If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The Canary is a British left-wing independent news site, running since 2015, that calls itself “radical working-class media” and made its name attacking the political establishment and the mainstream press. On June 30, after almost ten years of banking together, Lloyds Banking Group shut the site’s business account, held on to a large share of its money, and gave no reason. The Canary now says it has “barely any funds” and cannot pay all its staff. According to the outlet, Lloyds is “withholding a substantial amount of our money” and “has not explained why it has taken this action.” The Canary went back to the bank more than once looking for an answer. “Despite multiple communications from us, the bank has not been forthcoming with its reasoning,” it wrote. Its editors called the move an “outrage” and said they had been “unceremoniously dropped into financial instability with no notice or explanation from Lloyds.” No warning came, and the bank has named no date for handing the money back. The arrangement is one-sided. Lloyds holds the money and sets the timeline, and it answers to nobody for either. A long-standing customer can lose access overnight and never learn what triggered it. That silence is a large problem with debanking. The bank never has to prove its case because the damage lands before the target can push back. So who gets to decide a news organization is too risky to bank? Right now, Lloyds does, privately, behind language it won’t explain. Asked about the account, a spokesperson would say only “We do not comment on individual customer accounts.” That answers nothing. The Canary suspects its politics played a part and says it will not pretend otherwise. “Whilst we do not currently know the reasons behind our debanking, we cannot afford to be naive about this,” the outlet wrote, adding that other politically active people have been cut off by their banks lately. Guessing at motive is what customers are reduced to when a bank withholds the real one. The Free Speech Union, which has fought its own banking battles, backed the outlet fast. A spokesperson called debanking “one of the most pernicious forms of cancellation that an individual or organisation can face” and said the group is in contact with The Canary and “stand ready to help.” Britain wrote rules meant to curb exactly this. Since April 2026, a bank must give 90 days’ notice and a written reason before closing an account. The protection reaches only accounts opened after the rules took effect, so a decade-long customer like The Canary falls outside it. None of this began with The Canary. Coutts, part of NatWest, dropped Reform UK leader Nigel Farage in 2023 after tagging him a politically exposed person, a row that cost chief executive Alison Rose her job and pushed debanking onto the front pages. A bank decides a customer’s views have become a liability, shuts the account, and reaches for regulation instead of an explanation. The Canary had just announced a daily print newspaper, 25,000 copies across England and Wales. An outlet building toward a bigger platform suddenly cannot make payroll, not through any court order or public process, but because one bank chose to hold its money and stay silent. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Lloyds Debanks The Canary, Withholds Its Funds appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A group of operatives gathers every few years to write the document that will supposedly save the party, and this season’s entry comes from Project 2029, a “liberal” outfit built as the mirror image of the conservative Project 2025. One side wrote a blueprint that ended up staffing part of a presidential administration. The other would like the same result, but opens with the safest subject in American politics, the welfare of children. What it has actually picked up is a global digital ID agenda, a policy spreading through Australia, Britain, and the European Union, the government-backed age check, increasingly a digital ID, that decides who gets onto a platform. As first reported by Semafor, Project 2029 wants to make it the opening pitch of the next Democratic campaign, sold under the same banner every other global elite is using, child protection. The first product off the line is called “Kids Over Clicks.” It would ban social media accounts for anyone under 16, trim the liability shield in Section 230, cap data collection on minors, and outlaw the targeted ads that follow them around the web. The group’s executive director, Chad Maisel, a former adviser to Joe Biden and Cory Booker, frames the rollout as a contest of nerve. “We’re going to see many people running for president…and we want to set the standard in terms of the type of ambition that we want to see when it comes to solving these problems,” he said. The pitch arrives wrapped in the language of a public-health crusade. Project 2029 calls this the “tobacco moment” for social media, and the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, one of its boosters, supplies the closing argument. “We are at the ‘tobacco moment’ for social media. The science is in, the lawsuits are succeeding, and public support is overwhelming. This agenda gives policymakers no excuse not to act,” he said. It’s a clean story, complete with a villain and a rescue. It also runs on something its authors rarely say out loud. To keep children off a platform, somebody has to check the age of everyone who shows up. At the scale of a national social network, there is no gentle way to do that. You confirm identity. A birth year typed into a box proves nothing, so the check hardens into a government ID, a face scan, or a digital credential tied to a real person. The under-16 rule, sold as a wall around children, becomes a turnstile that adults have to badge through too. The framework keeps this in the footnotes. Once a platform must verify ages, the anonymous account stops being possible, and the pseudonymous handle that lets someone speak without surrendering a legal name turns into a verified record, logged and stored, waiting for the next breach or subpoena. Not all of Kids Over Clicks pulls in that direction. Banning surveillance ads and capping data collection on minors would shrink what companies hoard, the rare provisions that take something from the platforms rather than from the user. The age gate sits awkwardly beside them, demanding the one thing the rest of the document is trying to protect, a person’s identity. The countries already running it offer a preview, and not all of them are democracies. Australia switched on its under-16 ban in December 2025. Britain’s Online Safety Act now greets users of Reddit and X with a demand for a passport or a face scan before they reach ordinary content, a regime broad enough that the Wikimedia Foundation went to court arguing it could force identity checks onto the people who edit Wikipedia. The European Union is folding age verification into a continent-wide Digital Identity Wallet. The United Arab Emirates bars under-15s outright and requires digital identity checks to enforce it. Saudi Arabia, which already runs one of the most heavily policed internets on earth, shows where the road ends, in a country where the link between a citizen and every word they post is permanent and state-held. That is the recurring shape of age verification as a genre. It is sold on its effect on children and judged, eventually, on its effect on everyone else. The bet is that no candidate will want to be filmed arguing against protecting children, which is almost certainly correct. The price of winning it is a Democratic Party that runs, in 2028, on the same instrument Britain, Brussels, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh are each building for their own reasons, a standing check on who gets to speak without a name. Australia has already shown how the story goes. The kids find the workaround but the ID requirement stays. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Democrats Pick Up the Global Digital ID Agenda in Project 2029 appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Discord has a new company handling your face and your government ID, and it is making the same privacy promises that came right before tens of thousands of those documents leaked last fall. The platform began testing Incode, an AI-powered identity verification firm, earlier this month for both ID scans and selfie-based age estimation. That trial runs through July 2026, next to parallel tests of Google Wallet and credit card checks. Discord describes all of it as giving people more ways to prove they are old enough for age-restricted servers, channels, and sensitive content. What it does in real terms is widen the roster of outside companies you have to trust with your most sensitive documents to keep using a service that once asked for nothing more than a username. The ID scan sends your government ID and a selfie straight to Incode, where Discord says “the entire process is fully automated so no human ever sees your ID,” that “everything is permanently deleted once your age is confirmed,” and that “your ID is never linked to your Discord account.” The other option, selfie verification, runs on facial age estimation that Discord says “meets our strict requirements for on-device facial age estimation so your biometric data never leaves your phone.” Discord CTO and co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy described Incode as an additional provider for countries that legally require age verification, pointing to a UK law that took effect in July 2025. That law, the Online Safety Act, is the regulatory pressure that has pushed Discord through a rotating cast of verification vendors over the past year, from Persona to k-ID and now Incode. Discord has reached for nearly identical wording before, and it did not prevent anything. Back in April 2025, a company spokesperson said, “The information shared to power the age verification method is only used for the one-time age verification process and is not stored by Discord or our vendor. For Face Scan, the solution our vendor uses operates on-device, which means there is no collection of any biometric information when you scan your face. For ID verification, the scan of your ID is deleted upon verification.” A July 2025 blog post offered the same reassurance, stating that “the video selfie used for facial age estimation never leaves their device.” Then a third-party vendor got breached in October 2025, and more than 70,000 government IDs spilled out along with names, emails, and other personal data. Those exposed IDs came from age verification appeals. Incode brings its own record to the arrangement. The company settled a class action under Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act in November 2024 for $4 million. The plaintiffs alleged that Incode gathered biometric data, selfies and photo IDs, without the notice or consent the law requires. The settlement covered people in Illinois who uploaded a selfie and photo ID to any application, software, or website an Incode customer operated between November 2018 and August 2024 without first receiving the disclosure BIPA mandates before biometric data can be taken. Discord’s pledge that “everything is permanently deleted once your age is confirmed” also runs straight into Incode’s own published policies. Incode’s privacy policy and biometric data notice say the firm may hold biometric data for up to three years and keep other personal data “as long as necessary for the purpose(s) for which it has been collected and in accordance with applicable laws and regulations,” which is a polite way of saying indefinitely. Incode’s policy also reserves the right to share personal data with service providers, analytics partners, business partners, and legal authorities, so the documents you hand over to clear an age gate can travel well beyond the company you handed them to. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Discord’s New Face-Scan Vendor Comes with a Familiar Promise appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The House voted Monday night to build the machinery of online identity checks into federal law, packaging the mandate inside a bundle of kids online safety bills that cleared the chamber 267-117, with 47 members not voting. It marks the first time any version of the Kids Online Safety Act, known as KOSA, has escaped the lower chamber, and the version that survived carries a structure that pushes platforms to figure out who you are before you can use them. The legislation, called the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, or KIDS Act (H.R. 7757), stitches together more than a dozen separate bills, including KOSA, the SCREEN Act, the SAFE BOTs Act, COPPA 2.0, and the SPY Kids Act, plus data broker rules and research initiatives. House leaders rushed it to the floor under suspension of the rules, a fast-track path requiring a two-thirds majority. Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone, who announced their agreement a week earlier, said the bill would “hold Big Tech accountable” and described months of cross-aisle work toward what Guthrie called a “workable compromise.” If you’ve been following our updates, you’ll know the accountability positioning hides the actual design. The bill defines “know” or “knows” to mean “to know or should have known,” and that phrase runs through sections covering platforms, AI chatbots, and gaming services. A company that fails to spot a minor faces legal exposure, which gives every platform a reason to gather more information about everyone who shows up. The text tries to defuse this, stating that nothing in it may be construed “to require the provider of a covered platform to implement an age gating or age verification functionality on the covered platform.” The reassurance collapses on contact. A platform forbidden from ignoring a user’s age, yet liable the moment it “should have known” someone was a minor, has one move left. It starts checking ages, deploying age-estimation tools, demanding ID, or watching behavior closely enough to guess. The law does not order surveillance outright, it engineers the incentive and lets companies build the rest. That is the First Amendment problem dressed as a child-safety provision. Verifying age means verifying identity, and identity checks sit between a person and ordinary protected activity, whether that is reading, watching, posting, or speaking. Adult websites would face explicit age-verification requirements under the package, which functionally means every visitor proves who they are before viewing lawful content. Anonymous and pseudonymous speech, the kind the Supreme Court has shielded for decades, gets harder to find the more platforms lean on identity to limit their liability. The bill tightens how data brokers handle children’s information and updates the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to widen its reach. But, to do that, it would require platforms that know a user is a minor to offer controls that limit communications, restrict geolocation sharing, cut compulsive-use features, and let users opt out of personalized recommendation systems, with default settings for minors set to what the bill calls “the most protective level of control with respect to privacy and safety.” These are strong protections on paper and would be good if they applied evenly to all users, but they all depend on the platform identifying minors first, which loops straight back to the same question of how much data gets pulled from users, adult or not, to sort out who the children are. The encryption language carries the same gap. The bill says platform requirements may not override encrypted communications and that companies must comply in ways that “do not compromise the integrity of strong encryption.” That could read as a shield until you notice that regulatory pressure to monitor behavior or flag certain users can hollow out encryption without ever formally banning it. Compliance routes around the protection the text claims to offer. Getting the package across the floor cost the duty of care provision, the piece many child-safety groups and KOSA’s Senate authors consider the heart of the bill. The text now states that nothing in it may be construed to “impose a duty of care on a provider of a covered platform.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a KOSA co-author, wrote that “KOSA without a duty of care isn’t KOSA,” and said last week that the House version is “dead in the Senate.” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), the other co-author, agrees the provision was central. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, told reporters he stays open to negotiating with the House. That stalemate is the most encouraging thing about this whole fight. The Senate’s standalone KOSA (S.1748) keeps the duty of care, which would legally require platforms to “exercise reasonable care” to prevent broad categories of harm to minors. On the free speech axis, that is the more dangerous of the two bills, not the safer one. A duty of care over vaguely defined harms compels companies to police or re-engineer recommendation algorithms for lawful, constitutionally protected content, under threat of liability so open-ended that the rational corporate response is to over-remove anything that might draw a lawsuit. So neither chamber holds the civil-liberties high ground. The Senate bill compels platforms to suppress protected speech, while the House bill conscripts them into identity verification, and a conference committee tasked with reconciling the two could just as easily graft the worst of each onto a single law as split the difference. The good news for anyone who values either anonymity or free expression is that the two chambers, each representing a different type of civil liberties disaster, do not appear close to agreement. Blumenthal and Blackburn have written off the House version, House Republicans spent four years refusing the Senate’s duty of care over censorship fears, and nothing in the current standoff suggests that gap is about to close. Gridlock, in this case, is the protection the bills themselves do not provide. Guthrie defended the result from the floor. “While no single bill will solve every challenge facing families online, this legislation represents a significant and long-overdue step forward in establishing meaningful safeguards,” he said. “It is an important milestone, not a finish line, in the effort to better protect children online and hold bad actors accountable.” Blackburn is running a separate track in the Senate, negotiating with the White House over a deal that could carry the Senate version of KOSA. Two sources familiar with those talks said the White House told several tech and policy organizations this month that the package might also fold in the House’s version of the App Store Accountability Act, along with language preempting some state laws, which would override the stronger protections states have written into their own books. The agreement still needs Senate approval and President Trump’s signature, neither of which looks imminent. What it offers, if it ever gets there, is a federal blueprint for the same identity-gated internet other countries have spent the past few years assembling, sold under the banner of protecting children and built to make proving who you are the price of going online. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post The House Just Voted for KOSA, a Privacy and Free Speech Disaster appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A 6-3 decision says geofence warrants, the tool that lets law enforcement vacuum up everyone near a crime scene, trigger the Fourth Amendment. US Police can no longer demand a digital dragnet of everyone’s phone location near a crime scene without answering to the Fourth Amendment. The US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Monday that the geofence warrants law enforcement has relied on for years count as a search of the people they catch, even when those people did nothing but carry a phone through the wrong place at the wrong time. We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here. A geofence warrant treats location itself as the suspect. Police draw a virtual fence around a spot and a stretch of time, then force a company like Google to turn over data on every phone that passed through. The method does not begin with a specific person and a trace their movements. It begins with everyone’s movements and goes looking for a person, which is why it gathers bystanders by the thousands. Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the majority, held that the records pulled into these warrants carry a “reasonable expectation of privacy,” even for someone out in public. “An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information – even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company,” Kagan wrote. The majority refused to treat the everyday act of using a phone as permission to hand your life to the government. A cell-phone user, Kagan wrote, “is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties – which then can be freely passed on to the government – just by doing the ordinary things cell-phone users do.” The opinion ran through the apps that pull location all day, the maps app that wants to route you home, the rideshare app that keeps tracking after you’ve climbed out, and a dozen others doing it in the background. The government’s fallback was that two hours of someone’s movements is too thin a slice to deserve protection. The Court rejected the notion that privacy only switches on once the tracking runs long enough. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “even short-term monitoring” of a person’s movements can yield “a wealth of detail about [his] familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations,” and she listed the stops most people consider nobody’s business, trips to “the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the Aids treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, (or) the by-the hour motel.” The government also argued that anyone running Location History chose to, that the feature is optional, and so the data it produces is fair game. It leaned on its own figure that “only about one-third of active Google account holders actually opted into the location history service.” The majority called that argument “meritless” and spelled out why in terms anyone who has set up a phone will recognize. “That argument ignores how and why Google users turn on location history: Google repeatedly prompts users to turn on the service, often warning that devices will not “work correctly” otherwise, while not disclosing in that prompt how frequently users’ location information would be recorded, how precise it would be, or how it might be given to the government,” the judges wrote. The case behind the ruling, Chatrie v US, grew out of an armed robbery at a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia, where the robber left with $195,000. Investigators ran out of leads and turned to a geofence warrant aimed at Google. Their eventual suspect, Okello Chatrie, had switched on Google’s optional location history, which logged his position every couple of minutes and placed him near the credit union around the time of the robbery. He later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 years. Chatrie’s lawyers had argued the search was far too broad and breached his Fourth Amendment shield against “unreasonable search and seizure.” The Court agreed that a search happened. It left the harder question, whether this particular search was reasonable, to the lower court, which now has to decide whether the “search was reasonable, meaning that each of its steps was properly described with particularity and found to be supported by probable cause.” Officers never have to name a target. They just define a place and a window of time, and Google produces everyone who was inside it. That one-third of accountholders still came to more than 500 million people, by the count Chatrie’s lawyers gave the court. Google itself admitted that geofence searches “often run a high risk of sweeping in innocent users–sometimes thousands of them,” reaching into private homes, apartment buildings, government buildings, hotels, places of worship, and busy roads that police had no cause to search. This is the first time the Supreme Court has taken up the scope of the Fourth Amendment in the digital age since 2018, when a 5-4 majority in Carpenter v United States held that the government generally needs a warrant to obtain a person’s cellphone location history. Monday’s decision carries that logic from a single tracked suspect to the whole crowd a geofence pulls in. The ruling lands on a procedure that no longer exists. Google changed how location history works in July 2025. It now stores that data on users’ own devices instead of its own servers and says it can no longer answer geofence warrants for it. The exact procedure the Court just ruled on is one Google has already abandoned but the principle the justices set down outlasts it, though, and it reaches whatever location database law enforcement turns to next. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Supreme Court Rules 6-3 That Geofence Warrants Trigger Fourth Amendment Protections appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.