If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The Justice Department is asking a federal court in Atlanta to treat a man’s erasure of his own phone as destruction of property, in the first known US prosecution built on a phone’s duress password. Samuel Tunick faces one count under Title 18, Section 2232(a), a statute covering the destruction of property to stop the government from taking it. Prosecutors say he handed Customs and Border Protection officers a passcode that deleted the contents of his Google Pixel instead of unlocking it. His lawyers appeared before the court for the first time on Monday, arguing that officers ran a custodial interrogation without Miranda warnings, denied him a lawyer, and searched him unlawfully. They want everything obtained from the encounter suppressed. CBP pulled Tunick into secondary inspection at Hartsfield-Jackson on January 24, 2025, as he returned from the Dominican Republic. An FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force officer and an FBI special agent had coordinated with CBP in advance to question and search him on arrival. The account comes from the defense filing, which draws on the government’s own reports. Officers from CBP’s Tactical Terrorism Response Team opened by telling him they were “looking for people who are pedophiles.” Officers never read Tunick his Miranda rights. He said early in the interview that he did not want to keep talking without a lawyer, then asked to call one repeatedly. Questioning continued. One officer told him his refusal to talk gave them authority to go through his phone. When he asked again about his attorney, an officer told him customs and immigration work was a different matter, “and we have search authority, we don’t need a warrant.” Tunick eventually provided a password for his phone and his e-reader. The screen “went blank, flashed several times and the phone appeared to restart,” according to the government’s report. Officers seized the devices anyway and told him they would be returned after thirty days. A third officer took him to another room for a pat-down that was not recorded. A DHS agent then told him he was free to leave once the other agents were finished with him. The government’s reports contain no indication that anyone suspected Tunick of carrying illegal images, his lawyers wrote. The reports record an interest in his association with Defend the Atlanta Forest, the movement opposing the clearing of the South River Forest for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Opponents call the 85-acre, $115 million police facility Cop City. Federal documents label the movement an “Anti-Government, Anti-Authority Violent Extremist Group.” Tunick has not been charged with any offense connected to it. Eleventh Circuit precedent favors the government. Its 2018 ruling in United States v. Touset permits forensic searches of electronic devices at the border with no warrant, no probable cause, and no individualized suspicion. Tunick’s lawyers cite decisions from the First, Fourth, and Ninth Circuits going the other way, including a Fourth Circuit holding that warrantless border searches of devices cannot be used to hunt for evidence of domestic crime. They also argue that surrendering a passcode is testimonial, relying on a 2012 Eleventh Circuit decision that decrypting and producing the contents of a hard drive triggers Fifth Amendment protection. Courts allow suspicionless border searches to keep contraband out of the country. The accusation here is that data left a phone rather than entered the United States, and digital files move across borders over the internet anyway. A ruling on the motion is not expected before the end of October. GrapheneOS, the hardened Android build that replaces the stock software on Pixel devices, lets an owner set a second PIN or password that irreversibly wipes the device and any installed eSIMs when entered at a credential prompt. No confirmation dialog appears, and nothing distinguishes it from a normal unlock. Bill Budington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Runa Sandvik, founder of the security firm Granitt, both said they had seen no comparable prosecution. Sandvik said she had discussed the scenario with activists and journalists for years and advised travelers to leave sensitive data off devices they carry across borders rather than count on wiping it. Christophe Boutry told the Guardian the prosecution “sends the message that [GrapheneOS] is criminal by default.” Matthew Dodge, an assistant federal public defender on Tunick’s legal team, said the statute is rarely seen in an indictment. Tunick was arrested about ten months after the airport stop. His crowdfunding page says he was pulled over for a purported tail light fault and cuffed by FBI and DHS officers when he stepped out of the car. He has pleaded not guilty. The single-count indictment  accuses him of acting to delete the digital contents of a Google Pixel to impair the government’s lawful authority to take it, in violation of Title 18 of what the document calls the “Untied States Code.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post GrapheneOS Wipe at Airport Leads to Federal Charge in Atlanta 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. The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled on that a VPN provider cannot be held liable for copyright infringement when its users route around a geoblock. The court described VPNs as lawful technical tools that people may legitimately use. The finding removes the argument that privacy software makes its makers party to whatever their customers do with it. We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here. The Second Chamber delivered the judgment in Case C-788/24, Anne Frank Fonds v Anne Frank Stichting and Others, on a reference from the Dutch Supreme Court. The ruling cannot be appealed. Advocate General Athanasios Rantos had reached the same conclusion in January. The court held that a VPN provider “does not give end users access to a protected work” and does not play an “indispensable role” in any act of communication. Where a geoblock fails and a protected work reaches readers it was meant to exclude, responsibility stays with whoever put the work online. The court placed VPN operators alongside the intermediaries it declined to hold liable in earlier cases, including YouTube. French courts have been moving the other way. Canal+, which holds French rights to the Premier League and Top 14, has won orders requiring NordVPN, ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Proton and Surfshark to block pirate sports streaming sites for their French subscribers. A French court ordered Proton in late January to filter around thirty domains under a dynamic injunction the regulator Arcom can extend to new addresses without a fresh hearing. Those orders rest on the French Sports Code rather than copyright law, so they do not collide with Luxembourg directly. Proton has said it intends to bring the question of VPN blocking to the CJEU itself. Anne Frank’s manuscripts are in the public domain in Belgium and around 60 other countries. Parts of the text stay under Dutch copyright until 2037. The Anne Frank Stichting, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Association for Research in and Access to Historical Texts published a free scholarly edition on a Belgian-hosted website in September 2021. The site blocked visitors from countries where the work is still protected. Dutch readers get a notice saying the edition “cannot be made available in all countries, due to copyright considerations.” The Anne Frank Fonds, the Swiss foundation holding the Dutch rights, sued to force the site offline. Its argument was that a block anyone can defeat with a consumer VPN protects nothing, so the institutions were communicating the work to the Dutch public regardless of what their filters did. The judges rejected that. Geoblocking built to the state of the art keeps a website out of the countries it excludes, and the possibility of circumvention “cannot, in itself and in all circumstances, be a decisive factor” in finding those measures inadequate. A publisher that blocks a territory has shown who its audience is not. The court refused to require the subscriptions or login accounts the Fonds wanted, holding that such demands would disproportionately restrict free access for readers in countries where the text belongs to the public. A geographic filter asks a reader for nothing. An account asks for a name, an address to send mail to, and a record of which manuscripts that person opened. The site’s self-declaration prompt, which asks visitors to confirm they are in a country where the work is free, does not do the job on its own, the judges said. Arnout Groen, a lawyer for the Fonds, said the court had treated geoblocking as “a tick-in-the-box exercise” instead of an ongoing duty that keeps pace with technology. He said the judges ignored other indications that the website was aimed at Dutch readers and that the decision opens the door to misuse. The Dutch Supreme Court must now decide whether the geoblocking the institutions deployed met the state-of-the-art standard. If it did, the publication does not infringe Dutch copyright. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post EU Court Rules VPN Providers Not Liable When Users Bypass Geoblocks 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. Government officials in Canada are contacting people at their homes over social media posts written months or years ago, according to the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF). The legal advocacy group says the reports began arriving after Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, cleared Parliament. The law received royal assent on June 18 and came into force on July 18, expanding Canada’s “hate speech” offenses, raising penalties, and eliminating defenses that had limited prosecutions for what the state calls hate-related expression. “We are receiving reports that some Canadians are being contacted at their homes by government officials about social media posts made months or even years ago,” the JCCF wrote. “These reports come after the passage of Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, which expands Canada’s hate speech laws by creating new offences, increasing penalties, and removing certain legal safeguards that previously limited prosecutions for hate-related expression.” The Act makes hate-motivated crime a standalone offense and creates new charges for intimidating or obstructing people at places of worship, schools, and community centers. It also criminalizes the public display of symbols used by listed terrorist groups, two Nazi symbols, and a noose. Maximum sentences climb across the board. The JCCF’s reading of the bill puts the increases at two years to five for lesser offenses, five to ten for the next tier, and up to life imprisonment for the most serious hate-motivated crimes. The law defines hatred as “an emotion of an intense and extreme nature that is clearly associated with vilification and detestation.” Police and prosecutors decide which posts meet that description. Bill C-9 also removes the good-faith defense that had shielded religious opinion under the Criminal Code, which let a person avoid conviction for expressing, in good faith, an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a religious text. Moore says the change reaches directly into how these cases will be handled. “Bill C-9 will directly impact investigation and prosecution decisions concerning religious expression which possibly could have been viewed as good faith expression based on a religious text,” he said. The bill removes another safeguard as well. Prosecutors no longer need the attorney general’s consent to bring hate speech charges. Justice Minister Sean Fraser says the change was built for speed. “By removing this step, law enforcement would be able to act quickly,” he said. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Canada’s New “Hate” Law Is Already at People’s Doors 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. There is a new checkpoint on the road into Azeroth. It’s just past the login screen, roughly where the dragons used to be, and it would like to see some identification. Nothing sinister, you understand. Only for your own good. In California, a company that makes games about orcs has decided that before you may type “gg” at a stranger, the United Kingdom must be satisfied you are old enough to do it. And so, lately, Battle.net has begun asking its British players to prove they are grown-ups. By passport, ideally. The moment arrives in Account Settings, where a banner now waits for the UK’s players like a customs officer at the end of a long flight. Age verification may be required, it says. Required for what? For the right to speak. Voice chat, text chat, and, in Blizzard’s own words, “any other social interactions with people other than friends.” Your friends you may keep. Everyone else is now a border matter. There are three ways through. You may show the state your government ID, the passport or the driver’s license, held up to a camera like a suspect at a lineup. You may let your mobile provider vouch for you. Or, and this is the one they would quite like you to reach for, you may hand over a credit card for a check. The credit card check costs thirty pence. Thirty pence. A temporary charge, they promise, returned in due course. But there it is, in black and white. The price of proving to a video game that you are an adult is now thirty pence, plus the contents of your wallet, plus your face. The paperwork is handled by a third party called Yoti, which is the sort of name a company gives itself when The Ministry of Truth is already taken. Yoti looks at your passport, agrees that you are the person the passport says you are, and then, we are assured, deletes the picture. Encrypted and deleted. Gone. You are invited to find this reassuring, and, having no other option, you do. None of this was Blizzard’s idea, naturally. It is the law. The Online Safety Act, that great warm blanket thrown over the nation, under which no child shall ever again hear a cross word in a chat lobby. The Act must be served. And so a company built on orcs and loot is now in the passport business, because Parliament looked at the internet and decided the real dragon was the person three seats down in the voice channel. The net is wide. World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, Diablo. Millions of people who logged on to shoot things and shout at each other, now queuing at the digital passport desk to win back the right to shout. Anyone who declines to prove themselves is shown to the quiet carriage. Blizzard says the whole apparatus is there to ensure “age-appropriate experiences” and to keep the community safe. Then again, the community was mostly there to call each other names over a game about killing demons, and it managed that for thirty years without showing a single passport. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Blizzard Begins Asking UK Players for ID Before They Can Chat appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.