Europe’s Chat Control law is not about protecting children. It is about normalizing surveillance of citizens while shielding the powerful.

The EU’s Chat Control law is pitched as a crusade against child sexual abuse. Yet it is not about protecting children at all. It is about the systematic construction of a pan-European surveillance apparatus, designed to monitor the many while the powerful few remain exempt.

The proposal is a Trojan Horse, smuggled in on the unassailable slogan of child safety, but it does not enter through the gates; it slinks in through a seemingly trivial compromise, a cat flap carved into the vault of private communication. Once it’s there, the vault’s integrity is forever compromised. The idea that only “good cats” can enter is a fallacy.

Indiscriminate surveillance by design

Child abuse is a real and heinous crime. The EU’s solution is fraudulent: forcing spyware on every phone and laptop does not target criminals but presumes everyone’s guilt. EU Council lawyers warned that scanning encrypted services constitutes “general and indiscriminate” surveillance, a direct violation of European rights. More than 600 security experts condemned the proposal as perilous and unworkable.

Once embedded on every device, the scanners can be repurposed: today for images of abuse, tomorrow for flagging dissent, leaks or satire. The Trojan Horse is no longer mythical, but built into the system.

Backdoors break vaults

Encryption is binary: either only the sender and recipient hold the keys to the vault of information, or someone else does. Insert a backdoor or cat flap, and the vault no longer guards what’s inside from prying eyes. It removes privacy altogether, as every device becomes a compulsory node in a surveillance network, an irresistible target for hackers and hostile states.

The legal principle of “innocent until proven guilty” is inverted. Chat Control mandates pre-emptive evidence collection, without the need for credible suspicion, warrants, or oversight. Germany’s constitutional courts struck down Palantir’s Gotham profiling system for precisely this reason. Chat Control is Gotham, deployed to every pocket, purse, and desk.

Impunity for the powerful

The moral justification is a decoy. Predators in positions of power have long escaped the very scrutiny Chat Control aims to impose on the public. Jeffrey Epstein’s network entangled global elites. In the UK, a dossier shows decades of allegations of high-level cover-ups in Westminster. The Marc Dutroux scandal left Belgium convinced the investigation was blocked to protect high-ranking figures. These cases reveal the core hypocrisy: the dragnet of Chat Control is designed for ordinary citizens, while the powerful are the ones carved out by exemption.

Surveillance as weakness

A government secure in its legitimacy does not need to read every private conversation. A brittle one demands a live feed into its citizens’ lives.

Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission pushes ahead despite explicit legal and technical warnings. Donald Trump’s administration expanded surveillance in the name of security. Both mirror the reflex of authoritarians everywhere: leaders who cannot persuade, control instead.

Mass surveillance is not the mark of strength. It is the confession of weakness.

Reject the lie

Supporters of Chat Control insist the scope is limited. That is a blatant lie. Powers granted are powers expanded. History shows that surveillance metastasizes. To believe otherwise is wilful amnesia.

The choice is not between safety and privacy. It is between freedom and permanent monitoring. Europe must, yet again, reject Chat Control to protect its citizens and their children from the Stasi’s dream panopticon, in which everyone is always a suspect.