Four decades past the real 1984, and there's still no Oceania. But Britain looks more and more like Airstrip One as Parliament considers a bill opening up everyone's smartphone to government supervision — and jail time for tech execs who don't submit.

You had to figure this was probably coming, right?

Right.

Reclaim the Net reports that "Ministers are reportedly drafting a law that would force Apple, Google, and the rest to make it impossible for a child to send, receive, view, or share a single nude image, with the executives who refuse facing up to five years in prison."

That might sound all well and good, but as usual, For the Children™ is little more than the government's justification for total surveillance.

"You cannot block every naked picture someone might stumble across without inspecting every picture, every message, every video call, every streamed film, on every device, all the time," Reclaim noted, with nudity serving as "the excuse and the unbroken view into your phone is the actual prize."

The industry term is "client-side scanning," which sounds much nicer than "a government mandated app that looks at everything on your phone all the time."

And even that sounds better than "Big Brother is Watching You," which is exactly what it is.

As already required by Britain's Online Safety Act, Apple and Google forcibly install age verification on every iPhone and Android device in the UK via app store updates.

No, it can't be uninstalled.

As I reported in January, what this means in practice is that London's Office of Communications ("Ofcom" in Newspeak) mandates on-device software able to read everybody's "private" messages in real-time and scan their images, too, before any personal encryption tools come into play. 

London pinky-swears that it'll only look for CSAM and terrorism-related materials, but as the Telegram's Zia Yusuf put it back then, "the slippery slope is obvious" and "mission creep is inevitable." The country looking to ban traditional chef's knives (really!) in the name of safety simply cannot be trusted with this much digital power.

Nobody can, really. 

The way things work now, if you don't pass the mandatory age check, the iPhone software bars adult websites on every installable browser, and the Communication Safety feature scans every AirDrop, FaceTime, Messages, and photo for nudity, blurring whatever it catches. And the Android filter works in a similar way.