If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Angela Lipps spent nearly six months in jail because an algorithm looked at surveillance footage and decided she matched the suspect. She had never been to North Dakota. She had never been on a plane. A facial recognition system said otherwise, and police took that as enough. Lipps, a 50-year-old mother and grandmother from north-central Tennessee, was arrested at her home in July while babysitting four children. US marshals arrived with guns drawn. She was booked as a fugitive from justice. “I’ve never been to North Dakota, I don’t know anyone from North Dakota,” she told WDAY News. The case began with bank fraud in Fargo. Between April and May 2025, someone used a fake US Army military ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars from banks across the city. Detectives pulled surveillance footage of a woman at the counters. They fed that footage into facial recognition software. The software returned a name: Angela Lipps. A detective wrote in court documents that Lipps appeared to match the suspect based on facial features, body type, and hairstyle. That assessment, made by software and rubber-stamped in a report, was treated as sufficient cause for arrest. Nobody from the Fargo police called Lipps before the marshals showed up at her door. She sat in a Tennessee county jail for 108 days waiting for North Dakota to arrange her transport. No bail. Four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information. Four counts of theft. The algorithm had spoken. Her attorney, Jay Greenwood, told InForum: “If the only thing you have is facial recognition, I might want to dig a little deeper.” Fargo police did not dig deeper. What eventually cleared Lipps was her bank records, which showed she had been more than 1,200 miles away in Tennessee during every transaction investigators said she committed in North Dakota. Greenwood obtained those records and brought them to the investigators. Lipps was released on Christmas Eve. The story didn’t end there. While locked up and unable to pay bills, Lipps lost her home, her car, and her dog. When Fargo police released her, they didn’t arrange her trip back to Tennessee. Defense attorneys helped cover a hotel room and food over Christmas. A local nonprofit, the F5 Project, got her home. As of the reporting from InForum, nobody from the Fargo police department had apologized. This is how facial recognition operates: it generates a match, law enforcement acts on it, and the burden of disproving a computer’s guess falls entirely on the person whose life gets upended. Lipps had to produce documentary evidence of her own location to escape charges based on software that was simply wrong. The Lipps case is not unusual. Last October, an AI system at a Baltimore school identified a bag of Doritos as a firearm and notified police. Officers arrived armed at Kenwood High School, forced student Taki Allen to his knees, handcuffed him, and searched him. They found nothing. In the UK, Shaun Thompson, 39, had just finished a volunteer shift with Street Fathers, a group dedicated to steering young people away from knife crime, when the Metropolitan Police’s live facial recognition cameras flagged him outside London Bridge station. Officers detained him for nearly half an hour, demanded his fingerprints, and threatened arrest, even as he produced multiple forms of ID proving he wasn’t the person they were looking for. “They were telling me I was a wanted man, trying to get my fingerprints and trying to scare me with arrest, even though I knew and they knew the computer had got it wrong,” he said. Thompson is now bringing the first legal challenge of its kind against the Metropolitan Police’s use of live facial recognition. The man the algorithm flagged as a criminal was spending his evening trying to prevent crime. The technology made no distinction. What these cases share is a common architecture. A system makes an identification, human oversight treats that identification as reliable, and the person flagged has no recourse until significant damage has already been done. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Angela Lipps Spent 108 Days in Jail Because a Facial Recognition Algorithm Was Wrong appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The European Commission just proposed attaching a verified digital identity to every company operating across the EU. The framework, called EU Inc., pairs a new pan-European corporate legal structure with something called the EU Business Wallet: a credential holding a company’s identity, ownership structure, and legal status, shareable with public authorities across all 27 member states on request. The pitch is speed and simplicity. Under EU Inc., businesses can register anywhere in the EU within 48 hours for a maximum fee of €100. The Commission wants the European Parliament and Council to agree on the proposal by the end of 2026, with the full single market vision operational by 2028. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen framed it as the opening move in something larger: “This crucial step is just the beginning. Our goal is clear: one Europe, one market, by 2028.” https://video.reclaimthenet.org/articles/528651283068421146.mp4 That goal has a data architecture attached to it that is a plan for something bigger. The EU Business Wallet isn’t a filing cabinet for company documents. It creates a standardized, machine-readable identity layer for businesses, one that links verified corporate credentials to the individuals authorized to act on the company’s behalf. The wallet builds on eIDAS 2, the regulation already requiring all 27 member states to provide digital identity wallets to citizens by the end of 2026. The corporate credential and the individual credential tie together. A company’s legal structure, its beneficial owners, and the people signing on its behalf all become traceable through a chain of verified, shareable credentials. The EU Business Wallet was first announced in November 2025 and isn’t yet fully operational. The justification is administrative efficiency and anti-fraud. Cross-border registration harmonized across national registers. Compliance paperwork that stops getting lost at borders. These are real problems. The question, as always with identity infrastructure at this scale, is what gets built in solving them. The playbook is recognizable. Governments that have struggled to sell digital identity schemes directly to citizens are finding a more compliant entry point: business. Make it a compliance requirement, frame it as anti-fraud, attach it to something people already have to do, and watch enrollment climb. By the time anyone objects at scale, the infrastructure is built, and the identifiers are issued. The UK ran this experiment first, and recently, with company directors. From 18 November 2025, all directors or persons with significant control of a UK-registered company will be legally required to complete a digital identity verification check with Companies House. The government estimates that 6 to 7 million individuals will need to verify their identity by mid-November 2026. The verification routes through GOV.UK One Login. Without a verified personal code, directors cannot file confirmation statements, appoint other directors, or update any company records. The system won’t let them proceed. A flaw introduced during a Companies House system update in October 2025 left directors’ residential addresses, dates of birth, and email addresses potentially visible to other logged-in users for five months, the same five months the agency was enrolling millions of those directors into its mandatory identity verification system. Companies House insists this doesn’t constitute a digital ID. The claim is technically careful and substantively hollow. A situation where directors must upload their passport or driving licence, and receive a persistent digital code linking them to their company record, is a state-controlled digital ID by any common-sense definition. The British public had already noticed: a parliamentary petition against mandatory digital ID gathered almost 3 million signatures. That opposition formed around a separate national ID announcement, but the Companies House rollout was moving in parallel, mostly below the noise threshold. By the time the petition was making headlines, the director verification system had been running for weeks. The justification in the UK was anti-fraud, specifically the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, targeting shell companies and money laundering. Fraud reduction doesn’t require universal enrollment of everyone who runs a business, from the director of a logistics company to the trustee of a local charity. Universal enrollment does. HMRC has since joined GOV.UK One Login, bringing the number of government services accessible through the platform to over 200. The Companies House requirement didn’t create this system. It populated it. Millions of verified identities, enrolled under a compliance obligation, now form the foundation for whatever One Login becomes next. The EU Inc. proposal follows the same structural logic at the continental scale. The scheme is technically optional. Companies don’t have to register under EU Inc. or use the wallet. For now. What isn’t optional is the compliance obligation that makes the verification necessary to access the benefits. Once every public authority across 27 member states is set up to accept and request wallet-based credentials, the calculus for any business wanting smooth access to EU markets shifts considerably. Optional frameworks have a way of becoming the path of least resistance, then simply the path. What’s being built, in both cases, is persistent verified identity at scale, enrolled through commercial obligation rather than civic choice. The UK version covers millions of company directors. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post EU Proposal Links European Business Registration to Digital ID Wallets appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

This Post is for Paid Supporters Reclaim your digital freedom. Get the latest on censorship and surveillance, and learn how to fight back. SUBSCRIBE Already a supporter? Sign In. (If you’re already logged in but still seeing this, refresh this page to show the post.) The post Linux Distros Are Mounting a Response to the Age Verification ID Laws Coming for Your OS appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Ofcom has now fined 4chan £520,000 ($691,572) under the Online Safety Act. The platform hasn’t paid a penny and isn’t intending to. Its lawyer replied to the latest demand with a picture of a hamster. That’s the state of UK online speech regulation in 2026: a regulator issuing fines to American websites, receiving rodent-themed correspondence in return, and collecting almost nothing. The breakdown: £450,000 for failing to put age verification in place, £50,000 for failing to assess the risk of illegal material being published, and £20,000 for failing to set out in its terms of service how it protects users from criminal content. Ofcom says 4chan must comply by April 2 or face daily penalties on top. But this confrontation and push for 4chan to start checking IDs didn’t start with a £520,000 fine. It started with an email sent across the Atlantic to a company that owes the UK government nothing. 4chan is an American platform. Its registered in Delaware. Its servers are in the United States. It has no employees in Britain, no offices in Britain, no legal registration in Britain, and no business presence of any kind in Britain. It is, in every meaningful sense, none of Ofcom’s business. And what good would the First Amendment be if it could be overridden by foreign demands? When the Online Safety Act came into full force, Ofcom declared that any site with “links to the UK” had duties to protect UK users, regardless of where in the world it was based. That phrase, “links to the UK,” is intentionally vague, allowing British authorities to demand compliance from virtually any website. Under that logic, any American platform that a British person can visit is subject to UK speech law. No presence required. No UK operations required. Ofcom thinks it has jurisdiction over planet Earth. Beginning in April 2025, Ofcom sent a “legally binding information notice” to 4chan’s corporate services company, by email, demanding compliance with the Online Safety Act and threatening that failure could “constitute a criminal offence” resulting in a fine of £18 million or 10% of 4chan’s worldwide turnover, arrest, and imprisonment for up to two years. The notice was sent to a company not authorized to accept service on 4chan’s behalf. No UK court had issued it. No treaty process had been followed. It was, legally speaking, a strongly worded email. Preston Byrne, the attorney representing 4chan, described the regulator’s actions as “an illegal campaign of harassment” directed at American tech firms, and made clear his client would not comply: “4chan has broken no laws in the United States, my client will not pay any penalty.” By June 2025, Ofcom had opened a formal investigation. Byrne’s reply was characteristically direct: “Increasing the size of a censorship fine does not cure its legal invalidity in the United States.” He continued: “After an entire year of your agency’s spectacular failure to get the memo, my only suggestion is that you take a first-year course on U.S. constitutional law.” In August 2025, 4chan and Kiwi Farms took the fight to the US federal courts. The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, argues that the Online Safety Act is not only an unlawful extraterritorial power grab but a direct attack on foundational American liberties. The complaint states: “Where Americans are concerned, the Online Safety Act purports to legislate the Constitution out of existence.” The platforms argue that Ofcom’s demands, including written “risk assessments,” content moderation systems, removal of speech deemed “illegal” by UK standards, and user identity verification, would require violating the First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Byrne told reporters: “American citizens do not surrender our constitutional rights just because Ofcom sends us an email.” October 2025 brought the first confirmed fine: £20,000 plus £100 per day. Byrne responded publicly: “4chan’s constitutional rights remain completely unaffected by this foreign e-mail. 4chan will obey UK censorship laws when pigs fly.” He followed up: “You have to laugh. That Americans don’t obey British censors is settled law here; Ofcom might as well have ordered that the Moon be made of cheese.” Ofcom’s response today was delivered by Suzanne Cater, its director of enforcement. “Companies, wherever they’re based, are not allowed to sell unsafe toys to children in the UK. And society has long protected youngsters from things like alcohol, smoking and gambling. The digital world should be no different,” she said. “The UK is setting new standards for online safety. Age checks and risk assessments are cornerstones of our laws, and we’ll take robust enforcement action against firms that fall short.” The children protection argument is politically durable. It always is. The actual reach of the Online Safety Act extends considerably further than child protection. Under UK law, the “illegal content” category covers forms of speech that remain constitutionally protected in the United States, including material that may be labeled “grossly offensive” or politically controversial. The UK has no equivalent free speech protections. The government gets to define what “illegal content” means. That definition can shift without Parliament voting on it. When Ofcom moved to dismiss the US lawsuit, it revealed the central contradiction at the heart of its position. Ofcom claimed sovereign immunity under US law to shield itself from the case, the same legal traditions it was simultaneously dismissing when 4chan cited the US Constitution. The regulator wants to impose its rules on American soil but doesn’t want American courts reviewing whether it can. It wants jurisdiction without accountability. The lawsuit’s filing accused Ofcom of deliberately targeting the most well-known but financially vulnerable American platforms to make public examples of them, signaling consequences to larger companies that might otherwise resist through the lawful exercise of their constitutional rights. Indeed, Ofcom’s own confirmation decision stated that “imposing a financial penalty in this case would ensure that both 4chan and the wider sector understand how seriously Ofcom takes compliance with these duties.” Byrne’s full reply, published publicly, is worth reading. Byrne wrote to Ofcom: “Thanks. As has been explained to your agency, ad nauseam, the United Kingdom lost the American Revolutionary War. We are not in the mood to discuss the matter further, and have not been in the mood for 250 years. “I note for the record that, last time your agency sent my client a censorship fine, we responded with a hamster joke. Since you have now sent my client a giant fine, a fine so large that Mr. Whiskers’ enclosure is not big enough to contain it, we will need to send the fine to Mr. Whiskers’ giant hamster cousin, Nigel J. Whiskerford. Unfortunately, Nigel is out of the country this week, touring in Japan. Here’s a picture of Nigel in Tokyo, dressed up as Godzilla and holding an equally giant peanut. “Isn’t he just the cutest? “My client reserves all rights and waives none. Reserved rights include the right to sue you again and/or to respond to future correspondence with an even larger rodent, such as a marmot. “Or, maybe, you could just stop sending Americans stupid letters and acknowledge the sovereignty of the United States.” It is, by any measure, not how regulatory compliance correspondence usually reads. But then, Ofcom’s demands don’t really deserve a more serious reply. Byrne is meeting the regulator precisely at the level its letters warrant. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post UK Regulator Ofcom Has Fined 4chan £520,000 Under a Law That Doesn’t Apply in the US appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Joseph Foreman, better known as Afroman, walked out of an Ohio courthouse Wednesday having beaten a $4 million defamation lawsuit brought by the sheriff’s deputies who raided his home in 2022. The jury found in his favor on every count. Police executed a warrant, found nothing actionable, filed no charges, and left behind a broken door and gate. Foreman responded the way artists respond: he made songs about it. The deputies responded by suing him. “The whole raid was a mistake. All of this is their fault. If they hadn’t have wrongly raided my house, there would be no lawsuit. I would not know their names,” Foreman said. “They wouldn’t be on my home surveillance system, and there would be no songs, nothing.” The videos, which racked up more than 3 million views on YouTube, pulled directly from Foreman’s home security footage. They showed deputies breaking down his front door, rifling through his suit pockets, and lingering near a cake on the kitchen table. That last detail became a song title: “Lemon Pound Cake.” Another track went after the deputies personally and called them “crooked cops” over $400 that Foreman said went missing during the search. The deputies claimed the videos caused public harassment and damaged their reputations. One testified the videos questioned her gender and sexuality. A sergeant said his child came home crying after being hazed at school. Their attorney, Robert Klingler, told the jury that Foreman had lied about “these seven brave deputy sheriffs” for three years. “Even if somebody does something to you that hurts you, that you think is wrong,” Klingler argued, “that doesn’t justify telling intentional lies designed to hurt people.” What Klingler was describing as lies, a jury just classified as protected speech. Defense lawyer David Osborne put it plainly in closing: “No reasonable person would expect a police officer not to be criticized. They’ve been called names before.” The warrant that sent armed deputies through Afroman’s front door cited a drug and kidnapping investigation. No charges followed. Foreman was not even home at the time. His wife was, and she recorded parts of the search on her phone. His testimony was direct about what he believed he had the right to do: “Police officers shouldn’t be stealing civilians’ money. This whole thing is an outrage.” He told the court the raid traumatized his children, then aged 10 and 12, and that he used revenue from the diss tracks to cover the damage the deputies left behind. The lyrics in “Will You Help Me Repair My Door?” address the officers directly: “Did you find what you were looking for/ Would you like a slice of lemon pound cake/ You can take as much as you want to take/ There must be a big mistake.” Another passage: “The warrant said, ‘Narcotics and kidnapping’/ Are you kidding? I make my money rapping,” and “You crooked cops need to stop it/ There are no kidnapping victims in my suit pockets.” Judge Jonathan Hein read the verdict plainly: “In all circumstances, the jury finds in favor of the defendant; no plaintiff verdict prevailed.” Foreman walked outside and shouted: “We did it, America! Yeah, we did it! Freedom of speech! Right on! Right on!” He posted the clip to social media. The deputies who wanted him silenced gave him the material for that post. Seven public officials with law enforcement authority, a $4 million damages claim, and three years of litigation. That is a significant amount of institutional power to bring against one person for making songs about what police did in his house. The jury was not persuaded that it was justified. Foreman showed up to deliver his closing arguments in a red, white and blue American flag suit. For once, the outfit matched the occasion. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Afroman Wins Defamation Lawsuit Brought by Adams County Sheriff’s Deputies Over Videos and Songs About 2022 Home Raid appeared first on Reclaim The Net.