Plebs Demand Digital ID and Chat Control to Read Leaders’ Signal Messages

The public, having spent years being told that private messaging is a dangerous loophole exploited by criminals, extremists, terrorists, misinformation aluminium hat wearers, tax avoiders, wrongthinkers, and people who decline cookies, has now agreed - encrypted chats are a threat to "our" democracy.

The group, informally known as the Washington Group, was set up after a White House visit in August 2025. It includes Ursula von der Leyen, Friedrich Merz, Emmanuel Macron, Giorgia Meloni, Keir Starmer and, notably, the eternal Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

The group has been used to talk about how to handle the current U.S. administration, Ukraine policy, donating taxpayers’ money, contacts with Extra-Terrestrials, Ursula’s emergency hair protocol, Macron’s crisis turtleneck schedule, Starmer’s personality firewall, Meloni’s approved eye-roll quota, Merz’s fax-based cybersecurity strategy, whether Zelensky needs a new tailor before the next aid package photoshoot, emergency protocols for accidentally liking a Trump tweet while scrolling in bed, how to say “Europe stands united” without actually committing to anything, ranking which country’s taxpayers are still willing to pay with the least amount of complaining, and collective panic about who will be left holding the bill once the Americans get bored.

When asked to see the messages, the European Commission refused. The reason given was that disclosure would damage relations with third countries. The EU Ombudsman is now investigating the refusal.

A hearing is scheduled for mid-July.

Citizens immediately expressed concern.

“If private messages are dangerous when ordinary people send them, they must be absolutely catastrophic when sent by people with armies, budgets, sanctions and treaties.”

Campaigners are now demanding that all leaders’ Signal chats be subjected to the same safety architecture proposed for everyone else.

Before opening a private political message, each leader should be required to identify themselves using a European Digital Identity Wallet, pass a child-protection scan, complete a misinformation risk assessment, accept institutional cookies, declare whether the message contains extremism, and upload a short video proving they are not being impersonated by a deepfake, foreign agent, lobbyist, or ambitious consultant.

Messages containing phrases such as “strategic autonomy,” “temporary emergency measure,” “rules-based order,” “for the children,” “European values,” or “we should not tell Parliament yet” would be automatically flagged for human review.

A new agency, provisionally titled the European Centre for Reading Everybody’s Messages While Protecting Our Democracy (ECREM), would oversee compliance.