If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Russia’s FSB has charged Telegram founder Pavel Durov with aiding terrorist activity and demanded that he be placed on an international wanted list. This formalizes a case Durov first disclosed in February, one the FSB ties to how Ukrainian intelligence allegedly used a dating bot running on his app. The FSB said Telegram had been used “to prepare and co-ordinate acts of sabotage and terror” inside Russia and had failed to remove channels, chats, and bots used by Ukraine. The charge, assistance to terrorist activities under Article 205.1 of the Russian Criminal Code, carries up to 15 years in prison. The bot is called Daivinchik/Leo. It works like Tinder but works inside Telegram, with up to 16 million monthly users. The FSB says Ukrainian operatives posed as young women there to befriend young Russians before pressuring or coercing them into attacks. According to the Investigative Committee, Russia’s federal investigating authority, the agents sent phishing links about supposedly hacked government accounts, then, posing as Russian law enforcement, pushed their targets into setting fires and assaulting police. Russian authorities say 46 people aged 12 to 22 have been detained since July 2025 across 16 regions over the alleged campaign. The FSB released a video it said showed several young people confessing to setting fire to gas stations after being recruited by anonymous handlers through Telegram. Telegram’s press account on X answered with a photo of Durov raising his middle finger, an image Russian media noted he first published in 2011 during his fight with Mail.ru over control of VKontakte, the network he founded before Telegram. The post drew 1.3 million views by morning. Durov rejected that earlier case in February. “Each day, the authorities fabricate new pretexts to restrict Russians’ access to Telegram as they seek to suppress the right to privacy and free speech,” he said then. He called it “a sad spectacle of a state afraid of its own people.” The prosecution is happening alongside Russia’s push to move users off Telegram and onto MAX. Moscow has throttled Telegram’s traffic by 55%, according to Roskomnadzor, its own communications regulator. It has steered users toward MAX, a state-built messenger with no encryption between users, pre-installed on every smartphone sold in Russia since September 2025. Telegram is used by nearly 90 million Russians each month and around 950 million people worldwide, is what MAX is meant to replace. Durov has said Russia is restricting the app to force its citizens onto a state-controlled service built for surveillance and political censorship. Unusually, Russia is charging the man who built the app, not the people who allegedly broke its laws inside it. Durov has already experienced a version of this in France, where police detained him at an airport in 2024 over allegations that Telegram failed to counter criminal activity and cooperate with law enforcement. France lifted his travel ban last November and Durov denies wrongdoing and says Telegram exceeds its obligations to moderate content and answers valid legal requests. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Telegram Founder Pavel Durov Charged with Aiding Terrorism by Russia appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

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If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A Texas court has ordered Discord to turn on the age-verification system it built for the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act for every user in the state. Britain’s age-check regime has reached America by court order, and opening or keeping a Discord account in Texas can now mean a face scan or a government ID. The agreed temporary injunction, signed by a Collin County judge, gives Discord 90 days to extend its age-assurance and default settings to Texas. We obtained a copy of the temporary injunction for you here. The company can still ask the court for more time if it shows the deadline is not feasible. Discord must serve the Texas Attorney General’s Office a confidential progress report every 30 days until it complies, and the order binds the company until final judgment, enforceable by contempt. The order lets Discord identify Texas users from data it already holds rather than gather new categories of personal information. Today a Texan opens an account with an email address and a self-reported birthday, nothing more. The injunction imports that system instead. By Discord’s own published account, more than 90 percent of users are never asked to confirm their age, facial age estimation runs on the user’s own phone, and identity documents go to a third-party vendor rather than to Discord. The reassurance holds only for the users the system never questions. For everyone else, the account now comes with a face scan or a government ID handed to an outside company. Under the order, Discord must route messages from strangers into a separate request inbox and block sensitive content for Texas teens unless it confirms the user is an adult. It must also close adult-only spaces to anyone it has not age-assured, according to the attorney general’s office. The state says these are the protections Discord already gives British children under the Online Safety Act and withheld from Texas. Texas’s expert told the court that extending Discord’s existing safety features to the state was “just a matter of turning it on for Texas.” Discord runs the age-assurance system in the UK, Australia, and Brazil, its witnesses testified. In Texas the company still relies on a self-reported birthday at signup, a fact it did not dispute for the order. Discord announced in February 2026 that it would roll its protections out worldwide, with the US launch only weeks away. Then it pulled back, telling the public the rollout would wait until the second half of 2026. Attorney General Ken Paxton called the ruling a historic victory. “Discord built a platform where adult predators could hunt Texas children, then looked parents in the eye and told them it was safe,” he said in a statement. His office says Discord submitted 489,782 reports of suspected child sexual exploitation to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 2025, more than 1,300 a day. Under cross-examination, Discord’s lawyers drew out that those reports largely amount to the company flagging crimes it finds on its own platform and passing them to the center. New Jersey sued before Texas did, and Nevada, Indiana, and Arkansas have taken their own legal action. Texas filed on May 22, 2026, and won a restraining order within weeks. The case heads to a trial on the merits set for June 2027, where the state will seek civil penalties under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which can reach $10,000 per violation. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Texas Orders Discord to Run UK-Style Age Checks for State Users 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. Aishe Ghosh, former president of Jawaharlal Nehru University’s students’ union, has asked the Delhi High Court to declare the mass surveillance of student protesters unconstitutional and to order police to permanently destroy the personal data collected on them. Her petition, filed on July 15, 2026, calls the watch over Jantar Mantar “continuous, indiscriminate and intrusive,” and argues it violates the rights to privacy, dignity, free speech, and peaceful assembly. The demonstrators are the Cockroach Janta Party, led by student activist Abhijeet Dipke, who held a hunger strike at Jantar Mantar from June 20 over repeated exam paper leaks. According to the petition, they were under round-the-clock watch from a permanent surveillance tower, filmed while eating, resting, and seeking medical help. At the July 27 hearing the government tried to shut the case down. Additional Solicitor General Chetan Sharma told the Bench that with the protest over, the surveillance had stopped and there was nothing left for the court to rule on. Senior Advocate Nandita Rao, for Ghosh, said the case was still alive because it seeks a declaration that the surveillance already carried out was illegal. She asked that the data be destroyed, especially since the government has assured that no action will be taken against the protesters. The Bench of Chief Justice DK Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia told her to “let things cool down further” and file a more general petition, then said it would hear the matter on Tuesday. What the students want deleted comes from two police vehicles parked outside Kerala House. Officers inside a van called Ikshana watch live CCTV feeds run through facial recognition software, which draws green boxes around faces and checks them against a police database. The van carries eight fixed cameras for 360-degree coverage and was inducted before the 2023 G20 Summit. A senior Delhi Police officer confirmed to the press that the force runs facial recognition on protest footage against its criminal database to find any wanted people present, according to The Indian Express. The Internet Freedom Foundation, which has fought for transparency on this system since 2020, pulled the numbers out through the Right to Information Act. Delhi Police told the group in writing that no rule governs its use of facial recognition, that no assessment of its effect on privacy was ever done, and that a similarity score of 80% counts as a positive match. When the American Civil Liberties Union ran Amazon’s Rekognition at its default setting in 2018, it falsely matched 28 members of the US Congress to criminal mugshots, a disproportionate number of them legislators of color. Rao warned the court that an 80% match could wrongly implicate someone in a criminal case. Students at the site said they cover their faces while holding placards, afraid that landing in a police database could cost them future government jobs. Ghosh’s petition singles out girl students aged 16 to 20. A second officer told the press there are no fixed retention rules for the footage, since a probe into unrest at the site could open months later, so recordings could stay in police systems indefinitely. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, for the government, defended the recording at the earlier hearing on July 20. He said every protest is videographed as a routine law-and-order measure and called a claim of privacy in a public place “ironical”. He also told the court that protesters themselves film and post everything, and that the CJP had asked them to “videograph everything”. At that hearing he put it flatly, “There is no snooping. There is no surveillance.” The green boxes inside the Ikshana van say otherwise. The databases the software matches against were maintained under Sections 3 and 4 of the Identification of Prisoners Act, 1920, a law Parliament repealed in 2022. Seven years after the IFF began asking, what legal basis they rest on now, and whose faces they hold, is still unknown outside the police. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Delhi Students Ask High Court to Destroy Police Facial Recognition Data on Protesters 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. Harry Harlow died in 1981. His maternal-deprivation experiments on rhesus macaques turn up in most undergraduate psychology courses, usually as the case study for why research ethics rules exist at all. Four decades after his death, his surname was one of the terms the National Institutes of Health typed into Facebook’s comment-filtering tool so that any comment containing it would vanish from public view. Next to Harlow on the Facebook list: Suomi, for Stephen Suomi, who runs a comparative ethology lab at NIH’s child health institute. Then monkey, monkies, marmoset, hamster, mouse, mice, primate, chimpanzee, cats, gatos, animales, animalitos, cruel, cruelty, revolting, torment, torture, two monkey emojis, and an emoji with an expletive face. Until December 2021, the list also held PETA and PETALatino. The Instagram list ran shorter and odder: animal, chimpanzee, monkey, experiment, hurt, kill, test, torture, stop. Much of this has been public since 2024, when the D.C. Circuit held the filters unconstitutional. What was missing was the agency’s own side of it: what NIH’s lawyers thought they were doing, and what they told the communications staff running the accounts. On July 22, 2026, Senator Rand Paul, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released 128 pages of internal NIH email from the case. The messages run from November 2021 to January 2022, between NIH’s Office of the General Counsel, its Office of Communications and Public Liaison, and, relayed second-hand, the Justice Department attorneys defending the suit. Paul’s interest was COVID, and the COVID material is in there. What the emails document, in greater detail, is how an agency behaves in the days after its own attorney tells it, in writing, that it is discriminating against a viewpoint. How the hiding works Facebook and Instagram give page administrators an optional keyword filter. You paste in a list of words. Any comment containing one of them, past or future, is hidden automatically. On Facebook there is also a built-in profanity filter with strength settings; NIH had it on “strong.” Instagram has its own default offensive-word filter, which NIH had enabled as well. “Hidden” has a technical meaning on these platforms that differs from what most people assume. A hidden comment survives. It remains fully visible to the person who wrote it and to that person’s friends. Everyone else scrolling the page sees nothing. The joint stipulation in the case spells out the consequence in flat language: the user whose comment has been hidden typically receives no notice. So the speaker’s screen looks normal. They wrote a sentence; they can see the sentence, the sentence is there tomorrow. The rest of the page sees nothing, and no error message ever told them so. The silencing leaves no trace, so there is nothing to appeal and no accurate way to complain. Madeline Krasno, one of the plaintiffs and a former University of Wisconsin animal-lab employee, eventually worked out that she was being filtered and started deliberately misspelling words to get through. What the lawyers told NIH On December 1, 2021, an NIH senior attorney in the Office of the General Counsel wrote to the communications team after a call with DOJ. The email is the heart of the release. She opened with a direct instruction. NIH should stop blocking PETA and PETALatino on Facebook and PETA on Instagram, immediately. That is agency counsel identifying terms as viewpoint-based; you cannot block the name of an organization and claim you are policing subject matter. The words stayed up until December 3. Three Instagram hashtag filters, #stopanimaltesting, #stoptesting, and #stoptestingonanimals, were still running afterward. The attorney later had to check from her own personal Instagram account to establish that they were still live. For those hashtags she laid out four options. The first, which NIH took, was to remove them and use a different neutral keyword hashtag “to achieve the same effect” against the volume of PETA comments; she suggested #testing or #animals. The second was to keep the anti-testing hashtags and add a pro-testing one to offset them, and she offered an example: #keepanimaltesting. The third was to drop the filters if they were not doing much. The fourth was to keep them, on which DOJ’s advice was that a court might find the terms not viewpoint-neutral, and that the worst that could happen would be an order to stop using them. The first option is a piece of legal engineering. Counsel has identified a constitutional defect in the selection of words. The remedy chosen is a different selection of words, picked to produce the same suppression while surviving review. The volume of hidden speech stays exactly the same. The category of hidden speech barely changes. What changes is the paper trail. The evidence DOJ kept asking for DOJ wanted to argue that NIH had no policy of targeting animal-rights speech, and that a comment defending animal testing would be hidden on the same terms as one attacking it. To make that argument stick, they needed examples. They asked at least three times, across several emails, for two or three instances of the filters catching a pro-testing comment. NIH came up empty. The answer that came back was that this was not a scenario that happens, since people were not really posting in favor of animal testing. The closest they could offer was that a pro-research reply posted under an already-hidden comment would disappear along with it. That is a serious problem for the neutrality argument. A filter can be even-handed in its text and one-sided in its operation because only one side of a debate uses the vocabulary. “Torture” and “cruelty” are loaded words in a fight about animal research. They are the other side’s words. The substitute hashtags counsel proposed work the same way: #testing and #animals catch the people who came to complain, and say nothing about them. Wuhan, ivermectin, and the “neutral” filter Pressed for examples of off-topic hiding that had nothing to do with animals, NIH’s comms staff supplied one. On a post about the agency’s initiative to end structural racism, comments about the Wuhan Institute of Virology and ivermectin had been hidden as off-topic. At its narrowest that is defensible. Ivermectin has no bearing on a post about racial equity in the biomedical workforce, and a moderator who removes it is doing an ordinary job badly rather than doing a sinister job well. However, the agency’s stated purpose for its accounts, according to its own documents, is to be the voice of factual information in a time of “misinformation,” and its internal list of disruptive comment examples is characterized as mostly COVID misinformation. And the December email contains a line that should worry anyone regardless of where they land on lab-leak or ivermectin: if the court found NIH’s pages to be designated public forums, the attorney wrote, NIH might lose the ability to use neutral filters to shut down discussion of a broad topic. Her two examples: animal testing generally, and COVID vaccinations generally. A neutral filter is a tool for removing a subject, not off-topic noise, and the subjects an agency wants gone are the subjects on which it is under attack. What it costs the rest of us Keyword filtering falls hardest on people without lawyers. PETA had the Knight First Amendment Institute and the Animal Legal Defense Fund and four years of litigation budget. A parent asking whether a mouse-model result applies to their child, on a post about a mouse-model result, had none of that and never learned the question was invisible. Any political movement with a recognizable vocabulary can be filtered by list. Animal advocacy happens to be the test case because its lexicon is unusually easy to enumerate. Immigration, abortion, Gaza, vaccine injury, policing: all have signature words, and all can be removed from a government comment section by an administrator with fifteen minutes and no oversight. What is documented is this one list on these two accounts. Whether the rest of the federal government and the fifty states run filters like it is unknown; almost nobody has asked. Krasno asked. She filed a Freedom of Information Act request with NIH on April 24, 2021, for the keyword blocklist on its social accounts, and had the records five days later. A circuit opinion, four years of litigation, and 128 pages of internal email descend from that request. For the years before it, the only people who knew which words were on the list were the ones who typed them in. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post How NIH Silenced Its Critics Without Telling Them appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.