https://techletters.substack.com/p/the-european-commission-is-turning

The oh so virtuous European elite care so much about privacy and reducing the power of US tech companies that they are ... giving random other foreign spies, sorry, companies, access to private information of all their citizens, wait what?

(Story's actually a little more nuanced but the author explains how the protections can be worked around trivially. Worth reading.)

I've said this before but given "current topic", time to say it again: pattern-matching to the 90s winning of the crypto wars is just wrong. The political forces leading to full ID and monitoring of every digital event is inevitable, and **the advent of ZK technology is going to make it happen**, not prevent it. Why? Because the academics' argument of "golden key"/"key escrow" being fundamentally flawed won't matter: the political will is there. Example: right now, a large majority of the UK public support social media controls for kids, and don't focus on the freedom violation this implies for themselves (ID verification). They will grumble, because they don't want ID cards, but online they'll accept it, because they've already accepted that ID verification is good, not bad, for online discourse, they are all using Apple, Google ID systems ... they've already accepted it should be used as a gate for even financial transactions; hardly a big stretch since they've accepted full slavery w.r.t. their bank accounts. This might be affected by how few people in the UK have any wealth at all except in their house (if they're lucky enough to have a house). ZK and FHE will accelerate this from crude ID verification into full on filtering: you can do secure communication, that will be allowed with sanctioned providers, but it will be proved "safe" using various techniques (I mention ZK, FHE to show the advanced version: your e2e chats will be filtered for child porn/terrorism/criticizing the govt, while still fully encrypted). I see no version of the future where this doesn't happen; it's just a matter of time, and admittedly it could be a very slow process. If we still care about freedom we should look into full disconnection: p2p, mesh networks, steganography where it can work. Am I hopeful? No, I don't see a good reason to be. Perhaps only a very dark future involving a lot of war can stop this inevitable flow towards digital tyranny.