If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. AU10TIX, an identity verification company operating out of Israel and serving prominent clients like TikTok and more recently Elon Musk’s X, was found to have inadvertently left sensitive user information vulnerable after administrative credentials were exposed online, according to a report from 404 Media. The company, known for processing photos and drivers’ licenses to verify identities, allegedly had this security lapse exposed by cybersecurity firm spiderSilk, revealing a potential goldmine for hackers. The exposed data, accessible for over a year, included not only basic identity details such as names, birth dates, and nationalities but also images of the identity documents themselves, such as drivers’ licenses. This breach underscores a growing concern as more platforms, including social networks and adult content sites, demand real identity verification from users, increasing the risk of personal data exposure. Further complicating the issue, AU10TIX’s services involve sophisticated processes like “liveness detection” and age estimation through photo analysis, indicating the depth of data potentially compromised. The breach was first detected when credentials stolen by malware were found on a Telegram channel. This channel had posted these credentials in March 2023, despite them being harvested back in December 2022. These included passwords and tokens for various services, which 404 Media suggests deepens concerns. In a statement, AU10TIX said “While PII data was potentially accessible, based on our current findings, we see no evidence that such data has been exploited. Our customers’ security is of the utmost importance, and they have been notified.” X, formerly known as Twitter, has recently introduced a new policy requiring users who earn through its platform—via advertising or paid subscriptions—to verify their accounts using government-issued IDs. This move, facilitated through a partnership with Au10tix was designed to reduce impersonation and fraud. But starting immediately for new creators and by July 1, 2024, for existing ones, the policy aims to enhance authenticity and secure user transactions. However, it also sparks significant privacy and free speech concerns, as the platform is recognized for championing free expression—a principle often supported by the ability to remain anonymous. The implementation of mandatory government ID verification by X is part of a wider trend towards digital ID verification in the online and political arenas, raising questions about the impact on free speech and anonymity. While the intent behind such policies is to improve security and authenticity, they risk infringing on the fundamental rights to privacy and anonymous speech, essential for activists, whistleblowers, and those critical of their governments. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post ID Verification Company Partnered With X Suffered Data Leak, Report Claims appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Evan Gershkovich's Secret Trial in Russia Began Today

Jackson’s journey from the streets to a loving home is a tale of transformation and second chances. Found struggling in a shelter, Jackson was initially considered a mean cat, destined to be released back to the streets. His behavior at the shelter painted him as unapproachable and aggressive. These traits almost sealed his fate. However,... The post Shelter cat written off as ‘mean’ completely changes when he meets love of his life appeared first on Animal Channel.

A typical day on Grayton Beach in the Florida Panhandle took a terrifying turn when Andrew Cady and his son encountered an aggressive bull shark while jet skiing. The menacing predator, known for its unpredictable behavior, circled their jet ski before launching itself out of the water in a dramatic attack. This close call added... The post Aggressive bull shark goes after jet skier and won’t let up appeared first on Animal Channel.

The Media Research Center and members of the Free Speech Alliance coalition have issued a strong warning to the leaders of the five largest telecommunications companies in the U.S.: You must not censor Americans in advance of the 2024 presidential election. In a Monday letter delivered to the CEOs of Comcast, T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon and Charger, the pro-free speech groups cautioned the telecommunications companies not to cave into leftist pressure for election-interfering censorship. “Our system of government and the ability for citizens to participate in it requires the unfettered, free flow of ideas,” wrote members of the Free Speech Alliance, a coalition of leading pro-free speech companies in the U.S. “Any action you take to limit that speech in advance of the November election is an attack on the very essence of freedom.” The letter, signed by 29 members, urges telecom giants to pledge to five pro-free speech promises: “Never limit calling, texting or other access to wireless communications to political campaigns, political action committees or political fundraising services. “Never throttle or otherwise censor access to the websites of political campaigns, political action committees or political fundraising platforms. “Never refuse contract renewal to a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) over the group’s political advocacy or the advocacy of its owners and employees. “Never throttle, block texted links or otherwise censor access to news outlets, including individual pages of news outlets. “Never impose restrictions on calling, texting or internet access based on nebulous, amorphous and misused phrases like ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ ‘extremism’ or ‘hate speech.’” Read the full letter below:  

Former CNN “reality checker” John Avlon won the Democratic Primary in New York’s 1st Congressional District, defeating chemistry professor Nancy Goroff by 40 points. Democratic campaigns recently have been obsessed with promoting abortion and the idea that democracy is at stake, but Avlon stands out among them for his previous career as CNN's "reality check" analayst who portrayed himself as a nonpartisan truth teller. Avlon repeatedly claimed that it is simply a fact that Democrats are not extreme on abortion and that pro-lifers oppose freedom. He falsely stated that overturning Roe v. Wade would “undercut majoritarian democracy.” He also claimed that the RNC withdrawing from the Commission on Presidential Debates was a “blow to our democracy” and used the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor to warn about a second civil war. Additionally, he attacked Ohio and Texas’s redistricting as racist. When Democrats were arguing amongst themselves in the early part of President Joe Biden’s term, he urged the party’s factions to come together and pass his agenda, claiming “failure is just not an option.” The partisan Democrat claimed to be the arbiter of what is and is not conservative when he attacked critical race theory bans and claimed GOP education bills were designed to make children dumber. Finally, CNN’s designated truth teller showed he didn't even know how to do a Nexus search during a failed attack on Fox News's Hunter Biden coverage. Avlon’s inserting his partisan opinions into his reality checks and other supposedly down-the-middle commentary does not just reflect poorly on him now that he has finally put a “D” next to his name, it raises questions about the rest of the self-styled independent fact-checkers. He will face GOP Rep. Nick LaLota in November. LaLota was first elected to the House in 2022, where he won by 11 points.

As the first presidential debate nears, Biden has some good news to share. United States Customs and Border Protection has released the newest numbers regarding border crossings by illegal immigrants, and the numbers indicate improving conditions. Since the expiration of the CDC’s Title 42 Public Health order, the Department of Homeland Security has removed or returned 775,000 individuals. And according to border patrol, after Biden’s announcement of asylum restrictions, border counters are down by 25%. While at first glance these stats look good, Stu Burguiere of “Stu Does America” sees what’s really going on. He cites a post on X from Fox News' Bill Melugin, who has been covering the border. “Despite the lower numbers, per CBP sources, there were 783 known gotaways recorded yesterday, a spike from the current 7 day average of 480,” Melugin wrote. “Big picture: we now have almost three weeks of data showing a significant drop in illegal crossings following Biden’s executive order earlier this month. Mexico continues enforcing on their side of the border, and Texas has their border on lockdown.""Combo of these factors coming together to now produce the lowest border numbers of Biden’s presidency - after three years in a row of the highest illegal crossings ever recorded,” Melguin continued. “This has been a very standard thing that Biden has done and bragged about, which is, set the record for the worst performance anyone has ever accomplished, and then back those numbers off and brag about that drop. They’ve done this with gas prices and inflation and a million different other topics,” Stu comments. The new border-crossing stats that reflect policies Biden is just now implementing were some of the restrictions that Donald Trump had put in place — and Biden had removed his first day in office. “Obviously, he shouldn’t get credit for that. He let this be a catastrophe for three and a half years, finally did something that people had been begging him to do the entire time,” Stu says. “That will not be the way he explains it on stage in a couple of days. He will surely brag about all these huge drops and how amazing he’s done.” “This was all designed specifically for this purpose,” he adds. Want more from Stu?To enjoy more of Stu's lethal wit, wisdom, and mockery, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Missouri v. Biden, the case that became known as Murthy v. Missouri before the U.S. Supreme Court, came about in response to the Democratic administration's well-documented efforts to shut down critics and questioners of its COVID-19 policies and preferred narratives during the pandemic — policies and narratives that have largely been demonstrated in the years since to have been unfounded, ruinous, or both. The states of Missouri and Louisiana were joined by other plaintiffs, including the coauthors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, in taking legal action against President Joe Biden, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, Anthony Fauci, and various Biden administration officials. Last year, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, who heard the case before it was kicked up to the high court, suggested the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits in establishing "that the Government has used is power to silence the opposition." Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden's policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature. Three of the so-called conservative justices on the Supreme Court joined Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan in concluding Wednesday that neither "the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established Article III standing to seek an injunction against any defendant." Barrett penned the majority opinion, noting, "The plaintiffs rely on allegations of past government censorship as evidence that future censorship is likely. But they fail, by and large, to link their past social-media restrictions to the defendants' communications with the platforms." 'The successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.' Barrett cast doubt on the causal link between the Biden administration's many efforts to have those with dissenting views censored online and social media platforms' ultimate censorship efforts. The former Notre Dame professor indicated that of all the individual plaintiffs, health care activist Jill Hines of Health Freedom Louisiana made the "best showing of a connection between her social-media restrictions and communications between the relevant platform (Facebook) and specific defendants (CDC and the White House)." "That said," continued Barrett, "most of the lines she draws are tenuous, particularly given her burden of proof at the preliminary injunction stage — recall that she must show that her restrictions are likely traceable to the White House and the CDC." "The plaintiffs, without any concrete link between their injuries and the defendants' conduct, ask us to conduct a review of the years-long communications between dozens of federal officials, across different agencies, with different social-media platforms, about different topics," Barrett said in her conclusion. "This Court's standing doctrine prevents us from 'exercis[ing such] general legal oversight' of the other branches of Government." The majority reversed the injunctions against the Biden administration's various censorious elements. Justice Samuel Alito filed a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, in which he stated, "If the lower courts' assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years." 'Free speech in America, for the moment, is dead.' "Freedom of speech serves many valuable purposes, but its most important role is protection of speech that is essential to democratic self-government ... and speech that advances humanity’s store of knowledge, thought, and expression in fields such as science, medicine, history, the social sciences, philosophy, and the arts," wrote Alito, adding that the speech stifled by the Biden administration fell "squarely into those categories." Alito acknowledged that private entities are not subject to the First Amendment, but government officials cannot coerce them to suppress speech. He emphasized that there is ample evidence the Biden administration did just that and noted further that the majority shirked the duty to tackle the free speech at issue in Murthy, thus permitting "the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think." Alito slammed the efforts by Biden's cabal of high-ranking bureaucrats as "dangerous," noting both their censorship was "blatantly unconstitutional" and that the country may come to regret the majority's decision. Contrary to the liberal justices' understanding, Alito also indicated that in the case of Hines, she had indeed made the requisite showing of traceability, adding that the presence of censorship on the social media platforms prior to direct governmental involvement did not subsequently complicate shows of causality as otherwise suggested. "For months, high-ranking Government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans' free speech," Alito noted in his conclusion. "Because the Court unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent." Bhattacharya noted on X following the court's ruling, "The Supreme Court just ruled in the Murthy v. Missouri case that the Biden Administration can coerce social media companies to censor and shadowban people and posts it doesn't like." "This now also becomes a key issue in the upcoming election. Where do the presidential candidates stand on social media censorship? We know where Biden stands since his lawyers argue that he has near monarchical power over social media speech," continued Bhattacharya. "The court ruled that the plaintiffs (Missouri and Louisiana, as well as me and other blacklisted individuals) lacked standing to sue. This means that the Administration can censor ideas & no person will have standing to enforce the 1st Amendment. Free speech in America, for the moment, is dead." Other supporters of free speech denounced the outcome. Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, among them, said, "The Court majority has rubber-stamped a way for the federal government to censor speech that it doesn't like. The Court is telling would be censors: you can't directly censor speech but if you pursue a sophisticated plan with enough subtlety you can get away with doing indirectly what the Constitution clearly ... forbids you from doing directly." Blaze Media cofounder and nationally syndicated radio host Glenn Beck wrote, "The Supreme Court has ruled that, practically, the government can continue pressuring social media companies to censor Americans. This is an absolute gut punch." Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

A Republican state representative in Michigan has made his first public comments since he was arrested a week ago, claiming that he was "framed" in a scheme of "political lawfare" and that he will soon be "totally" exonerated.In the wee hours of the morning last Thursday, Lansing cops arrested state Rep. Neil Friske, a first-term Republican representing northwestern parts of Michigan's Lower Peninsula and even a few counties in the southeastern portion of the Upper Peninsula. Friske had been accused of sexually assaulting a stripper at his Lansing condo and then chasing her down the street while firing a weapon, as Blaze News previously reported.'I just don’t even understand how someone that wants to claim to be an upright, Christian person can run this kind of a campaign and then live with themself and expect people to vote for him.'Gateway Pundit offered a different version of events, claiming that the stripper refused to leave Friske's condo unless he paid her money. When he would not comply, she allegedly grabbed a pair of scissors and attempted to stab him. She also allegedly called police to report falsely that he had shot at her, "even though no shots were fired," the outlet emphasized.Friske, a strong supporter of former President Trump and traditional American freedoms, "is always exercising his 2nd Amendment right," said a statement from his campaign issued hours after his arrest. His campaign later shared the Gateway Pundit article on social media.Officers had urged Ingham County prosecutors to charge Friske with sexual assault, assault, and a weapons violation, but thus far, prosecutors have declined to do so. Friske was released from custody shortly after noon on Friday.On Monday, Friske gave his first interview since the arrest, appearing on Tucker Randy's radio program, "Your Defending Fathers," to give his version of events. During their conversation, Friske vehemently maintained his innocence and hinted that he was likely the victim of a politically motivated hit job.Friske explained to Randy that on the night of his arrest, he quickly had the sense that "something wasn’t right." He then alleged that unidentified political forces had "set" him "up." "I was being framed," he said. "That’s how these people work.""I just don’t even understand how someone that wants to claim to be an upright, Christian person can run this kind of a campaign and then live with themself and expect people to vote for him," Friske added.Friske called this person "desperate." The statement issued by Friske's campaign after his arrest likewise called the incident "highly suspect," especially considering recent antics possibly associated with Friske's "opponent," who has "deep-state ties."Friske never told Randy the name of the person to whom he was referring, but Friske currently faces a tough primary challenge from Parker Fairbairn. A website for Fairbairn's campaign claims that too many state politicians have been "corrupted." "We need a Representative who will avoid the drama and do the job the people sent them to do," it added.In addition to the interview with Randy, Friske also released a letter, calling out his "opponent" for spreading "lies and half-truths." He also claimed that he was released from custody after "no evidence was found to support" the "false accusations" against him. "I am confident this investigation will totally exonerate me," he wrote. Finally, he insisted that "the extreme pressures of political lawfare" would never succeed against him."I know there’s been naysayers out there telling me I should step down, I should suspend my campaign. I am not doing that," Friske told Randy. "That is not what I feel like God wants me to do, that’s not the message I’m getting from my supporters, and I’ve not done anything wrong."Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

This Is Fine: Average Salary Required to Own a Home Increased 80.5% Under Biden