Brussels plans total surveillance of all citizens! All private chats, emails, and photos are to be scanned

Under the guise of child protection, the European Union is preparing one of the most far-reaching surveillance regulations in decades. What is officially intended to protect children from abuse could, in reality, herald the end of confidential, encrypted communication in Europe.

The draft is titled Proposal for a Regulation laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse (COM/2022/209 final) and is available on the European Commission’s platform. It stipulates that providers of communication services – from WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram to traditional email providers – can be required to scan all content for suspicious material. The EU Commission refers to this as “detecting, reporting, removing, and blocking” data that could be related to child abuse.

The crucial passage is contained in the so-called “detection orders.” These allow national authorities to issue an order requiring providers to scan all communications of specific users. This makes no difference whether the communications are public or private. In practice, this means that every message, every photo, and every video can be reviewed – even those that are end-to-end encrypted.

Since providers like Signal or WhatsApp are technically unable to decrypt their users’ content, the verification would have to take place on the devices themselves. This process, known as “client-side scanning,” would evaluate all messages before they are sent using artificial intelligence or a government-approved database. What is currently being sold as a child protection measure is, in fact, an infrastructure for complete content control.

The draft does not explicitly provide an exception for encrypted communication. This would overturn the central principle of digital privacy: Only sender and receiver can read what is exchanged. Data protection advocates therefore warn of a dam break. In 2024, the Federal Data Protection Commissioner, Ulrich Kelber, spoke of a “paradigm shift – away from the rule of law, towards a preventive surveillance state.” Internet activists and human rights organizations have also voiced sharp criticism. European Digital Rights (EDRi) called the draft a “dangerous attack on encryption and freedom of expression,” while the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) warns of “massive censorship and a climate of fear.”

While the EU Commission emphasizes that the measures are necessary to combat abuse, their technical implementation would require unprecedented data collection. This would create a digital surveillance network that not only affects criminals but also places all citizens under general suspicion. Critics are already demanding that the systems, once implemented, will inevitably be used for other purposes – for example, to detect “hate speech,” “fake news,” or politically undesirable content.

Chat control could thus become the biggest intrusion into digital privacy since the introduction of the internet. It changes the personal communication space into an open book for government algorithms – under a morally unassailable label. After all, who could possibly argue against child protection? This is precisely what makes the planned regulation so dangerous.

What is sold as a measure against crime threatens to become a tool of total surveillance. Once introduced, such a system can no longer be reversed. The path from preventive control to digital censorship is then only a short step.

Sources:
European Commission – Draft COM/2022/209 final: EUR-Lex
European Digital Rights (EDRi): The EU Chat Control Proposal Explained
Netzpolitik.org: EU wants mass surveillance of private chats
Euronews: Is the EU about to start scanning your text messages?
Federal Data Protection Commissioner Ulrich Kelber: BfDI warns against chat control

yogaesoteric
October 13, 2025