As the final vote draws closer, an open letter has highlighted significant risks that remain in the EU’s controversial ‘Chat Control’ regulation. 617 of the world’s top scientists, cryptographers and security researchers have released an open letter today (10 September) calling on governments to reject the upcoming final vote on the EU’s ‘Chat Control’ legislation. Any content flagged as potential CSAM material by the scanning algorithms would then be automatically reported to authorities. “There is no scientific basis to argue that detection technology would work any better on images than on text,” reads the letter, with further assertions that CSAM detection methods can be easily evaded. The group states that just changing a few bits in an image is “sufficient to ensure that an image will not trigger state-of-the-art detectors”.