Obliterating Our Freedom

Lately, I made a promise to myself to follow politics less. It is a game in which I am always a sore loser, and I honestly don’t like that. Politics and politicians are like junkies, getting addicted to power the moment they sense it, and they never let go.

However, I can’t escape the abhorrent stupidity they spread around. So naturally, some news reach me. Mostly about how no politician seems to understand technology, but would like to rule it.

Chat Control is again on the menu in Brussels, a law so bad, it makes the politicians in Eastern Europe look good. An act of tyranny so brazen, it makes me wonder where are the people. The proposed law would make an end to end-to-end encryption, not just for your messages in Signal or Whatsapp, but for your mails, for the encryption used in other protocols too. Because once you break the encryption for one, what is stopping the politicians to break other or even worse, what is stopping the actual bad actors to break all of it?

But no politician ever thought about it for longer than few minutes, because frankly, most of them don’t have the mental capacity for such things. They were elected based on empty promises by a handful of people, and think they know better. A story as old as politics itself.

Encryption must not be touched by anyone, it is one of the few guarantees of personal freedom in the ever-connected online world. Now, don’t you start thinking that I am some grumpy libertarian spewing nonsense messages about personal freedom. I am not. Libertarianism is a failed concept with so many loop-holes it literally defeats its own purpose most of the time.

Saying “we are doing this to protect the children” or “the law enforcement agencies need this to combat crime” is basically saying “we have no idea how to solve these problems without limiting the freedom of you all, but it’s a sacrifice we are willing to make”. And as the political standard goes, this obviously won’t apply to them, because if there is somebody with things to hide besides actual criminals, it’s politicians. And the Venn diagram for these two groups is often just a circle.

What bothers me the most, that even political parties, which are vocal supporters of democratic processes and personal freedoms in their own countries are just giving up one of the most important rights of their voters. It’s like in EU if you criticise any proposal made by the “democratic” parties you are labeled anti-EU. The fractions there work like a sheep factories, regurgitating whatever nonsense the bigger countries need to peddle to satisfy their leader.

I like the EU, I support it and I think it is the best thing that happened to Europe as a whole, to Slovakia my home country and to Czechia my now-home country. But I understand why more and more people are fed up with it. And now a lot of people like me, who are pro-EU, are getting fed up with it, which is the worst outcome for EU itself, and the best outcome for foreign saboteurs.

Please stop this nonsense and start protecting your people again!