Iraq Without Water: The Cost of Oil to Italy

1. The Theft of Water

Basra, Iraq. When Saddam Hussein drained most of the Mesopotamian marshes in 1990 to punish rebels hiding among the reeds who opposed his regime, Mahdi Mutir took his few belongings, nets and small boat and fled to the Hammar marshes, north-east of Basra, where he thought he could continue to make a living from fishing. The Hammar Marshes are a large wetland complex in south-eastern Iraq and are part of the Mesopotamian Marshes, which originate from the Tigris and Euphrates River system.

These ancient rivers rise from the snow-capped headwaters of the Taurus Mountains in south-eastern Turkey, flow through valleys and gorges to the plateaus of Syria and northern Iraq, and then run parallel down to the floodplains of central Iraq. Like the arteries of the circulatory system, the rivers, joined by other tributaries, glide south and join at Al-Qurnah to form the majestic Shatt al-Arab, a river that travels two hundred kilometres before emptying into the Persian Gulf.

For millennia, the lives of the marsh dwellers have been closely linked to the Tigris, the Euphrates and the wetlands seasonally flooded by the rivers. Thanks to water and canals, these dwellers transported goods, navigated from one region to another, and they cultivated and lived from fishing in a symbiotic relationship with their environment.  Mutir also lived this way. Every day, at two o’clock in the afternoon, he would leave his house to cast his nets in a traditional mashuf — a long, narrow wooden canoe used by the fisherman of this area as a main mode of transport to navigate canals and marshes. He would wait for the sun to go down and leave the next day at first light to collect them. From the fish he caught, he managed to earn around 17,000 dinars a day, about 3 euros, a small amount but enough to feed his family.

Since the beginning of 2022, everything has changed for Mutir and the people of the area. His boat sits at a trickle of water surrounded by mudflats. It is a late afternoon in January when we meet him. The seasonal rains should have filled the canals and marshes but there is no water and no fish to be found. “Italian company. Italian company,” he repeats excitedly, pointing in the direction of the plant a few kilometres away. “Eni has taken away our water.” Mutir is a simple man with a mild gaze and a welcoming smile. He agrees to accompany us to the place he calls ‘the plant.’ After passing through a checkpoint, a structure under construction — surrounded by concrete walls and control towers around the perimeter — comes into view. At the entrance flies a tattered yellow flag with the six-legged dog, the symbol of the Italian energy company Eni. Opposite it, along the bank of a canal, a dam has been built to divert water to a recently constructed reservoir. And it is precisely this dam which will prevent the surrounding marshes from being flooded. “Before they built this dam, we had water,” Mutir explains, “it is not operational at the moment, but they will use the water to extract oil.”

The dam and the under-construction facility visited by IrpiMedia are part of a project Eni is implementing through the local contractor Iraq General Company for Execution of Irrigation Projects (IGC). This facility is intended to supply water needed to extract oil in the Zubair field. The field is one of Iraq’s largest and has been operated by the multinational Italian company Eni since 2010, under a ‘technical service contract.’  The contract provides for the development of the field with a production target of 700,000 barrels of oil per day.

Iraq is the second-largest producer in OPEC, the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, and holds the world’s fifth-largest proven crude oil reserve, with approximately 145 billion barrels. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, and the subsequent rise in oil and gas prices, Iraq has increased the value of its oil exports by 9 percent. This resulted in revenues of $ 115.5 billion in 2022. At the same time, Iraq is ranked by the United Nations as the fifth most vulnerable country in the world when it comes to the climate and water crisis.

Rising temperatures, increasingly irregular rainfall, the construction of upstream dams in Turkey and Iran, and irrigation methods rendered obsolete have caused a drastic reduction in the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers over the past decade. But the already serious situation due to the aforementioned factors is made critical by the oil industry. To extract crude oil, in fact, companies operating in Iraq use a technique involving water injection. On average, one and a half to three barrels of water are needed for each barrel of extracted oil.

Extracting oil by water injection is a standard technique that dates back to the 1950s. Often there is already water mixed with oil in the wells, and some of this water is normally extracted from the reservoir along with the oil. But that is not enough, so water is added from other sources such as reservoirs, aquifers or from the sea. Saudi Arabia, for example, built a desalination plant back in the late 1970s and uses water from the Persian Gulf to supply its wells.

In Iraq, it is not this way: in the absence of investment and infrastructure, water is taken from the rivers and diverted from other uses. The fields around Basra, where two-thirds of Iraq’s oil is extracted, daily consume 25% of all the water used in the Basra governorate.

In response to requests for clarification from IrpiMedia, Eni states that “there is no use of fresh water,” and that in general, “Eni Iraq has developed a Water Management Plan that provides guidance to minimise the use of water resources, particularly fresh water, according to the drivers of operational efficiency and reuse.”

The Al Khora plant, whose construction will be completed in 2025, “will draw water from the Main Outfall Drain (MOD) canal,” Eni stated to IrpiMedia. “The MOD is a canal that collects brackish and contaminated water resulting from the drainage of irrigation water, which, after a few kilometres, flows into the Persian Gulf west of Shatt el Arab.”

Currently, however, a third of the water used for injection at Zubair (equivalent to about 156,000 barrels per day) “is supplied by the ROO consortium through a brackish surface water collection canal called Qarmat Ali.”

Just like Zubair, most of the fields in southern Iraq obtain their water from the Qarmat Ali plant, located a few kilometres south of Al Khora. Built in the 1970s, it is currently managed by the Rumaila Operating Organisation (ROO), a consortium in which the British multinational British Petroleum holds a 47.7 percent stake. The water, drawn from a canal connected to the river of the same name, is first treated and then distributed through a system of above-ground pipes to the various fields in the south, including Rumaila and Zubair, where BP and Eni operate. IrpiMedia was denied access to the Qarmat Ali plant.

According to Eni, neither the water extracted from Qarmat Ali nor the “brackish and contaminated water taken from the MOD canal” have “any impact on reduction in the volumes of water potentially usable for other purposes.”

While it is true that the water from rivers and canals used by oil companies is of poor quality, due to the concentrations of salt and other pollutants, it is not true that it is not used for other purposes. If this water is purified, it can be used by citizens for domestic purpose.

Just downstream from the Al Khora and Qarmat Ali plants, as verified by IrpiMedia, the canals from which the companies draw their water flow into a public purification plant — known as R0 (R Zero). Thirty-five percent of the water used in Basra households comes from here. Additionally, the water, although saline, permitted navigation and fishing in what remained of the delicate marshland ecosystem where Mutir lived.

2. The Zubair Oil Field (Work, Rights?)

For Mutir, deprived of water and his sole source of income, the Zubair oil field is nearby and overwhelming presence in every way: on a clear day, the wells and their plumes of smoke are clearly visible from Mutir’s house and dot the entire horizon. It takes more than half an hour to get to the wells by car. The area takes the form of an immense expanse of barren land, densely populated areas, landfills, and car parks for oil trucks.

The Zubair field itself is completely militarised, with checkpoints, cameras and barbed wire at all entrances. Around two million people live in the area around the field. The promise of development that oil was supposed to bring has not been fulfilled. Most families have no access to electricity and the roads are in poor condition. Rubbish, plastic and debris are a constant. Agricultural lands, once cultivated with tomatoes—a typical product of Zubair—are now abandoned and contaminated by oil spills.

Zubayr, Iraq (Author: Daniela Sala)

Oil exploration in Iraq began in the early decades of the 20th century. Today, more than a century later, oil constitutes more than 90% of the Iraqi state’s revenue. With Saddam Hussein’s rise to power, and the nationalisation of the oil industry in 1972, things changed dramatically. Despite the Baathist slogan “Arab oil to the Arabs,” it was not the local communities who benefited from the oil revenues.

Moreover, due to international sanctions, the Iraqi fields were largely under-utilised. There was a lack of technology and investment, and Saddam Hussein’s attempts in the 1990s to strike deals with Chinese and Russian companies were of little or no use. The US-led invasion in 2003, followed by the fall of Saddam Hussein, definitively opened the way for multinational oil companies to enter the country.

Today, in southern Iraq, multinational company presence includes Italy’s Eni in Zubair, British Petroleum (BP) in Rumaila, the US-based ExxonMobil in West Qurna, Lukoil in West Qurna 2, China’s National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) in Maysan, and also Korean company Kogas and Egypt’s General Petroleum Corporation.

The legal framework is complex and confusing, still referring to laws predating 2003. In practice, however, these companies operate mainly through a series of licensing agreements, in partnership with the state-owned Basra Oil Company. Foreign companies are entitled to a percentage of the profits per barrel of oil produced.

Regarding environmental protection obligations, there is a general provision in Articles 33 and 114 of the Iraqi Constitution introduced in 2005, stating that “the State is responsible for the protection, conservation of the environment, and its biological diversity” and “shall formulate environmental policies, in collaboration with regional governments, to ensure the protection of the environment from pollution and preserve its quality.”

***

In Shaibah, a neighbourhood in the north of the city of Zubair, sandwiched between the oil field and a refinery, the air is pungent and smelly. The only public health centre in the area, a dilapidated building lacking sufficient medical staff and medicines, has a non-functioning air monitoring system.  Nouri Sadeq Hassan Salman, 33, lives just around the corner. Salman worked at the Zubair wells until 2014, when he fell ill with chronic kidney failure. He is now waiting for a transplant. “I worked in the reservoir from 2011 to 2014. I left the job in 2014 because I got sick. The doctors told me that the illness was caused by air pollution and the conditions of the place where I work and live. There was smoke everywhere in the factory, I was paid by the day, without a contract and I earned $9 a day. When the doctors told me the probable cause of my illness, I was angry. How could I not be? I blamed myself for taking that job. But the truth is that there is no other option here.” His older brother and two cousins also work in the same wells. Salman receives no financial support, no pension and no insurance.

Like Salman, the vast majority of workers are subcontracted out, effectively exempting the multinational oil companies of from direct responsibilities in terms of pay and workplace safety.

In fact, the foreign companies responsible for developing the field and ensuring production can subcontract various parts of the production process to other companies, local or foreign, in agreement with the state company — the Basra Oil Company.

Only a minority of the workers in the field have direct contracts with international companies. They are almost exclusively engineers or managers, and most of them are non-Iraqis. In theory, 80% of jobs should be reserved for local workers, but as two Eni employees in Zubair and other sources close to BOC and the union confirmed to IrpiMedia, this obligation is never fulfilled.

The Zubair field and the surrounding urban areas, where Mutir, Salman and thousands of Iraqi families live, were the gateway to Iraq for US Marines and British soldiers in 2003. Fierce and violent battles were fought here, which, in addition to dead bodies and destruction, left behind mines, depleted uranium and, above all, a lasting legacy: the presence of foreign oil companies. This is what Abdilkarim Omran, president of the General Federation of Workers’ Unions in Iraq (GFWUI), thinks: “We believe that these companies have obtained contracts and licences thanks to their home countries’ participation in the war against Iraq. Firstly, because the contracts, including ENI’s for the Zubair field, made during the ‘licensing waves’ were not subject to parliamentary approval. These companies work against Iraq’s interests. Every year they promise us that they will put an end to gas flaring and instead they continue to pollute the air, water and land. The citizens are paying the price. Cancer rates are high. There are numerous cases of birth defects and stillborn children.”

Nahr Bin Umar, Iraq. Early in the morning, a group of fishermen from Qarmat Ali collect the nets on the Shatt al-Arab river. (Author: Daniela Sala)

At night, the outskirts of Basra are illuminated by a series of torches, visible from a satellite, brighter than the city itself. This is known as “gas flaring.” Along with the oil, a certain amount of naturally occurring gas escapes from the wells. In Iraq, companies that have not invested in recovering this gas, which could be stored and used to produce energy, are burning it. The companies thus release huge amounts of not only carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but also other highly polluting substances which are harmful to public health, such as nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and sulphur dioxide (SO2).

In 2009, Shell estimated that if this gas would be used rather than burned, it would cover 70 percent of the country’s energy needs.

In 2018, within a 70-kilometre radius of Basra, more gas was burned than in all of India, China, Canada and Saudi Arabia combined. In the following years, until 2022, the trend remained unchanged.

In theory, Iraqi law prohibits gas flaring within 10 kilometres of homes, but in many areas visited by IrpiMedia, flares were observed burning gas within a few hundred metres of homes.

For years, multinational oil companies such as Eni and BP have promised to reduce flaring worldwide, but in reality, they are skirting their responsibilities. As documented in a recent Greenpeace investigation, British Petroleum’s annual emissions report does not count gas flares in the Rumaila field, claiming that it does not directly operate the field. If Rumaila were included in the report, BP’s reported emissions would double.

Even at Zubair, according to World Bank data, flaring is extremely high: In 2021, as much as 2.5 billion cubic metres of gas were burnt. However, Eni, which claims global flaring is 1.2 billion cubic metres, does not include emissions from the Iraqi field in its annual report.

In response to requests for clarification from IrpiMedia, Eni states that it “operates under a technical services contract signed with Basra Oil Company, BOC, in 2010 (…). Eni, therefore, does not control strategic decisions on the asset, including projects to reduce flaring.” For this reason, Eni would not be obliged to account for the gas flaring emissions produced at Zubair: all responsibilities, the company says, lie with BOC, including the emission count.

In any case, the details of responsibilities, environmental and otherwise, are contained in the licence agreements, signed between the foreign companies and the Ministry of Oil, which remain secret. Everything related to the companies goes through the powerful Ministry, to the point that the Department of the Environment — which in theory has the task of supervising their actions — can often do very little. ‘The government and the Ministry of Oil should oblige these companies to respect the law,” explains Walid Hamid, director of the Department of the Environment in southern Iraq. “Why don’t they burn the gas and spill the oil in other Gulf countries, but here they do? To save money. They do not want to spend or invest. It is more convenient for them to pollute, at the expense of the population.”

3. The Impact on Health: The Sick

While it is true that the data and research on the relationship between environmental aggression, pollution and public health are increasingly incontrovertible, it is equally true that epidemiological studies are needed to prove them. In Iraq, no studies have ever been conducted on the relationship between environmental pollution caused by multinational oil companies and the health of Iraqi citizens. Certainly, the political intention is not to raise the issue. According to the Ministry of Health, the official number of new cancer cases in Basra is about 2000 per year. But a document leaked by the same Ministry and viewed by IrpiMedia reports a figure of at least 8000 new cases per year. “We collect various data on occupational diseases from workers in the oil and gas industry, but it is confidential data. The information we collect must be sent directly to the Ministry and the oil companies. We know that there is an increase in tumours, but we have no power over the companies. That is up to the Ministry of Health,” explains Mai Taha Radi, director of the National Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, which is responsible for inspections inside the companies and conducting medical examinations of workers.

Those who fall ill with cancer in southern Iraq, an area inhabited by approximately seven million people, do not have much choice. Chemotherapy is provided by two public hospitals, one for children and one for adults. At the time of this writing, access to these hospitals has been suspended for all foreign journalists. Despite the lack of authorisation from the Ministry of Health, IrpiMedia was able to access and visit the oncology ward at Basra Children’s Hospital.

The hospital was built at the behest of Laura Bush, wife of former US President George W. Bush, after the 2003 invasion. Two signs are prominently displayed at the entrance. Both bear the logos of two oil companies: Italy’s Eni, and Korea’s Knoc, which are funding a new paediatric oncology ward as part of their so-called corporate social responsibility. Thirty extra beds in a hospital that currently has forty-five.

According to the contract, foreign companies are required to reinvest part of their profits in social utility projects and “local development “projects identified and managed by the Governor. Eni makes a big deal out of these projects: in Zubair, a few hundred metres from the entrance to the field, in a neighbourhood that lacks paved roads and drinking water, the company is building a school.

Then, in 2022, the company enthusiastically announced a project in partnership with the European Union and UNICEF dedicated to building a series of infrastructures to supply drinking water to more than 850,000 people. One of the projects supported by Eni, together with other companies, consists of refurbishing a water treatment plant on the Shatt Al Arab. Once completed, the plant will provide 19,200 cubic metres of water per day to the city. For comparison, in Zubair, just under 25,000 cubic metres of water per day are injected into wells, drawn from Qarmat Ali.

From 2018 to 2022, Eni, as conveyed to Irpi Media by the company, has invested “over 60 million in various social projects to support the health, water, and education sectors and strengthen infrastructure.”

In the meantime, however, with the ongoing war in Ukraine and the Russian fuel embargo, exports from Iraq are expected to increase steadily. And the major fossil fuel companies have already posted record profits: Eni has announced a group operating profit of 20.4 billion EUR for the 2022 financial year, more than double the figure for 2021. The same goes for BP, with 28 billion EUR in 2022.

***

In the early hours of the morning, the ward is still sleepy. All the beds are occupied by patients arriving from more distant cities such as Nassiriya, Amarah, and nearby Zubair. The mothers and grandmothers accompanying the sick children sleep on the floor on improvised beds. Ward nurses report a lack of chemotherapy drugs for this hospital, as well as insufficient equipment and personnel to carry out bone marrow transplants. In addition to the patients interviewed inside the hospital, IrpiMedia met with dozens of people who are ill or have lost a family member in the area around Zubair. Among them is Falah Hassan Sajed, son of Hassan Sajed, who died of liver cancer in July 2022. “The pollution killed my father. My wife has asthma, my eight children are growing up in this polluted environment. We can’t even get a job in the fields without a recommendation, and we don’t even have oil to light the stove. How can we think of fighting these companies?” he asks resignedly.

Zubayr, Iraq. (Author: Daniela Sala)

And yet there is a new generation of young Iraqis who are carrying out numerous campaigns and mobilisations to protect the air and water in Iraq, even at with the risk of losing their lives or being made to disappear. Ahmed (the name is fictitious), 32, is one of them. After the massive protests in Basra in 2018 due to the water crisis and the lack of basic services for the population, he decided to get involved and denounce the alleged crimes of the oil companies. He has already received a death threat for helping journalists document the pollution, but says, “I am doing it for my son and future generations.” Ahmed is a member of Humat Dijlah, an environmental organisation dedicated to defending the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the Mesopotamian marshes. In recent years, many Iraqi environmentalists have been threatened, killed, kidnapped or forced to flee abroad. The latest was Jassim Al Asadi, a well-known face of the Nature Iraq organisation, who was kidnapped on 1 February 2023 and released after two weeks.

Meanwhile, despite the risks and threats, it is precisely Ahmed’s generation, born or raised in the wake of the 2003 US invasion, that is trying to start anew and has decided to do so from the water. It is Friday morning, a public holiday in Iraq. In front of the Shatt al-Arab, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet, a group of environmentalists talk to passers-by about pollution and the problems caused by a lack of water resources. The rivers and canals of what was once nicknamed “the Venice of the Middle East” are open sewers, filled with waste and used for domestic and industrial discharges. If once their grandparents and parents, despite the conflicts and Saddam’s dictatorship, were able to live off the river, fish, and drink from the river — today this generation, which grew up in an oil-rich country with theoretically medium-high incomes, — no longer has access to clean, drinkable water. “Here in this land, civilisation was born. And here, if we remain silent and do nothing, we will see its end,” says Ahmed.

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The EU Fight Against Child Pornography Stokes Fears of Widespread Online Surveillance

“The privacy advocates sound very loud. But someone must also speak for the children.” Just a few months before launching her initiative against online child pornography, in November 2021, Ylva Johansson had already prepared the debate over what would become one of the most contentious legislative proposals Brussels had seen in years. Did the EU Commissioner for Home Affairs sense that this apparently universally agreeable policy would provoke such heavy backlash from among civil society and across the political spectrum?

The Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR) plans to introduce a complex technical architecture called client-side scanning to combat the proliferation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

This approach relies on artificial intelligence systems for detecting images, videos and speech containing sexual abuse against minors, and attempts at grooming kids. It would require all digital platforms at risk of being used for malicious purposes – from Facebook to Telegram, Signal to Snapchat or TikTok, to data clouds and online gaming websites – to use this technology to detect and report traces of CSAM on their systems and users’ private chats. This is impossible without weakening end-to-end encryption, currently the ultimate way to secure digital communications.

‘Chat control’

Technology specialists and online rights groups were quick to warn that, behind a veil of good intentions (equipping the authorities to effectively combat the proliferation of CSAM), this “chat control” could lead to the disproportionate infringement of fundamental rights and online privacy for all EU citizens. This has fed an important opposition movement among EU legislators, both in the Parliament – where the text will pass a key test during a vote at the Civil Liberties Committee in October – and in the Council – where discussions are stalling due to opposition from a few key Member States.

Johansson, though, has not blinked once, dubbing the project as her “number one priority”. The Commissioner can boast the support of numerous child protection organisations loudly urging for the adoption of the text.

Far from a spontaneous movement, the campaign in favour of CSAR has been largely orchestrated and bankrolled by a network of entities with ties to the tech industry and security services, whose interests go far beyond child protection. Amidst the Commission’s efforts to keep a tight lid on details of the campaign, our investigation – based on dozens of interviews, leaks of internal records and documents obtained through freedom of information laws – has uncovered a coordinated communication e ort between Johansson’s cabinet and these lobby groups. Johansson has not responded to several requests for an interview.

One of the first hints at this behind-closed-doors pact lies in a letter sent by Johansson in early May 2022, a few days before launching her legislative proposal on CSAM. “We have shared many moments on the journey to this proposal. We have had extensive consultations. You have helped provide evidence that has served as the basis to draft this proposal”, wrote the Commissioner.

The previously undisclosed letter was not sent to a classic child protection organisation but to the executive director of Thorn. Despite its non-profit status, this American organisation also has a for-profit operation, selling artificial intelligence (AI) technologies which can identify child sexual abuse images online.

Thorn’s tools, such as Safer, are already used by companies such as Vimeo, Flickr and OpenAI – the creator of ChatGPT. Its clients also include law enforcement agencies across the globe, like the US Department of Homeland Security, which has spent $4.3 million for their software licences since 2018. Should “client-side scanning” for CSAM be imposed on all major platforms in the EU, Thorn could come out as one of the main beneficiaries of the new regulation – along with other tech companies which it has already partnered with, such as Amazon or Microsoft.

Hollywood celebrity lobbyist

Thorn has pushed for this regulation long before it was put down on paper. The company has hired high-profile lobbyists, including FGS Global, a major lobby rm with considerable access to the Brussels powerbrokers, to which it has paid more than €600,000 in representation costs for the year 2022 alone.

But Thorn has also relied on its own resources. Its board has long been chaired by Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher, who co-founded the company with Demi Moore in 2012, and whose multiple invesments in AI companies could stand to benefit from the development of a market for CSAM surveillance. The actor was forced to step down from his position at Thorn on September 14th, amid indignation over his support for a fellow actor accused – and now convicted – of raping two women. For years though, access to the top echelons in Brussels has never been an issue, both for Kutcher and for Thorn, thanks to the actor’s star power and tear-jerking speeches.

Kutcher and Johansson were the key speakers at a summit organised and moderated by an enthusiastic Eva Kaili, then the Vice President of the European Parliament, in November 2022; before she was removed from her position following corruption charges against her in December. The actor also addressed lawmakers in Brussels in March 2023, attempting to appease concerns about the possible misuse and failures of existing technology – his speech was “highly misleading in terms of what the technology can do”, according to an internal document from European Digital Rights, an association of civil and human rights organisations.

Throughout the preparation process, Thorn was also granted close access to EU legislators behind the doors. The organisation, listed as a charity in EU transparency registers, met with cabinet members of every top Commission official with any say on security or digital policy, including Margrethe Vestager, Margaritis Schinas, and Thierry Breton. Ursula Von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, was one of the first to be briefed about the plans for fighting child sexual abuse in a video conference attended by Ashton Kutcher, as early as November 2020.

Author: Galateia_Iatraki_SOLOMON

A generous offer

Thorn’s main point of contact was, however, Johansson’s team. Emails released by the Commission after a long struggle reveal a close and continuous working relationship between the two parties in the months following the rollout of the CSAR proposal, with the Commission repeatedly facilitating Thorn’s access to crucial decision-making venues attended by member states’ ministers and representatives.

A few days following the presentation of Johansson’s proposal, Thorn representatives sat down with one of the Commissioner’s cabinet members and expressed a “willingness to collaborate closely”. Not only did they o er help to prepare “communication material on online child sexual abuse”, but they also made an o er of service to “provide expertise” for “the creation of the database of indicators” to be hosted by the future EU Centre to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse.

Thorn is among the most vocal stakeholders advocating for the creation of this new body which would vet and approve scanning technologies, as well as then purchase and offer them to small and medium companies. Thorn’s offer to support building its database reads as a generous pro bono offer, and it would be – if major commercial interests were not at stake.

Abdication of corporate responsibility and ‘false positives’

“What I don’t think governments understand is just how expensive and fallible these systems are”, warned Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Technology Foundation, a US non-profit which runs an encrypted chat application which prevents anyone from collecting or reviewing user data, which has no interest in seeing encryption techniques weakened. “We’re looking at [a cost of] hundreds of millions of dollars indefinitely due to the scale that this is being proposed at”, added Whittaker, who compared this policy to offering tech companies a “get out of responsibility free card”, by saying “you pay us and we will do whatever it is to magically clean up this problem”.

This scepticism has been shared by a growing number of stakeholders. “Current technologies lead to a high number of false positives”, said a spokesperson for the Dutch government, suggesting that many users might be needlessly reported to the authorities, overburdening law enforcement agencies. In a severe blow to the advocates of this solution, Apple announced in Summer 2023 that it is impossible to implement CSAM scanning while preserving the privacy and security of digital communications. A few weeks later, UK officials privately admitted that there is no existing technology able to scan end-to-end encrypted messages without undermining user privacy.

Matthew Daniel Green, a security technologist at John Hopkins University, also warned that AI-driven scanning technology could expose digital platforms to malicious attacks: “If you touch upon built-in encryption models, then you introduce vulnerabilities. This could endanger the kids themselves, by opening the way for predators to hack accounts in searching for images.”

Suspicions of mixing interests

While Thorn played a central role in framing the Commission’s proposal, a tight and intricate network of players has stepped into Brussels’ offices to build consensus around it. Among them is a discrete but highly influential organisation called WeProtect Global Alliance. Registered as a “foundation” at an unassuming residential address in the tiny Dutch town of Lisse, the Alliance aims to “develop policies and solutions to protect children from sexual exploitation and abuse online”. However, it is no ordinary civil society group.

Launched as a government initiative by EU, UK and US authorities, WeProtect was transformed into a supposedly independent organisation in the spring of 2020, as efforts to push for legislative initiatives to tackle CSAM with client-side scanning technology were picking up. Its membership includes not only NGOs, including Thorn, but also tech companies, like Snap or Palantir, and dozens of governments.

The EU Commission has endorsed WeProtect as “the central organisation for coordinating and streamlining global e orts and regulatory improvements” in the fight against online child sexual abuse. Johansson’s Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs (DG Home) granted the organisation almost €1 million to organise a summit in Brussels dedicated to the fight against CSAM, as well as activities to enhance law enforcement collaboration.

One of DG Home’s most senior officials, Antonio Labrador Jimenez, who has played a central role in drafting and promoting the CSAR proposal, has officially been part of WeProtect’s board since July 2020, though documents suggest that his involvement dates as far back as 2019. Although Mr. Labrador Jimenez “does not receive any kind of compensation”, his holding this position raises serious questions about how the Commission uses WeProtect to promote Johannson’s proposal. When Labrador Jimenez briefed his fellow board members about the proposed regulation in July 2022, notes from the meeting show that “the Board discussed the media strategy of the legislation”.

WeProtect has not answered questions regarding its funding arrangements with the Commission nor to what extent its advocacy strategies are shaped by stakeholders sitting on its policy board. This question is all the more important as WeProtect’s board also includes representatives of powerful security agencies, such as Stephen Kavanagh, the Executive Director for Police Services of INTERPOL, or Lt. Colonel Dana Humaid Al Marzouqi, a high-ranking United Arab Emirates’ Interior Ministry official who chairs or participates in numerous international police task forces.

Trojan horse hypothesis

Ross Anderson, professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University, says the missing picture in the current debate is precisely the role of law enforcement agencies, who he suspects expect to undermine encryption by letting child protection organisations lead the charge in Brussels.

“The security and intelligence community have always used issues that scare lawmakers, like children and terrorism, to undermine online privacy.” They have, Anderson said, “told EU policymakers that once the machinery has been built to target CSAM, it is entirely a policy decision to target terrorism too. We all know how this works, and come the next terrorist attack, no lawmaker will oppose the extension of scanning from child abuse to serious violent and political crimes.

This concern is shared by Wojciech Wiewiórowski, the EU’s Data Protection Supervisor, who told Le Monde and its partners that the proposal would amount to “crossing the Rubicon” towards the mass surveillance of EU citizens if this technology were to be used in wider contexts.

These warnings are not mere speculations. In July 2022, the head of DG Home met Europol’s Executive Director, Catherine de Bolle, to discuss Johansson’s proposal and the EU law enforcement agency’s contribution to the fight against CSAM. According to the minutes of the meeting Europol oated the idea of using the proposed EU Centre to scan for more than just CSAM. “There are other crime areas that would benefit from detection,” Europol told the Commission official, who “signalled understanding for the additional wishes” but ” flagged the need to be realistic in terms of what could be expected, given the many sensitivities around the proposal.”

Research by Imperial College academics Ana-Maria Cretu and Shubham Jain showed how client-side scanning systems could be discreetly tweaked to perform facial recognition from the devices of unaware users, cautioning that there might be more vulnerabilities that we don’t know of yet. “Once this technology is rolled out to billions of devices across the world, you can’t take it back”, they warned.

Intense lobbying by ‘survivors’

When the regulation proposal came under attack by privacy experts, a nearly unknown group came to the rescue. The Brave Movement, “a survivor-centred global movement campaigning to end childhood sexual violence”, emerged only a few weeks before the text rolled out, and soon became a key ally for Johansson.

In April 2022, the organisation hosted the Commissioner in an online “Global Survivors Summit”. A year later, she joined a photo-op in front of the European Parliament during the “Brave Movement Action Day”, along with a group of survivors gathered to “demand EU leaders be brave and act to protect millions of children at risk from the violence and trauma they faced”. During that period, Brave recruited its new Europe Campaign Manager, Jessica Airey, from Johansson’s department, where Ms Airey had worked as an intern to promote the CSAR proposal for ve months.

An internal strategy note during the course of this investigation leaves no doubts about the Brave Movement’s central role as an advocacy instrument to advance consensus around Johansson’s proposal. “The main objective of the (.) mobilisation around this proposed legislation is to see it passed” and to “create a positive precedent for other countries which we will invite to follow through with similar legislation”, wrote the organisation.

This November 2022 note suggests that Brave has played a key role in lobbying officials both in Brussels and in EU member-states. The organisation has, for instance, built a strong relationship with Conservative MEP Javier Zarzalejos, a supporter of Johansson’s proposal who leads negotiations at the Parliament level. The document reveals that Zarzalejos “asked for strong survivors’ mobilisation in key countries like Germany”, one of the “potential blockers in the negotiations”. Brave has also met with the French Junior Minister for Child Protection, Charlotte Caubel, in an effort to turn France – already in favour of the text – into “a Champion for the legislation.”

A generous American sponsor

Obviously, preventing the circulation of CSAM is a common goal for all child protection organisations. Not all, however, approve of the approach proposed by Johansson. For instance, the German Child Protection Association argues that “relying on purely technical solutions to protect children from sexualized violence online is a fatal mistake with devastating consequences for the fundamental democratic rights of all people”. Scanning private communications would “deeply interfere with the fundamental rights of children and young people”, added the association.

Dissenting voices like this one have struggled to make themselves heard in the face of the powerful coalition of pro-CSAR organisations grouped together under the banner of the European Child Sexual buse Legislation Advocacy Group (ECLAG). This coordination platform, launched immediately after Johansson’s proposal, brings together renowned children’s rights organisations (Terre des hommes, Missing Children) with Thorn, the Brave Movement or the Internet Watch Foundation (a UK non-profit which produces technology to identify CSAM and is funded by some of the biggest players of the internet industry).

In addition to close access to Johansson’s team, ECLAG members have received financial support from an American charity called the Oak Foundation. Headed by an ex-US State Department official, the foundation has granted them at least €24 million since 2019. In addition to supporting Thorn ($5.3 million), the foundation donated $10.3 million for the creation of the Brave Movement, and $1.5 million to Purpose Europe, a UK-based consultancy controlled by French giant Capgemini, which has worked with multiple ECLAG organisations and held meetings with Johansson’s cabinet.

A spokesperson for the Oak Foundation, who has a long-term commitment to helping NGOs that fight child abuse throughout the world, said that the foundation supports organisations that “advocate for new policies, with a specific focus in the EU, US, and UK, where opportunities exist to establish a precedent for other governments”. However, it did not address privacy concerns raised by the CSAR proposal.

Struggling for transparency

Throughout this investigation, our reporters have found it very difficult to obtain internal European Commission documents related to the proposed CSAR regulation, in spite of the EU’s freedom of information law. While the Commission’s failure to deal with document access requests within statutory deadlines is not uncommon, requests fled as early as December 2022 have gone unanswered for months.

It ended up being necessary to ask the European Ombudsman to intervene in order to get the frst series of documents released. But several requests about email exchanges and the minutes of meetings between senior Commission officials from Ylva Johannson’s cabinet and private lobby groups like Thorn and WeProtect were rejected. For example, the Commission refused to disclose Cordua’s email in reply to Johannson’s message in May 2022, as well as a “policy one pager” Thorn shared, after Thorn, despite its charity status, argued that “the disclosure of the information contained therein would undermine the organization’s commercial interest”.

The European Ombudsman is currently investigating four separate complaints filed by the reporting team regarding the Commission’s failure to fulfill its transparency obligations. The Commission has thus far failed to respond to the Ombudsman’s request for information regarding two of the complaints that were submitted in July.

‘A commercial interest’

Ylva Johansson’s close dialogue with this network of organisations and tech companies is all the more remarkable in light of her silence shown to other stakeholders. The European Digital Rights has repeatedly complained about the lack of consideration from Johansson, who has never received them. The same frustration is shown by O imits. Hosted in a bright office room at the edge of Amsterdam’s famous red light district hosts, this organisation is Europe’s oldest hotline for kids and adults wanting to report abuse, whether happening behind closed doors or seen on a video circulating online. Every day, its seven analysts view thousands of reports and images, to assess whether they are abusive or illegal.

While Off limits’ legitimacy is unquestioned, Arda Gerkens, its former director (2015-September 2023), has found herself in front of a wall of silence since Ylva Johansson launched her proposal. “In the past years, Commissioner Johansson and her sta visited the Silicon Valley and big North American groups”, explained Gerkens: “I invited her here, but she never came.”

“Who will benefit from the legislation?”, Gerkens asked rhetorically. “Not the children”.

Instead, she believes that Johansson’s proposal is excessively “influenced by companies pretending to be NGOs, but acting more like tech companies”. “Groups like Thorn”, she added, “use everything they can to put this legislation forward, not just because they feel that this is the way forward to combat sexual child abuse, but also because they have a commercial interest in doing so.”

Struggling for transparency

Throughout this investigation, our reporters have found it very difficult to obtain internal European Commission documents related to the proposed CSAR regulation, in spite of the EU’s freedom of information law. While the Commission’s failure to deal with document access requests within statutory deadlines is not uncommon, requests fled as early as December 2022 have gone unanswered for months.

It ended up being necessary to ask the European Ombudsman to intervene in order to get a first series of documents released. But several requests about email exchanges and the minutes of meetings between senior Commission officials from Ylva Johannson’s cabinet and private lobby groups like Thorn and WeProtect were rejected. For example, the Commission refused to disclose Cordua’s email in reply to Johannson’s message in May 2022, as well as a “policy one pager” Thorn shared, after Thorn, despite its charity status, argued that “the disclosure of the information contained therein would undermine the organization’s commercial interest”.

The European Ombudsman is currently investigating four separate complaints filed by the reporting team regarding the Commission’s failure to fulfill its transparency obligations. The Commission has thus far failed to respond to the Ombudsman’s request for information regarding two of the complaints that were submitted in July.

Credits:

Maxime Vaudano – Investigations editor
Dusica Tomovic  – Managing Editor
Ivana Nikolic  – Program Manager
Matt Robinson – Copy Editor
Ivana Jeremic   – Fact Checker
Igor Vujcic   – Illustrator
Ilianna Papangeli – Managing Director
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Galatia Iatraki – Illustrator
Kai Bierman – Investigations editor
Andrés Gil – Foreign desk editor
Mariangela Paone – Special envoy
Evert De Vos – Editor
Xandra Schutte – Director
Olivia Ettema – Illustration
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Antonella Napolitano – Impact editor
Francesca De Benedetti – Foreign news editor
Andre Meister – Editor

Funding partner:
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