The UK’s Most Unpopular Government on Record Just Went All-In On Digital Surveillance, Censorship and Control

What could possibly go wrong?

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer appears to be on borrowed time. Barely two years into his first term, he is the most unpopular prime minister on record — indeed he had already earned that dubious distinction by the end of his first year in office. More than 100 backbench members of parliament (MPs) have called for him to quit in recent weeks.

Last Thursday, his defence secretary resigned, becoming the seventh senior minister to abandon ship in recent months and the 21st since the government was formed just two years ago.

Starmer himself will not resign though he is likely to face a leadership challenge in the coming weeks or months. If the Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, wins the Makerfield by-election on June 18, he will become an MP, thereby becoming eligible to challenge Starmer for the Labour leadership and the premiership of the UK.

Despite all this, Starmer is no lame duck. He still has a huge parliamentary majority backing him up, albeit begrudgingly. And he is using that majority to push through policies that will grant his government, and future governments, including possibly one led by Nigel Farage, unprecedented digital surveillance and control powers, much as we warned would happen in July 2024:

Like his mentor, Blair, Starmer has clear technocratic sensibilities. On his return from the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos in January, he was asked on a news podcast to choose between Davos or Westminster. Without hesitation, he answered: Davos. There, he said, you “actually engage with people that you can see working with in the future.” Westminster, by contrast, is just a “shouting place”.

“So let us ask – you have to choose between Davos & Westminster?”

Keir Starmer – “Davos” pic.twitter.com/NMIEEFUWBf

— James Melville 🚜 (@JamesMelville) June 12, 2024

The World Economic Forum, of course, has done more than just about any other organisation to push the development and roll out of digital identity systems, especially since signing its strategic partnership with the UN in 2019.

Taking a Bludgeon to End-to-End Encryption

In a speech at London Tech Week last week, Starmer gave tech companies operating in the UK an ultimatum: introduce device controls that prevent children from sending and receiving explicit images, or the government will bring forward legislation making it mandatory to do so in just three months’ time.

The UK aspires to be the first country in the world to stop children taking, sharing, or viewing naked pictures on their devices. To do that, it is calling on companies to perform what is called client-side scanning on all their under-16 customers — a controversial practice we previously discussed in our article on the EU’s proposed Chat Control law, “The EU’s Latest Plan to Stifle Online Privacy Is Terrifying“.

If tech firms buckle under the pressure or Starmer carries through on his threat, assuming he’s still in office in three months’ time. every child’s messages and images will be pre-inspected while every adult will be required to show a form of ID in order to operate their phones and tablets without restrictions or monitoring. As far as I understand it, the proposed system will happen on-device at the operating system level, meaning VPNs will offer no respite.

The technology that enables client-side scanning already exists today. As the Indian tech analyst Anish Moonka notes on Twitter, if it came into widespread use, it would essentially drive a nail through the coffin of end-to-end encryption, the technology that prevents third parties from accessing data transferred from one endpoint to another, as is the government’s clear goal:

Apple built this exact tool in 2021. Within weeks, security researchers showed it could flag innocent people’s content. Apple killed it 16 months later. The UK just gave tech companies three months to build it anyway, threatening prison for executives who refuse.

The proposal is for something called client-side scanning. End-to-end encryption (the technology that protects your WhatsApp or Signal messages) works by scrambling your messages on your phone before they leave it. Nobody intercepting them can read them.

Client-side scanning changes that sequence: your phone checks every image and message against a database of prohibited content before encrypting it. The lock stays in place, but the inspection happens first. When the government says “scan for nude images,” technically they mean “scan everything.”

The people who invented internet security have already ruled on this. Ronald Rivest helped create RSA encryption, the system behind every padlock icon you see in a browser. Whitfield Diffie invented public-key cryptography, the math that all web security is built on. In October 2021, both co-signed a paper with twelve other leading cryptographers, concluding that device-level scanning undermines security for everyone while giving law enforcement only unreliable gains. Once that infrastructure is on every phone, any government can point it at whatever they decide to ban next.

The EU spent three years trying to pass something identical. Germany blocked a Council vote in October 2025. On March 26, 2026, the European Parliament voted 307 to 306 to reject it. One vote. German federal police data from those debates showed roughly 48% of the 300,000 chats reported annually under existing scanning rules were false positives, innocent people’s messages treated as criminal evidence.

The ostensible goal of Starmer’s proposed legislation is to protect minors, but the measure would require inspecting the content of every camera, messaging app and gallery to detect a single prohibited image.

And what begins with the suppression of nude images can easily bleed into other areas, such as the censorship of speech. As the mobile messenger app Signal notes, “Forcing all UK residents to prove their age and/or have all their content scanned, simply to exercise their fundamental right to communicate, is a perilous proposition”:

The UK governmentʼs demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the
UK be scanned on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age
verification and content scanning, will not safeguard children. It endangers us all, whilst
strengthening Apple, Google, and Microsoft’s market dominance and their control over our
most personal information…

We know that mass surveillance and censorship capabilities, however sincere-sounding the promises of those who initiate them are, never remain narrowly scoped. Once created, they will be expanded, forming a dangerous tool that will be wielded both in the UK and abroad to censor and surveil whatever they might consider ‘threats’ or ‘harmful content.’

Promises that this system will only run on-device are cold comfort. Wherever it runs,
including the “cameraˮ itself once it is in place on UK devices – its scope will be defined by
the whims and proscriptions of the government to detect nudity today and political speech
tomorrow.

“Australia-Plus” Social Media Ban

This week, the Starmer government followed up its proposed assault on end-to-end encryption by announcing a ban on major social media and streaming platforms for under-16s that will come into effect by Spring 2027. The measure will apparently apply to Snapchat, TikTok,  YouTube, Instagram, Facebook Reddit and X but, for some reason, not to Bluesky. Also under consideration is a social media curfew for under-18s.

The Starmer government is calling the measure “Australia-plus”, as it seeks to improve on the social-media ban imposed by Australia in December, with limited success. As we warned before the ban came into effect, Australian teens have found numerous work-arounds, including, of course, VPNs. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner’s latest compliance update reports that 70% cent of the 898 parents surveyed said their kids still had active social media accounts.

“Evidence from Australia demonstrates that these bans are largely ineffective, as over sixty per cent of underage users bypassed restrictions simply because platforms failed to close existing accounts, while others easily utilised workarounds like alternative routing and shared accounts,” writes Prof Elvira Perez Vallejos, Professor of Digital Technology for Mental Health, University of Nottingham.

The problem is not just the ineffectiveness of the proposed solutions — biometric age estimation, for example, can be deceived by high quality photographs, deepfakes, and AI generated imagery — but also the potential unintended consequences, warns Dr Hisham Al-Assam, associate professor in Computing at the University of Buckingham:

Requiring identity documents and biometric information at scale would create highly attractive targets for hackers, increasing the risk of data breaches and identity theft on an unprecedented scale.

The deeper problem is architectural. The internet was designed to route information, not to verify human identity. Any attempt to impose state mandated identity verification across the network is therefore built on foundations that were never intended for that purpose, making such systems inherently fragile, costly, and prone to failure.

Australia was the first country in the west to implement an under-16 social media ban. Since then, more than two dozen countries around the world have proposed or adopted bans on social media use for large sections of their public, reports Taylor Lorenz in The Guardian:

These laws, often proposed under the guise of “child safety”, are ushering in an era of mass surveillance and widespread censorship, contributing to what scholars have called a “global free speech recession”.

Last year, Australia became the first country to ban anyone under the age of 16 from accessing social media. The move emboldened other countries around the world to quickly follow suit. Germany’s ruling party announced it was backing a social media ban. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, called for a ban on social media for under-15s. In the UK, Keir Starmer has sought to enact sweeping social media bans. Greece, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Japan have also pursued similar online identity verification laws.

In the US, online age verification laws have passed or are being considered in more than half of the nation’s states. In the coming weeks, a package of 19 “child safety” bills, several which require identity verification for social media, are set to move forward in the House of Representatives. Big tech platforms such as Meta, Google and Discord have begun pre-complying with the laws in order to get ahead of regulation.

Pretty sure this is all coordinated between key Western states that want to end online anonymity https://t.co/IIzwCEVOS1

— Alonso Gurmendi (@Alonso_GD) June 15, 2026

As we have argued since July 2024, when the Spanish government proposed launching a digital identity wallet to limit and ration access to Internet porn sites, online age verification is ultimately a Trojan horse for the mass rollout of digital IDs. As an Australian government official admitted in testimony to the Senate in November 2024, online age verification traps everyone, not just minors, in its web:

RE: Social Media Ban for Under16's (aka the trojan horse Digital ID for ALL Australians)

So the Federal Labor Gov't have confirmed at Senate Estimates that ALL Australians will have to go through an age verification process to access social media, not just under 16 year olds.… pic.twitter.com/LgPu5DXdek

— Glen Schaefer (@hardenuppete) November 10, 2024

The Starmer government’s proposed online age verification does exactly the same, as the following headline confirms. Put simply, it is an ID check on all adults on social media.

JUST IN: UK Government clarifies adults will still be able to use social media by verifying their identities with digital IDs, facial recognition, passports and credit cards.

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) June 15, 2026

“The result would be that millions of British adults would have to surrender passports, biometric facial scans, or financial records to technology companies simply to access online services,” notes Dr Hisham Al-Assam. “In effect, the privacy of the entire population would be sacrificed in an attempt to regulate the behaviour of a minority.”

This is a reality that is not lost on many UK-based commenters…

It’s important to know that the social media ban for under 16s is not a ban for under 16s.

It is a ban on *selected* social media for EVERYONE. Until you identify yourself.

— Ranty Man (@RanTeeThree) June 15, 2026

It's not an under-16 social media ban, it's digital IDs with better marketing

— Alonso Gurmendi (@Alonso_GD) June 15, 2026

The last sentence is the real meat and potatoes of this.

What's being promoted as a 'social media ban for children', is really an ID check for every adult. https://t.co/9H3B9nLZ4h

— Jonathan Pie (@JonathanPieNews) June 15, 2026

Admittedly, protecting children from the darker corners of the Internet as well as over-use of social media is a commendable goal. We have featured a number of articles on this site warning of the harms resulting from children’s excessive use of social media, AI bots and smart phones (e.g., here, here and here). However, as the German financial journalist Norbert Häring argues, governments have, until now, sat on their hands as the harms have multiplied.

It takes little imagination to think of effective measures that could have been taken a long time ago: enforcement of data protection law. Bans on algorithmic suggestion systems for social media to prevent tech companies from deliberately creating online addiction, opinion manipulation and artificially increased radicalisation… Development of a child protection app by tech firms or governments that allows parents to effectively protect their children from pornography and online addiction. Smartphone bans in schools.

Instead, governments did next to nothing for more than a decade and are now using child protection as a pretext for launching an unprecedented — and quite possibly, irreversible — assault on online speech, privacy and anonymity. The real goal, notes Glenn Greenwald, “is online surveillance, an end to anonymity, and control over political content that young people can access.”

The real goal arguably extends beyond that. Digital identity is intended not just as a tool for online surveillance and control but as the lynchpin for all digital public infrastructure (DPI) — including, crucially, central bank digital currencies, which 146 countries & currency unions, representing over 98% of global GDP, are exploring, according to the Atlantic Council’s CBDC Tracker.

In other words, if this global push for age verification is successful in facilitating the mass roll out of digital identity, as intended, CBDCs will be next on the agenda. This fact is openly admitted by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the central bank of central banks. In a 2023 paper, the BIS concluded that CBDCs must be account-based and ultimately tied to a digital identity. Without digital identity, there will be no CBDCs.

Investigative journalist Whitney Webb says that the synchronised global effort to roll out digital ID is driven by its critical role in implementing Agenda 2030.

"CBDCs and digital IDs are meant to go together… Without digital IDs, the CBDC digital finance system cannot… pic.twitter.com/mKRWWAF3om

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) April 21, 2026

Lastly, it’s worth adding that social media bans are not only ineffective, they endanger both children and adults alike, as Lorenz warns:

Removing anonymity from the web, which will inevitably happen when tech companies are required to identify and ban children, allows for easier government tracking and censorship of journalists, activists and whistleblowers, who rely on online anonymity.

And while some claim the laws would curb big tech’s power, only the largest tech companies have the resources to shoulder the extensive costs of age verification systems. Non-profit and indie platforms could be forced to close, consolidating big tech’s power further. Mass surveillance systems, once constructed, could also be easily leveraged by governments and bad actors.

The UK’s Home Secretary recent admission in a conversation with Tony Blair (who else?) that “her ultimate vision” is to “achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon… that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times” is hardly reassuring in this regard. When the senior minister in charge of policing and national security makes such a frank statement of intent, it probably makes sense to take her at her word.

After all, this is a government that is not only seeking to radically reconfigure the way the Internet works for everyone, adults included, regardless of the intended consequences it could unleash, but is also determined to scrap the right to trial by jury in the majority of cases — a right that dates back to the 12th Century and is a foundation stone of common law justice systems.