About this episode
None of Your Goddamn BusinessJohn Morgan Salomon said something during our conversation that I haven't stopped thinking about. We were discussing encryption, privacy laws, the usual terrain — and he cut through all of it with five words: "It's none of your goddamn business."Not elegant. Not diplomatic. But exactly right.John has spent 30 years in information security. He's Swiss, lives in Spain, advises governments and startups, and uses his real name on social media despite spending his career thinking about privacy. When someone like that tells you he's worried, you should probably pay attention.The immediate concern is something called "Chat Control" — a proposed EU law that would mandate access to encrypted communications on your phone. It's failed twice. It's now in its third iteration. The Danish Information Commissioner is pushing it. Germany and Poland are resisting. The European Parliament is next.The justification is familiar: child abuse materials, terrorism, drug trafficking. These are the straw man arguments that appear every time someone wants to break encryption. And John walked me through the pattern: tragedy strikes, laws pass in the emotional fervor, and those laws never go away. The Patriot Act. RIPA in the UK. The Clipper Chip the FBI tried to push in the 1990s. Same playbook, different decade.Here's the rhetorical trap: "Do you support terrorism? Do you support child abuse?" There's only one acceptable answer. And once you give it, you've already conceded the frame. You're now arguing about implementation rather than principle.But the principle matters. John calls it the panopticon — the Victorian-era prison design where all cells face inward toward a central guard tower. No walls. Total visibility. The transparent citizen. If you can see what everyone is doing, you can spot evil early. That's the theory.The reality is different. Once you build the infrastructure to monitor everyone, the question becomes: who decides what "evil" looks like? Child pornographers, sure. Terrorists, obviously. But what about LGBTQ individuals in countries where their existence is criminalized? John told me about visiting Chile in 2006, where his gay neighbor could only hold his partner's hand inside a hidden bar. That was a democracy. It was also a place where being yourself was punishable by prison.The targets expand. They always do. Catholics in 1960s America. Migrants today. Anyone who thinks differently from whoever holds power at any given moment. These laws don't just catch criminals — they set precedents. And precedents outlive the people who set them.John made another point that landed hard: the privacy we've already lost probably isn't coming back. Supermarket loyalty cards. Surveillance cameras. Social media profiles. Cookie consent dialogs we click through without reading. That version of privacy is dead. But there's another kind — the kind that prevents all tha
