Over the last ten days, hundreds of thousands of people have watched my videos about governments reading private messages. This is the Substack version. Every law, every power, every source. Check every one of them yourself. Do not take my word for any of it.
I spend most weeks in this newsletter talking about staying relevant as a leader in the AI era. This week is different. This week is about a decision that already affects every message you send, whether you lead a team of five or five thousand.
The vote nobody expected to lose
On the ninth of July, the European Parliament voted on extending Chat Control, the regulation that lets platforms scan private messages on services such as Gmail, Facebook Messenger and Instagram. Three hundred and fourteen MEPs voted to reject it. Two hundred and seventy-six voted to keep it. A clear majority wanted it gone.
It passed regardless. The procedure required an absolute majority of three hundred and sixty-one votes to block it, and empty seats counted as support. The law now runs until 2028.
One genuine protection survived the same session. Signal and WhatsApp, being properly end-to-end encrypted, were explicitly excluded. The broader push to reach inside those apps, Chat Control 2.0, has already failed five rounds of negotiation and returns to the table in September.
Across the Atlantic, the direction is the same. The KIDS Act passed the US House on the twenty-ninth of June, covering age verification and platform duties. No on-device scanning yet, but the trajectory matches Europe’s.
Britain went further, and Apple lost
Britain did not wait for Brussels. The Online Safety Act now requires platforms to scan content before it reaches you. Underneath it sits older legislation letting the Home Secretary issue secret orders demanding companies weaken encryption, orders the recipient is legally barred from confirming even exist.
Apple received one. The Home Office ordered a backdoor into iCloud. Apple refused to build it, switched off its strongest encryption tier for every UK customer instead, challenged the order in court, and lost. Today, an iPhone in Britain carries less protection than the identical device anywhere else on earth.
The most valuable technology company in history held the line everywhere it could. It still folded in the one place that mattered.
And in Britain, it goes further than messages, into prediction itself. In Bristol, data on over ninety percent of the population has been fed into a police prediction system built jointly with the city council. Mental health records, housing status, free school meals, all of it feeding scores assigned to children. Nobody was told. It looks like a court case waiting to happen.
That is one city. More than seventy AI policing tools now operate across England and Wales, most with no meaningful oversight, and the government has funded a national predictive policing prototype combining police, council and social services data. Facial recognition vans are rolling out across seven forces, and in June the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police argued publicly that police should not have to wait for legislation before deploying new technology.
Meanwhile, seventy-four percent of Britons say they expect large-scale unrest this year. That is the precise moment the state chose to build a machine that tries to predict who might cause trouble, before anyone has done anything at all.
The machine that does not work
Here is the part that should trouble anyone who believes this protects children, because that was the stated purpose throughout.
Amazon’s scanning system flagged over one million pieces of content as suspected abuse material. 99.6 percent were false alarms, by the European Commission’s own reporting. Germany’s Federal Criminal Police say close to half of everything referred is not even criminally relevant.
Patrick Breyer, a former Member of the European Parliament, called it five years and millions of euros spent on an algorithm that cannot protect a single child, money that never reached the survivors still waiting for support. They did not fund the people who protect victims. They funded the machine that watches everyone else.
One rule for the people who wrote it
This is the part that should genuinely irritate you.
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, the institution behind Chat Control, uses Signal with disappearing messages. Keir Starmer has used disappearing WhatsApp messages during the very parliamentary inquiry seeking his own records. In America, senior officials planned live military strikes over Signal, a lapse serious enough to trigger a formal Inspector General investigation.
They trust encryption with the nation’s deepest secrets. They do not trust a citizen with a private conversation.
Where this leaves you
This is the short version, the sharpest cuts from a longer investigation. If you want every law, every power and every source, the full piece is on the site: https://www.natschooler.com/chat-control-the-online-safety-act-and-the-kids-act-how-the-eu-uk-and-us-are-each-building-message-surveillance-into-law/
You can also watch the video, or listen to it as a podcast episode, wherever you get your shows:
Three things worth doing this week. Use properly encrypted tools, Signal for messages, Proton Mail for email. Watch September, when Chat Control 2.0 returns to the table, and write to your representative before that vote rather than after it. And talk about this, because every one of these laws has depended on one thing above all else, that nobody was paying attention for long enough to object.
Staying relevant as a leader means understanding the systems shaping how your teams, your clients and your own communications are governed. This is one of them.
MONDAY INFLUENCER® is a world-renowned strategic digest and executive intelligence platform for those serious about success in business, career, and life.
Get your $1 Trial here → mondayinfluencer.com ←
