, a company that sells semantic hashing tech for CSAM. Journalists covering the story don't seem to care. [image] Dylan Lindgren / @dylanlindgren : @mer__edith It's interesting to see Purpose mentioned in this article. They are also the shady group behind the Australian branch of the “Reset” NGO @ausreset, an anti-tech lobby group who were receiving funding to the tune of a million dollars a year from Pierre Omidyar's @luminategroup. Matthew Green / @matthew_d_green : This new investigation into the web of money and influence behind the EU's anti-encryption legislation is pretty amazing. https://balkaninsight.com/... Meredith Whittaker / @mer__edith : This is absurd. A fake “foundation” stood up by the governments pushing for mass scanning in order to promote mass scanning proposals... [image] @kkomaitis : This EU Commission operates under a democracy deficit. There are commonalities between especially contentious issues, re #FairShare & #encryption; they come down to:The Commission listens to whoever it wants; not the experts. This is massively problematic https://balkaninsight.com/... Matthew Green / @matthew_d_green : You know how they say “data is the new oil”? Well it sounds like someone out there sees private correspondence data as though it's a lucrative and heretofore-untapped pool of oil. Forums: Hacker News : ‘Who Benefits?’ Inside the EU's Fight over Scanning for Child Sex Content r/privacy : ‘Who Benefits?’ Inside the EU's Fight over Scanning for Child Sex Content r/europe : ‘Who Benefits?’ Inside the EU's Fight over Scanning for Child Sex Content
Context & Ripple Effects
The proposal sits within a long-running policy conflict over whether child-safety enforcement can coexist with private communications. Earlier coverage tracked both the effect of EU rules on service-side scanning and law-enforcement concern that broader end-to-end encryption reduces investigatory access, including the EU monitoring-law constraint and the debate around WhatsApp’s detection approach.
The investigation adds a political-economy dimension: it alleges that organizations advocating scanning were financed by actors with interests in related technology, while a U.S. campaign also pressed Apple to scan iCloud content through Heat Initiative’s public campaign.
First-order effects
- The reported funding relationships put Thorn, affiliated advocacy groups, and vendors of CSAM-scanning tools under immediate conflict-of-interest scrutiny as they advocate for the Commission proposal.
- EU policymakers and the Commission face added pressure to distinguish child-protection arguments from the commercial incentives of organizations promoting technical scanning mandates.
Second-order effects
- Privacy and encryption advocates gain a more concrete basis to demand funding disclosure, independent technical review, and tighter rules around advocacy access during the proposal’s consideration.
- Platforms could face a more contested procurement and compliance environment: scanning suppliers’ commercial roles may become part of the policy debate rather than a downstream implementation detail.
Third-order effects
- If similar funding patterns emerge elsewhere, public-safety AI governance may shift toward treating advocacy, technical standards, and vendors as one enforcement ecosystem requiring transparency safeguards.
- The broader encryption dispute could increasingly turn on who controls and profits from detection infrastructure, not solely on the stated trade-off between safety and privacy.
The trend: This is one data point in the expansion of AI-enabled enforcement surfaces, where policy campaigns, safety NGOs, and suppliers of detection systems can become economically intertwined.