As many, many critics have pointed out, the EU claiming to defend human rights, protect free speech, and respect personal privacy, is demonstrably nothing more than a fictional moral high ground.
Russia and China are in your face and obvious about where they stand, and don't mind being a boolean of true. The EU just prefers some subtlety with more politically correct and polite wording, and prefers a float of 0.92.
Part of me almost prefers the Singapore model. Clear rules, even harsh rules, but near-total do-whatever-you-want if it's not on the list. None of this gray-area nonsense. Uncertainty is a form of oppression, and the US/EU are masters in that regard.
I think the issue is that the EU believes to do these things above corruption. In a sense, if you think you are upholding human rights, free speech, and personal privacy, you don't think it is required to offer people ways to hide from the government.
The government thinks the rule of law itself is good enough. Even if they are aware of your speech and it criticizes or shock or whatever the currently elected, they believe nothing could be done against you because the rule of law would protect your right to do so.
Therefore they assume if you have to be secret about it, you must be doing something illegal, otherwise they don't see why you would worry about the government being able to know you are doing it, since they could not do anything against you.
Here for example, they assume that it would only be used to catch and prevent CSAM, which is illegal. But that it would never be abused to prevent legitimate legal free speech, or that it would be done in a way that your privacy is respected because the rule of law won't allow other use of "snooping", etc.
And to be honest, I don't know if they are completely wrong or right. It's a different perspective, one that relates to "gun control" as well.
In the US, people have zero trust of government, and feel like at any point they need to be armed and have the means to hide, escape, and rebel against it. That means secure communication channels, bearing arms, etc.
In the EU, generally people assume that the systems in place will protect the institutions and upheld the rule of law, constitutions, democratic freedoms, etc. And people trust the system in place, so they don't see why individual citizens should be allowed to have weapons, places to hide, etc., and see that more in practice as something that enables crime.
Generally, the counter argument to the American stance is that the power imbalance is too big anyways, it's the system that must be protected and needs to be trusted, if the system becomes corrupt, no amount of civilian weapon and hiding places could match the power the state has, so it's a futile attempt that just ends up benefiting criminals.
The problem with that framework is that even if you believe the EU Governments are the "good guys", it's not going to be just them who get access to the data.
It opens it up potentially to anyone with the means to infiltrate these systems - rogue employees of the companies running the messaging and cloud services, cyber criminals who will be able to hack into them, foreign states who will be able to hack it (we very recently saw this how China had infiltrated CALEA backdoors into telephone systems around the world for many years).
Which of course is part of the reason that companies are so on-board with end to end encryption in the first place - being able to ensure that rogue employees can't access customer's private messages and files, and that if cyber criminals hack in and infiltrate data that there are no encryption keys accessible is a huge benefit to them - but the moment you try to open it up to "lawful intercept" you open it up to all the unlawful intercept too...
That's a good point, and I'd assume it comes down to what people consider the least of two evils, possible corporate espionage or maybe blackmail, versus CSAM (assuming you believe monitoring for CSAM will help reduce it).
I was more trying to frame the perspective I think in which these proposals are made. As I think it explains a bit why for some this seems ludicrous while for others it seems a reasonable proposal worth considering.
Realistically the EU only cares about protecting their citizens from private companies, and especially American ones. When it comes to government overreach they know virtually no bounds.
Then the US on the other hand does decently protect its citizens from the government itself (well, this recent year/administration notwithstanding), only because the US government knows full well they can just turn around and grab all the data they want from the private American companies they don't regulate at all.
Russia and China are in your face and obvious about where they stand, and don't mind being a boolean of true. The EU just prefers some subtlety with more politically correct and polite wording, and prefers a float of 0.92.
Part of me almost prefers the Singapore model. Clear rules, even harsh rules, but near-total do-whatever-you-want if it's not on the list. None of this gray-area nonsense. Uncertainty is a form of oppression, and the US/EU are masters in that regard.