By now, we’ve all heard the familiar refrain: “It’s for your safety.” It’s the soothing mantra of every government official who’s ever wanted a peek behind your digital curtains.
This week, with a move that would make East Germany blush, the UK government officially confirmed its intention to hand Ofcom (yes, that Ofcom, the regulator that once investigated whether Love Island was too spicy) the keys to your private messages.
The country, already experiencing rapidly declining civil liberties, is now planning to scan encrypted chats for “bad stuff.”
Now, for those unfamiliar, Ofcom is the UK’s communications regulator that has recently been given censorship pressure powers for online speech.
It’s become the government’s Swiss Army knife for everything from internet censorship to now, apparently, full-blown surveillance.
Under the Online Safety Act, Ofcom has been handed something called Section 121, which sounds like a tax loophole but is actually a legal crowbar for prying open encrypted messages.
It allows the regulator to compel any online service that lets people talk to each other, Facebook Messenger, Signal, iMessage, etc to install “accredited technology” to scan for terrorism or child abuse material.
More: Starmer Adds To UK Civil Liberties Decline With Reckless iCloud Backdoor Demand
The way this works is by scanning all your messages. Not just the suspicious ones. Not just the flagged ones. Every single message. On your device. Before they’re encrypted.
This is “client-side scanning,” which is a clever euphemism for “we’re turning your phone into a government informant.”
Let’s be clear about what’s at stake. End-to-end encryption is what keeps your private messages private.
But the UK’s plan effectively makes that encryption irrelevant. If the message gets scanned before it’s encrypted, the whole thing is about as useful as putting a padlock on a door that’s already wide open.
This isn’t some consequence. This is the point.
Lord Hanson of Flint, the man chosen to deliver this particularly Orwellian update in the House of Lords, confirmed that Ofcom is expected to start using these powers just as soon as it finishes its report.
“We have set a date of April 2026,” he said, presumably while polishing his best ‘nothing to see here’ smile, “and we expect to act extremely speedily once we have had the report back.”
Baroness Butler-Sloss, clearly tired of waiting for this dystopia to arrive on schedule, pushed for Ofcom to get on with it. “Work to do this now,” she said.
Meanwhile, Baroness Berger popped up to promote something called “upload prevention technology.” It sounds like an antivirus program crossed with a puritanical school principal, and she claimed it can stop harmful content before it spreads. Lovely idea. Also, exactly how Chinese censorship works.
She also accused tech companies of lying when they say scanning encrypted messages isn’t possible. And maybe they are. But when your answer to that is “Well, we’ll just force them to comply by law,” you’re not solving the problem. You’re building a digital panopticon with the grace of a sledgehammer.
Here’s the problem. Once you install the infrastructure to scan for one kind of content, however vile, it’s there forever. And that tool, like every government tool, will be “repurposed.”
It starts with child abuse material, because who’s going to defend not catching that? Then maybe a few terrorist memes. Then maybe “hate speech.” Then “misinformation.” Then a joke about the
Prime Minister’s haircut. And suddenly, you’re far from a democracy.
You’re just renting space in an open-air digital prison where your every word is silently filed away in a database next to your Amazon shopping history and that one embarrassing search from 2013.
We’ve been yelling about this for years. You cannot build a scanning system that only finds “the bad stuff.”
The government is playing the long game. Ofcom will issue its report by April 2026, followed by a “consultation,” which, let’s be honest, only ever goes one way, and then the Home Office will act “extremely speedily,” whatever that means in bureaucratic time.
What’s certain is this: if they get their way, private messaging in the UK will be gone.
