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Table of Contents
Then god seperated the state from the church
Secularization
Issues of their times
Jehovah's Witlesses
Christianity
Science
Woman
Overton Window
Malcolm X
We're not burning witches anymore, so we are secular
Misogyny
Incest
Ableism
Pedophilia
Arrogance
Man or Bear?
If Buying isn't Owning, then Pirating isn't Stealing
Slashed Zero
Self-Censoring
Politics/European Union/Legislature/
Chat Control
Chat Control is a proposed piece of legislation that would force messaging providers to install backdoors into their encryption methods, so that governments can access the contents of all and every correspondence. Ostensibly, the goal is to combat child sexual abuse, but it conveniently leaves out the implications of what it means to give a government full, unrestricted access to 100% of its citizen's data.
Therefore, the “Biggest Letdown of the Year 2025” award goes to the European Union, which is swayed by companies that have successfully identified that laymen will forget all sense of rationality when they hear “child sexual abuse”. Knowing this, companies are now pushing for an end of secrecy of correspondece, a fundamental security given to us by wise men who learned from the Second World War and understand what government overreach is, and how it threatens democracy.
Introduction
The exact implications of Chat Control are that any online correspondence (ie. conversations on WhatsApp, E-Mail, Signal, Telegram, Discord, etc.) are sent to the government as copies before they are sent to the intended recipient. In both cases, the messages are encrypted - a message will be sent to the government with encryption, and it will send the message to the intended recipient encrypted as well. So, nobody outside of you, the government and the intended recipient, will be able to read the messages. But, crucially, it means that the government will be able to read the messages. And by that I mean.. everything. If you remember East Berlin and how agents at the post office opened, read, and then resealed letters sent between people to keep detailed profiles on 100% of the population - the Chat Control legislation is everything you need to make that a reality. In fact, since this is digital, no opening/closing is required and everything can be condensed using advanced algorithms or even AI, it would be naive to think that the government wouldn't.
The goal of laws like “secrecy of the mail” is to make it impossible for such a thing to even be possible. The makers of these kinds of laws, back in the day, knew, that no government should ever be trusted with not spying on its people at such a scale. So instead of trusting the government to “please don't do the evil”, they just declared that it should be illegal for anyone to open anyone's letters, for whatever reason. They knew that if the government was given the option to open letters at all, that such would be too much of an invitation to just do it with every letter. Therefore: No opening of letters at all.
By one way or another, Chat Control levers away end-to-end encryption. Sure, the transfer between you and the government, and the transfer between you and the recipient are both technically still end-to-end encrypted, but it is now amputated to make the encryption fail at the exact task it is meant to do: To prevent illegitimate and unethical access to someone's messages.
Status Quo
So, the idea is that privacy should be the default. When you say something from you to another person, it should be possible to do so without the government getting a say in that, at any stage. This is, in part, a piece of historical enlightenment, as this is meant to protect the ability of minorities to communicate in a hostile environment. For example, German dissenters during the Nazi era were cracked down on, even though they did the right thing. Their mail was intercepted and used against them in arrest campaigns (or worse). Mail-based discrimination, if you so want, is a real threat and could still be a reality today. And even though we today are smarter than Nazis in the early twentieth century, we are still Probably Wrong and should not be given the power to do mail-based discrimination against other people.
However, as a utilitarian society we also agree that, sometimes, surveillance of individual people can be good or necessary to prevent harm. Known or suspected offenders can be surveilled in a modern type of wiretapping. Restricting or limiting the privacy of people for the good of all is something we accept as reasonable, so how is that different from Chat Control?
Well, there are two primary factors to consider when thinking about Chat Control: Proportionality and Responsibility.
1. Proportionality
Whenever an event, a location or a government is scared of something bad happening, it will devise methods to minimize risks. Such methods will typically require subjects to tolerate some kind of invasion, either physically or in their privacy. If I want to get into a stadium, I will be pat down. This gets even more intensive at an airport, where you and your belongings will be ran through metal detectors, forcing you to get rid of belts, watches and other things on you. If you want to apply for a visa to a country, you will have to supply papers, lots of papers. Self-protection mechanisms are plenty, and they all force you to give away some of your privacy. However, there are limits to what is proportionate. At places with increased risk - airports, courts of law, prisons - security measures will be comparatively aggressive, whereas places with minimal risk will have lax security measures.
This is good. Security measures come at the expense of everyone and always need to be kept as light as possible.