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If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Texas can now require proof of age (which means digital ID checks) before anyone downloads an app, and the Supreme Court has decided not to stand in the way. The justices on Monday refused to reinstate a lower-court order that had blocked the Texas App Store Accountability Act, known as SB 2420. Two short, unsigned orders released that afternoon carried the decision, and no justice publicly dissented. Texas is free to enforce the law while the fight over its constitutionality plays out. We obtained a copy of the orders for you here and here. Every app store now has to check the age of every downloader. Anyone under 18 needs a parent’s consent to download an app or to pay for content inside one. Adults land inside the checkpoint too, because sorting minors from everyone else means screening everyone. Show a government ID, or some other proof of age, and then the store opens. It still sounds unbelievable to have to write this, but reaching software in Texas runs through an identity check. Two lawsuits are trying to tear the law down, both built on the First Amendment. One comes from Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, a group whose members, in its own words, “use mobile apps to teach other kids how to get involved in policymaking.” The other comes from the Computer and Communications Industry Association, the trade group representing app stores and developers. They sued the same day last October, well before SB 2420 was set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2026. The students spelled out the stakes. The appeals court ruling, they warned, “would render virtually the entire internet—not to mention the distribution of every book, newspaper, magazine, movie, or record album—’commercial speech’ the government could more readily ban, restrict, edit, or compel. That is clearly wrong.” They also noted that Texas already walls minors off from online pornography under a separate statute the Supreme Court upheld last year. So SB 2420’s stated goal of shielding children “from ‘accessing harmful or inappropriate content’ … is not a valid government interest,” they told the justices. The CCIA counted the cost in liability and dollars. The Fifth Circuit’s decision, it argued, “has upset the status quo by allowing the Act to be enforced for the first time, exposing app stores and millions of app developers to potential liability” and saddling them with “enormous and unrecoverable compliance costs.” Its members, the group added, already “provide various, voluntary tools that enable parents to control their children’s exposure to apps and content.” Parents who want those controls can already reach for them. SB 2420 swaps that option for a command. Texas tells the story differently, in a version where none of this touches speech. The state says the law governs commercial transactions, the contract terms a young person agrees to when downloading an app. It reaches for an analogy. “In the same way that the State can deny drivers’ licenses to children under sixteen, even though some fourteen-year-olds may wish to drive to a bookstore and purchase a book, the State can restrict children’s downloads of software applications to mobile devices as a product category, even if some children may wish to use applications to engage in expressive conduct.” Recast a bookstore as a product category, and the books inside stop reading as speech. Because the law covers all apps “regardless of their content,” Texas says the district judge reached for too demanding a constitutional test and should have applied intermediate scrutiny at most. The Fifth Circuit accepted that the law likely clears the lower bar, holding that “Requiring age verification, parental consent, and app-related content ratings likely directly and materially advances Texas’s substantial interest in protecting children’s data, safety, and privacy in a digital world.” Content-neutral on paper, the requirement still decides who gets to read, watch, and speak. US District Judge Robert Pitman in Austin blocked the law in December, finding it likely unconstitutional. The Fifth Circuit lifted that block in May, sending the challengers to the Supreme Court within days. Texas also complained that Pitman had reached too far by barring enforcement “against anyone, not just the Plaintiffs.” The dispute now returns to the Fifth Circuit, which is expected to hold an expedited hearing on the merits in early August. Matt Schruers, the CCIA’s president and CEO, welcomed the timing. “We look forward to an expedited hearing before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in early August to demonstrate how Texas’ App Store Accountability Act violates the First Amendment. People should not have to turn over personal data to access the internet any more than they should show government identification to enter a bookstore.” The checkpoint stays up until then. Anyone in Texas reaching for an app store meets the ID demand first and access now waits on proof of identity that the state can require by law. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Supreme Court Lets Texas Enforce App Store ID Check Law 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. Federal agents climbed the steps to David Streever’s porch in Rochester, New York, walked past his kid’s toys, and rang the doorbell to warn him that an email might be a crime. He wasn’t home. He was in Finland, riding theme-park rides with his seven-year-old daughter. The message that sent two Homeland Security Investigations officers to his door was five months old, and every word of it was protected speech. Streever is fighting back. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a federal lawsuit on July 6 in Washington, D.C., naming Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, three agents, and other ICE officials as defendants. We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.   The suit asks a court to affirm what the Constitution already guarantees, that an American can call a top law enforcement official a monster without federal officers turning up at his home. Streever, a writer and author, sent the message on January 26 to Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE, using Lyons’ government address. He wrote after federal immigration officers in Minneapolis shot and killed two US citizens during the agency’s January surge, among them Alex Pretti. The subject line read “What’s next.” Across three paragraphs, Streever compared Lyons to a Nazi and predicted he would be devoured by his own conscience. “You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher. The way you are protecting the obvious execution in Minnesota, even as we see the videos, will lead to your downfall. Even Trump will turn on you before the end, and you will be a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your own pathetic weakness. You will never know peace. You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.” The email Streever sent to the acting director of ICE. Those are the words of political anger at full volume. Streever predicted that Lyons would be crushed by guilt and shame. He threatened no one. Angry letters to powerful officials run through the whole of American history, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly protected this kind of overheated rhetoric against government attempts to brand it as dangerous. The response came on June 23. Streever’s Nest camera caught two agents arriving in the afternoon, climbing the steps past children’s toys and ringing the bell of an empty house. Agents arrive to issue Streever a warning over his email, alleging that he may be violating the law. His wife came home and found them waiting. One agent handed her a document meant for her husband. The paper was labeled “WARNING NOTICE.” In underlined capital letters on ICE and DHS stationery, it told Streever “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW” and said the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility had flagged his email. It asked that he “promptly remove and/or discontinue the aforementioned behavior.” The bottom of the form carried the actual threat, a line warning that “Receipt of this Notice will be taken into consideration, should you continue to be involved in any criminal activities described above.” Streever’s wife told the agents he was abroad and would fly home that Friday. They did not wait. Streever and his daughter landed at JFK two days later and checked into a nearby airport hotel to sleep off the jet lag. That evening a Homeland Security agent walked up to the front desk, asking for him and left a business card. Two agents called his phone through the night, leaving voicemails that identified them only as “Homeland Security Investigations.” His wife had never told anyone where he was staying. They found him anyway. The government’s official account is thin. DHS said only that “ICE investigates all credible threats towards its employees and officers, including threats to the ICE Director” and that “As a matter of policy, we do not comment on any ongoing investigations.” Set that against the calendar. Five months passed between the email and the knock. Agents who believe a man poses a genuine danger do not spend nearly half a year getting around to it. FIRE Senior Attorney Adam Steinbaugh made the same point. “If someone is really threatening a government official, you don’t wait five months to act on it,” he said. “The fact that authorities didn’t respond immediately shows that David presented no threat. This pursuit is designed to intimidate lawful speech, pure and simple.” The lawsuit treats the warning notice as the weapon it is. The government “is actively threatening that freedom,” the complaint reads, “tracking down and retaliating against speakers like Plaintiff David Streever because he exercised his fundamental right to criticize one of the highest-ranking law enforcement officers in the United States.” Handing someone an official federal document that accuses them of possible crimes, then sending armed agents to deliver it by hand, the suit argues, “can have only one purpose: to systemically chill ICE’s critics and coerce them into silence.” As the complaint puts it, “Our Constitution does not tolerate such a brazen abuse of authority.” Streever is one of the first two people to reveal that Homeland Security handed them these warning notices over their online speech. How many others got one and went quiet is the question the notices are built to answer in the government’s favor. Streever chose not to. “I cherish our right to speak openly about issues of public concern,” he said. “I hope others will not be discouraged from peacefully expressing their views, even when those views are critical of the government.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Man Sues DHS After Agents Tracked Him Over ICE Email 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. Andy Burnham hasn’t set foot in Downing Street, and his team has already worked out how to protect your children. They’re going to card every adult in the country who wants to get online. The favorite to be the next British Prime Minister will keep the current government’s age-verification scheme running. His spokesperson told The Mirror, “Andy is committed to keeping kids safe online, and has been vocal in his support of age restrictions for kids using social media.” “He knows this ban is a critical first step to keeping kids safe online and preventing further tragedies for families. The task now is to build on the consensus across political parties to make sure it’s enforced in full, and delivered with the urgency this issue demands.” Nobody wants children hurt. The question worth asking is what “age restrictions” has grown into, because this thing was fed after midnight and it is no longer about social media. It began as a rule about Instagram and TikTok. It now reaches into online gaming, artificial intelligence chatbots, and, if the government gets its way, the VPNs that millions of people use to keep their browsing private. Back in June, the government published a progress statement on its under-16 plans. Tucked into the “what happens next” section is a promise to report back by 16 July 2026 on, among other things, the “risks of circumvention through use of virtual private networks.” Read that as a threat to your VPN. The same document raises “whether the age of digital consent should be raised,” which is a roundabout way of saying they might start restricting adults up to 18, or older. Then there is Liz Kendall. In June the Technology Secretary said she would come back in July with more on VPN restrictions, chatbot rules, and, my personal favorite, “overnight curfews or breaks in doomscrolling for 16 and 17 year olds.” A curfew for the internet. Someone in Whitehall seriously believes the cure for teenage anxiety is a nationwide bedtime enforced by software. The gaming rules are already drawn up. Under-16s will lose access to what the statement calls “risky functions on services like gaming services, including communicating with strangers and creating livestreams.” Talking to strangers and going live, the two things that make online games worth playing. Players aged 16 and 17 get them switched off by default. To decide who is allowed what, every player has to prove how old they are, which means every player has to prove who they are. You cannot check a nation’s ages without checking a nation’s identities. Age verification and identity verification are the same machine wearing different hats. To prove you are over 16 to a games company, or over 18 to a chatbot, you hand over a face scan, a credit card, or a government ID. Adults included. The 45-year-old who wants to shout at strangers about football now has to upload a passport for the privilege. The VPN plan is the part that gives the game away. A VPN reroutes your connection so a website can’t see where you really are. People use them to shop safely on public wifi, to dodge tracking, to read news their own government would rather they didn’t. Going after VPNs isn’t child protection. It’s an admission that the whole scheme falls apart the second someone can hide their location, so the location has to be nailed down by force. Kendall’s report is due on July 16. It will arrive wrapped in the language of child safety, because all of this does. Open it up and the request is the same one every time, for your ID, your face, or your real location. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Burnham Backs UK Social Media Ban, Digital ID Age Verification 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. Britain’s Labour Party’s deputy leader wants your social media feed to obey the same election rules that already restrict what British broadcasters are allowed to say. Lucy Powell spent the past week making that case across UK media, and she intends to write it into law. Her plan borrows from Section 6 of Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code, the regime that governs UK television and radio once an election period begins. Those rules tell broadcasters how much airtime each party and candidate may receive, force them to stay “impartial,” and shut down discussion of election issues entirely on polling day, from the moment polls open until they close. Opinion polls go dark too. Powell looks at that machinery and sees a template for the open internet. “We absolutely need to strengthen regulation in the social media space,” she told LBC’s Sunday show with Lewis Goodall. “I’ve got some proposals for doing that, especially when it comes to election time, where you know, as a broadcaster, Lewis, how much you are restricted and regulated during election periods, who you can have on your show, how you have to be impartial, how you have to share information and facts about different people standing for election and so on.” Social media, she went on, “is where most people get their news and information and are influenced from, is out with that completely.” Her censorship fix runs through legislation already moving through the House of Commons. “We’ve got an elections bill going through the House of Commons at the moment to strengthen that bill so that social media comes under some of the same requirements during an election period as our broadcasters do.” The bill she means is the Representation of the People Bill. Powell wants amendments that would police, in her words to Times Radio, “what information and news they can amplify and share during election time if it’s not been checked for its accuracy or balance.” Someone would have to check. Someone would have to decide what counts as accurate, what counts as balanced, and which posts get throttled for failing the test. Powell has not said who that someone is. Of course, she frames all of this as protection rather than control. “Freedom of expression is fundamental to our democracy,” she told The Mirror. “These proposals are not about policing political opinions or censoring legitimate political debate. They are about asking how we can make sure the public can make informed choices based on accurate information.” The reassurance sits awkwardly next to the request, which is a demand that the state gain power over which political speech spreads during the exact weeks when political speech decides who governs. Her stated reason is the usual one. “The biggest influence on what many voters see during election campaigns is not a TV news bulletin, it’s social media feeds decided by opaque algorithms, where falsehoods, deepfakes and co-ordinated mis and disinformation can spread at alarming speed, with real-world consequences,” she told The Mirror. She added that “hostile actors, bad-faith campaigners, and bot farms can be used to distort democratic debate.” Every one of those categories requires a definition, and whoever writes the definition of “disinformation” gets to decide whose posts qualify. You also won’t be surprised to learn that Powell also made clear she has soured on the platform she most wants to rein in. X is “a platform that increasingly I find to be quite a toxic and difficult environment,” she told Goodall, echoing Cabinet colleague Lisa Nandy’s decision to quit the platform. A politician who finds a platform toxic while also seeking legal power over what it amplifies during elections invites an obvious question about whose speech ends up targeted. Powell’s voice carries further than a typical deputy leader’s. She keeps the deputy leadership regardless of who succeeds Keir Starmer, and by the party’s own rules she cannot be fired from it. She is close to Andy Burnham, the frontrunner to become the next Labour leader and prime minister, which puts her in line for a senior Cabinet post. What she wants for the internet is a reasonable preview of what a future Labour government might try to pass. The amendments themselves have not been filed yet. What already sits on the bill is a proposed requirement that ministers publish a report on foreign platforms, singling out “US-based social media companies amplifying electoral campaign material via algorithms,” along with “any recommendations considered necessary to protect the integrity of United Kingdom elections.” The Electoral Commission has gone further, urging the government to consider “a new overarching duty on social media platforms operating in the UK.” Each of those phrasings leaves the hard question unanswered. A duty to do what, enforced by whom, measured against whose idea of the truth. Broadcasters accepted these constraints as the price of a license to use public airwaves. The internet was never that. Extending election-period speech controls from a regulated broadcast channel to the platforms where hundreds of millions of people talk to each other changes what the rule is for. It stops being a condition of a scarce license and becomes a standing power to decide which political arguments reach voters when the stakes are highest. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Labour Eyes Social Media Censorship for UK Elections appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.