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Going Dark: The war on encryption is on the rise

Under the slogan ‘Think of the children’, the European Commission tried to introduce total surveillance of all EU citizens. When the scandal was revealed, it turned out that American tech companies and security services had been involved in the bill, generally known as ‘Chat Control’ – and that the whole thing had been directed by completely different interests. Now comes the next attempt. New battering rams have been brought out with the ‘Going Dark’ initiative. But the ambition is the same: to install state spyware on every European cell phone and computers.

Every call, every message and every chat, all the emails, photos, and videos saved in cloud services – all of it would be filtered in real time via artificial intelligence and then checked in a newly established EU center, in close cooperation with Europol. Ylva Johansson’s colleague in the European Commission, Labrador Jimenez, was on the Board of Directors of WeProtect, together with Thorn’s CEO Julie Cordua, representatives of Interpol, and government officials from the US and the UK (the latter simultaneously pursuing its own monitoring legislation, also using children as the battering ram). The Intercept article also referred to the fact that Thorn was working with Palantir, the big-data company that helped the NSA mass-monitor the whole world and was involved in the Cambridge Analytica scandal where Facebook users’ private messages and data were used to influence the presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump in 2016.

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