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We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal. In a very real way it could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. Germany has long been a champion for privacy; drawing on its own history of the terrible harm that can be facilitated by mass surveillance and standing firm to safeguard this right for all of Europe. To capitulate now, at a time of great geopolitical uncertainty where the cybersecurity of our core infrastructures matters more than ever, would be an incomprehensible strategic blunder, and a fundamental betrayal of Europe’s commitment to learn from history. Under the guise of protecting children, the latest Chat Control proposals would require mass scanning of every message, photo, and video on a person’s device, assessing these via a government-mandated database or AI model to determine whether they are permissible content or not. This is a horrifying idea for many reasons. First, the technical consensus is clear. Scanning every message–whether you do it before, or after these messages are encrypted–negates the very premise of end-to-end encryption. Instead of having to break the gold-standard Signal encryption protocol to access someone’s Signal messages, hackers and hostile nation states only need to piggyback on the access granted to the scanning system.