The Gist: A Bad State of Affairs

By the end of the 20th Century it was very clear that there had been an unchecked proliferation of the most dangerous and compelling weapon that had ever been invented- The Modern State.

A modern state is equipped with organs for completing various tasks. Some are crucial to the wellbeing of everyone in the state (welfare, tax collection, security). Some are chosen to reflect the values of its citizens (art grants, culture promotion, libraries, traffic planning) and some just pop up to solve a particular problem and never go away (Media regulators, dog breed testers etc).

A key to ranking high on any of the global lists of happy citizens is living in a state where the right balance has been struck between these various strands of power and where no one aim dominates the others.

A state, an entity capable of liquidating its citizens or neighbours, can also be used to deliver nice schools to children and lend large print cowboy books to senior citizens. Living in a failed state is usually accompanied by trucks full of people with guns deciding what you will do with your Wednesday as opposed to experiencing perfect freedom, despite the utopian alternatives presented by the advocates of anarchism or libertarianism.

In other words, despite its dangers, the modern state is unlikely to go away any time soon and we would certainly miss it if it did.

Bad eggs stink

But sometimes a state goes bad. This can happen because it is captured by bad people intent on subverting it. Or it can happen because one of its competing strands becomes overpowered, swallowing or erasing all the other priorities we may want the state to consider. Post-independence Ireland had a state fused with the interests and obsessions of the institutional Catholic Church, resulting in decades of quasi-official child abuse, arbitrary mass incarceration of women and the promotion of mass emigration as an alternative to allowing pressure for social change to build.

A flavour of those decades, from the speech made by the FG Taoiseach of the day, John A Costello, after the church had objected to mothers and children receiving state-funded healthcare, describing his Cabinet;

I have no doubt that they do not desire in the slightest to go one fraction of an inch outside the sphere of faith and morals—our complete obedience and allegiance."

Whenever a state demands or offers "complete obedience and allegiance" to anything, you know it's gone bad.

ChatControl, emphasis on control

But before there is a demand for complete obedience, there is always an effort to build up the powers of monitoring and surveillance which will let the state check it really has got that sort of obedience.

For the people in institutions building that capability, the idea that their machinery could be hijacked by people who might use it for ill is always alien. For institutional reasons, they frequently can't think of that happening. They can see the drug dealers, abusers and terrorists that they have been charged with tracking and catching. That's their imperative and it obscures everything else. The state is filled with Paperclip Maximising institutions, charged with just one job and not given any duty to see how that job should be limited in favour of the overall health of a society.

Surveillance is a particularly stark example of that tension. If only the state authorities could introduce a perfect panopticon, they could eliminate all crime. Sadly, they would also have eliminated all freedom at the same time. This is the Minority Report problem. Or, if you prefer your references a bit more recent, A Three-Body Problem.

Which takes us to the EU's ChatControl plan. In 2023 the EU Commission proposed a regulation to force evey form of messaging in the EU to be intercepted and scanned automatically. In effect, faced by the implacable force of maths the Commission decided to try to legislate it away.

This was received about as well as you might expect. The European Data Protection Supervisor convened a seminar of experts and published their collective thoughts on the proposal under the not-at-all ominous title "The Point of No Return". They warned that the plan was for "General, indiscriminate and automated analysis of all … communication." Encryption was to be 'backdoored' to allow for mass scanning by the states. The head of the EDPS warned that, given the very shaky technology proposed to actually do this scanning, "Scanning of messages is not only a threat to the privacy, but also a means that produces extremely questionable results."

In February 2024 the European Court of Human Rights issued a ruling [Podchasov v Russia] which ruled that laws requiring weakening of encryption for all users were "not proportionate".

Nonetheless, when Viktor Obán's Hungary took the Presidency of the European Council for the back half of 2024, it announced that passing the ChatControl proposal and breaking encryption for eveyone in the EU was one of its main priorities.

We're all used to Hungary acting as an illiberal spoiler inside the EU, but in this case, it nearly got a majority of votes from the other member state governments to pass the plan. It was only when the Dutch spy agency actually came out and warned their own government that the plan would threaten the country's own cybersecurity that they flipped from support to abstain and the Hungarian plan lost its majority.

Oh, and of course, we found out Ireland was one of the countries supporting Hungary's plan.

By October 2024, it looked as though the plan was dead again.

In November 2024 we got further evidence of the insecurity of backdoors for good guys, when it turned out that in the US mobile phone companies had allowed back doors into their systems for law enforcement surveillance purposes. But, shocker, didn't it turn out that China had sneaked in the same doors and used them to track potentially millions of American mobile phones including ones owned by JD Vance and Trump.

They must not have known those backdoors were only meant for American spies.

But then on the 12th December 2024 the plan came back, like a B-Movie monster, for one last desperate push while Hungary held the Presidency. Matters teetered on the brink, by all accounts, but they didn't have the votes. It was agreed that all the countries would continue to work to pass a law. But they didn't pass this one.

Poland took the Presidency on the 1st Jan 2025 and the proposal to bring in enforced mass surveillance and to mandate the end to encrypted messaging was changed to a voluntary scheme.

But they hand over to Denmark (who supported the Hungarian plan) in July 2025, who will be followed by Cyprus (another Yes on mass surveillance). So these trees around us suggest privacy isn't out of the woods yet.

The UK, Europe's Mine Canary of surveillance

But we don't have to wait that long to see what might happen if a state started to demand that internet platforms break encryption for its users so they could peep into their private communications and data.

Yes, Brexit Britain is here. And it has passed the Investigatory Powers Act

On the 7th of February 2025, the BBC reported "UK demands access to Apple users' encrypted data".

As there is no way to only let the UK government break end to end encryption for its advanced security cloud offering, this would have meant Apple creating a backdoor for their entire platform.

On the 22nd February 2025, the BBC followed up on their earlier report. "Apple is taking the unprecedented step of removing its highest level data security tool from customers in the UK, after the government demanded access to user data."

So it is that Britain doesn't have the data it wanted and, also, its people don't have the option to encrypt their data on Apple's platform.

Other nations worry about the power of the Deep State. But only Brexit Britain continues its world-leading innovation in the novel field of the Shallow State. Just capriciously doing self-harm for the headlines.

Who's in the pipes?

A Europe which is existentially threatened from the East and under verbal assault from the West, to the point where it has announced a mass rearmament platform may find this ChatControl plan a test of its states' ability to ensure that it balances one part of its state's demands (surveillance) with the larger needs of security.

When the Dutch have their own spies in chorus with privacy, security and data protection researchers and experts, maybe we should be asking the Irish Government why they still think this is a good idea?

Can our state move past the impulse to look for obedience and allegiance from its citizens and start to listen as well as speak?

Recent history doesn't inspire much hope on that front. But these are changing times. We may yet hope that we are not all fed into a machine for converting all matter into the surveillance equivilent of paperclips, just to let our enemies to our East and our West into everyone's conversations.