If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Stuffed inside a resignation letter about the UK’s Labour Party’s leadership crisis is a proposal that should alarm anyone who owns a phone. Jess Phillips, who stepped down as Safeguarding Minister today, spent a significant portion of her parting shot to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, complaining that the government failed to mandate technology on every phone and device in the country that would prevent children from taking explicit images. We obtained a copy of the letter for you here. Phillips framed this as child protection but what she described is device-level surveillance deployed at national scale. Her letter stated that “91% of online child sex abuse is self-generated by children groomed, tricked and exploited in to abuse,” and that she presented solutions to Starmer “over a year ago” that would “end the ability for children in the UK to take naked images of themselves.” She wanted this installed on every device in the country. The government dragged its feet for twelve months before agreeing to “even threaten to legislate in this space. Not legislate, just threaten.” Phillips called this “the definition of incremental change.” An announcement planned for March got pushed to June. She’d “given up believing it” would happen. The resignation falls during a brutal stretch for Starmer. More than 90 Labour MPs have called for him to go after disastrous local elections. Phillips told Starmer he is “a good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things” but that she’d “seen first-hand how that is not enough.” His instinct to avoid confrontation, she argued, had paralyzed the government. “The desire not to have an argument means we rarely make an argument, leaving opportunities for progress stalled and delayed.” What Phillips Was Actually Proposing In November 2025, Phillips publicly backed an Internet Watch Foundation campaign urging tech companies to install client-side scanning in encrypted messaging apps. That system checks every image against a database of known abuse material before it gets sent, scanning content on your device before encryption can protect it. The IWF called it “upload prevention.” The EU called a nearly identical proposal “Chat Control.” Both rely on the same architecture and that architecture requires software on your personal device that inspects your private content before you send it. The EU’s version collapsed after Germany and several other member states rejected it on privacy grounds. Germany’s Justice Minister compared mandatory message scanning to “opening all letters as a precautionary measure.” Signal threatened to leave the EU rather than compromise its encryption. Over 700 experts warned that narrowing the scope of such scanning “does not eliminate the serious concerns” about mass surveillance. Those concerns apply directly to what Phillips wanted. Any software capable of scanning images on a device can be updated to scan for different content. The infrastructure built to detect abuse material can search for political speech, protest coordination, or journalistic sources. The technical capability doesn’t care about the stated justification. Once it sits on every device, the question becomes who decides what it looks for and that decision moves from Parliament to software updates. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Jess Phillips Resigns, Pushes Phone Scanning Law in UK appeared first on Reclaim The Net.