The EU's Silent Assault on Human Dignity
The EU is outlawing private communication, anonymous social media accounts, will scan your private messages and force you to register with your ID/passport everywhere online.
The EU is outlawing private communication, anonymous social media accounts, will scan your private messages and force you to register with your ID/passport everywhere online.
TL;DR: Last week, behind closed doors, a new EU wide chat control proposal was approved. The direct implications are far reaching.
Anonymous communication and social media accounts are outlawed.
Mandatory surveillance of all text chats, emails and social media.
Forced registration with ID/passport for chat, social media or email apps.
Everyone is affected, YOU as well! Any foreign citizen communicating with Europeans will have their messages scanned!
This legislation is going to determine the fate of 450 million citizens. It will set the course for whether the European continent moves toward freedom or digital oppression.
“Everything that is profound loves the mask“
- Friedrich Nietzsche
A civilization reveals its character by how much space it allows a person to keep for themselves. To understand the stakes of the EU’s current push for digital surveillance and control, one must first understand what is being lost - the quiet, sacred space where a person can whisper and be unobserved.
The Quiet Comeback of Europe’s Surveillance Regime
A couple of weeks ago, you might have seen the previous attempt by surveillance proponents in the EU to pass chat control legislation fail.
People were celebrating - but the celebration was premature.
Only four weeks later, a new attempt has emerged.. This time, the responsible players have learned from their previous mistakes in numerous ways: they have adapted the language to be more ambiguous, and the process has (ironically) taken place mainly behind closed doors so far. If not stopped, this new proposal will soon be put into action.
This would mark the end of private communication for 450 million citizens directly. Furthermore, millions of people from the U.S. and all around the world will also be surveilled by the EU’s surveillance regime if they choose to communicate with Europeans.
This Week’s Quiet Turning Point
Last week, the EU Law Enforcement Working Party group approved a new revised chat control proposal (revision of the Danish Chat Control proposal) behind closed doors with broad support.
1. Private Message Scanning
The previous Chat Control legislation explicitly forced client side scanning of all private messages. Which in practice means AI will read your private chats and messages and if there is something it doesn’t like about your chats, they will automatically be forwarded to law enforcement.
This proposal failed after enormous backlash thanks to initiatives like “Fight Chat Control”.
The new legislation contains adapted language, but the adapted language is only an euphemistic smokescreen as the consequences are exactly the same. A new requirement for e-mail, chat, and messenger services to take “all appropriate risk mitigation measures” has been introduced.
This is literally the same as before, expressed more mildly with abstract language that distorts its intention. . This single sentence alone will force providers to scan ALL messages, including private, end-to-end encrypted messages.
What they’ve done is pour honey over their words to hide the taste of poison underneath. They operate under the belief that you won’t grasp the magnitude of this.
And this affects all of us. You’re an American texting someone from Germany? Guess what, your texts will now also be scanned.
2. Outlawing of anonymous communication
Anonymous communication is being outlawed, as now every citizen will be required to verify their age with their ID or passport before accessing any chat, messenger, e-mail, and social media service.
The gravity of the consequences of this cannot be overstated. If this legislation passes it will mark the end of private communication in the EU.
Where are we in the process now?
The proposal now moves to the Committee of Permanent Representatives, where member states will attempt to agree on a unified position. If they succeed - which based on the broad consensus in the LEWP seems likely - the Council can push the file into negotiations with the European Parliament almost immediately. In the best case for the surveillance proponents, this means the legislation could be adopted within months, not years. A fast-tracked agreement could make the law effectively live by mid-to-late next year, while heavier resistance or a second reading would push implementation into the following year. In other words: the window to stop this is rapidly closing.
The Motive Behind the Machinery
Just as they veil the consequences of their legislation in soft language, they make use of dishonest and false arguments to establish this new surveillance regime.
Their chosen argument: we need to protect children online.
This approach is far more sophisticated, far more devious, and far more dangerous than previous attempts. Earlier versions of chat control leaned on counter-terrorism and crime prevention. Arguments that, while flawed, were at least straightforward to refute. But now? Now it’s about the children.
Don’t you want the EU to protect children?
Aren’t you on the side of the innocent?
Who would oppose something done “for the children”?
It is emotional and moralizing by design - and that is precisely what makes it so effective and so manipulative.
Most (based on the statistic you’re looking at around 85%-90%) of child abuse is committed offline, by someone known to the child. Family members, caregivers, or trusted adults. If you’re serious about protecting children, you would have to address this fact. The EU knows this. Every criminologist knows this. They simply utilize children as a political shield to hide behind.
It uses their suffering as a rhetorical battering ram to dismantle civil liberties, to normalize mass interception, and to force through a system of digital control that could never survive an honest debate.
“I Don’t Have Anything To Hide”
There is no greater violation of human dignity than forcing a person to live under permanent inspection. When an AI system is granted the authority to scan your most private messages, photos, and thoughts, something fundamental breaks: the boundary between your inner life and the outside world.
“Arguing that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
- Edward Snowden
Private messages are not “data”.
They are the raw material of a human being. Fears, desires, doubts, intimate moments, fragments of identity that only exist because we believe they remain unseen.
When an algorithm is trained to judge them, classify them, or flag them, you cease to be a person with a private inner world and become an object of analysis. Your conversations become datasets. Your memories become evidence. Your relationships become patterns.
You are no longer treated as a sovereign human with an inviolable inner life, but as a potential threat whose every expression must be evaluated by a machine.
This is the precise moment dignity collapses: when the most intimate parts of your life are no longer yours, but inputs into a system of suspicion.
A society that allows this does not just lose privacy. It loses the basic recognition of the individual as something more than a machine-readable file.
Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes
In game-theoretical terms, a surveillance system like this cannot remain unused. Once it exists, every actor with access - politicians, agencies, bureaucrats, private corporations, even foreign states - faces the same choice: exploit the system for advantage, or trust that everyone else will voluntarily restrain themselves.
But restraint is not the stable strategy.
The payoff for exploitation (political leverage, insider information, suppression of opponents) is high, while the cost of being caught is low or distant. Meanwhile, the cost of not exploiting it is potentially losing power to someone who does.
This creates a classic defection equilibrium (prisoners dilemma):
If I don’t use it, someone else will - and I’ll be worse off.
Over time, the probability that no one ever misuses the surveillance system is effectively zero.
In other words: given the incentives, exploitation is not a risk - it’s the logical and predictable outcome.
A System No Democracy Can Survive
A surveillance system of this scale will not sit quietly. It will be exploited - predictably and systematically. A tool capable of scanning every private message and removing anonymity is a tool capable of targeting anyone who threatens those in power. Journalists, whistleblowers, activists, dissidents, opposition politicians, and vulnerable minorities will be the first to feel its weight. These are the people who rely on private channels to reveal corruption, challenge abuses, or simply survive. Remove privacy, and you remove them.
Freedom of speech cannot survive in a world where every sentence is examined by an AI judge. Human dignity collapses when the most intimate corners of your life are treated as machine-readable input. And the basic freedoms that define an open society - the freedom to think, to question, to dissent - become impossible.
The irony is that this system does not create more security; it destroys it. Breaking privacy breaks safety. Weakening encryption weakens everyone. A society in which every message is inspected is a society where hostile actors, criminals, and foreign intelligence agencies are given an unprecedented attack surface. It is the opposite of protection.
Inversion of Political Sovereignty
And then there is sovereignty, the core of any democracy. The people are the sovereign, not the state. Democratic decision-making happens both in public and in private: in conversations, debates, doubts, plans, disagreements, and the countless invisible dialogues that precede every meaningful political act. When private communication is monitored, the people’s sovereignty is quietly transferred to those who control the surveillance infrastructure.
The “child protection” narrative is a smokescreen. History shows the same pattern every time: any tool that can be exploited will be exploited. This isn’t cynicism; it’s game theory and the lived reality of every surveillance system ever built. Once the infrastructure exists, it will inevitably be used against political opponents, critics, and inconvenient voices.
The EU’s Descent into Self-Destruction
“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws”
- Tacitus
As the complexity scientist Peter Turchin would argue, societies do not collapse because of one bad law - they collapse when their elites, losing legitimacy, turn coercive tools inward. This is the hallmark of what Turchin calls the disintegrative phase: elite overproduction, rising instability, loss of societal cohesion, and a state that responds not with renewal but with repression.
Mass surveillance is exactly that pattern.
A confident political order does not need to monitor every private message. Only a system aware of its own internal weakness reaches for such powers. In Turchin’s framework, this is not a show of strength - it is a strong signal and symptom of decline, the moment when rulers begin treating citizens as a threat rather than the source of sovereignty.
By trying to control its population instead of restoring trust, the EU is accelerating the very instability it fears.
A Future Still Worth Defending
This moment seems dark, but it gives us clarity: privacy matters because it is the space where freedom begins.
The proposal is not law yet. It can be stopped - but only if people speak up. Contact your representatives, spread the word, support “Fight Chat Control“, refuse to let this pass quietly, regardless if you’re a citizen of the EU or not (you are still indirectly affected).
Privacy is the light they are trying to dim.
We can make it shine brighter.
We can use privacy, cryptography and decentralized systems to build a more resilient and free world.
I have also published this article on my X.com profile.