My boss mentioned that someone had mailed her from a protonmail email, and when I explained what internet privacy means she immediately started talking about pedophiles and how they also used "those things". It's difficult to make people understand.

By what medium did you contact your representatives? Was there perhaps a van and a dark pillowcase involved? Your message engraved on a brick? Whispered in pillow talk? Why should they give a fuck what you think if you just send an email?

It will keep returning as long as there is no counter movement. Instead of only trying to stop chat control, we should push in the opposite direction. Propose legislation that enforces stricter privacy rules, forbid commercialization of private data (e.g. criminalize and penalize data brokers) and so on. We need to shift the balance in favor of the people instead of trying to maintain a status quo. A Newtonian approach, every action requires an (equal and) opposite reaction.

Some US states allow citizen initiative so we could ban something similar in our state constitution. For some reason we haven't done this. Does the EU have a citizen referendum, a way to update the charter, or any law that would prevent a defeated piece of legislation from being attempted over and over? Perhaps we should introduce a law to publish every politicians text messages publicly. When it fails, we'll just submit it over and over again.