Fuck Chat Control.

The trick in Chat Control 2.0 is called client-side scanning: the search runs on your phone itself. Your messenger reads your message, reduces it to a fingerprint and checks that against a government-supplied list, all before the message is encrypted. “We never touched the encryption,” they say, which is true and beside the point once the informant sits inside the envelope with you.

Once that scanner exists, it is a general-purpose surveillance tool. The list it checks against is secret: today it holds fingerprints of child abuse images, tomorrow a leaked document, a protest flyer, a banned symbol or a political meme, and nobody will tell you what was added. More than 500 cryptographers and security researchers have put it more plainly: this cannot be built safely, and it breaks the security everyone else relies on.

Every mass-surveillance law wears a child on its cover. Nobody is against protecting kids, which is what makes it such a useful crowbar: object to the method and you get called an accomplice. Protecting children means paying for investigators, hotlines and prevention. Strip-searching a continent's private life and hoping does none of that.

Earlier drafts of this same regulation carved out the “professional” accounts of police, military and intelligence, so the communications of the powerful stay private while yours get scanned. If suspicionless scanning is safe enough for you, why not for them? They know exactly what it is, and they kept the encryption for themselves.

A dragnet this wide catches everyone except the people it names. Anyone trafficking abuse material moves to custom tools the moment a mandate lands, and what stays in the net is you: your family photos, your medical questions, your nudes, your arguments, your union chat, your therapist.

The Grundgesetz does not leave this to a majority in Brussels. Article 10 guarantees the secrecy of telecommunications, the Fernmeldegeheimnis: the confidentiality of what you write and to whom. Client-side scanning reads your message before it is sealed and checks it against a state list, on everyone, forever, which amounts to searching your correspondence on your own phone.

In 2008 the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) created a fundamental right for this situation: the right to the confidentiality and integrity of information-technology systems, the so-called IT-Grundrecht, drawn from Art. 2(1) together with Art. 1(1) GG. Conscripting your own device to scan you and report you is the scenario that right was written to forbid.

The Volkszählungsurteil of 1983 established the right to informational self-determination and held that the state may not create a climate in which no one knows who knows what about them. German data retention, anlasslose Massenüberwachung (dragnet surveillance with no cause), has fallen twice since: the Bundesverfassungsgericht struck down the first law in 2010, and the Court of Justice of the EU ruled its successor incompatible with EU law in 2022. A scan that runs across everyone's private messages is designed to produce that climate.

Some lines even a majority cannot cross. Human dignity (Art. 1) and the absolutely protected core area of private life mean there is an inner zone the state may never enter, and a scanner that reads everything necessarily reaches into it. Art. 19(2) adds that the essence of a fundamental right must never be touched. Yes, this is an EU regulation, but Germany's government is bound by the Grundgesetz when it votes in the Council, and the Constitutional Court has reserved the power to reject EU acts that breach Germany's constitutional identity. A minister who waves this through answers to the Grundgesetz, whatever Brussels decides.

The scheme leans on a short list of choke points: the app stores, the big US platforms, and a company willing to ship an update that turns the scanner on. We designed Aphotic to stay clear of all three.

We cannot put a scanner in your pocket without you seeing it. The giants can, and that difference comes from how Aphotic is built: