More MEPs voted against Chat Control than for it. It advanced anyway. And it's still not law. Here's what actually happened.

• 314 MEPs voted to reject it, 276 to keep it. Rejection failed anyway: second reading requires 361 votes, an absolute majority of all 720 seats, not of those voting. An absent MEP counts the same as a yes.

• An amendment limiting scanning to people under judicial suspicion won 322–255, more support than the extension itself. Also killed by the threshold.

• The ONLY thing that cleared 361 all day: two amendments protecting end-to-end encryption, at 369 and 362 votes. One passed by a single vote. On the hardest bar in the chamber, the only consensus was: don't touch encryption.

• And crucially: because Parliament amended the text, it is NOT law yet. Under Art. 294(8) TFEU it returns to the Council, which has until ~October 9 to accept all amendments — or trigger conciliation, where Parliament decides by simple majority and the 361 threshold disappears. If conciliation fails, the act falls entirely.

Targeted surveillance won the room. Mass surveillance won the procedure. And the procedure isn't over. For the next three months, the decision sits with national governments, not Strasbourg. Italy's government formally warned the Council against private mass surveillance; then voted for the text in that same Council (🫠). Your capital has a position too. Now is when it can change.

Watch the calendar.

Yesterday the EU Parliament voted on Chat Control. 314 MEPs voted to reject it. 276 voted to keep it. A clear majority of those who voted said no, and it wasn’t enough. The 360-vote threshold did exactly what it was designed to do.

Whatever the outcome, don’t look away now. Chat Control 1.0 is NOT mandatory scanning. It’s the expired ePrivacy derogation, the legal basis for platforms that choose to scan private messages. Voluntary.

Bad? A lot. Rejected in March. Expired in April. Resurrected in July via urgent procedure, on the last day before summer recess, when blocking it took 361 votes and every absent MEP counted as a yes. They didn’t win the argument. They changed the rules.

Why? Because the Council needed it to buy time and leverage for the real fight: Chat Control 2.0 (CSAR).
CSAR detection orders would let authorities force every platform to scan your private communications. Still stuck in negotiations. Still not law. Still stoppable.
That’s exactly why this is not the moment to tune out. This is the moment they’re counting on you to tune out.

So please, stay loud. The real battle is still ahead.

Cypherpunks write code. But that’s half the job.

Code protects your privacy; it doesn’t repeal bad laws. The law that survives untouched keeps producing honeypots and mandates for everyone, technical or not. If the goal is a better society and not just individual protection, someone has to walk into a courtroom.

So @BULL BITCOIN did. Individuals have virtually no standing to sue an EU directive directly, so we challenged the French decree implementing DAC8 and asked the judge to refer the directive itself to the EU Court of Justice.

Complaining is free and changes nothing. Code and case numbers change things.
🖤❤️

Why am I so fixated on Chat Control?
Because saying that “encryption remains in place” is one of the most dishonest statements I’ve ever heard.

Client-side scanning checks your content ON YOUR DEVICE, before encryption takes place. The padlock is intact. They’re simply searching your bag before you put anything inside it. E2EE ends up protecting the transmission, not the communication. Your own device becomes the informant.

And what about detection technology? The Commission’s own evaluation of voluntary scanning found false positive rates of up to 20% for AI-based image detection. One in five flagged conversations: it wasn’t CSAM. Now scale that to billions of messages.
Over 800 cybersecurity researchers have warned the European Parliament that the error rates are unacceptable and that targeted tools already exist. In tech policy, that level of scientific consensus against a proposal is almost unheard of.
Even the Council’s own Legal Service says that access to private communications without suspicion violates Article 7 of the Charter.

So what?
So they intend to approve it.

→ fightchatcontrol.eu

“A line in the sand” is nothing more than the limit we draw on our willingness to accept rules and behaviors we consider unjust, even when holding that line means making hard choices.
You don’t choose Bitcoin because it’s easier.
You choose it because it’s right.
Proudly @BULLBITCOIN_

Every surveillance system in history was built for a good reason. None of them stopped there.

Today, the EU begins its final negotiations on Chat Control 2.0, and the threat to your privacy isn’t over. Mandatory scanning of encrypted messages? Off the table, but the Council is still pushing for mandatory identity verification to use messaging apps, including end-to-end encrypted ones.

Privacy is not a tool for hiding wrongdoing.
It is a necessary condition for free thought, free expression, and free relationships.
The real question isn’t only whether to monitor private communications. It’s what kind of digital society Europe wants to build.

But Europe is its citizens. This question belongs to us. We can’t keep outsourcing centuries of hard-won civilization.

One “necessary exception” at a time.

Think privacy and economic incentives are incompatible? Watch this video. Payjoin for everyone.
https://youtu.be/dTSZ9nDFQ5Y

Chat control will eventually pass because it’s NOT about child protection. It’s about institutional expansion masquerading as security policy. Europol stands to triple his staff and massively expand his power. An entire EU Centre will be created with ongoing funding.

Once these institutions are built, once the infrastructure exists and the budget is allocated, scaling back becomes politically impossible. We’ve seen this pattern before. The Patriot Act. And the question will be: “what else can we do with it?”

This is how mission creep works: build the infrastructure for one purpose, then discover - conveniently - that it can serve many others. Today’s is CSAM. Tomorrow it’s “extremist” content monitoring.

This is securitocracy in action.

A heartbreaking injustice.
Keonne Rodriguez has been sentenced to 5 years in prison and fined $250,000 for creating Samourai Wallet.
The judge called privacy “anti-social,” ignoring the real threats faced by ordinary people.
Those with courage pay for the indifference of those who refuse to see how brutal this war will be.