If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The era of the anonymous phone number could be ending. On April 30, the Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved a proposal requiring telecom providers to verify customers’ identities before activating service. Government-issued ID, physical address, legal name, and existing phone numbers would all be included. The stated goal is stopping robocalls. The result would be an identity-verification regime covering one of the last semi-anonymous communication tools available to ordinary Americans. The proposal applies to nearly every voice provider in the country, from traditional carriers and mobile operators to VoIP services. The FCC is seeking public comment on specifics, but the direction is clear. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr framed it around negligent carriers. “As we have continued to investigate the problem of illegal robocalls over the last year, it has become clear that some originating providers are not doing enough to vet their customers, allowing bad actors to infiltrate our U.S. phone networks,” he said. Some providers, he added, “do the bare minimum (or worse) and have become complicit in illegal robocalling schemes.” That language targets telecom companies and the surveillance targets everyone else. The framework borrows from banking’s anti-money-laundering rules. The FCC is also asking whether carriers should retain identity documentation for at least four years after a customer leaves and whether they should check customers against law enforcement watchlists. Penalties would shift to a per-call basis, meaning fines of $1,000 to $15,000 for every illegal call a poorly verified customer places. The real privacy stakes sit in the proposal’s section on prepaid service. Right now, you can pay cash for a prepaid phone and SIM card without showing identification. Journalists use prepaid phones to protect sources, domestic violence survivors use them to avoid being traced, and whistleblowers, activists, or anyone with a reason to separate phone activity from legal identity relies on this. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post The FCC Wants Your ID Before You Get a Phone Number appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

This Post is for Paid Supporters Reclaim your digital freedom. Get the latest on censorship and surveillance, and learn how to fight back. SUBSCRIBE Already a supporter? Sign In. (If you’re already logged in but still seeing this, refresh this page to show the post.) The post Brave Now Has a Stripped Down Option — Here’s Who Should Care appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The House of Commons in Canada is keeping a database of what Canadians say about their elected representatives online and officials are sorting those comments by category, including the tone and identity-based content of social media posts about MPs. That admission came from Deputy Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Mellon at a parliamentary committee, where he described the operation as a “very robust records management system.” According to Blacklock’s Reporter, the system catalogues incidents involving MPs and allows staff to sort and analyze posts, including those deemed “misogynistic” or otherwise “abusive.” Mellon told MPs the database tracks “every single incident” and can break complaints down by category, including gender-based harassment. What the records contain, why they are kept, and who has access to them, none of that was explained. Mellon offered few details. A spokesperson for the Office of the Sergeant-at-Arms said files may include both criminal and non-criminal complaints, but declined to disclose specifics, citing security reasons. So the Commons is logging non-criminal speech about politicians. Citizens posting opinions about their representatives are being filed away in a government system, sorted by category, and held for purposes the government will not describe. The line between a threat and a sharp comment is being drawn by people who answer to the institution being commented on. The testimony came as MPs pushed for the system to track speech in more granular ways. Liberal MP Anita Vandenbeld asked whether officials track threats differently based on gender or identity. Mellon confirmed the system can differentiate such data and acknowledged that female MPs are often the target of misogynistic comments. Categorizing speech by the identity of the speaker’s target moves the logic from threat assessment toward something closer to content classification, with the state holding the taxonomy. The chilling effect of an arrangement like this does not require enforcement. A Canadian who learns that a parliamentary office is filing posts about MPs into a categorized database, with no disclosed retention policy and no clear line between criminal threat and ordinary criticism, has a reason to think twice before posting. That hesitation is the point at which speech is suppressed without anyone being charged or any post being taken down. The targets of the speech control the records of the speech. Parliament will not say what is in the file, what stays in the file, or what happens to the people whose posts end up there. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Canada House of Commons Tracks Online Posts About MPs appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A New Mexico judge spent his first morning of the Meta remedies trial signaling that he doesn’t plan to become “a one-person legislator, judge and executive branch enforcer,” and the privacy stakes of that reluctance run deeper than the child safety framing suggests. The bench trial opened Monday in Santa Fe before First Judicial District Judge Bryan Biedscheid, the second phase of a case that already produced a $375 million jury verdict against Meta in March. State prosecutors now want the judge to rewrite how Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp operate inside New Mexico, with a remedy list that reaches well past algorithm tweaks into the architecture of identity verification and encrypted messaging itself. Before opening statements, Biedscheid told both sides he held “some concerns” about the New Mexico Department of Justice’s proposals. “I’m probably not the easiest sell on an idea where I would become a one-person legislature, judge and executive branch enforcer of administrative code provisions,” he said. The warning lands at a moment when several of the state’s requested fixes look like permanent surveillance infrastructure dressed up as protection. It start with age verification. The state wants Meta ordered to confirm the age of every New Mexico user, an obligation that cannot be met by asking people to type a birth year. Meaningful age verification at the platform level means government IDs, facial scans, or third-party identity services that link a real legal identity to every account. Once that link exists, it does not unlink. The pseudonymous Instagram account becomes an identity-verified Instagram account, for adults and minors alike, in service of a check that only formally concerns the under-18 population. The state is also demanding restrictions on end-to-end encryption for minors. Encryption does not have a child mode. A platform either holds the keys to your messages or it does not and once Meta is required to scan or filter the content of conversations involving anyone under 18, it builds the technical capability to scan everyone’s. Prosecutors want bans on infinite scroll, autoplay, and push notifications during school and sleep hours for minors. They want Meta to identify underage users and detect at least 99 percent of all new child sexual abuse material on its platforms. They want a 90-hour monthly cap on access for New Mexico children and they want Biedscheid to appoint an independent monitor with ongoing authority to enforce whatever order he issues. David Ackerman, a private civil attorney representing the state, told the court that prosecutors are also seeking $3.7 billion in restitution paid out over the next 15 years. The award, he said, “recognizes the scope of the public nuisance that Meta has caused. There are items in this abatement plan for public education, to assist schools, to assist law enforcement, to assist mental health providers who are treating children who are suffering from the effects of their social media use. [This] is about preventing harm from occurring to additional New Mexico children, It’s about fixing the harm that already occurred to New Mexico children and their families.” Meta’s lawyers responded that the state’s demands are “overbroad, vague, unworkable” and would compel speech, and the company has separately threatened to withdraw Facebook and Instagram from New Mexico rather than comply. Meta attorney William Parkinson framed that threat as serious rather than performative. “This is not a PR stunt, this is not a threat,” he said. The withdrawal warning serves Meta’s interests, but it also illustrates how difficult it is for a single state to impose platform-level identity verification and content-scanning mandates without effects that bleed across borders. Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who filed the case in 2023 after his office ran an undercover operation using a fake Instagram account presented as a 13-year-old girl, has rejected Meta’s claims of impossibility. “Meta is showing the world how little it cares about child safety,” he said in a statement responding to the withdrawal threat. “Meta’s refusal to follow the laws that protect our kids tells you everything you need to know about this company and the character of its leaders. We know Meta has the ability to make these changes.” Torrez has separately argued that the March jury verdict “punctured the aura of invincibility” that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has long provided to tech companies. Consider what a 90-hour monthly access cap actually requires. To enforce it, Meta has to know, with legal certainty, which accounts belong to New Mexico minors. That means location tracking precise enough to distinguish a 17-year-old in Las Cruces from a 17-year-old visiting from El Paso, identity verification robust enough to survive legal challenge, and an account-linked usage clock that runs whether the user is on their phone, a friend’s laptop, or a school computer. The cap cannot be implemented without comprehensive surveillance sitting underneath every New Mexico account. Build that surveillance for minors and it exists for everyone because the only way to know who the minors are is to verify everyone. The 99 percent CSAM detection mandate sounds unobjectionable until you ask how it would be met. No human review process operates at that scale. The mandate is a demand for automated scanning of every image, video, and message posted by every user on the platform, calibrated to catch a category of material that automated systems are notoriously bad at distinguishing. Platforms that have rolled out aggressive automated scanning have already silenced parents sharing photos with doctors, journalists reporting on conflict zones, and survivors documenting their own histories. A court-ordered 99 percent floor pushes the false-positive rate higher, and the people whose accounts get deleted by mistake have no realistic recourse. The restrictions on encrypted messaging are the part of the proposal that should worry anyone who uses Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, or any other end-to-end encrypted service. The state is asking a court to order Meta to break, weaken, or bypass encryption for a subset of its users. There is no technical mechanism that does this only for minors. Whatever Meta builds to satisfy the order, client-side scanning, mandatory key escrow, and content inspection before encryption, becomes part of the product. It scans the journalist’s source, the abuse survivor talking to a counselor, and the political organizer in a country where organizing is dangerous. The mandate is presented as child protection but the capability it creates is general-purpose surveillance. What Biedscheid signaled on Monday is important because the alternative to his restraint is a single trial court order, in a single state, becoming the template for how more than 40 other state attorneys general resolve their own pending Meta cases. Bellwether trials are scheduled across 2026. A national identity verification regime imposed through public nuisance litigation would be a substantial shift in how Americans access social platforms, achieved without Congress voting on it, and one whose surveillance infrastructure would not disappear if a future court decided the harms it was meant to address had been overstated. The trial is expected to run for three weeks. Meta has said it will appeal the underlying verdict regardless of how the remedies phase ends, meaning the privacy questions raised by the state’s proposed fixes will continue moving through the courts well past Santa Fe. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post New Mexico’s Meta Trial Opens with Judge Wary of State’s Broad Surveillance Demands appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. France’s intelligence delegation in parliament has formally backed breaking the encryption that protects WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram conversations, recommending that magistrates and intelligence agents be granted what lawmakers describe as targeted access to messages that platforms currently cannot read even themselves. The delegation, an eight-member body composed of four deputies and four senators, published its conclusions on Monday after months of work on a question that keeps returning to the French Parliament. “The inability to access the content of encrypted communications constitutes a major obstacle for the work of the justice system and intelligence services,” the delegation wrote, framing end-to-end encryption as a problem to be solved rather than a protection to be preserved. The technology end-to-end encryption uses is precisely the thing the delegation wants weakened. Decryption keys live on user devices, not on company servers, which means the platforms holding your messages genuinely cannot read them. That’s the design and the point. Strip that property away and the protection collapses because a system that lets investigators read messages on demand is also a system that can be abused, leaked, subpoenaed, or hacked. French police and intelligence services have spent years complaining about this tech. They can still intercept old-fashioned phone calls and SMS messages with a judge’s warrant but encrypted platforms route around that capability entirely. The delegation acknowledged that investigators already have a workaround called RDI, or “collection of digital data” which can involve compromising a target’s device and harvesting its contents wholesale through what officials call “remote interception,” remote captures. That technique gives security services access to everything on a phone, far more than just the messages they’re chasing. The delegation called it inadequate anyway. Senator Cédric Perrin, who chairs the foreign affairs committee and sits on the intelligence delegation, has been pushing this fight for over a year. During debate on a narcotrafic bill, he secured an amendment that would have forced messaging platforms to “implement the necessary technical measures in order to allow intelligence services to access the intelligible content of communications and data passing through them.” Refusal to comply carried fines of up to 2 percent of worldwide annual turnover. The Senate passed it. The National Assembly killed it, with the Macronist deputies, the left, and even the Rassemblement National voting it down. Perrin’s framing then was that nothing fundamental was changing. “I don’t see how there would be any difference between what is done today with SMS and emails and what would be done tomorrow with WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram,” he said at the time, with backing from then-Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau and Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin. The argument treats encrypted messaging as just another communication channel that should sit within reach of the state, ignoring that the entire reason these platforms exist is to occupy a different category. Aurélien Lopez-Liguori, the RN deputy who opposed the amendment, made the technical objection bluntly. “This is a total misunderstanding of what encryption means. The decryption keys are at the level of users’ devices. The key isn’t centralized somewhere within the platform. You would then have to set up backdoors for all communications, which would go far beyond the scope of fighting drug trafficking. The first hacker to come along would have access to our communications,” he warned. Translated into engineering terms, his point was the one cryptographers have been making for thirty years. There is no such thing as a backdoor only the good guys can use. Perrin now offers a different framing. “Article 8 ter, which I had adopted, was not at all aimed at obtaining encryption keys but at introducing a ghost participant into a conversation before encryption,” he says. The “ghost participant” approach, sometimes called a ghost user proposal, was floated by GCHQ in 2018 and rejected by every major privacy organization, civil liberties group, and security researcher who looked at it. The idea is that the platform silently adds a third recipient, an invisible intelligence agent, to a supposedly two-person conversation. Users never see them. The encryption technically still works, except that one of the parties is the state. Perrin also rejected the suggestion that civil liberties were at stake. “Protecting public freedoms is our concern as parliamentarians. That was addressed through various administrative and judicial checks. The work carried out within the delegation was about getting a clearer technical picture of what is or isn’t possible. It’s curious that the RN, which constantly emphasizes its desire to protect the French people, doesn’t want to give intelligence services the tools to do so,” he said. The delegation’s report concluded that targeted access is not technically out of reach and noted that an expert group convened by the European Commission is working on a technological roadmap to identify how such access could be built. This means the technical problem cryptographers have been describing as unsolvable is being treated as a project management exercise. Mass surveillance, of course, isn’t what the delegation is proposing. The fear isn’t that a French investigator will read every WhatsApp message. The fear is that infrastructure built for targeted access has a way of growing, that an authentication mechanism built for terrorism cases ends up serving organized crime cases, then drug cases, then immigration cases, then political surveillance cases, and that a French ghost-user system gets demanded by less democratic governments next. Not everyone in the Senate’s right-and-center majority agrees with the delegation’s direction. Senator Olivier Cadic, of the Centrist Union, secured an amendment to a separate bill on critical infrastructure resilience and cybersecurity that would do the opposite, writing encryption protection into French law and prohibiting any obligation on messaging services to install backdoors. The Senate adopted it in March 2025. The intelligence delegation’s report attacks that text directly, claiming “This new Article 16 bis would weaken the legal framework for intelligence and investigative techniques and would hinder their implementation.” Cadic’s reasoning was the one the delegation seems determined to ignore. “I am obviously in favor of tracking down criminals, but not with tools that could bring us down. We must not create our own vulnerabilities,” he said. His bill was examined in committee at the National Assembly in September and has been stalled since. Earlier this year, then-Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu commissioned deputy Florent Boudié, who chairs the National Assembly’s law committee, to examine “possible changes to existing legal frameworks” for giving investigators access to encrypted communications. The legislative vehicle for any new attempt remains undecided, with parliamentarians waiting to see what Boudié produces but reportedly open to a fresh proposition de loi if it’s needed. What’s underway in France isn’t really a debate about whether intelligence services should have tools to investigate serious crime. They already do. They have the RDI authority to compromise individual devices, the surveillance algorithmique they expanded last year, satellite interception powers, traditional wiretaps, metadata access, and the cooperation of every French telecom operator. The new fight is about whether the one category of communication that currently resists state interception, secured by mathematics rather than by promise, should be reshaped so that resistance disappears. The delegation has answered yes. The cryptography hasn’t changed. The political will to ignore what the cryptography says has. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post France Moves to Break Encrypted Messaging appeared first on Reclaim The Net.