Despite efforts by various presidencies, the European Union has failed since 2022 to adopt a law that would allow for the automatic scanning of message content to detect illegal material. Denmark may succeed on October 14, as the last attempt only narrowly fell short.

I have previously criticized a similar attempt by Belgium, along with its proposed amendments. Denmark's proposals are not much better in terms of user freedoms or privacy.

Users are still being forced to choose between allowing client-side scanning of message attachments or giving up the ability to share images, videos and links. Scanning messages on a user's device before encryption remains on the table for most major social media platforms and messaging apps, making this a form of mass surveillance. (The draft law exempts accounts associated with state and security institutions — because, apparently, child abusers are not found among their ranks.)

To protect minors, all potentially risky apps, services and app stores will be required to verify users' ages. In practice, this currently means collecting biometric data or identity documents from all users. For most ordinary people, the result is the loss of anonymity online, since service providers or governments can now easily identify them.

Europol head Catherine De Bolle has argued that anonymity is not a fundamental right. Perhaps not, but it supports one of the core rights on the internet — freedom of speech — because it protects us from the tyranny of the majority, something John Stuart Mill also held dear.

Politicians and law enforcement agencies who support the law, dubbed chat control by its critics, are well aware that it's unpopular. Public documents repeatedly emphasize the need to find a "better narrative" to win over the public. So far, this has consisted of trotting out the four tired horsemen of the infocalypse — child abusers, drug dealers, money launderers and terrorists — to scare and elicit sympathy from the public.

They've also borrowed the metaphor of "going dark," introduced by the FBI in 2010, to describe how law enforcement will soon be unable to access data because everything will be encrypted. Ironically, this only became a serious issue after Edward Snowden's revelations about mass surveillance by security agencies accelerated the encryption of internet traffic and user data in the early 2010s.

Much has been written about the dangers of client-side scanning and software backdoors. A 2016 report from Harvard University concluded that the "going dark" metaphor fails to accurately describe the relevant social and technological trends. Under surveillance capitalism, the authors argue, the widespread adoption of end-to-end encryption is unlikely. Instead, new sources and types of data will simply take the place of encrypted information.

Democratic backsliding is the process by which democratic countries gradually slip into authoritarianism — often through the very democratic institutions and processes meant to safeguard them. Organizations like Freedom House and the V-Dem Institute have tracked this global trend for the past two decades.

Chat control and other laws that entrench the surveillance society are laying the groundwork in the present for a potential democratic backslide in the future. In a world that is slowly but surely becoming more authoritarian, individuals are not protected by the state's surveillance capabilities being reined in by law — they are protected by the absence of such capabilities altogether.

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