2024: The Year I Started Resisting The Formation Of The Surveillance State

2024 was a year I stopped worrying and started to take concrete actions to resist the the corrosion of our digital right to privacy.

2024: The Year I Started Resisting The Formation Of The Surveillance State
I used a very cool generator created by Foone to generate this image in the style of the iconic message from the Sega CD version of the game Snatcher. https://digipres.club/@foone/113711842837483087

I was going to write a post today where I'd review the year I had, with all it's ups and downs, talking about the various projects I've been trying to work on and attempt to make sense of what I should focus on in 2025. Instead, it dawned on me that I hadn't written anything on this blog about the concrete actions I took this year to fight Chat Control, the legislative proposal making the rounds in the European Commission that, if made into law, would harbor a new age of mass surveillance in the European Union. If anything, the things I undertook this year to fight for the privacy of Europeans everywhere are what I will remember as being the most important. Going into 2025, my resolve to fight for privacy and resist government and corporate spying is stronger than I think it has ever been before.

In 2024 the European Commission made two attempts to push through Chat Control, a proposal that threatened to seriously undermine the encryption used in private messaging apps. If you follow this blog or follow me on Mastodon, you'll know that I took this very seriously. During the first half of 2024 when the European presidency was with Belgium, I looked on, paralyzed, as the news came in saying that Chat Control might be put up for voting.

I had seen this happen a couple times before, as in the end of 2023, but this time I didn't just want to stare in disbelief as this happened, hidden from view. I live in Finland, a democratic society after all, and if my high school civics lessons were to be believed, I ought to be able to affect the decision making process somehow. Before 2024, the way I attempted to resist Chat Control was though occasional retoots on Mastodon or by sometimes mentioning it during the random conversations I would have with friends and family. That wouldn't be enough this year, a deep need to do something about this began to overtake me this time around. I needed to actively resist.

I asked a few people what I could do and looked into who I could contact regarding this vote. For the first time in my life I began directly contacting members of Parliament and various journalists, asking them to please looking into Chat Control and everything that could go wrong if the measures it demanded were to be implemented. I was expecting any responses from anyone, I just wanted to feel like I was doing something and not being a hapless witness to history.

In the spring of 2024, I had gotten a late start and wrote to politicians and journalists mere days before the vote. I received some responses to my great surprise, thanking me for reaching out. That spring Chat Control was not put to a vote and I felt some relief. I had taken the first step to reaching out and interacting with my government. I decided then to begin preparing for the fall as the latter half of 2024 the European presidency would transfer to Hungary and Chat Control would very likely be voted on again.

The fall of 2024 came along and I was able to learn that, of course, Chat Control would be voted on again. It was in the beginning of the fall when I had a chance meeting with a local Pirate Party activist. They had began arranging meetings with other people interested in matters that the late Pirate Party in Finland had been engaged with, including Chat Control, and I was excited to meet other people in actual meatspace who shared my concerns. Meeting other people is very difficult for me, but meeting just 2 or 3 others and talking to them about these matters had a marked effect on me. I felt rejuvenated and vindicated. I felt that this thing I had been fighting against wasn't just some intangible language game I was playing on Mastodon, I began to see it as an actual threat in the wider world and I could do something about it.

Having risen up again with a full heart, I began to reach out far wider than I had the previous spring. I reached out to various journalists in Finland and found specific journalists who had at least written about Chat Control in passing and thanked them for their coverage, asking them to please keep on writing about it. I still feel that most Finnish people would be outraged to learn that the European Union is aiming to create a system to oversee and scan every private message in Europe, and if this was reported on more widely the outrage would be palpable.

I received a few "thank you" messages and was contented to know that I was one more voice in hopefully a choir of other concerned citizens like myself writing to these same journalists. I didn't expect that a few weeks later, various news outlets in Finland would begin writing about Chat Control and as I predicted, there was a lot of societal outrage over it. I know I wasn't the sole person that spurned this on, but I couldn't help but feel a sense of accomplishment all the same. The message was getting out and there was a chance that resistance to Chat Control would begin to grow in Finland.

I had been frustrated for quite a while with how little coverage Chat Control has gotten in the press here in Finland and generally in Europe. There was something deeply undemocratic about this to me and represented the worst sides of the shadowy way European politics is conducted. As the stories began to come out, I decided to set up chatcontrol.fi, a Finnish language site where I began to collate news stories in Finnish that discussed Chat Control and to also hopefully keep people up to date with what is happening with it. It is still a work in progress but I hope to have it set up and ready to update when the next push comes up this coming spring.

Chat Control – Viestinnän yksityisyyden suojan tulevaisuus Euroopassa

Along with reaching out to journalists and creating chatcontol.fi, I went out and contacted every member of the Great Council of the Finnish Parliament, the body that decides on Finland's stance on Chat Control. Again, I was expecting no responses and hoping to be yet again one more voice expressing my concern. At this point later in the fall, it was uncertain if Finland would flip their resistance to Chat Control and begin to support it. It has been rumored that the then interior minister was saying that she supported the proposal in principle and was pressuring her political allies to adopt stances in support of Chat Control.

I had sent messages some days before the Great Council met and was surprised to get multiple messages from MPs, many expressing their concern over the effects this proposal would have on privacy. Jouni Ovaska, an MP from Pirkanmaa, even asked me to call him. Shocked, I was able to talk to him shortly about the very real threat this proposal posed and we promised to vet it thoroughly.

The meeting was held and a decision was made for the proposal to go through a round of reviews by various other committees before making a final determination of Finland's stance. This was great news as I was quite sure many of these committees, especially the Constitutional committee, would have to side against it.

The short version of this is that the committees almost all agreed that Finland should side against Chat Control, and what made it all the sweeter for me, outright called the proposal mass surveillance ("massavalvonta" in Finnish), the phrase I had used in the emails I sent to MPs. You can read more about exactly what each committee said by following links on chatcontrol.fi and using translator if your Finnish isn't too great. All in all, Great Council decided that Finland should side against Chat Control and the year ended without Chat Control sneaking its way into the lives of every European.

There are dark clouds on the horizon nonetheless. European Commissioners have changed up in 2024 and despite the Commissioner that proposed Chat Control, Ylva Johansson, leaving her post, the new Finnish Commissioner for Digital Services, Henna Virkkunen, has stated in an interviewer that she would want to see Chat Control be accept on the European level.

Sosiaalinen media | Henna Virkkunen kertoo, miten lapsia netissä saalistavat aiotaan pysäyttää
Digikomissaari Henna Virkkunen kaavailee sosiaaliseen mediaan pakollista vahvistettua kirjautumista ja toivoo, että kiistanalainen CSAM-asetus hyväksytään.

To add to this, this year a report was released, “High Level Group on Access to Data for Effective Law Enforcement”, AKA the "Going Dark" report, where various EU institutions are expressing their desire to have greater access to personal data in the name of fighting crime and enforcing EU law. There is no telling what kinds of proposals are going to spawn out of this report in 2025, but I'm going to be ready. Following EU politics is a deeply frustrating activity, as every decision is hidden behind layers and layers of opaque protocols and meeting notes. Going into 2025, I hope to become better at navigating EU political bureaucracy and keep you all posted.

Shedding light: We address the flawed Going Dark Report - European Digital Rights (EDRi)
The HLG Going Dark presented its final report and recommendations for an agenda of maximal access to personal data.

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If you want a starting point to how you can start resisting Chat Control, here's a post I wrote this year talking about how to get going.


Along with all this resistance activity regarding Chat Control, in 2024 I also started running a Tor node. It's something I've been wanting to do for years now but I never got around to sitting down and learning all the nitty-gritty things you need to know to run one. I like to do things for the ideas I think are important and even if running a Tor node is more a symbolic gesture in regards to its usefulness to the network, but I still want to upkeep it.

Something I am currently in the works to set up that I feel would have a real impact on the lives of people around the world is taking part in the current drive the Tor community is advocating to increase the amount of Tor Bridges in the network. Bridges are points where people can access the Tor network if it is being actively censored by a government entity. If you want to start a fun technical hobby in the name of privacy, this would be a good one. You also get a t-shirt if you start up enough Bridges!

Tor in Russia: A call for more WebTunnel bridges | Tor Project
As the Russian government intensifies its grip on the internet, censorship circumvention tools like Tor are more critical than ever. Here’s the latest on Tor censorship in Russia and how you can help by running WebTunnel bridges.

I really began to see the Tor network differently after reading Ben Collier's book this year about the history of the Tor network. You can get a free online copy of it if you want to read it yourself from here:

https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5761/TorFrom-the-Dark-Web-to-the-Future-of-Privacy

One small thing I would also want to do this coming year is shift my internet usage to the Tor network. I've tried this before and it failed to stick, mainly because as you might know if you've ever used Tor, the internet works very differently when you don't passively accept every Javascript element and cookie on blind trust. Honestly, I don't even really want to use the internet like a regular person, one regret I do have regarding 2024 is spending so much time mindlessly scrolling Reddit and YouTube. Using Tor as my daily driver might change these mind-numbing habits I've developed.


That was my review of 2024 in respect to privacy advocacy. There are things I probably left out, but writing this all down fills me with a lot of hope. Once in a while as I walk around a shopping mall doing my shopping for the week or looking at stuff at a game store or whatever, I'm feel a sting of a kind of revelation: the society I live in is geared to keep so many of us consuming things and buying random crap we don't really need all that much and to keep us occupied. It's during such times that it dawns on me that it really is only when I am creating things on my own, sweating out a post in this blog or when I'm working on some technical project, that I'm at my happiest.

I'm not sure what I'm going to be working on exactly in 2025, as it feels like so many of my efforts end up meaning so little. Should I get deeper into OSINT research, or reverse engineering, or web development, or what? What path should I follow that would lead me to a project that would mean anything in the wider world? That's still open at this point, but one thing I know I really want to do is write more here in this blog and to fight the surveillance state. Even if I only get those two things right, I think I'll be just fine.

Oh yeah, and I make sure to still donate monthly to Signal. :D