r/PrivacyToolbox

You cannot have end-to-end encryption with a government backdoor. It is a mathematical impossibility. The Council of the European Union trying to sneak this "Chat Control" proposal through a fast-track written procedure before recess is cowardly, but more importantly, it is a catastrophic security risk.

I manage networks for a living. If I told my boss we were going to scan all internal communications on user devices before encrypting them, I would be fired for introducing a massive vulnerability. Client-side scanning is not "targeted safety." It is local malware mandated by the state.

The 800 scientists who signed the open letter are right. Once the scanning infrastructure is on the device, the security model is dead. It will be abused, leaked, or hijacked. I left a corporate gig years ago because management covered up a state-level surveillance exploit. This is that same philosophy, just scaled to half a billion people.

How are you planning to handle your communication if this passes? I'm already looking at self-hosting Matrix nodes for my family back in France.

Structurally, any government attempting to restrict VPN use to stop teenagers from scrolling TikTok is fighting against basic network mathematics. I manage network infrastructure for an SME. You cannot block or degrade consumer VPN protocols without also breaking the commercial IPsec and WireGuard tunnels that businesses rely on daily to operate.

If Liz Kendall pushes through these anti-circumvention mandates next month, the state has two choices. They can force ISPs to run invasive Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to block handshake signatures, which is what authoritarian regimes do. Or, they can try to force app stores to geofence VPN downloads. Both are trivial to bypass. Anyone with a basic understanding of routing can set up a private VPS in Spain or France in five minutes and tunnel out via SSH.

This is security theatre designed by bureaucrats who do not understand how the OSI model works. They are sacrificing basic routing integrity and citizen privacy to solve a parenting issue. The UK is heading down a path where they either build a Western version of the Great Firewall or, more likely, pass a useless law that everyone under the age of 14 easily circumvents.

How are other network admins preparing for the inevitable routing mess this will cause if they actually try to enforce it?