If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Brazil hired an American law firm and filed a motion in a Florida federal court this week to defend one of its judges. The country is now a party to Rumble’s lawsuit against Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the judge who ordered the American platform to delete the accounts of his political critics. US District Judge Mary Scriven let Brazil intervene, then held off on its motion to dismiss until Rumble and Trump Media respond. “This lawsuit is extraordinary,” the filing opens, before arguing the dispute belongs nowhere near an American courtroom. We obtained a copy of the filing for you here. Moraes acted as a judge, Brazil says, so sovereign immunity shields him, and the case must be thrown out. The argument that his orders ran past his authority gets a one-word answer. Brazil calls it “risible.” The President of the Supreme Federal Court reached even higher, writing that what is at issue is “the independence of the Brazilian Judiciary, the integrity of the rule of law in Brazil, and, ultimately, national sovereignty itself.” Set against what the orders actually did, this comes down to a claimed sovereign right to reach into the United States and switch off American accounts. Brazil does not even try to defend the orders against Rumble as lawful. It argues that lawfulness is beside the point because foreign official immunity covers “acts the foreign official took in his official capacity, even if those acts were unlawful.” So a Brazilian justice can order a Florida company to delete a US-based account, “preserve its contents, and disclose associated user data,” and whether that order tramples the First Amendment is a question Brazil says no American court may ask. The plaintiffs’ own complaint, the motion notes, accuses Moraes of going after “speech that is fully protected under the First Amendment.” Brazil’s answer is that immunity swallows the question whole. The plaintiffs, Brazil says, can “challenge the Supreme Federal Court’s orders in the courts of Brazil,” the same court that ordered the accounts erased. The remedy on offer is an appeal to the institution doing the censoring. Brazil even concedes where that road can dead-end, quoting a Supreme Court ruling that dismissal may leave plaintiffs “without a forum for definitive resolution of their claims.” That is the foreign-censorship play start to finish. Lean on the American platform, demand the user data, and when the platform fights back at home, insist American law has no say. The orders that set this off go back more than a year. Moraes, who sits on Brazil’s Supreme Federal Tribunal, sent Rumble sealed directives to shut down the accounts of a conservative Brazilian commentator who had fled to the United States and won political asylum. He wanted the platform to hand over that user’s personal data. He attached fines of roughly $9,000 for every day Rumble refused. When the company held the line, Moraes suspended Rumble across all of Brazil and threatened its CEO, Chris Pavlovski, with criminal prosecution. Rumble is a Florida corporation with no operations in Brazil. So in February 2025, it sued Moraes in the US District Court for the Middle District of Florida, asking for a declaration that his orders carry no force on American soil. Trump Media, which leans on Rumble for video hosting and streaming behind Truth Social, joined as a plaintiff, arguing the suspension hit its business too. The dissident Moraes wanted silenced was someone the US had already shielded. Washington rejected Brazil’s extradition request in March 2024, ruling the charges amounted to “crimes of opinion.” A foreign judge emailed takedown commands to a US company and expected American platforms to enforce them, skipping the treaties and the courts that exist so foreign orders get reviewed before they bite. Rumble’s lawyers said Moraes “is attempting to sidestep U.S. law entirely.” No US court order, no independent review, and the accounts were supposed to vanish on a Brazilian justice’s say-so. After service under the Hague Convention failed, the court let Rumble serve Moraes by email. He never answered, the plaintiffs moved for a default judgment, and Brazil filed to intervene on the last day before the deadline. By stepping in, Brazil pulled the whole record into the open. Rumble’s complaint lays out Moraes’s broader operation, the so-called “Fake News Inquiry,” a years-long campaign. Since 2022, he has ordered close to 150 accounts suspended, hitting journalists, opposition legislators, satirists, jurists, and musicians who criticized the sitting government. Many of those orders arrived sealed. When the public cannot see what speech is being erased or why, people start pruning themselves before any order arrives. That is the chilling effect working as designed. The US State Department sanctioned Moraes and fellow justices last year. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote that the administration will hold accountable foreign nationals responsible for censoring protected speech in the United States, describing what he called a “persecution and censorship complex so sweeping that it not only violates basic rights of Brazilians, but also extends beyond Brazil’s shores to target Americans.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Brazil Enters Rumble Case to Defend Pro-Censorship Judge appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Brazil’s social security agency wants your fingerprints and a photo of your face before it will pay your pension. A new ordinance from the INSS, published in the official federal gazette on June 22, makes biometric registration mandatory across nearly all the social benefits the agency hands out, reaching retirement pensions, disability payments, and assistance benefits that carried no such requirement before. The collection covers prints from both hands and a facial image, all of it stored in a federal database. Until now, biometrics has been applied to a narrow set of programs, mostly the BPC assistance benefit since September 2024 and certain payroll loans. Enforcement runs through Brazil’s biometric national ID, the Carteira de Identidade Nacional, or CIN. Anyone without a biometric record on file will need a CIN from January 2027 to keep receiving benefits and from January 1, 2028, the CIN becomes the sole accepted standard for granting, maintaining, and renewing covered benefits. This all presented as fraud prevention, a way to confirm that money reaches the named recipient. However, that justification lands a little strangely, given what the INSS confirmed one month earlier. On May 21, the agency acknowledged a security failure that exposed the data of roughly 2 million insured Brazilians. Dataprev, the state company that manages pension records, traced it to April 22. The cause was a Meu INSS query service that was supposed to require a login and didn’t, leaving the records reachable without authentication. Dataprev later put the exposure at around 2.8 million taxpayer IDs. The INSS worked to make the number sound smaller, saying 97 percent of the accessed records belonged to people who had already died, with roughly 50,000 living citizens affected. Reassuring as the agency meant that to be, 50,000 living people having their data spilled through an open endpoint is its own problem, and the records of the dead feed fraud against their survivors and estates. Among the protections the agency then pointed to going forward was facial biometrics. The institution that just leaked millions of records is now asking citizens to trust it with the most sensitive identifier they own. Brazil’s plan funnels the biometrics of tens of millions of recipients into one national base, the same kind of centralized store that turns a single misconfigured endpoint into a mass leak. The ordinance allows exemptions for people over 80, refugees and stateless residents, Brazilians abroad, those in hard-to-reach areas, and people physically unable to travel. Everyone else who neither registers nor qualifies can have their application closed and treated as abandoned. Brazil could verify identity using documents it already holds. It is choosing instead to demand the face and fingerprints of nearly everyone who depends on a state payment, months after showing it cannot keep its existing data behind a login screen. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Brazil Requires Biometrics for Pensions, Even After Data Leak appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A government committee has concluded that the British public cannot be trusted to scroll responsibly. The cure it proposes is more government. Ministers are cooking up plans to force YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to shove BBC, ITV and Channel 4 content to the front of people’s feeds, asked for or not, all in the noble cause of fighting “misinformation” and “disinformation.” The Department for Culture, Media and Sport says this will help Britons “discover trusted news sources.” This means the state has picked your news for you and would prefer you stop wandering off. Ofcom found that social media is now the main news source for 51 percent of adults and 75 percent of people aged 16 to 24.  The remedy it proposes is to fit a hand-picked club of approved broadcasters with a permanent escalator to the top while everyone else is left taking the stairs. And who’s the headline act on this trusted-news scheme? The BBC, yes, the very one whose director general and head of news both walked the plank last November after a Panorama documentary stitched together separate chunks of a Trump speech so artfully that its own internal report found it “materially misled” viewers. That’s only scratching the surface of the BBC’s shortcomings. The real question underneath is who gets to define “trusted.” The answer is the same people running the scheme, which is convenient. The reported roster is BBC, ITV and Channel 4, with Channel 5 and S4C wearing the same public service badge and newspapers possibly getting an invite. The trick lives in the technical detail. On TV, “prominence” is ancient furniture. You can legally bolt BBC One near the top of the channel guide, and the Media Act 2024 dragged that habit onto smart-TV home screens. A recommendation feed is a wholly different beast. It sorts content in real time by what you personally watch and click and share. Forcing “prominence” onto that means reaching into the machine and hauling chosen publishers above where your own behavior would have left them. It’s less a gentle nudge than a crowbar. YouTube has already pushed back. David Wheeldon, a senior public policy executive at the company, wrote back in April that prominence rules “could force YouTube to give special treatment to a small group of organizations hand-picked by a government. For creators and media companies that are not chosen, the risk is real.” He added more. “By forcing these channels to the front of the line, everyone else gets pushed back, regardless of what viewers actually want to see. This makes it harder for creators to grow an audience and earn a living. If governments start picking the winners, independent creators become the losers.” There are only so many slots at the top of a feed. Every one handed to a state broadcaster is one yanked away from somebody who earned it. The independent creator filming in her kitchen, the scrappy local outlet covering the council meeting nobody else will sit through, the upstart who built an audience the hard way; all elbowed aside so everyone’s favorite punching bag can have the good seat by the window. The plan also arrives dressed up as “voluntary.” According to the Financial Times, platforms could be asked nicely first, with legislation tucked in the drawer for whenever they don’t fancy obliging. That is an interesting use of the word “voluntary” but it’s sadly how things in Britain work these days. There’s always a chance the policy might die with this government, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer prepares to leave office, but the instinct behind it may not. Prime ministers rotate out like duty managers at the end of a rough shift, yet the urge to decide what grown adults are allowed to see signs a much longer contract. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post How Britain Plans to Lock Legacy Media Into People’s Feeds appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Larry Sanger spent the spring suggesting that Wikipedia could stand to host a wider range of opinions. The community took the suggestion under advisement, deliberated in the open spirit the site loves to advertise, and then banned him for life. They took his point, apparently. He had argued the place was an ideological monoculture that punishes dissent and a panel of volunteers settled the question by punishing the dissenter. Sanger cofounded Wikipedia in 2001 and wrote a good chunk of the neutrality rules still bolted to the wall. This week he collected the harshest sanction the project hands out, an indefinite block, upgraded to a permanent ban after he had the nerve to mention the block on X. There was no appeal and his founder status bought him nothing. When the editors closed the discussion that ended his run it wasn’t that they concluded that he broke an explicit rule. They certified that Sanger is “not here to constructively build the encyclopedia.” That is a ruling about the man, pretending to be a ruling about an act. You can fight a specific charge against you with evidence but you can’t fight a reading of your heart because no evidence on earth disproves a feeling. The committee decided what was rattling around inside Sanger’s head and what was rattling around inside Sanger’s skull turned out to be bannable. Anyone with real pull on Wikipedia has an agenda, the admins and the power editors included. Sainthood has never been a documented feature of the volunteer base. If “not really here to build” becomes grounds for exile, the rule stops catching people who have motives and starts catching people whose motives the room has voted to dislike. The selective eyesight is sitting right out in the open for all to see. One of the accounts that helped run Sanger off, an editor going by TarnishedPath, had already been barred by Wikipedia’s own administrators from the Israel-Palestine topic area over conduct and still got a say in whether the cofounder was pure of heart. The watchmen, it turns out, are lightly watched. The same community keeps neat little lists ranking which outlets a citation is permitted to come from. CNN, The New York Times, and the BBC ride up front in the trusted carriage. Fox News, Newsmax, and The Federalist get seated in the marked-down section. Deciding in advance whose journalism is allowed to count, rather than the accuracy of the report and information itself, is the same reflex as deciding in advance whose intentions are allowed to be good. The site does both and files the whole operation under neutrality. Sanger, for his part, is not charmed by the courtroom. “There is no due process,” he said to the New York Post. “People are being blocked—in other words, disciplined—and yet there is no respect for certain expectations that any other serious disciplinary procedure would be held to.” He compared it to a trial by “faceless mob.” Ban discussions are meant to stay open at least 72 hours. An administrator blocked him before the clock ran out, thought better of it, reversed, then reinstated the ban as permanent the instant the window closed. Wikipedia is also not a court and its defenders will tell you, correctly, that it never signed up to be one. The bar here is lower than a courtroom. Anybody with the power to erase a person from a project he founded owes him more than a snap show of hands on whether he seems like their sort and owes a great deal more than that when the accusation boils down to his heart being in the wrong place. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Larry Sanger Said Wikipedia Punishes Dissent. Then It Banned Him. appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Just weeks after Americans criticized the United Kingdom for imposing intrusive and heavy-handed social media rules, Congress is now advancing legislation that raises strikingly similar concerns about government overreach, privacy erosion, and the expansion of online surveillance. A bipartisan agreement on children’s online safety legislation unveiled by House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders would impose new obligations on social media platforms, while creating powerful incentives for companies to end online anonymity. The proposal is part of the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act), an omnibus package that bundles together multiple bills, including the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), the SCREEN Act, the SAFE BOTs Act, COPPA 2.0, the SPY Kids Act, and more, as well as data broker provisions and research and education initiatives. We obtained a copy of the bill for you here. Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone announced Monday that they had reached agreement on the legislation, which would require social media companies to provide additional safeguards and parental tools for minors. The lawmakers said it would “hold Big Tech accountable.” “We worked across the aisle for many months and have now found common ground on policies to significantly improve the digital environment for kids,” Guthrie and Pallone said in a joint statement. As always, under that framing lies a familiar and deeply controversial approach: imposing broad obligations on platforms that hinge on whether companies know a user is a minor, without clearly defining how that knowledge is supposed to be obtained. Congress has tried for years to set national rules for social media and youth safety. Those efforts have repeatedly stalled, in part because of unresolved tensions between child protection goals and fundamental privacy rights. In the absence of federal action, states have moved ahead with their own laws, often pushing even more aggressive requirements. One of the main disputes appears to have been resolved in favor of House Republicans. According to a committee spokesperson, the agreement does not include a “duty of care” provision, a requirement backed by many child-safety advocates and several Senate lawmakers. The bill text states that nothing in it may be construed to “impose a duty of care on a provider of a covered platform.” That language has drawn criticism from some Senate supporters who had pushed for stronger requirements. Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote that “KOSA without a duty of care isn’t KOSA.” Even without that provision, however, the bill still creates a framework that pressures platforms to determine who their users are and how old they are. The legislation defines “know” or “knows” to mean “to know or should have known.” Similar language appears across multiple sections of the KIDS Act, including provisions covering online platforms, AI chatbots, and gaming services. That standard creates legal risk for companies that fail to identify minors, effectively encouraging them to gather more information about users to avoid liability. The bill attempts to soften that implication by stating that “Nothing in this subtitle may be construed to require the provider of a covered platform to implement an age gating or age verification functionality on the covered platform.” But that reassurance rings hollow. Platforms are told they do not have to verify age, while simultaneously being held responsible if they “should have known” a user was a minor. The most obvious way to resolve that contradiction is to collect more data, deploy age-estimation technologies, or introduce identity checks across the board. Privacy advocates have long warned that this kind of legal structure incentivizes surveillance. The bill would require platforms that know a user is a minor to provide privacy and safety controls, including tools to limit communications, restrict geolocation sharing, reduce compulsive-use features, and offer options to opt out of personalized recommendation systems. Default settings for minors must provide what the legislation describes as “the most protective level of control with respect to privacy and safety.” But those protections depend entirely on platforms being able to identify minors in the first place, raising the question of how much personal data will be collected from all users, not just children, in order to make that determination. Parents would also receive expanded oversight tools. Platforms would be required to provide account-management controls, time-limit features, notifications about new messaging requests, and other supervisory functions for accounts belonging to minors. Another provision allows states to enact stronger protections than those set at the federal level. The bill says nothing prevents a state from enforcing laws that provide “greater protection to minors” than federal requirements. That opens the door to an increasingly fragmented regulatory outlook, where companies must comply with a patchwork of state laws, many of which may impose stricter identity verification or access restrictions. For users, that could mean more aggressive data collection and fewer opportunities for anonymous or pseudonymous participation online, depending on where they live. The measure also includes language on encryption. It states that platform requirements may not override encrypted communications and that companies must comply in ways that “do not compromise the integrity of strong encryption.” While that language appears protective, indirect regulatory pressure can still lead companies to weaken encryption, particularly if compliance requires monitoring user behavior or identifying specific categories of users. The agreement still faces hurdles before becoming law, including Senate approval and President Donald Trump’s signature. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post The KIDS Act: A Bipartisan Mass Surveillance Megabill appeared first on Reclaim The Net.