Breaking Regulators Must Protect The Architecture Of Freedom
Opinion by: Agata Ferreira, assistant professor at the Warsaw University of Technology
Recently, Europe came alarmingly close to approving mass surveillance of private communication through the proposed Chat Control regulation. The proposal faced intense backlash from the community, as it would have obliged providers to scan all private messages.
It was rejected only after Germany refused to support it. Just nine EU member states opposed the proposal, while 12 backed it and six remained undecided.
The flawed argument that safety requires and justifies mass surveillance is gaining traction on the regulatory agenda, a development that is worrying.
A recent Amnesty International report, “Shadows of Control: Censorship and Mass Surveillance in Pakistan,” illustrates what happens when that logic is applied and misused against society. Pakistani authorities deployed surveillance technologies from international companies to create a nationwide system for monitoring, interception and filtering that turned the country’s digital environment into a widespread surveillance machine, which grants intelligence agencies real-time access without any judicial oversight.
The report’s findings are not unique to Pakistan. They illustrate what happens when a vulnerable, centralized internet architecture, riddled with single points of control, intersects with an unchecked appetite for surveillance. The result is a digital environment that undermines trust, erodes rights and weakens the fabric of societies.
These problems are not limited to any single regime. Every modern digital infrastructure, from national networks and cloud platforms to Web3 protocols, crosses the same vulnerable checkpoints: access, discovery, decision logic, data storage, transmission and user interfaces. Each can either support freedom or reinforce control. The current trend toward centralization means that networks are increasingly visible, with a handful of global indices managing discovery and corporate and government actors mediating access. The original vision of an open and decentralized internet has been replaced by a model centered on surveillance and control.
Web3, often championed as an alternative, is not immune to this issue. Web3 users still rely on a small number of trusted endpoints, clearnet front-ends and public ledgers that reveal transactional metadata. This dynamic recreates the chokepoints and surveillance risks familiar from legacy web infrastructure. When core blockchain opera
Source: CoinTelegraph
