Privacy isn’t a crime fighting strategy. It’s a human right.

On Oct 14, EU governments are slated to vote on ‘Chat Control.’

The pitch is child protection. The reality is scanning everyone’s private messages and weakening end-to-end encryption.

679 scientists from 36 countries have signed an open letter explaining why this won’t work and will make us less safe.

Their bottom line:

- Large-scale CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) detection cannot reach acceptable accuracy. It’s easy to evade and floods systems with false positives.

- On-device scanning breaks E2EE by design, creating single points of failure and new targets for abuse.

- Expanding “mitigations” (AI filters, age checks) adds complexity and risk, not security.

(Find the full letter in the comments)

Why mass scanning is the wrong tool:

1. It flips the presumption of innocence. Treating every citizen like a suspect is not “safety”. It’s surveillance.

2. It’s the bedroom-camera problem. Putting spyware on every phone to catch a few criminals is like installing cameras in every bedroom to prevent murders. We all want to stop harm. Violating the privacy of millions of innocents isn’t the way.

3. Function creep is inevitable. Once the scanning pipeline exists, it can be re-tuned for politics, speech, and power. Borders shift, laws change. What’s legal here may be criminal elsewhere. Who draws the line next year?

4. You can’t “re-secure” leaked data. Privacy is protective armor, not a PR setting. Once stripped, it’s gone.

👁️ The cypherpunk lesson:

As Eric Hughes wrote, “Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.”

Cypherpunks didn’t ask for permission. they wrote code so ordinary people could have the same defensive tech that institutions take for granted.

That’s not a niche hobby. It’s democratic hygiene.

🫶 Better ways to protect children (and everyone) :

Real protection doesn’t require blanket surveillance. It needs education, prevention, faster takedowns, resourced investigators (with warrants and due process), targeted operations (against offenders, not dragnet scans of the innocent).

These are exactly the pathways experts (and the UN) recommend: effective, proportionate, and rights-preserving.

💪 Build the free, private stack:

We already have tools that defend both safety and liberty without backdoors:

- Bitcoin for open, borderless payments.

- Nostr to own your identity and content.

- White Noise for truly private messaging: no phone numbers, no emails, end-to-end encryption with forward secrecy and post-compromise security.

This isn’t about ‘nothing to hide.’

It’s about the power to live, speak, organize, report, and dissent without pre-approval.

A controlled population is not a free population.

And a free society is the best long-term defense against abuse and corruption alike.