If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Apple deleted Bitchat from the China App Store, acting on a direct order from the Cyberspace Administration of China. Jack Dorsey, who created the app, posted a screenshot of Apple’s removal notice to X with a short caption: “bitchat pulled from the china app store.” The notice Apple sent to Dorsey is almost a copy-paste of the one it sent to Damus three years earlier. The language is identical. The accusation is identical. The CAC determined that Bitchat violates Articles 3 of the Provisions on the Security Assessment of Internet-based Information Services with Attribute of Public Opinions or Capable of Social Mobilization. That regulation, enacted in 2018, requires any online service capable of influencing public opinion or organizing collective action to undergo a government security assessment before going live. If a service hasn’t submitted to that assessment, the CAC can order it pulled. It targets the capacity for “public opinions” and “social mobilization.” The Chinese government has decided that the ability to communicate outside state-approved channels is itself a security threat, and Apple consistently treats that determination as sufficient grounds for deletion. Bitchat is a peer-to-peer messaging app that operates over Bluetooth mesh networks. It requires no internet connection, no phone number, no email address, and no user account. Messages are end-to-end encrypted and stored only on the devices involved. There are no central servers to subpoena, no user databases to hand over, and no content moderation pipeline for the CAC to plug into. Dorsey built the initial version over a single weekend in July 2025, coding it with Goose, Block’s open-source AI assistant. He published a white paper on GitHub and opened a TestFlight beta that hit its 10,000-user cap within hours. That design is precisely the problem from Beijing’s perspective. China’s internet censorship apparatus depends on having a chokepoint. WeChat, the country’s dominant messaging platform, has censorship tools baked into its architecture. The government can monitor conversations, flag keywords, and delete content before users even see it. Bitchat offers none of those control surfaces. The app makes censorship structurally impossible on a technical level because there is nothing between sender and receiver for the state to intercept, filter, or read. The app had already proved its usefulness in exactly the scenarios that make governments nervous. Protesters in Madagascar downloaded it 70,000 times in a single week during September 2025. Nepalese users pulled down nearly 50,000 copies on September 8 alone, after their government shut down social networks during anti-corruption demonstrations. Downloads spiked in Uganda and Iran during internet blackouts in January 2026. Dorsey noted publicly that Russia was at one point the app’s largest user base by country, as citizens looked for alternatives to state-surveilled messaging platforms. Apple’s compliance with the removal order was, as usual, immediate and without public comment beyond the boilerplate notification to the developer. The notice told Dorsey that his app “includes content that is illegal in China, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.” Apple cited Section 5 (Legal) of those guidelines, which requires apps to comply with local laws. Apple has refined this process into a routine. When the CAC ordered WhatsApp, Threads, Signal, and Telegram removed from the China App Store in April 2024, Apple complied and issued a statement saying, “We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree.” The company has removed VPN apps, news apps, a Quran app, and tens of thousands of games from its China storefront over the past several years, all at government request. Apple positions itself publicly as a defender of privacy and an advocate for human rights. The company’s own human rights commitment states that it believes in “the critical importance of an open society in which information flows freely.” And yet Apple functions as the enforcement arm of the CAC’s censorship decisions whenever those decisions concern the Chinese market. The company doesn’t challenge the orders. It doesn’t delay. Apple controls the only door into every iPhone on the planet. Unlike Android, which allows users to install software from the web or third-party stores, iOS locks app distribution to the App Store. Apple decides what gets listed, what stays, and what disappears. That makes every removal order from a government functionally absolute for anyone using an iPhone in that country. When the CAC told Apple to pull Bitchat, it wasn’t asking Apple to remove one option among many. It was asking Apple to cut off access entirely, and Apple had the architectural power to do exactly that. No sideloading, no alternative storefront, no workaround short of jailbreaking the device or having already installed the app before the order came through. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Apple Removes Bitchat from China App Store at Cyberspace Administration Order 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 lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York offers a clean example of something that keeps happening and keeps getting ignored: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act being used to censor speech and unmask anonymous speakers. The case is Lolcow LLC v. Fong-Jones, filed on March 12, 2026, and it pits the operator of the web forum Kiwi Farms against Liz Fong-Jones, an activist and field Chief Technology Officer at SaaS observability platform Honeycomb, who has been filing DMCA subpoenas in an attempt to identify anonymous forum users. The content Fong-Jones wants censored is a screenshot of a Fong-Jones Bluesky post and an edited version of a Fong-Jones headshot, both related to what Fong-Jones has previously described publicly as a “consent accident.” Forum users posted and discussed those images. Fong-Jones responded by claiming copyright ownership and filing DMCA subpoenas to force the site to hand over the identities of the people who posted them. The copyright claims seem thin. Kiwi Farms operator Joshua Moon argues that the screenshot is a derivative work over which Fong-Jones holds no copyright, and that the edited headshot represents a textbook case of fair use, given that the image has no commercial value and was modified specifically for purposes of criticism and commentary. That argument carries weight. Courts have long recognized that transformative use of images for commentary or ridicule sits comfortably within fair use protections. What makes this case useful as a case study is less the copyright question itself and more the mechanism being exploited. The DMCA subpoena process, codified in Section 512(h), allows copyright holders to obtain a judicial subpoena to unmask the identities of allegedly infringing anonymous internet users just by asking a court clerk to issue one and attaching a copy of the infringement notice. No judge needs to review the merits. No adversarial hearing takes place first. The anonymous speaker can be exposed before they even know a claim has been filed. This is a feature that has been routinely abused to strip anonymity from people whose real offense is saying something someone powerful doesn’t like. The EFF has documented this pattern extensively. Copyright law is “an all-too common method used to silence lawful speech,” and the DMCA subpoena is the sharpest version of that weapon because it sidesteps the normal protections a lawsuit would require. The standard DMCA process works like this, and it tells you everything you need to know about why Fong-Jones chose it: Under the DMCA, posts must come down first, and then the user who posted them must reveal their real identity and accept the risk of being sued and threatened, or else the posts stay down permanently. For anonymous forum users, the options are brutal. You either give up your identity to someone with a demonstrated history of legal aggression, or you accept the permanent censorship of your speech. The chilling effect is the point. More: How the DMCA has become one of the biggest threats to online speech Fong-Jones has campaigned against Kiwi Farms for years. Moon characterizes the DMCA approach as the latest tactic after technological and financial efforts to force the site offline have failed, describing it as probing “legalistic avenues” to achieve what deplatforming campaigns could not. The copyright route is more dangerous, and it’s designed to be. Instead of pressuring companies, it goes after individual users. If Fong-Jones’s DMCA subpoenas succeed, anonymous forum participants could be exposed by name. Lolcow LLC’s suit seeks a declaratory judgment that the copyright complaints are false, along with attorney’s fees. There’s an important precedent worth understanding here. A 2022 ruling in the Northern District of California confirmed that the First Amendment’s protections for anonymous speech apply even in DMCA cases, and that copyright holders issuing subpoenas must meet the Constitution’s test before identifying anonymous speakers. In that case, involving an anonymous Twitter user who posted photos while criticizing a private equity billionaire, it was established that a court should apply a two-step test before unmasking anyone. The court found that even if the copyright holder had established a valid infringement claim, the subpoena should still be quashed because the user’s interest in remaining anonymous outweighed the copyright interest. The parallel to the Kiwi Farms situation is obvious. Fong-Jones claims copyright over a Bluesky screenshot and an edited headshot. The forum users posted those images as part of the discussion and commentary. The question is whether copyright law should be available as a shortcut to unmask and silence anonymous speakers engaged in commentary about a public figure. Courts have thankfully been skeptical of exactly this kind of move. The EFF has argued that courts “must apply robust First Amendment safeguards to prevent DMCA abuse that either seeks to suppress speech or to identify anonymous speakers.” The Northern District of California agreed, ruling that “it is possible for a speaker’s interest in anonymity to extend beyond the alleged infringement.” Moon has been open about the financial stakes, noting that approximately $125,000 was crowdfunded three years ago for litigation costs, that most of it has been spent, and that the site’s annual legal expenses exceed $25,000. He’s asking users to contribute to a legal fund, and the outcome could determine whether the site survives. If Fong-Jones wins the copyright dispute, Moon says, “the site is gone.” The broader pattern here matters more than any individual piece of forum content. Copyright claims are becoming a preferred weapon for people who want to censor speech they find offensive or embarrassing, and the DMCA gives them a loaded gun. The subpoena process was designed to help copyright holders protect their creative works. Fong-Jones is here accused of using it to try to identify anonymous people who posted a screenshot of a public social media post and a mocked-up photo. Lolcow LLC has already shown a willingness to fight these free speech battles. The company, alongside 4chan, filed a separate lawsuit in August 2025 challenging the UK’s Online Safety Act, arguing that enforcement of the Act against American companies is “intended to deliberately undermine the First Amendment and American competitiveness.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Kiwi Farms Challenges DMCA Subpoenas as Tools to Unmask Anonymous Speech appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Preston Byrne is a dual-qualified English solicitor and American attorney. He is currently suing the British speech regulator on behalf of 4chan in US federal court. And when Britain’s internet regulator, Ofcom, sent his client a £520,000 fine for the crime of not checking the age of every visitor, Byrne responded by emailing them an image of a giant hamster dressed as Godzilla, holding a peanut. The hamster’s name is Nigel J. Whiskerford. He is the giant cousin of Mr. Whiskers, the regular-sized hamster Byrne sent Ofcom the last time they tried to fine 4chan. The email also noted that 4chan “reserves all rights and waives none,” including “the right to sue you again and/or to respond to future correspondence with an even larger rodent, such as a marmot.” This is the funniest thing to happen in international regulatory law since, well, ever. But the hamster was never the point. The point was that the British government spent £169 million building an online censorship apparatus, staffed it with hundreds of bureaucrats, gave it the power to fine companies up to 10% of their global revenue, and the first time it tried to use those powers against someone who could fight back, it was defeated by a picture of a rodent in a lizard costume. Which brings us to the Free Speech Act 2026, published this week by the Adam Smith Institute. Byrne wrote it, along with two co-authors named Elijah Granet and Michael Reiners, and it is, without exaggeration, a proposal to burn down the entire British censorship state and salt the earth where it stood. Seven Acts of Parliament repealed. Ofcom’s online safety empire dismantled. Every conviction under the repealed laws annulled. The whole lot. Gone. Finished. Replaced with a simple statutory right that says: the state cannot punish you for speaking. It is magnificent. And it will be fought with every weapon available by every institution that currently profits from telling you what you’re allowed to say. Britain Pretends It Has Free Speech “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom, and it will last for a very, very long time.” That was Prime Minister Keir Starmer, speaking to US President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance in the Oval Office in February 2025. Seven months later, five armed police officers arrested Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport. Linehan is an Irish comedy writer. He created Father Ted. He created The IT Crowd. His crime was posting three tweets from Arizona. His original bail condition was that he could not use X while in the UK. Even Starmer admitted the police might have gone a bit far. He did not, naturally, change the law that sent them. This is what “free speech” looks like in Britain, and it has looked like this for quite some time. Nobody was paying attention because the people being arrested were usually not famous comedy writers who could generate international headlines. They were ordinary people. The sort of people governments find it very easy to prosecute because nobody important will kick up a fuss. Freedom of information requests compiled by The Times found that over 12,000 people were arrested under the Communications Act and the Malicious Communications Act in 2023. Twelve thousand people. That is 30 arrests a day, every day, for posting things on the internet that someone, somewhere, found “grossly offensive.” The maximum sentence is two years in prison. For writing something rude on Facebook. You could burgle a house and get less. And these are just the arrests. The real damage is invisible. Polling by YouGov for Prospect magazine found that nearly half of Britons say they cannot say what they think about important issues. In 2026. In a country whose Prime Minister flew to the White House to announce, with a straight face, that free speech is one of Britain’s “founding values.” A Brief History of Britain Not Having Free Speech Starmer’s claim that Britain has “had free speech for a very, very long time” is, to put it charitably, historically creative. It is the kind of statement you make when you are confident that nobody in the room has read a book. The first law against free expression in England was the Statute of Westminster in 1275. It made it a crime to say anything that brought the King into “hatred or contempt.” The Treason Act of 1351 made criticizing the Crown punishable by death. When the printing press appeared, the Crown immediately established a licensing monopoly to control it. Tom Paine published The Rights of Man in 1791 and was convicted of seditious libel in absentia. He had to flee to France to avoid prison. Over 200,000 copies of his book sold anyway, because the British people have always been more committed to free speech than the British state. After the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, Parliament passed the Six Acts, which tightened seditious libel laws and imposed taxes on newspapers to prevent the working class from reading them. Richard Carlile was jailed for three years for publishing articles about Peterloo. His wife kept publishing while he served his sentence. The British spirit of free expression has never been a gift from the government. It has always been an act of defiance against it. The Bill of Rights of 1689, which everyone likes to wave about as evidence of Britain’s ancient liberties, guaranteed freedom of speech in Parliament. Not outside it. MPs could say what they liked. Everybody else could shut up or go to prison. Seditious libel was not formally abolished until 2009. Blasphemous libel survived until 2008. When Parliament finally repealed them, the Ministry of Justice cheerfully acknowledged that their existence had been used by authoritarian governments around the world as justification for their own speech laws. Well done, Britain. Medieval censorship stayed on the books until the year the iPhone 3GS came out, and dictators were copying the homework the entire time. The honest version of Starmer’s Oval Office pitch would have been: “Britain has had a culture of people bravely speaking despite the law for a very, very long time, and a state apparatus dedicated to punishing them for it for roughly the same period.” The Machine That Ate People’s Rights The modern version of the censorship state didn’t appear overnight. It was assembled piece by piece, each component presented as a reasonable response to a genuine problem, each one drafted broadly enough to catch everything from death threats to bad jokes. The Public Order Act 1986 made it a crime to use “threatening, abusive or insulting” words likely to cause “harassment, alarm or distress.” Note the word “insulting.” Not threatening. Not violent. Insulting. The standard was the feelings of the person who heard you. If they were distressed, you were a criminal. If they were a particularly delicate soul who found everything distressing, you were especially criminal. Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 criminalized sending “grossly offensive” messages. The Malicious Communications Act 1988 covered “indecent or grossly offensive” material causing “distress or anxiety.” Each of these laws came with comforting rhetoric about harassment and public safety. Each one gave police the power to arrest someone for posting something rude on the internet. And arrest they did. Enthusiastically. The numbers doubled between 2017 and 2023. Less than one in ten arrests led to a conviction, which tells you everything about the real purpose. The arrest was the punishment. The knock on the door at six in the morning. The seized laptop. The months of uncertainty. The mugshot. The chilling effect, which is the polite term for terrorizing an entire population into silence by publicly destroying a handful of them. Then came the Online Safety Act 2023. This was supposed to be the Rolls-Royce of internet regulation. Parliament spent years on it. It turned out to be a clown car. The government gave Ofcom an estimated £169 million to build the enforcement machine. They hired hundreds of staff. They wrote codes of practice that run to thousands of pages. They gave themselves the power to fine companies up to £18 million or 10% of global revenue, whichever was higher. Criminal liability for directors. Business disruption measures. The works. Ofcom’s enforcement director, Suzanne Cater, declared that “2025 is the year of action” and promised to “drag them kicking and screaming into compliance.” The first major target was 4chan. 4chan’s lawyer sent back a hamster. Then sued Ofcom in federal court. Then, it started writing legislation to make it illegal for Ofcom to do what it was doing. The hamster went more viral than any Ofcom enforcement notice in history. It would be funny if it weren’t so expensive. British taxpayers paid for this. They paid for the staff, the investigations, the codes of practice, the enforcement programs, and the fines that will never be collected from a man who responds to regulatory correspondence with pictures of rodents. Meanwhile, the same taxpayers are being arrested at a rate of 30 a day for saying things on the internet that someone found offensive. Why They’ll Fight to Keep It The Free Speech Act would end all of this. And that is precisely why it will face the most ferocious opposition from the people who should be most ashamed of the current system. Start with Ofcom. You don’t spend £169 million building an empire and then let someone repeal it. Ofcom has staff. Ofcom has budgets. Ofcom has enforcement programs and codes of practice and a director who goes on the record promising to drag people kicking and screaming. They will, of course, frame it as being about the children. This is the rhetorical equivalent of a human shield. “If you repeal the Online Safety Act, children will see terrible things on the internet.” The Free Speech Act actually addresses this directly. It imposes a mandatory obligation on platforms to detect and remove child sexual abuse material and report it within 24 hours. What it removes is Ofcom’s power to censor legal speech. But that distinction, the difference between protecting children and controlling adults, is one that censors have spent the entire history of civilization trying to blur. Then there’s the government. Labour supported the Online Safety Act. Well, technically, the Conservatives passed it, but Labour has embraced it with the fervor of a convert who has just discovered religion. Admitting the whole thing was a mistake, that the censorship apparatus should be scrapped, that thousands of people were arrested for things that should never have been crimes: that would require a level of honesty from politicians that does not exist in nature. The Conservatives, meanwhile, had 14 years in government to do something about speech prosecutions. They did nothing. Rishi Sunak publicly opposed Scotland’s hate crime law. He did not repeal it. He did not pass alternative legislation. He made a disapproving face and moved on. The Conservative Party’s contribution to free speech in Britain has been roughly equivalent to expressing concern about a house on fire while holding the matches. And then there are the quiet beneficiaries. The lobbying groups that have discovered it’s much easier to get their opponents’ speech classified as “harmful” and deleted than to win an argument. The university administrators who have built entire departments around speech codes and training that the Free Speech Act would render illegal. The compliance industry, which makes a very comfortable living telling organizations how to avoid running afoul of speech laws that shouldn’t exist. These people are not going to send a letter saying “please don’t repeal the censorship that keeps me employed.” They’re going to send a letter saying, “if you repeal these laws, people will be harmed.” Same letter. Different gift wrap. The American Comparison They Don’t Want You to Make The Free Speech Act is modeled on the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. This comparison is useful because it immediately exposes the absurdity of every argument against it. The United States has 350 million people, more guns than people, a political culture that sometimes makes a Premier League locker room look civilized, and social media platforms that host every conceivable variety of unpleasant opinion. It manages all of this with a 45-word constitutional amendment that says, essentially: the government cannot punish you for speaking. America prosecutes genuine threats. America prosecutes fraud, perjury, and incitement to imminent violence. America protects children from exploitation. America does all of this without arresting comedy writers at airports or jailing women for tweets they deleted and apologized for. The argument that Britain cannot do what America has done for over two centuries is, when you think about it, an argument that the British people are somehow less mature than Americans. That they are too fragile to handle disagreement. That they need the government to protect them from opinions, like children who might hurt themselves if left alone with scissors. Anyone should find this argument deeply insulting, which in the current legal climate may actually be a criminal offense. What Happens Next The Bill was published this week. Any MP can pick it up. Byrne says a couple of parliamentarians know it’s coming. He told GB News that “this bill is designed to do something very simple: It gets the Government out of the business of policing the opinions of the British people.” The Bill’s authors frame the question as binary. “Do you want the UK to have a free speech right that is equivalent to the First Amendment?” Yes or no. No “yes, but.” No “in principle, subject to safeguards.” Yes or no. This will drive the political establishment absolutely insane, because the political establishment has spent decades perfecting the art of answering that question with a paragraph that sounds like yes but means no. The whole infrastructure of modern British censorship has been built on the proposition that free speech is wonderful, in theory, but that in practice there need to be rules about what people can say, and the rules need to be flexible, and someone needs to enforce them, and that someone needs a budget and a staff and the power to fine you into oblivion, and before you know it the country is spending £169 million and arresting 12,000 people a year and sending five armed officers to Heathrow to intercept a comedy writer who posted something rude from Arizona. The Free Speech Act says: stop. All of it. Now. Replace it with a right. Define the narrow exceptions. Let the courts handle the edges. Trust the British people to be adults. This is, admittedly, asking a great deal of a political class that has spent two decades building the opposite system. Ofcom will not go quietly. There are hundreds of people in Whitehall and beyond whose careers depend on the continued existence of laws that criminalize speaking your mind. The newspapers will fill with op-eds warning of the terrible consequences of allowing British people to say what they think without first checking whether someone, somewhere, might be upset. But half the population is afraid to speak. Twelve thousand people a year are arrested for words. A man was convicted for praying silently. A woman got 31 months in prison for a tweet she deleted within two hours. The Prime Minister tells the world Britain protects free speech fiercely, while the country he governs has been downgraded by international monitors to below “Open” status for the first time in history. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Britain’s Free Speech Crisis and the Bill That Would Fix It appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Police organizations across Illinois are fighting to preserve their access to facial recognition databases and other biometric surveillance tools. House Bill 5521, introduced by state Rep. Kelly Cassidy, would ban state and local law enforcement from using biometric identification technology, and 227 opponents have formally registered against the bill through the Illinois General Assembly’s witness slip system, compared with a single proponent. We obtained a copy of the bill for you here. The lopsided opposition count tells a familiar story. When biometric surveillance faces legislative limits anywhere in the country, police agencies and their allies flood the process. What it doesn’t tell you is why Illinois residents might want these protections, or what happens to the millions of people whose biometric data sits in government databases with no meaningful restrictions on how it gets used. HB 5521 would bar law enforcement from obtaining, retaining, possessing, accessing, or using biometric identification systems. That includes facial recognition, iris scanners, voiceprints, and fingerprint-matching software. The bill also closes a workaround that agencies currently exploit, prohibiting them from contracting with third parties, other government agencies, or federal agencies to access biometric data on their behalf. Fingerprints remain part of the bill’s definition of biometric identifiers, but the ban carves out specific exceptions: police can still fingerprint someone after an arrest or conviction, collect forensic evidence at crime scenes, run employment background checks, and verify their own identity on work devices. What they can’t do is trawl fingerprint databases as a general investigative tool, searching for matches against the biometric data of people who haven’t been arrested or charged with anything. The bill would also shut down one of the most significant surveillance pipelines in the state. The Secretary of State’s facial recognition database has long been a go-to resource for police agencies across Illinois. Every person who gets a driver’s license or state ID has their photograph fed into that system, which law enforcement can currently search without the knowledge or consent of the person being identified. Under HB 5521, the Secretary of State could only use facial recognition for verifying someone’s identity when issuing a mobile driver’s license or ID card. That means millions of Illinoisans would no longer have their license photos treated as entries in a police surveillance database simply because they wanted to drive legally. More: Angela Lipps Spent 108 Days in Jail Because a Facial Recognition Algorithm Was Wrong Illinois already has one of the strongest biometric privacy laws in the country, the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which regulates private-sector use of biometric data but does not restrict government or police agencies. The state told corporations they couldn’t harvest your face scan without consent, then left a gap wide enough for every police department in Illinois to scan that same face through a government database with zero oversight. HB 5521 closes that gap. It grants individuals a private right of action to sue for violations, allowing for damages and the deletion of their biometric data, and empowers the Attorney General to enforce the provisions. Cassidy also pushed back on the argument that facial recognition is reliable enough to justify mass biometric surveillance. “Rather than look at anecdotes, we should know that facial recognition technology is demonstrably inaccurate. It is curious that in discussing this issue, we hear about particularly heinous and troubling crimes, but nothing about people being misidentified by facial recognition technology and held for hours (if not days) based on system errors. House Bill 5521 does not limit state and local police from investigating crimes. It simply protects the privacy of millions of Illinois residents simply because they have an Illinois driver’s license.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Illinois Police Fight Bill to Ban Facial Recognition Use appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Mexico’s government wants you to believe that handing over your fingerprints, iris scans, and facial data is voluntary. President Claudia Sheinbaum has said so publicly. But by July 2026, every one of the country’s roughly 130 million mobile phone lines must be linked to a biometric national ID, and unregistered numbers get suspended on July 1. Refuse the biometric credential and lose your phone. The CURP Biométrica upgrades Mexico’s existing population registry code, the Clave Única de Registro de Población, from an 18-character alphanumeric string into something far more personal. The updated system captures face, fingerprint, and iris biometrics, packages them with a QR code and digital signature, and produces what amounts to a mobile-readable identity document tied to your body. Registration happens at RENAPO and Civil Registry offices, where staff scan all ten fingerprints, both irises, take a facial photograph, and record a digital signature. You’ll need a valid photo ID, a certified CURP, and an original or certified birth certificate just to walk in. The government has framed this primarily as a tool for addressing Mexico’s crisis of forced disappearances. The biometric data feeds into a Unified Identity Platform connecting the National Population Registry with the National Forensic Data Bank and records held by prosecutors and intelligence agencies, enabling real-time identity searches. That’s the stated purpose. The actual system being built does considerably more than locate missing people. The legislation gives broad access to biometric and personal information to law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and the National Guard, and the law doesn’t require authorities to notify citizens when their data gets accessed. You won’t know who’s looking at your biometrics, or why, or how often. The SIM registration mandate is what turns a theoretically optional credential into an effectively compulsory one. Mexico enacted its mandatory mobile registration law on January 9, 2026, requiring all cell phone numbers, including prepaid and postpaid lines as well as physical SIM and eSIM, to be verifiably linked to an individual with a government-issued credential. Carriers must verify subscriber identity against the national biometric database. That means anonymous prepaid SIMs, long relied on by domestic abuse survivors, journalists, and political activists, will simply stop working for anyone who doesn’t complete biometric registration before the deadline. This is Mexico’s third attempt at linking phone numbers to identity. The track record should concern anyone paying attention. Mexico’s first cell phone registry, called RENAUT, was launched in 2008 and required users to register their numbers with their CURP. Within months, the private information of millions of cellphone users was leaked and allegedly sold by high-ranking corrupt officials within the federal government. RENAUT was abandoned by 2012. The second attempt, PANAUT, required biometric data including fingerprints and facial recognition. Digital rights organization R3D and others challenged the law, and in 2022, Mexico’s Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional, citing privacy violations. More: Federal Tribunal in Yucatán Suspends Biometric Data Collection for Mexico’s National ID System So here we are at attempt number three. The biometric CURP collects the same categories of sensitive data that the Supreme Court found unconstitutional just four years ago, except now it’s attached to a much larger identity platform with far more access points for government agencies. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Mexico Speeds Up Biometric ID Rollout appeared first on Reclaim The Net.