>I sympathize with nation states’ urge to be able to see what’s going on online, but I hate the way they’re going about it. How do we balance a free Internet against a need to crack down on foreign influence?

and more importantly - whose influence? how do we pick whom do we ally ourselves with and who we go against? How do we prevent such system from being abused to just entrench current powers that be, and stifle genuine opposition?

If it is done behind closed doors, there's not much difference in EU becoming like Russia or China, with a coat of liberal paint instead.

Security services qualitatively have as many fuckups to their name as they do successes. I was listening to a podcast last week about British undercover police fathering children with the women they were undercover with. If the position of the anti-Chat-Control people is that we should reject not just the backdoors but also — on the basis that they just can’t be trusted — the whole idea of a national, secret security service, then they should be open and say so.