If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. “Think of the children” is the oldest skeleton key in the political toolbox and the British government has just jammed it into the lock on every phone in the country. Ministers are reportedly drafting a law that would force Apple, Google, and the rest to make it impossible for a child to send, receive, view, or share a single nude image, with the executives who refuse facing up to five years in prison. The children are the headline but the surveillance is the product. Peel off the press release and the demand turns out to be impossible to meet without doing the exact thing the government has wanted to do for years. You cannot block every naked picture someone might stumble across without inspecting every picture, every message, every video call, every streamed film, on every device, all the time. A filter that total requires surveillance that total. The nudity is the excuse and the unbroken view into your phone is the actual prize, with “protecting kids” chosen as the wrapping paper precisely because nobody dares unwrap it in public. The industry calls the method client-side scanning, a phrase engineered to sound like a checkbox in Settings rather than what it is, a permanent informant living on hardware you paid for. Frame it as catching predators and it sails through. Frame it honestly, as government-mandated spyware on tens of millions of phones, and it sinks. So the framing stays welded to the children, where objection is made to feel indecent. The enforcement is lifted from the Online Safety Act, that gift that keeps on taking, which already lets the state jail technology bosses for five years. Sold to the public as a shield for children, it’s behaving more like a crowbar, and the government has now found the wall it most wants to lever open, which is the inside of your phone. Jess Phillips, the former Home Office safeguarding minister, resigned in May after concluding ministers would only ever “encourage” firms to comply, a word that in Whitehall binds about as tightly as a strongly worded birthday card. “It has taken me a year to get you to agree to even threaten to legislate in this space,” Phillips wrote to Prime Minister Keir Starmer. “Not legislate, just threaten.” As usual, she kept going. “The announcement was meant to be in March, I’m still on a promise this will happen in June, I’ve given up believing it,” she added, before asking, “How many children were left without a safety net in the time we dilly dallied and worried about tech bosses?” Phillips plainly means every word, and that sincerity is exactly what makes her cause so useful to the people who don’t. The giveaway is that the government isn’t inventing any of this. It’s ordering a louder remix of tracks the tech giants already cut. Apple switched on device-level age checks for UK users earlier this year and now runs two relevant systems. Its Web Content Filter bars adult websites across Safari and every other browser. Its Communication Safety feature rifles through AirDrop, FaceTime, Messages, and Photos for nudity and blurs whatever it catches. Google shipped its own version, branded Sensitive Content Warnings, which paws through Google Messages doing the same chore. According to The Times, ministers want all of it fused together and cranked up. A program clever enough to recognize a naked body in any image, message, or video stream is more than a modest little nudity detector. It’s a general-purpose content scanner pointed at one target this year and swivelable toward any other the next, a flyer for the wrong march, a banned book, a face the Home Office has taken against. Retargeting it won’t require a new law, a vote, or a podium. It’ll take a software update you never agreed to and almost certainly won’t be told about. The nudity ban is the foot in the door and doors have a habit of staying open once a government’s boot is wedged inside. When Apple turned on age verification in March, roughly 35 million UK iPhone users restarted their phones and learned they now had to prove they were adults to keep using devices they already owned. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post UK Wants Message Scanning on Phones, Jail CEOs Who Refuse 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 What to Like and What to Question About Europe’s New Open Source Office Push appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. San Diego State University spent more than $1.3 million turning its campus into one of the most heavily watched in the California State University system and the students who study and live there learned the full scope from their own newspaper rather than from the administration. University Police finished installing over 1,300 AI-enabled cameras in 2024, threading them through classroom buildings, bookstores, dining areas, parking structures, gyms and the residence halls where students sleep. The picture only came together after investigative journalism students at The Daily Aztec pried the camera locations loose with a public records request. Where the cameras went says a lot about who the system is built to watch. More than 330 of them point at student housing, close to 28 percent of the entire network. Huaxyacac, the largest first-year dorm, carries 79 cameras on its own. Tenochca and Chapultepec hold 36 and 33. Eighteen of the school’s 24 residential buildings turned up on the location list and the license agreements students sign before they move in mention none of this. The harder problem is what the cameras can do, a question the school never answered for anyone. These are Avigilon units and on its own website the manufacturer advertises a long menu of artificial intelligence features, among them facial recognition, license plate recognition, object and intrusion detection, behavior analysis, crowd density analysis and audio detection. SDSU bought hardware capable of identifying who you are, reading your plates and analyzing how you move. La Monica Everett-Haynes, the university’s associate vice president and chief communications officer, said students are told about the cameras through the Guide to Community Living handbook and the campus housing website. Neither document says a word about the AI sitting behind the lens. That silence runs straight into the school’s own rules. CSU policy says cameras belong in public areas, defined as “an area open to public use, where no reasonable expectation of privacy exists,” and forbids pointing them at “areas where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, nor will they be directed or zoomed into the windows of any private residential building, including residence halls.” More than 330 cameras now sit in residence halls. The handbook narrows the promise to “community elevators and other common areas (e.g., lobbies, lounges, laundry rooms, hallways, dining facilities, etc.),” which is a generous reading of a dorm wired with 79 cameras. Pressed on all this, the campus police framed the network as something close to a glorified motion sensor. “The upgrades support basic motion detection in restricted areas to help alert staff when activity is present outside of business or class hours,” wrote Amanda Stills, the department’s public information officer, in an email to The Daily Aztec. “To be clear, they are not used for behavioral tracking, profiling or facial recognition.” Stills said the university limits the features on purpose, out of regard for privacy and campus expectations, and has no plans to buy more AI capability. The Avigilon contract language tells a different story, describing intent that reaches well past maintenance and efficiency. A camera that can run facial recognition is still a camera that can run facial recognition, whatever a policy says today about leaving the feature switched off. Students get no map of where any of this lives and the department wants to keep it that way. Asked about posting signs, Stills said marking the cameras would jeopardize public safety. “The university does not currently use signage specific to camera locations and does not have plans to add such signage,” she wrote, adding that “cameras are widely present in public spaces and common work areas both on and off campus.” The position amounts to constant recording with no notice at the point of recording, which leaves students to assume they are always on camera and never sure when the AI is reading them. SDSU sits out front of its own system here. All CSU campuses run some form of CCTV, and only California State University, Northridge has joined SDSU in switching on AI-powered cameras. The trend reaches well beyond California. Michigan State hired a contractor to build a system designed to “detect barrier breaches, track individuals as they move across campus, count crowd size and read vehicle license plates,” and products like ZeroEyes, Flock Safety and Volt AI are turning up on campuses across the country. The hardware is already on the walls at SDSU, capable of far more than the school admits to using. Whether it stays idle depends entirely on a promise and promises about surveillance have a short shelf life. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post SDSU Wired Its Dorms with 1,300 AI Cameras Without Telling Students appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Turkey’s oldest newspaper is posting under a new name this week and the switch wasn’t a branding decision. A court in Elazığ ordered X to block Cumhuriyet’s account across the country, and the paper changed its handle to stay reachable. The Elazığ 2nd Penal Judgeship of Peace built the order on Article 8/A of Turkey’s Internet Law, the clause that lets the state cut off any content it can tie to national security, public order, crime prevention, public health, or the right to life and property. The Freedom of Expression Association, İFÖD, surfaced the ruling on June 2. The official ground was “protecting national security.” What the court would not say is which post crossed the line. İFÖD reported no details about the actual reason and that silence does real work. A justification this broad hands the government a button it can press against almost any outlet without ever describing the offense. The newspaper is left guessing at its own crime. Cumhuriyet answered by moving from @cumhuriyetgzt to @cumhuriyetgzt1, a workaround meant to keep its 3.4 million followers within reach. EngelliWeb, the censorship-tracking platform İFÖD runs, reported that once the paper abandoned the old handle, another account grabbed @cumhuriyetgzt and X then suspended it, for reasons nobody has explained. As of that Wednesday, İFÖD said X still had not made the newspaper’s account inaccessible inside Turkey. So the order sits on the books while enforcement stalls, and the original name has become contested ground. The company usually does what these courts ask, though it has occasionally refused. Some history sharpens the picture. Cumhuriyet has printed since 1924, longer than any paper in the country and its name translates to “republic.” Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who founded the republic itself, helped start it. The state is now blocking a publication older than the modern Turkish nation and named after it. The same law did near-identical work a few hours earlier, against reporting the public had every reason to read. Turkey’s internet authority, the BTK, blocked four articles on the news site Kısa Dalga, again under Article 8/A. The pieces formed a dossier called “The Visa Empire,” or Vize İmparatorluğu, written by journalist Canan Coşkun. She said on social media the series wasn’t finished and more was coming. The censorship arrived first. The reporting went after a tangible target. It traced the Turkish operations of VFS Global, the visa-outsourcing firm, alongside its local partner Gateway Management and the company’s owner, Halis Ali Çakmak. It dug into alleged ties to former Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, allegations of a monopoly over visa appointments, a black market in slots, and fees that climbed toward 300 euros a person. The series was part of an international investigation coordinated by Lighthouse Reports, spanning 14 outlets across 12 countries. It described how VFS turned optional add-ons, things like VIP lounges, SMS alerts, courier delivery, and document scanning, into costs applicants couldn’t really avoid. Look at what earned the national-security label here. The blocked reporting covered overpriced visa appointments and a businessman’s reach into a former minister’s orbit. National security stretches to fit whatever the government finds inconvenient, which is the entire appeal of writing the rule that loosely. The people who decide what counts as a threat are the same people the threat-label protects. The block didn’t make the questions go away. The visa story reached parliament when Burak Dalgın, a lawmaker from the opposition İYİ (Good) Party, put questions to Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, citing the international investigation and asking whether Turkish authorities knew what was going on. The government, in other words, censored the reporting and then fielded questions about its substance in the same stretch of days. By the account of the Stockholm Center for Freedom, a minister has since acknowledged complaints about visa brokers, though the allegations tying former minister Çavuşoğlu to Gateway went unanswered in parliament. A state that calls a story a security threat one day and discusses its contents in the legislature is protecting itself from embarrassment. The reporters saw the block coming. All four articles sit on the Wayback Machine, archived before the state could erase them, the kind of defensive habit journalists develop only after censorship becomes routine. And it is routine. Turkey blocked more than 300,000 web addresses in 2024, a national record. The Media and Law Studies Association counted at least 49 social media accounts belonging to journalists and outlets blocked since January. İFÖD logged a single February 2025 order that took down 126 X accounts at once, again in the name of national security and public order. A renamed handle and an archived link are what’s left when a court decides a phrase outranks the public’s right to read. Cumhuriyet kept its audience by relabeling itself. Coşkun’s readers can still find “The Visa Empire,” but only by knowing to look on an American archive site instead of the Turkish web. For everyone who didn’t know to look, the censorship worked exactly as designed. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Turkey Silenced Its Oldest Paper. It Took One Unnamed Post. appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Google wants to sit between you and the growing list of websites that now demand proof of who you are. The company used its Money 20/20 Europe announcement to confirm that Google Wallet will start holding government digital IDs in select European Union countries this summer, with Ireland, Spain, France, Italy, and Estonia named as the first wave. British Android users get the same capability “soon,” with no firmer date attached. More: The Age Verification Con The selling point is age verification. To enroll, you record a short video of your face, scan a government-issued ID, and hand both to Google so the app can cross-reference them before the credential settles into Wallet. After that, your phone can vouch for your age whenever a site asks. Google has also signed Sparkasse Bank as its first national credential partner for European age checks, which lets the bank’s customers prove they clear an age limit “without revealing personal information, such as their name, address or date of birth.” On the merchant’s side, the claim mostly holds. A liquor retailer or an adult site learns that you passed the check, not your birthday. What the framing leaves out is where Google ends up standing in the transaction. The age check runs through a Google account could now be bound to a real, government-verified identity, which means Google can see that you ran one, when you ran it, and which gate you were trying to clear. The personal data stops flowing to the website but it does not stop flowing toward the company that built the wallet. Google leans on a cryptographic age-check technique it folded into Wallet in early 2025, the kind of system that can confirm a yes-or-no fact without exposing the document behind it. The cryptography is real and genuinely better than handing a bouncer-website a photo of your passport. It also reframes the question rather than answering it. The privacy problem with showing ID to read a web page was never only that the web page kept a copy. It was that you had to prove your legal identity to do an ordinary thing online at all and that someone had to be trusted to broker the proof. Google is volunteering to be that someone, at continental scale. The scope tells you where this goes. In the EU, these IDs cannot yet board a flight or cross a border, so for now their job is online age gating. In Britain, Google has partnered with the Rail Delivery Group so a Wallet passport can confirm eligibility for a discounted Railcard and the company says it is “exploring certification” inside the UK government’s digital identity trust framework that could extend the same ID to alcohol purchases “and more.” Age checks rarely contract once the plumbing is laid. They find new things to check. An updated Secure Payment Authentication feature lets European shoppers confirm a purchase with biometrics alone, skipping the one-time passcode, and Google’s own testing clocked it cutting authentication time by half while lifting conversions by 3 percent. That rolls out with Visa, Checkout.com, Autopay, and Adyen in the UK and Poland in the coming months. Google is solving a problem it helped create. The age verification laws sweeping out of the UK’s Online Safety Act and its American imitators decided that ordinary people should have to prove their identity to read a web page, and now the same handful of companies that lobbied around those laws are racing to become the toll booth. Google Wallet checking your government ID across Ireland, Spain, France, Italy, Estonia, and soon Britain is an infrastructure play, dressed as child protection, that ends with a single advertising company sitting between you and the things you want to do online. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Google Wants to Be the ID Checkpoint for Europe’s Internet appeared first on Reclaim The Net.