If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Washington wants a warning sticker on the tools that millions of Americans now use to make art, video, and writing, plus a federal agency standing by to punish anyone who leaves it off. Senator Brian Schatz reintroduced the AI Labeling Act on June 25, handing the Federal Trade Commission power to treat an unlabeled AI image as an unfair or deceptive act. John Curtis of Utah and Mark Warner of Virginia signed on as co-sponsors. We obtained a copy of the bill for you here. The reach goes well past what the word “label” suggests. Any company whose generative AI produces covered content would have to stamp that output twice. The first mark is a visible disclosure a person can read, the second a hidden machine-readable record of the system, its version, and the moment of creation. Large platforms would then have to carry that data forward, flag the content for users, and mark every chatbot as artificial. Skip a step and the FTC can come calling. “Covered AI-generated content” carries the weight of the whole bill and the definition stretches. It captures anything a generative system creates or substantially modifies so that the meaning shifts and a reasonable person would not assume a machine had a hand in it. A working group convened by the National Institute of Standards and Technology would spend a year deciding what that means in code, which detection tools count, and what else the hidden markers must store. The government here writes the definition, designs the label, and picks the enforcer. That is the shape of compelled speech, and courts have grown wary of it. The ACLU has argued that forcing a disclaimer onto lawful synthetic media is no different from ordering a comedian to announce a parody before the joke lands. FIRE names the constitutional defect directly, warning that label mandates turn speakers into “government mouthpieces for views they may not hold.” The courts have already run this experiment. A federal judge blocked California’s election-deepfake statute in Kohls v. Bonta, ruling that its restrictions and disclosure demands on AI political content violated the First Amendment. Satire, parody, and criticism of officials keep their protection when the tool that made them is new. Enforcement is where the bill grows teeth. A separate section bars anyone from stripping, faking, or trafficking in tools that defeat the disclosures, and it opens the courthouse to the US Attorney General, state attorneys general, and private companies alike. Statutory damages climb to $2,500 for every act of circumvention, or $25,000 per violation, tripled for repeat conduct inside three years. The text promises no prior restraint on protected speech, though the machinery bolted around it points the other way. Only the largest platforms sit inside the net, those with at least 10 million monthly US users or $1.5 billion in revenue. That hands the compliance job to the same few companies that already decide what most people see online. The FTC would also gain authority to write rules and bless “safe harbors,” a standing invitation to widen the mandate later. The backers are open about what they want. “People deserve to know whether the videos, photos, and content they see and read online are real or not,” Schatz said, calling his bill simple. Curtis pitched “clear, commonsense transparency standards,” and Warner said it was “time for the U.S. to catch up.” The Authors Guild, SAG-AFTRA, the National Association of Voice Actors, and Public Citizen lined up behind it, each with a stake in marking machine work as machine work. Good intentions do not settle the constitutional question. A rule that compels a speaker to attach the government’s chosen message to lawful expression starts on the wrong side of the First Amendment, whatever that message happens to be. The scams and fakes the bill points at are already illegal as fraud, forgery, and defamation, reachable without a permanent order that every AI creator wear a federal tag. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Washington Wants a Government Label on AI Speech 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. The Canadian government drew up a plan to take individual citizens to court over what they post online. That plan sat inside a 35-page internal memo from the Department of Industry, most of it blacked out before the public could see it. Blacklock’s Reporter pried the document loose through an Access to Information request. Dated March 31 and titled “Misinformation And Disinformation Strategy,” it belongs to the department run by Minister Mélanie Joly, known as ISED. The memo weighs “legal action” against people who post what the government calls “false and misleading information” on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. What kind of legal action? The redactions hide that. What survives the black ink is the logic. “This strategy seeks to uphold the integrity of and public trust in government information,” the memo says. The department is appointing itself guardian of its own reputation, with lawsuits as one available tool. Here is who would decide. ISED itself would judge whether a post is “factually incorrect, misleading or out of context.” The same department that dislikes a post gets to rule on whether the post is true. No court makes that call first and no independent reviewer checks the work. The government writes the definition of misinformation and then enforces it against the people it defines. The memo describes any punishment as “proportionate and subject to senior level approval.” That language reassures no one. Proportion gets measured by the same officials pushing the complaint, and senior approval means a manager signs off, not a judge. Officials already watch. Managers “already monitor the department’s official social media channels and media outlets on a daily basis for comments and recurring inaccuracies,” the memo says. The strategy would push that surveillance from reaction toward “prevention and early detection,” catching disfavored speech earlier in its life. The chilling effect writes itself. A citizen who knows a federal department is reading posts, grading them for accuracy, and holding a lawsuit in reserve thinks twice before typing. The threat does the work a courtroom never has to. The government’s own files admit the problem. Its research found Canadians feel capable of spotting fake news and do not want Ottawa “declaring what is true or not.” The memo concedes that answering misinformation can amplify it, and that going after individuals risks “further backlash.” The department understood the public would object and mapped the plan anyway. Compare the tune from four years back. This same Liberal government declared that “the rights and freedoms that individuals have offline must also be protected online.” That promise reads differently next to a memo about suing people for their posts. Ottawa has not explained how the monitoring runs, how often lawsuits were floated, or what a post must do to land on the department’s radar. The memo sets no threshold. It names no outside check. It leaves a federal department free to decide which citizens spoke falsely and what the price should be. A government sure of its facts answers speech with more speech. This one drafted a plan to answer speech with lawyers. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Canada Considered Suing Citizens Over “False and Misleading” Social Media Posts 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. Every new car and van sold across the European Union will watch its driver from July 7, when an infrared camera aimed at the person behind the wheel becomes a legal condition of sale. The requirement reaches tens of millions of vehicles a year, and it arrives wrapped in the language of safety. The rule goes by Advanced Driver Distraction Warning, or ADDW, and is inside the bloc’s General Safety Regulation, formally 2019/2144. Carmakers have had to fit it to new vehicle types since July 2024. From July 7, 2026, they must fit it to every new car and van that reaches the market. The camera tracks where a driver’s eyes are aimed and how the head is positioned, then judges whether the driver has looked away from the road for too long. Glance off for more than six seconds at speeds between 20 and 50 km/h and the system has to warn you. Above 50 km/h the allowance shrinks to three and a half seconds. Each warning has to be visible, reinforced by sound or a physical buzz, and it grows more insistent the longer the software believes your attention has drifted. Brussels sells this as lives saved. The Commission expects the wider safety package to prevent more than 25,000 deaths and 140,000 serious injuries by 2038, part of a long-running target called Vision Zero that aims to end road fatalities by 2050. “The EU is a world leader in general safety rules for vehicles,” said Thierry Breton, then the bloc’s internal market commissioner, as the broader rules took effect. “We ensure that innovative technology solutions can be used to improve safety on our roads.” Set the messaging aside and a plainer fact remains. A law now requires a camera to face you for the entire time you drive. It is not an option you enable or a feature you pay to add, but a standard condition of owning a new vehicle. The regulation does carry a limit. The system cannot use facial recognition or any biometric identification of the people inside the car. The data it generates is not allowed to leave the vehicle, and it cannot be passed to third parties. The camera may know where your eyes are aimed while being forbidden from knowing who you are. Those are somewhat favorable rules, but they are also just settings. Data can get stolen or accidentally swept up. A later revision could loosen any of them. Regulators who mandate the hardware today can widen its job tomorrow and, by then, the expensive, fiddly work of wiring a camera into every cabin will already be finished. Once the lens is in and the software is running, the open question stops being whether cars can watch their occupants and turns into what else that watching should cover. None of this depends on pretending that texting at 120 km/h is safe. The worry is normalization. A generation of drivers is about to grow up treating a machine that studies their face as an ordinary part of travel, the way we came to shrug at always-on phones and doorbell cameras that report home. Consent gets manufactured through sheer repetition. Someone also has to pay for the hardware and that someone is the buyer. Cameras, processors, and the code that runs them cost money, and the bill lands on the sticker price of cars that already cost plenty. Switzerland and other markets that track EU rules will follow, stretching the reach of the mandate well past the bloc’s own borders. There is a strange asymmetry in how Europe treats machines that watch drivers against machines that drive. Advanced self-driving features that their makers say cut crashes face tight restrictions on European roads, while a camera trained on your eyes becomes compulsory. As dealerships across the continent open their doors this month, buyers are agreeing to more than a set of keys. They are accepting a camera on every trip, on the promise that the footage stays in the cabin and the software only ever cares about their eyes. That promise holds right until the day someone decides it no longer should. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post EU Mandates Driver-Facing Cameras in New Cars From Today 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. California wants to place a permanent watcher inside every 3D printer sold in the state. AB 2047 would force manufacturers to install what its authors call “firearm blocking technology,” software that inspects whatever a person tries to print and refuses to build anything a state-approved algorithm flags as a gun part. On June 30 the Senate Public Safety Committee voted the measure forward, moving a home-surveillance requirement closer to becoming California law. We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.  The scan would run on the machine in your garage or classroom and it would answer to Sacramento rather than to you. Five Democrats backed the bill in committee and one Republican opposed it. It now waits for the Senate Appropriations Committee when lawmakers return from summer recess, after already clearing the Assembly in May and the Senate Judiciary Committee in June. The Democrat who wrote AB 2047, Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, chairs the California State Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee. Her own committee exists to shield residents from constant data collection and her signature bill would hardwire always-on scanning into a household device. The software the bill leans on barely exists outside one company’s sales deck. That company, Physna, sent a representative to testify for the measure. David Tobin, executive producer for the 3D Printing Nerd YouTube channel, told the committee that he and his peers had already tried it. “There’s one company on the planet that supports this technology, and it’s called Physna,” he said. “They brought their salesman here last week to talk to you about it. We’ve all used their technology. It does not work and do what they’re saying it does.” He then described the flaw in asking an algorithm to read intent from geometry. “There’s a pen on your desks. That’s an object. That does not have intent. No object has intent. We instill intent. That could be a pen, it could be a tracheotomy tool. It’s a tube.” Physna’s business ties give the mandate an uglier shape. The company has announced a partnership with Palantir, the data integration contractor, and it won a Missile Defense Agency contract for its 3D data analysis work. A vendor built around military and intelligence pattern-matching stands to gain a guaranteed market if California requires its scanning inside consumer hardware. The blocking software would also refuse benign and lifesaving work because a gun part and a medical part can share a shape. Senator Kelly Seyarto, the only committee member to vote no, argued the law would miss the people it targets while punishing everyone else. Criminals will buy printers out of state or strip the software, he said, and the design leaves room for “way too much collateral damage” among lawful users. “You need to go after the people that are breaking laws, not after the technology that they use, because they’ll continue to use that technology whether you make new laws that affect everything else or not,” he said. One yes vote arrived with a startling admission. Senator Sasha Renee Perez said she did not “have a lot of information or knowledge about” 3D printing, then asked whether the bill even applied to all types of 3D printers. She said she was learning about the measure “in real time” as witnesses were “explaining this to me and as I was reading the bill last night.” She acknowledged a constituent’s surveillance fears and granted that “we have real concerns about privacy and data right now.” Then she voted for it. More than 200 people showed up to fight the bill, among them engineers, small business owners, disability advocates, medical professionals, and other groups. Much of the open-source printing world came too, from RepRap founder Adrian Bowyer to Prusa Research founder Josef Prusa. They share a refusal to accept the premise sitting at the core of AB 2047, that a machine you own should treat you as a suspect and report to the government about what you make at home. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post California Wants a Watcher Inside Every 3D Printer 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. The European Parliament spent time earlier this year dismantling Europe’s mass scanning of private messages, but on Tuesday it voted to hand that same regime a second life. By approving an urgent procedure requested by the European People’s Party, the chamber cleared the path for a decisive vote on Thursday, the final sitting day before the summer recess, when attendance thins and the arithmetic tilts toward the people who want your chats scanned. At this late stage of the file, known as second reading, the Council’s text can only be amended or thrown out if an absolute majority of all sitting members, 361 votes, lines up against it. Fall short of that and the law passes automatically, with no affirmative endorsement required. What Parliament rejected outright in March would return not because a majority backed it, but because too any members had left early for summer break. Parliament had not been shy about it the first time. Members tried to salvage the rules with tight limits, demanding judicial authorization and confining any scanning to actual suspects, then watched trilogue talks collapse when national governments refused the safeguards. The extension went down 311 votes to 228, and the ePrivacy derogation expired on April 4. US companies including Meta, Google, and Microsoft lost their legal cover to comb through the private messages of Europeans at will. Reviving a defeated file is not how this normally works, which is why diplomats reached for the word “unprecedented.” The reopening traces back to Parliament’s own president, Roberta Metsola, who urged EU leaders in June to press ahead despite her chamber’s stated position and her own political group’s vote against the text. Her party now justifies the rush by pointing to a “legal gap” left behind by the expired regulation. That gap turns out to be thinner than advertised. Germany has recorded no unusual drop in abuse reports since the derogation lapsed, and companies have kept scanning voluntarily, exactly as they said they would. By the EU’s own count, more than 60 percent of reports come from public posts and cloud storage, categories the old regulation never covered. The fight is really about private, person-to-person messages, the part of your digital life where the expectation of confidentiality is strongest and the case for automated inspection weakest. The Council’s own members are talking out of both sides. Italy filed an official statement this week warning against exactly this kind of mass surveillance by private providers and its threat to encryption. Then it voted for the text anyway. “How absurd this process has become is evident in Italy’s behavior in the Council,” said Patrick Breyer, the former Pirate Party member who has tracked the file for years, in a press release sent to Reclaim The Net. Even the lawmaker formally steering the file has refused to play along. Birgit Sippel, the Socialist rapporteur, called the governments’ move an unfair maneuver and drew a line under it. “As rapporteur, I will not support an extension on the Member States’ terms,” she said, warning that reopening the interim question endangers the slow progress toward a permanent framework. Over the weekend, two cybersecurity researchers reminded members that the technical case has not budged. Carmela Troncoso of the Max Planck Institute and Bart Preneel of KU Leuven wrote urging a no vote on the fast track, citing detection tools whose error rates stay unacceptably high and pointing to far more targeted methods that already exist. They noted that over 800 researchers had signed earlier warnings, a level of agreement that rarely forms around one proposal. Some members tried to stop the procedure on the floor. Martin Sonneborn demanded that Metsola rule the urgent motion inadmissible under Parliament’s own rules, brandishing a printed copy of the rulebook. “I tried to stop the Chat Control today,” he wrote afterward. The procedural fight hides a bigger cost. Parliament has been pushing a genuinely different approach to protecting children online, one built on detection orders aimed at suspects instead of blanket scanning left to industry’s discretion, a dedicated center to pull known abuse material off the public web, and security requirements. Keeping the old voluntary regime alive drains the pressure that might move governments toward it. Prolonging the status quo does not protect children better. It lets the least effective and most invasive method coast along because no one has to defend it on the merits. That is the decision facing the chamber on Thursday. Rejecting the text requires 361 members to appear and vote no. Silence or absence counts as consent. The regime at stake once let hundreds of millions of Europeans send a message without a machine reading it first, and the same setup that flags a suspected image can be repointed at a nationality, a demographic, or a political affiliation without any change to the underlying tools. Parliament reached that conclusion clearly in March, and whether it holds through a half-empty Thursday afternoon is what the vote will settle. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post EU Parliament Revives Chat Surveillance for Thursday Vote appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.