Snowden Warned Us. We Just Did It to Ourselves.

Cast your mind back to 2013. Edward Snowden revealed that governments were mass surveilling their own citizens, scanning communications, monitoring behaviour, collecting data on innocent people. The public was outraged. It sparked a global debate about privacy, civil liberties, and the overreach of state power.

Fast forward to 2026, and the UK government has just announced plans to mandate AI scanning of every smartphone in Britain. Messages, video calls, photo albums. All of it. By default. On every device.

The difference this time? Parents are cheering it on. These are the same parents who hand their phone to their child to fix the Wi-Fi, ask them to set up the new printer, and have never once connected a Bluetooth device without outside assistance. But yes, let us give them a national surveillance programme. That seems like the logical next step.

Because the pitch is child safety, and apparently that framing is enough to make population-wide surveillance not just acceptable, but popular. The same concept that had people marching in the streets a decade ago is now being rallied for by parents who simply do not want to put the time in to use the parental controls already built into every iPhone, Android, and Windows device.

I wrote about this last year when the Online Safety Act came into force. The pattern is the same. The government introduces sweeping, technically flawed policy, the actual problem goes unsolved, and the rest of us hand over a little more privacy in exchange for the illusion of safety.

Spoiler: children will still access what they want. A child only needs a parent or sibling's ID to bypass age verification entirely. VPNs remain legal and trivially easy to use. The kids who are determined will find a way. They always do.

What will remain is a government-mandated surveillance layer baked into every device in the country, the precedent that adults must seek permission to access the open internet, and the quiet death of online anonymity in Britain.

Snowden blew the whistle on governments doing this covertly. We are now doing it to ourselves, voluntarily, and calling it a win for children.

Parents have the tools. They have always had the tools. The solution is parenting, not a national firewall.

What can you do about it?

The Online Safety Act has already attracted over 550,000 signatures on a parliamentary petition calling for its repeal, making it one of the largest public expressions of concern about a UK digital law in recent history. Parliament debated it in December 2025 and rejected repeal, but the pressure has not gone away and the fight continues.

If you want to get involved, these are the organisations actively challenging this legislation:

  • Open Rights Group (openrightsgroup.org) - Campaigning for digital rights and reform of the Online Safety Act. They publish detailed briefings and run actions you can take.

  • Big Brother Watch (bigbrotherwatch.org.uk) - A civil liberties organisation leading the charge against surveillance overreach. You can join their mailing list, donate, or follow their campaigns.

  • You can also contact your MP directly at writetothem.com and tell them specifically why this concerns you. Personal, specific letters carry more weight than form emails.

References

References

back to blog