If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Britain’s government has decided that a functioning adult with thumbs and a phone cannot be trusted to pick your own news. So it has drawn up a plan to pick it for you. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport published a paper on June 23 proposing that social media platforms and video sharing sites be forced to push a hand-picked list of broadcasters to the top of your feed. The list runs BBC, ITV, STV, Channel 4, S4C and Channel 5. The government files them under “public service media.” You might file them under the channels people have spent two decades scrolling away from. Now the argument has crossed the Atlantic. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan sent Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy a letter on July 14 warning that the plan “would serve as a major threat to online speech and expression and infringe on the rights of American companies and their users.” He wants a briefing by 10 a.m. Washington time on July 28. We obtained a copy of the letter for you here. The platforms being ordered around are American. Their users are everywhere. A British minister rewriting how YouTube ranks video reaches straight into feeds in Ohio and Osaka. The DCMS says the goal is to help people “discover trusted news sources” and to fight “misinformation” and “disinformation.” Translated, the state has chosen your news and would rather you stopped wandering off. Who gets to decide what counts as “trusted”? The same government running the scheme, of course. The paper leans on real numbers. Ofcom found that social media is now the main news source for 51 percent of adults and 75 percent of people aged 16 to 24. People left. The government’s response is not to ask why they left. It is to guarantee the approved broadcasters a spot at the top while everyone else scraps for whatever attention is left over. The trick lies in the technology. On television, “prominence” is old furniture. You can legally park BBC One near the top of the channel guide, and the Media Act 2024 dragged that habit onto smart-TV home screens. A recommendation feed works nothing like a channel list. It sorts content in real time by what you personally watch, click and share. Forcing “prominence” onto that means reaching into the ranking and hoisting chosen publishers above where your own behavior left them. Less a nudge, more a shove. Think about who loses the slot. There are only so many places at the top of a feed. Every one handed to a state broadcaster is one taken from somebody who earned it. That’s the independent reporter filming in her kitchen, the local outlet sitting through the council meeting nobody else will, the upstart who built an audience the hard way. All shoved down the list so a government pick can take the seat instead. And what a pick. The star of this “trusted news” scheme is the BBC, whose director general and head of news both resigned last November after a Panorama documentary spliced separate pieces of a Trump speech so creatively that the broadcaster’s own internal report found it “materially misled” viewers. That is the outlet Britain wants to plant at the top of your feed by law, in the name of accuracy. YouTube has already said no. David Wheeldon, a senior public policy executive at the company, wrote that prominence rules “could force YouTube to give special treatment to a small group of organizations hand-picked by a government. For creators and media companies that are not chosen, the risk is real.” He went on. “By forcing these channels to the front of the line, everyone else gets pushed back, regardless of what viewers actually want to see. This makes it harder for creators to grow an audience and earn a living. If governments start picking the winners, independent creators become the losers.” The plan also arrives dressed up as “voluntary.” Platforms could be asked nicely first, with legislation kept in a drawer for whenever they decline to play along. That is a generous use of the word voluntary. The government’s own paper flags the danger without meaning to. It names “times of social unrest or crisis” as exactly when the state most wants a grip on which outlets people see. Read plainly, that is a government reserving the power to manage the information supply at the very moment citizens most need to hear things it would rather they didn’t. Jordan’s letter lands on the same nerve, warning that branding disfavored views as misinformation during unrest chills speech the government finds inconvenient. Britain has a track record here, having already leaned on people for what they posted while the country was on edge. Jordan’s committee has spent two years documenting how European rules reach across borders to police American speech, and how “misinformation” and “disinformation” keep stretching to cover whatever those in charge dislike this week. The plan might not even survive. Keir Starmer is on his way out of Downing Street, and the policy could leave with him. The appetite behind it will not. Prime ministers come and go like shift managers clocking off after a bad night. The urge to decide what grown adults are allowed to see signs a much longer contract. The consultation runs until August 31. After that, Britain gets to learn whether “trusted” news means news you can trust, or news you are simply made to see. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Jim Jordan Fights UK Plan to Force Legacy Media Into Feeds 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. Ofcom has decided that two of the planet’s most-used messaging apps deserve a spot on a list. Apple’s iMessage and Meta’s Messenger now sit on the UK speech regulator’s roll of “emerging Category 1 services,” a label that sounds bureaucratic and harmless right up until you read what Category 1 actually demands. The Online Safety Act sorts regulated services into tiers, and Category 1 is the top shelf, reserved for the largest platforms and stacked with the heaviest obligations. Ofcom’s freshly published register hands full Category 1 status to eleven services. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Quora, Reddit, Roblox, Snapchat, TikTok, WhatsApp, X, and YouTube all made the top tier. iMessage and Messenger didn’t make that cut. They landed on the emerging list instead, next to Threads and Wikipedia, which means they sit close to the threshold and can be reclassified whenever Ofcom fancies another look. An emerging Category 1 service, by Ofcom’s own account, need not actually resemble a Category 1 service. The regulator’s FAQ says apps can be listed “because they have a large UK user base,” even if they lack the “relevant functionalities and characteristics required.” The definition folds in on itself. A service gets flagged as nearly-Category-1 while missing the exact features that would qualify it as Category 1 in the first place. What waits at the top of that ladder is what should worry anyone who likes sending a message without first surrendering a passport. Category 1 services can be required to offer users optional identity verification. Ofcom leans on the word “optional” as though it ends the debate. It doesn’t. The Wikimedia Foundation already exposed the flaw. Combine optional ID checks with the parallel duty to let users block anyone who hasn’t verified, and you get a trap. On Wikipedia, editors could block every unverified user from touching content they post, which would herd volunteers toward verifying their identities just to keep doing unpaid work. The same trap fits other collaborative platforms. Apply the logic to X, and users could block unverified accounts from adding or editing Community Notes on their posts. Identity checks are only the opening act. Category 1 platforms also have to assess how likely adult users are to run into content that is perfectly legal yet officially unwelcome. The Act’s definition of this “relevant content” covers material that is “abusive” on the grounds of “race,” “religion,” “sex,” “sexual orientation,” “disability,” or “gender reassignment,” along with content that “incites hatred against people…of a particular race, religion, sex or sexual orientation.” Lawful speech, catalogued and risk-assessed by order of the state. From there the duties multiply, adding optional tools to filter that legal content, an enhanced complaints system, and consistent enforcement of terms of service. Then, with a straight face, the Act asks these platforms to publish assessments of how all this safety machinery affects users’ freedom of expression and privacy. A regime that mandates identity verification and speech monitoring now wants the companies carrying out that work to grade their own damage to free expression. Wikimedia dragged Ofcom’s categorization rules into court in 2025, warning they stretched wide enough to rope in a nonprofit encyclopedia. The High Court dismissed the case in August 2025, though the judge left a door ajar, saying Wikimedia could return if Ofcom “(impermissibly) concludes that Wikipedia is a Category 1 service.” He added that the ruling “does not give Ofcom and the Secretary of State a green light to implement a regime that would significantly impede Wikipedia’s operations.” On July 10, 2026, Ofcom told Wikimedia that Wikipedia is not, for now, a Category 1 service. The reprieve arrived with Wikipedia parked on the same watch list as iMessage and Messenger. Wikimedia described that roster as a “‘watch list’ of platforms that do not currently qualify as Category 1 services, but that could become Category 1 at any point in the future, should Ofcom choose to reassess its decision.” The clock is already running for everyone named on these lists. Services on the full register get one month to appeal to the Upper Tribunal, and lodging an appeal suspends the relevant duties until the case resolves. Services on the emerging list get three months to bring a judicial review to the High Court. For now, iMessage and Messenger carry no extra obligations. They sit on a government list, waiting to learn whether their own popularity becomes the reason a regulator asks for your identity before you say hello. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Ofcom Puts iMessage and Messenger on Its Watch List 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. Flock Safety‘s cameras did exactly what they were built to do on the day four squad cars boxed in Joel Feder outside a Kohl’s in Plymouth, Minnesota. They read a plate, matched it against a hot list, and told the police where the car was. Nothing malfunctioned. The network passed along a bad piece of data with the same authority it gives a good one, and a journalist ended up standing in a parking lot with his hands up while officers rested theirs on their holsters. The bad data had been sitting in the system for days. A Jaguar Land Rover dealership in Los Angeles misplaced a plate during a photo shoot and reported it lost. New Jersey prints its manufacturer plates with the middle characters in tiny type, and by the time the report reached law enforcement those digits had fallen off, so plate 34 03 DTM was logged as 34 DTM. Flock’s cameras cannot read the small middle numbers either. They looked at 34 10 DTM on the Range Rover Feder had borrowed as a press loaner, saw 34 DTM, and started telling the Plymouth police they had found a stolen vehicle. Two systems with the same blind spot confirmed each other, and their agreement became probable cause for an armed stop. A camera reports what it thinks it sees, and it reports it with the same certainty every time. Doubt is outside its vocabulary. It has no way to flag that the characters in the middle of a plate fall below the resolution of its sensor and the read should be thrown out. It returns a plate number, a timestamp and a location, and a wrong answer arrives looking precisely like a right one. Everything downstream inherits that false confidence, including the officer who gets out of the car with his hand near his weapon. The police in Plymouth had a seventeen-character VIN, stamped into the vehicle at the factory and checked against a state database, and it came back clean. They also had a camera hit generated by a machine that could not see two of the digits it was ruling on. “The plates on this car are stolen,” Officer Max Ganshyn told Feder. The department kept the camera’s story and set the VIN aside. The human in the loop, the safeguard these contracts are sold on, turned out to be the part of the system most willing to believe the machine. By Flock’s own numbers, its readers capture plates accurately about 93 percent of the time across roughly 20 billion vehicles a month. The company offers that figure as reassurance. Seven percent of 20 billion is 1.4 billion misreads a month, and any of them can land on a cruiser’s screen as grounds for a stop. Sharper cameras will not solve this. A higher accuracy rate applied to a far larger population of scanned drivers still produces bad hits by the million, and it produces them overwhelmingly against people who have done nothing wrong, since those are the people the network spends its day looking at. More technology here does not mean fewer errors. It means the same error rate industrialized and aimed at the public. Making an error and unmaking one run on completely different hardware. Feder’s misread propagated across a national network in milliseconds. Undoing it meant getting the LAPD to amend the original report and push the fix into Flock’s system, which Jaguar Land Rover was trying to arrange by phone on a Sunday afternoon while everyone stood in the lot. Ganshyn was already tracking four other cars on the same 34 ## DTM plate pattern that week, and any Flock partner department in the country would have flagged them off the same broken report. Feder was told to drive straight home and leave the car parked. “You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth,” the officer said. “If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.” That is the state’s own advice to an innocent man: stay off the roads because we cannot switch this thing off. A week of surveillance and an armed stop ran their course without a warrant. The Fourth Amendment assumes a human being forms a suspicion and can be made to answer for it afterward. A camera network hands police a suspicion pre-formed, generated by a private vendor’s software and stamped with a confidence nobody has to defend. There is no affidavit and no probable cause a judge could examine, only a hit on a screen. Nobody in Plymouth chose to hunt Joel Feder for a week. The surveillance system chose, and there is no one to depose. The Institute for Justice counts at least 26 cases since 2018 in which Flock misreads led to innocent people being pulled over, held at gunpoint, jailed, or attacked by police dogs, most of them since 2023. Those are the documented ones, the cases where somebody had the standing and the resources to make a record. A false hit that ends in a felony stop is a different experience depending on who is behind the wheel, and the network cannot tell the difference. It reads the plate. Officers arrive with their assumptions intact. Responsibility thins out as it travels down the chain. Flock sells the alert and disclaims the arrest. The department acted on the information it was given. The clerk in Los Angeles filled out a form. All of them performed their function, and a man with clean plates and a clean VIN was surrounded by four squad cars in a shopping center parking lot on a Sunday. The police report, when it arrived days later, confirmed the plate had never been stolen at all. “The plate was reported as NJ 34DTM instead of NJ 3403DTM,” it read. Two weeks before officers boxed him in, The Drive had run a report on Flock cameras being wired into a wider surveillance apparatus, one that reaches past plates toward phones, wearables, and even pets. The story went viral and was shared tens of thousands of times. Then the same kind of network came for one of the people who had warned about it, on the strength of five characters and a typo. Plate readers are only the highest-volume version of a failure that is turning up wherever police have wired a probabilistic system into a squad car. Detroit officers arrested Robert Williams in his driveway in 2020 on the strength of a facial recognition match against a blurry surveillance still, then arrested Porcha Woodruff, eight months pregnant, on another bad match three years later. Chicago prosecutors held Michael Williams for nearly a year on a gunshot-detection alert that pointed at the wrong noise. The software in those cases offered a candidate and the officers downstream took delivery of a conclusion, which is the same trade the Plymouth department made in the Kohl’s lot. The vendors describe these tools as leads to be corroborated. The lead arrives with a badge number attached to it, and the work of proving the machine wrong is left to whoever is already in handcuffs. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Flock Camera Error Gets Innocent Driver Boxed In by Police 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. Someone at the San Francisco Police Department wanted to share a link to some of its drone feeds. So they generated one, set it to expire in a year, and skipped the part where you put a password on footage of people’s living rooms. That link found its way into a public archive of web addresses used by security researchers, which is where two of them found it and started watching along with whoever else already had. Sam Curry and Maik Robert pulled down roughly 48 hours of SFPD drone operations from mid-June before the feed went dark. The researchers reported the exposed public link to Skydio, the company whose software the department runs, around two days after discovering it, and it was then quickly taken offline. By then, according to WIRED, “the link appeared to have already exposed the drone feeds for six months,” with “no assurance that Curry and Robert were the only ones who had been watching.” Sixty videos from twenty separate flights, every mission recorded three ways, a color camera, a thermal view that turns people into heat blooms, and a feed from the drone’s rooftop dock. Second-by-second telemetry came with it, more than 5,000 GPS coordinates tracing over 44 miles of flight and logging each drone’s altitude, speed, heading, and battery level from takeoff to landing. Six pilots had their names and work email addresses spill out too. What the cameras recorded is the part that should worry anyone who lives beneath them. The footage looked into dozens of apartments, caught hundreds of people and vehicles, and captured the clear faces of dozens of residents who were doing nothing more suspicious than existing outdoors. WIRED observed that “the innocuous appearance of many of the videos raises questions about whether the surveillance was necessary.” Take the call logged as an “auto boost/strip,” police shorthand for stealing a car to strip it for parts. A drone tailed two young men in a vehicle, one of them flagged as a “suspicious person in a vehicle,” until the pair parked, walked onto a basketball court, and started playing. The drone left. Another flight answered an alleged “prowler.” The drone found a young person sitting on a rooftop in headphones, hovered, zoomed in, and flew off. Curry called it “an invasion of privacy” and “uncomfortable.” As he described it, “This person thinks they’re by themselves on this roof and has gotten away from everybody, and then there’s a police drone watching them.” The department has rules for exactly this. SFPD’s drone policy tells operators to keep cameras trained on what a mission requires, to hold down the inadvertent collection of data about uninvolved people and places, and to turn the lens away from spots where people expect privacy. The leaked videos ran entire missions from takeoff to landing and captured streets, rooftops, courtyards, parked cars, and apartment windows belonging to people who were not the subject of any operation. Skydio makes the drones and the software, and it has built a business on being the American answer to Chinese-made DJI after agencies dropped those over security worries. More than 400 public safety agencies now fly its hardware, and the sales pitch rests on domestic gear keeping the data safer. The company recently closed a $110 million funding round at a $4.4 billion valuation and is angling toward an eventual IPO, a figure that leans on the belief its systems are harder to breach than the alternatives. SFPD says it is investigating how the link got loose, and the drones are still up. The feed that leaked showed active operations in real time, which hands defense attorneys a fresh question about how secure any of the department’s drone data ever was. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post San Francisco Police Left Their Live Drone Feeds Unlocked appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

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