Three Legislatures, Three Definitions of What an Unbreakable Line May Be Used For

GENEVA — Within hours of the Singapore demonstration, the argument had moved from the laboratory to three parliaments that cannot agree on the most basic question the Q-Net raises: what an unbreakable line is *for*. If a channel cannot be intercepted, one bloc argues, then the state's traditional powers of lawful interception simply evaporate, and good riddance. A second bloc calls that a charter for anyone with something to hide. A third wants to regulate not the encryption but the quantum machines behind it, and finds it cannot define what it means to regulate. "We are writing law about a technology that changes shape between the first reading and the second," a Concordat legal adviser told me, not for attribution. The Singapore result did not create this contest; it sharpened it, by proving the capability is real and here. Three drafts now sit in three chambers, each assuming a different world. The Q-Net, indifferent, carries all their arguments securely between them.