“Politicians have now discovered that people are using VPNs to protect their privacy and bypass these invasive laws. Their solution? Entirely ban the use of VPNs.”
The current Danish government is clearly no friend of online privacy or anonymity. During its rotating six-month presidency of the EU council, which is, thankfully, coming to an end, it tried to push through the European Commission’s proposed Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse — aka, the “Chat Control Law” — despite widespread opposition.
As we noted at the time, the ostensible goal of the proposed regulations — curbing the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online — is commendable. However, the way the EU was going about it not only threatened fundamental rights and protections for everyone; it risked transforming the Internet into an even more centrally controlled, surveilled environment.
In its original form, the proposed law effectively mandated the scanning of private communications, including those currently protected by end-to-end encryption. If enacted, messaging platforms, including WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram, would have to scan every message, photo and video sent by users, even when encrypted.
The proposal was opposed by enough member states, including Germany, in large part due to grassroots pressure, to prevent it from passing the EU Council. So, the Danish government went back to the drawing board. The compromise bill it came up with mandates a voluntary search for sensitive material in private chats, instead of general monitoring, and was duly approved.
While a marked improvement on the original, the new proposal still raises serious concerns. Former MEP Patrick Beyer, one of the key defenders of privacy in Europe, warns that three major problems still remain unsolved. From Euronews:
[T]he proposal still does not follow the European Parliament’s position that only courts can decide to access communication channels; it still bans children from downloading messaging apps; and, lastly, anonymous communication is effectively outlawed.
[T]he current Danish proposal does not follow the European Parliament’s (EP) position to allow scanning of communications only by court order.
The EP’s proposal is a fundamental safeguard for Europeans’ privacy of communications and sets a standard that cannot later be changed by extra pressure from EU institutions, such as the famous “Voluntary Codes of Practice/Conduct” we’ve seen for general-purpose AI and disinformation.
“Voluntary” in Europe often isn’t: opting out of a “voluntary code” can mean stricter treatment, nudging tech firms toward de facto mandatory scanning without explicitly regulating it…
[T]he Danish proposal’s Article 4(3) would effectively ban anonymous email and messenger accounts, as well as anonymous chatting:
“They would need to present an ID or their face, making them identifiable and risking data leaks”.
This alone should alarm journalists and civil society organisations that rely on private communication with whistleblowers.
Seemingly not satisfied with achieving a consensus on EU-wide control of messaging apps, the Danish government recently came up with a legislative proposal that sought to ban the domestic use of VPNs — to access geo-restricted streaming content and bypass website blocks.
The proposal formed part of a broader legislative effort to combat online piracy that has alarmed digital rights advocates, reported Tech Radar:
Jesper Lund, chairman of the IT Political Association, expressed deep concern over the bill’s ambiguous language, stating it has a “totalitarian feel to it.”
Lund argued that the current wording could be interpreted so broadly that it would not only criminalize streaming but also hinder the sale and legitimate use of VPN services across Denmark.
“Even in Russia, it is not punishable to bypass illegal websites with a VPN,” Lund told Danish broadcaster DR, pointing out that the proposed Danish law could go further than measures seen in more authoritarian states.
The good news is that the proposed measure drew so much flak from digital rights advocates and the general public that the government withdrew it — or at least temporarily shelved it — last week. Again, from Tech Radar:
The Danish Minister for Culture, Jakob Engel-Schmidt, announced on Monday that he was cutting the contentious section from the bill. “I do not support making VPNs illegal, and I have never proposed to do so,” Engel-Schmidt said in a statement. He admitted the initial text was “not formulated precisely enough” and led to a fundamental misunderstanding of its purpose.
The original proposal, part of a wider anti-piracy effort, sought to make it illegal to “use VPN connections to access media content which would otherwise not be available in Denmark, or to circumvent blocks on illegal websites.” This sparked alarm among privacy groups, who warned that the vague wording could criminalize not only streaming enthusiasts but also ordinary citizens using the best VPN services for legitimate privacy and security reasons…
Jesper Lund of the IT Political Association described the proposal as having a “totalitarian feel to it” and warned it could go further than measures seen in more authoritarian countries.
Denmark is by no means the only Western “liberal democracy” to have turned its sights on VPNs in recent months. Since VPNs essentially function as anonymity masks that allow users to hide their online activity and access restricted content, their popularity has grown as governments have sought to impose increasingly draconian restrictions on Internet use.
As readers may recall, when the UK’s Starmer government made age verification checks mandatory for accessing pornography and other supposedly adult content online in July, it sparked an explosion in VPN use. As we had previously warned, these online age verification checks, that are now proliferating across the collective West’s ostensibly liberal democracies, threaten to trap everyone, not just minors, in their web.
The Starmer government’s predictable response has been to buckle down by including amendments to its Orwellian-titled Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that seek to ban children from using VPNs, among other things.
As with the age verification checks for pornography websites, the new checks, if implemented, will trap both adults and children in their web.
It would be bad enough if this were just another bout of madness on the part of Europe’s political class, but the same thing is happening throughout the so-called “Collective West”. Australia just introduced its long-awaited age verification legislation, which blocks under-16s from joining social media platforms, thereby all adults to submit ID to access platforms.
As we warned in November 2024, online age verification appears to be the Trojan Horse for the mass rollout and enforced adoption of digital IDs. Other Western jurisdictions, including the UK, the EU, and the US, are now treating the Australian rules as a blueprint for their own legislation, reports Reclaim the Net.
In the United States, Senator Katie Britt of Alabama said she hopes “Australia taking this step…leads the US to actually doing something.”
Britt, a mother of two, is one of the sponsors of the bipartisan Kids Off Social Media Act, which would prevent children under thirteen from using social platforms.
Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told The Sydney Morning Herald that he supports similar limits. “I like it. I’ve supported age limits here in the US for kids on social media,” he said.
“I say this as a parent…Parents need help, and they feel like they’re swimming upstream when everybody else has social media.”
Hawley, author of The Tyranny of Big Tech, said he has spoken with Australian stakeholders about the ban, though he did not identify them.
The Starmer government’s proposed amendment to the also calls for requiring social media to use “highly-effective” age assurance measures to prevent children under 16 from using such services.
The problem is that most age assurance measures are anything but effective…
Nick Corbishley 