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If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is suing Character Technologies for letting its AI chatbot impersonate a psychiatrist. Shapiro then proposed ideas that would require a digital ID to use an AI companion bot, force companies to surveil every conversation children have with chatbots, and automatically report flagged messages to authorities. The proposals first appeared in Shapiro’s February 2026 budget address. The May 5 lawsuit press release recycles them for a second round of coverage, using a real legal action as a vehicle for something far broader. We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here. Shapiro wants to “require age verification and parental consent to utilize AI companion bots.” Age verification that can’t be bypassed by typing a fake birthday means government-issued ID uploads, facial scans, credit card checks, or third-party identity services. There is no version of enforceable age verification that doesn’t harvest and store sensitive personal data. The proposal would turn chatbot access into an identity-checked activity, requiring you to prove who you are with documents before a bot will talk to you. This mirrors Senator Josh Hawley’s federal GUARD Act, which the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced 22-0 on April 30. The GUARD Act explicitly states that a “reasonable age verification measure” cannot be a checkbox or a self-entered birth date. What it can be is a government ID, a biometric scan, or a financial record tied to your legal name. Shapiro’s proposal doesn’t spell out its methods yet but if the goal is real enforcement rather than theater, it lands in the same place. Between Harrisburg and Washington, showing papers to chat is becoming a bipartisan consensus. The surveillance proposal is worse. Shapiro wants to “require tech companies to detect when children mention self-harm or violence against others and immediately direct them to the appropriate authorities.” To detect whether a child mentions self-harm, the system reads every message. You can’t scan selectively without scanning everything. Every conversation a minor has with a chatbot would pass through automated content analysis and anything the algorithm interprets as a self-harm reference gets forwarded to unspecified “appropriate authorities” without human review and without context. These filters don’t understand sarcasm, dark humor, song lyrics, or how teenagers actually talk. A kid discussing a novel about self-harm gets flagged. A teenager telling a chatbot, “I could kill my brother for eating my cookies,” gets reported. The technology to reliably distinguish a genuine crisis from exaggerated language does not exist. The proposals create a two-layer system. First, you prove your identity to access the chatbot. Then your conversations are scanned and potentially reported. Anonymity disappears at the door. Speech is surveilled on the other side. The whole thing is framed as child protection, which makes it politically toxic to oppose. The actual lawsuit tells a different story about what’s needed. A state investigator found a Character.AI chatbot called “Emilie” that claimed to be a licensed psychiatrist in Pennsylvania and provided a fake license number, PS306189. The state is suing under the Medical Practice Act, which already makes it illegal to pose as a licensed medical professional. “Pennsylvanians deserve to know who — or what — they are interacting with online, especially when it comes to their health,” Shapiro said. “We will not allow companies to deploy AI tools that mislead people into believing they are receiving advice from a licensed medical professional.” That’s existing law handling a specific harm. The lawsuit itself proves the surveillance apparatus Shapiro is proposing isn’t necessary to address the problem he’s describing. The fake psychiatrist problem is one thing. The ID-to-chat regime being built on top of it is something else entirely. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Shapiro’s AI Chatbot Plan Opens the Door to ID-Gated, Surveilled Conversations appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Sweden’s government has announced plans to fit children with electronic tracking bracelets, the latest expansion of a surveillance apparatus the country has been building around its youngest residents for the past year. Social services would decide which children aged 13 and older get tagged, based on the government’s determination that they are “at risk” of recruitment by criminal gangs. Officials estimate between 50 and 100 kids would be tracked to enforce curfews. The bracelets are part of a much wider pattern. Since October 2025, Swedish police have had the legal authority to wiretap the electronic communications of children under 15, including in cases where no specific crime is suspected. The country is also lowering the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 13 for serious offenses starting July 1. The Swedish state can now listen to a child’s phone calls, read their messages, and, if this proposal passes, track their physical location in real time. Social Services Minister Camilla Waltersson Grönvall told reporters the device would be designed to look “like a watch or bracelet, so it wouldn’t be as obvious or stigmatizing” as an ankle bracelet used for convicted criminals. The cosmetic distinction is worth pausing on. The device performs the same function as a criminal ankle monitor. It tracks the wearer’s movements and reports them to authorities. Calling it a watch changes the aesthetics, not the surveillance. Grönvall said there were “173 children under the age of 15 suspected of being involved in murders or murder plots.” She also cited 52 evidentiary proceedings against children in 2025, a legal process where a court determines guilt for children below the age of criminal responsibility, though no punishment follows. Those numbers describe a real problem. Sweden’s gang violence has pulled children into serious crime at alarming rates, with gangs recruiting minors precisely because they face lighter legal consequences. None of that changes what the bracelet proposal actually is. The government wants to attach location-tracking hardware to children who have not been convicted of anything, based on a social worker’s assessment of future risk. The child doesn’t have to have committed a crime. They have to be deemed likely to encounter one. “When children are at risk of falling into the clutches of serious criminals, we must have more tools to protect them,” Waltersson Grönvall said. “Electronic monitoring should be usable in serious situations, in order to break a destructive pattern in time and guarantee the child’s safety.” The framing is protection, the mechanism is surveillance, and the target population is children selected not by courts weighing evidence, but by social services making predictions. Children’s rights organizations, Sweden’s National Council for Crime Prevention, and UNICEF have all raised concerns about what this does to children’s civil liberties, and it’s not hard to see why. A 13-year-old wearing a government tracking device because an official thinks they might fall in with the wrong crowd is not a child being protected. It’s a child being surveilled on the basis of a guess. The broader trajectory should concern anyone watching. In less than a year, Sweden has authorized warrantless wiretapping of children’s phones, lowered the age at which the state can imprison a child, and now proposed physically attaching tracking devices to minors who haven’t been charged with crimes. It all gets justified as a response to gang violence. Collectively, they represent a surveillance infrastructure built specifically around children, one that treats the youngest and most vulnerable residents of a democracy as subjects to be monitored rather than citizens to be supported. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Sweden Wants to Strap Tracking Devices on Children as Young as 13 appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Europol built and operated secret data analysis platforms stuffed with passport photos, phone records, financial transactions, and geolocation data belonging to people never suspected of any crime. The systems ran for years without the security or data protection safeguards EU law requires, and the agency concealed parts of them from its own privacy regulator. A joint investigation by CORRECTIV, Solomon, and Computer Weekly, based on leaked emails, internal documents, and whistleblower testimony, reveals that these parallel platforms became the backbone of Europol’s analytical work. “They protect the law while breaking it,” one former senior official said. The main system, called the Computer Forensic Network (CFN), was set up in 2012 to handle digital evidence. After the 2015 Paris attacks, Europol’s cybercrime unit EC3 repurposed it into a mass analysis platform operating outside IT controls. More: Europol’s Embarrassing Data Breach Exposes Flaws in Its Anti-Encryption Stance By 2019 it held two petabytes of data, roughly 420 times larger than Europol’s official databases. The agency’s own data protection officer found that 99 percent of operational data sat in this unregulated environment, with no adequate logging of who accessed or modified anything. Alongside the CFN, a second covert system called the “Pressure Cooker” let staff store and analyze operational data without the constraints of EU law. A leaked 2022 email marked “Importance: High” warned that the regulator might discover the “irregular situation with the Pressure Cooker.” Europol claims it was just an internal nickname for a lawful system. Former officials say it was a separate platform hidden from the EU’s data protection watchdog for years. The EU’s privacy regulator, the EDPS, spent nearly a decade trying to bring Europol into compliance, then closed its monitoring in February 2026 with 15 out of 150 recommendations still unimplemented, including core security safeguards. British Conservative MP David Davis said the findings, “if true, point to serious failures of oversight, legality and data protection.” He demanded the UK Home Office explain “whether any personal data of entirely innocent British citizens is being stored in Europol’s systems and, if so, why it is being stored and why the UK government is allowing it to be stored.” The European Commission is now preparing legislation to double Europol’s budget and expand its mandate. It wants to hand broader surveillance powers to an agency that ran an unaccountable data warehouse for the better part of a decade and still can’t guarantee the personal data of innocent people inside its systems hasn’t been tampered with. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Europol Ran Secret Data Platforms on Millions of Innocents appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. An anonymous Canadian man has sued DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to stop the US government from forcing Google to disclose his real name, physical location, movement history, browsing records, and private communications. The lawsuit, brought by the ACLU’s D.C. and Northern California branches, asks a federal court to invalidate the administrative summons DHS sent to Google and to block the agency from using customs enforcement powers to unmask online speech. We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here. The summons cites Section 1509 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a statute written to investigate import duties and customs fraud. Doe lives in Canada, hasn’t entered the US since 2015, and doesn’t do business with anyone in America. DHS issued the summons on February 14, 2026, demanding “[a]ll records and other information” tied to the Gmail address linked to Doe’s X account, covering September 2025 through February 2026. That window includes the period after federal agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, which prompted Doe’s sharpest posts. No judge reviewed the summons and no court approved it. DHS gave itself permission to demand a foreign citizen’s digital footprint because he tagged government officials in posts they found embarrassing. More: Secret Grand Jury Convened to Unmask Anonymous Government Critic on Reddit Google hasn’t complied but the company “has made clear that it cannot promise to hold out forever.” The lawsuit separates itself from three earlier ACLU challenges where DHS withdrew its subpoenas before a judge could rule, a pattern that looks like an agency that knows it would lose but keeps trying. This time, the ACLU is asking the court to set a precedent, not just block a single summons. “I have long admired the United States for its commitment to free speech,” Doe said. “Never in a million years did I think that, after criticizing the U.S. government, I would be targeted with a summons seeking to find out who I am, where I live, where I go, and what I read online. You don’t have to be from America to know that this is un-American.” The question is whether a judge will finally rule on the legality, or whether DHS will withdraw the summons again, wait for attention to fade, and send the next one. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Anonymous Canadian Sues DHS to Stop Google From Revealing His Identity Over Critical Posts appeared first on Reclaim The Net.