If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The European Parliament killed Chat Control on Thursday, rejecting the automated scanning of private photos and text messages by a single vote. One vote separated Europeans from continued mass surveillance of their private communications by American tech companies. After that razor-thin margin knocked out the most invasive provisions, the remaining proposal failed to reach a majority at all. The vote came after some forces in Parliament tried to force a repeat of a decision already made on March 13, when lawmakers had already rejected blanket scanning. The push for a re-vote was an attempt by the EPP to rewrite the outcome after negotiations failed, a maneuver that MEP Markéta Gregorová called “spitting in the face of their colleagues and citizens.” Starting 4 April, the EU derogation that allowed Meta, Google, and Microsoft to voluntarily scan every private message sent by European citizens expires permanently. The legal basis for warrantless bulk scanning of your people’s data disappears. What the surveillance regime actually did The expiring regulation, EU interim regulation 2021/1232, gave US corporations permission to read your messages at scale. Three types of scanning were authorized. Hash scanning matched images against databases of known illegal material and generated over 90% of reports. Automated AI assessment targeted images and videos that the algorithms hadn’t seen before. And text analysis trawled through private chat conversations looking for suspicious language. All of it happened without a warrant, without individual suspicion and without meaningful European oversight. The AI-based scanning of unknown images and texts was, by every technical measure, broken. A newly published study from researchers at KU Leuven and Ghent University delivered the technical confirmation. They reverse-engineered Microsoft’s PhotoDNA, the standard algorithm used by tech companies for Chat Control, and found fundamental weaknesses. Their verdict was damning. The software is “unreliable.” Criminals can make illegal images invisible to the scanner with minimal changes, like adding a simple border, while harmless images can be manipulated to falsely flag innocent users to the police. The most computationally demanding attacks take under ten minutes on a personal laptop. The numbers that buried Chat Control The EU Commission’s own 2025 evaluation report reads like a catalogue of failure. Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office reported that 48% of all flagged chats were criminally irrelevant. Nearly half of everything this surveillance system surfaced was junk, private conversations between innocent people exposed to law enforcement for nothing. That flood of false reports consumed investigative resources that could have gone toward actual cases. Around 40% of investigations triggered in Germany targeted teenagers sharing images consensually. The system built to protect children was criminalizing them. And the whole apparatus was already collapsing under its own logic. As messaging services adopted end-to-end encryption, the number of reports dropped 50% since 2022. The Commission’s report found no measurable link between mass scanning and actual convictions. Years of warrantless surveillance of hundreds of millions of people, and the EU’s own data shows it didn’t work. In a statement to Reclaim The Net, Patrick Breyer, the former Pirate Party MEP who has fought Chat Control for years, called today’s result historic. “This historic day brings tears of joy! The EU Parliament has buried Chat Control – a massive, hard-fought victory for the unprecedented resistance of civil society and citizens! The fact that a single vote tipped the scales against the extremely error-prone text and image search shows: Every single vote in Parliament and every call from concerned citizens counted! “We have stopped a broken and illegal system. Once our investigators are no longer drowning in a flood of false and long-known suspicion reports from the US, resources will finally be freed up to hunt down organized abuse rings in a targeted and covert manner. Trying to protect children with mass surveillance is like desperately trying to mop up the floor while leaving the faucet running. We must finally turn off the tap! This means genuine child protection through a paradigm shift: Providers must technically prevent cybergrooming from the outset through secure app design. Illegal material on the internet must be proactively tracked down and deleted directly at the source. That is what truly protects children. “But beware, we can only celebrate briefly today: They will try again. The negotiations for a permanent Chat Control regulation are continuing under high pressure, and soon the planned age verification for messengers threatens to end anonymous communication on the internet. The fight for digital freedom must go on!” The next threat is already moving Today’s win is real but narrow. Trilogue negotiations on a permanent child protection regulation, the one digital rights groups call Chat Control 2.0, continue under severe time pressure. EU governments still want “voluntary” mass scanning, a label that functions as political cover for the same bulk surveillance the Parliament just rejected. And the next attack on digital privacy is already on the agenda. Lawmakers will soon negotiate whether messenger services and app stores must implement mandatory age verification. That means government ID uploads or facial scans before you can send a message. Anonymous communication, the kind that protects whistleblowers, journalists, dissidents, and anyone who simply doesn’t want to hand their identity to a tech company, would effectively cease to exist across the EU. The Parliament won this fight by a single vote. The surveillance apparatus that governments and the Commission have spent years building doesn’t dismantle itself because of one close call. It comes back, rebranded, repackaged, pushed through quieter procedural channels. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post European Parliament Rejects Mass “Chat Control” Surveillance by Single Vote 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 When Government Hacks Go Wandering appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The Supreme Court has unanimously refused to let the recording industry turn internet providers into copyright enforcers with the power to cut millions of people off from modern life. The ruling, handed down Wednesday in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment, kills a legal theory that would have given ISPs one rational choice when they received a copyright complaint: sever the connection first, figure out the truth later. We obtained a copy of the order for you here. All nine justices thankfully agreed that Cox Communications bears no liability for the piracy of its subscribers. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, stated: “Under our precedents, a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights.” The real significance of the ruling isn’t what it means for Cox’s balance sheet. It’s what prevents it from happening to everyone who depends on an internet connection to live, work, and communicate, which in 2026 is functionally all of us. Consider what the recording industry was actually proposing. Sony Music Entertainment and more than 50 other labels, representing artists like Sabrina Carpenter, Givēon, and Doechii, wanted courts to hold ISPs financially liable for not disconnecting users accused of piracy. Not convicted. Accused. The accusations themselves came from an automated system paid for by the Recording Industry Association of America, which hires an anti-piracy company to blast notices at internet providers whenever its software detects possible infringement. Nobody reviews these notices with any care. Nobody checks whether the flagged activity was actually illegal, whether it fell under fair use, or whether the person named on the account was even the one responsible. Under the legal standard the labels wanted, an ISP that received enough of these automated complaints and didn’t disconnect the account could face catastrophic financial liability. A Virginia jury bought that theory in 2019 and hit Cox with a verdict of over $1 billion. The incentive structure that kind of liability creates is terrifying if you think it through for more than a few seconds. When an ISP faces billion-dollar exposure for not cutting people off, the only financially rational response is to start cutting people off aggressively. Cox, the largest private broadband provider in the country with more than six million homes and businesses on its network, tried to explain the human consequences. Its lawyers argued that disconnecting service “after receiving automated notices accusing an unknown user at a home or business” of infringement would force the company to kill internet access at entire locations based on a “bare accusation” against a single user. A family of five loses their connection because one teenager allegedly downloaded a song. A hospital serving hundreds of patients and their families goes dark because someone on the guest Wi-Fi triggered an automated flag. A university campus gets throttled or disconnected because students were doing what students have always done. “That notion turns Internet providers into Internet police and jeopardizes Internet access for millions of users,” Cox told the Court. The ACLU put the stakes in plain terms: “Parents’ Internet access…may be terminated based on the conduct of their children – over even their children’s friends. A hospital that offers internet access to dozens or even hundreds of patients and their families could find critical access shut off.” That’s what the Fourth Circuit’s legal standard actively encouraged. The appeals court had upheld Cox’s contributory liability while tossing the $1 billion damages figure, creating a rule that treated an ISP’s failure to disconnect accused infringers as grounds for massive financial exposure. If the Supreme Court had let that stand, every broadband provider in America would have been weighing the cost of a lawsuit against the cost of disconnecting a customer. The customer would lose that calculation every time. And this would have landed hardest on the people with the least power to fight back. A corporate law firm with a dedicated IT department and legal counsel can challenge a wrongful disconnection. A single parent relying on one broadband connection for remote work, their kids’ schooling, telehealth appointments, and every other essential function that now runs through the internet cannot. The recording industry’s preferred enforcement model would have created a system where the most vulnerable internet users bore the greatest risk of losing access based on the flimsiest evidence. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Supreme Court Blocks Recording Industry’s Push to Cut Millions Off the Internet Over Piracy Claims appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Two years ago, President Donald Trump told Congress to “KILL FISA.” On Wednesday, he asked them to keep it alive for another 18 months, no changes needed. The president posted on Truth Social, urging lawmakers to pass a clean extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the provision that lets US spy agencies intercept the communications of foreigners abroad without a warrant but has many times been used, directly or indirectly, to gather data on Americans. It means no new privacy protections. No warrant requirement for searching Americans’ data. No closing of the loopholes that let intelligence agencies buy your browsing history from data brokers instead of getting a judge’s approval. Trump framed the ask around the ongoing military operations in Iran. “With the ongoing successful Military activities against the Terrorist Iranian Regime, it is more important than ever that we remain vigilant, PROTECT our Homeland, Troops, and Diplomats stationed abroad, and maintain our ability to quickly stop bad actors seeking to cause harm to our People and our Country,” he wrote. “The fact is, whether you like FISA or not, it is extremely important to our Military,” he added. “I have spoken to many Generals about this, and they consider it vital.” The details of what Section 702 actually does tend to get buried under urgency. The provision nominally targets foreigners overseas, but the collection process vacuums up American communications too, every time a US citizen emails, texts, or calls someone abroad. Those intercepted messages sit in classified databases. FBI agents can then search that data using Americans’ names, phone numbers, and email addresses, all without a warrant. The FBI ran those warrantless searches more than 278,000 times in a single year, according to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The agency’s own inspector general found searches targeting peaceful protesters, sitting lawmakers, congressional staff, thousands of campaign donors, journalists, and at least one judge. The 2024 reauthorization bill, known as RISAA, introduced some changes to search procedures. It did not add a warrant requirement. A House amendment that would have required one failed in a 212-212 tie, the thinnest possible margin. Speaker Mike Johnson broke that tie against the warrant. Now Johnson is back, pushing the same approach. He told reporters Wednesday that the US does not “have the abuses that we had before,” and that “FISA as currently constituted, as we amended with 56 major reforms, is working as desired, and we do not have the abuses we did before.” The claim that 56 reforms solved the problem deserves scrutiny. Those reforms limited the number of agents who can search the database and required supervisor approval before reviewing information on Americans. They did not require judicial oversight. A supervisor’s sign-off is not a warrant. An internal checklist is not the Fourth Amendment. Trump’s pivot on FISA has pulled some notable Republicans with him. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, who voted against reauthorization in 2024 specifically because the warrant amendment failed, reversed last week. He now supports the extension, calling it “a whole different context today.” The context he means is the Iran conflict, not any change to how the surveillance system treats Americans’ data. President Trump himself acknowledged his own history as a surveillance target, noting that his 2016 campaign was spied on using a different FISA authority. He said his administration has “worked tirelessly to ensure these reforms are being aggressively executed at every level.” He had called for the extension to preserve the “Critical and Common Sense Reforms that were made in the last Reauthorization of FISA,” writing: “When used properly, FISA is an effective tool to keep Americans safe. For these reasons, I have called for a clean 18-month extension, HOWEVER, the Critical and Common Sense Reforms that were made in the last Reauthorization of FISA must remain intact to protect the American People from abuses. Nobody understands this better than me.” The bill still faces resistance. Section 702 expires April 20, and Johnson was forced to delay the expected vote to mid-April after hard-line Republicans refused to fall in line. Rep. Keith Self has called the warrantless surveillance of US citizens a fundamental privacy issue. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna has pledged to oppose the legislation unless Congress attaches the SAVE America Act, a voter ID bill, creating a separate legislative standoff within the surveillance fight. Rep. Lauren Boebert put it most simply. While there were 56 reforms last year, she wants to see 57. “I want warrants,” she said Wednesday. That demand, a warrant before the government searches Americans’ private communications, came one vote from passing in 2024. Three reform bills currently sit before Congress: the SAFE Act, PLEWSA, and GSRA. Each would add a warrant requirement for queries involving Americans’ data. The clean extension ignores all three. The pattern repeats every time Section 702 comes up for renewal. Intelligence officials warn that any reform will create dangerous gaps. Lawmakers who promised to fight for warrants find reasons to wait. The deadline pressure makes “just extend it” sound reasonable. And the warrant requirement, the single reform that would bring this surveillance program in line with the Fourth Amendment’s basic protections against unreasonable search, gets pushed to the next cycle. Congress built the two-year sunset into Section 702 specifically, so lawmakers would have regular opportunities to add meaningful protections. Instead, those deadlines have become opportunities to extend mass surveillance with fewer questions asked each time. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Trump Backs FISA Section 702 Extension, Drops Privacy Reform appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Priscilla Villarreal built a following in the way modern news often grows now. Not through printing presses or broadcast towers, but through a Facebook page that drew more than 200,000 people into its orbit. In Laredo, Texas, under the name La Gordiloca, she reported quickly, conversationally, sometimes uncomfortably close to the raw edge of events. In 2017, she texted a police officer to confirm the identities of two victims, one from a suicide, one from a car accident. She received answers. She published them. Months later, she was arrested. The law used against her had been sitting unused for 23 years. It makes it a felony to solicit nonpublic information from a government official “with intent to obtain a benefit.” In Villarreal’s case, authorities argued that the benefit was popularity, more followers, more attention, more reach. In other words, doing well at the job became the job’s alleged crime. A state judge dismissed the charges, finding the statute too vague to stand. That might have sounded like a resolution, the system correcting itself in the end. Instead, it became the beginning of a second act. Villarreal filed a civil rights lawsuit against the officials involved in her arrest. The response was immediate and familiar within legal circles: “Qualified immunity.” The doctrine protects government officials from liability unless there is already a court decision declaring nearly identical conduct unconstitutional. No case had ever addressed the idea of arresting a journalist for asking a question over text. A three-judge panel initially sided with Villarreal, stating, “If the First Amendment means anything, it surely means that a citizen journalist has the right to ask a public official a question, without fear of being imprisoned. Yet that is exactly what happened here: Priscilla Villarreal was put in jail for asking a police officer a question. If that is not an obvious violation of the Constitution, it’s hard to imagine what would be.” The clarity of that statement did not last. The full 5th Circuit reversed the decision. In a 9-7 ruling, the court concluded that the officers and prosecutors could reasonably believe they were enforcing the law. Judge Edith Jones wrote that it was inappropriate to “portray her as a martyr for the sake of journalism,” adding that Villarreal had skirted the Texas law “to capitalize on others’ tragedies to propel her reputation and career.” The focus moved. Not just what happened, but who it happened to. The Supreme Court Steps Aside When the case reached the Supreme Court, the justices declined to hear it. Villarreal’s First Amendment claim effectively ended on Monday. We obtained a copy of the order list for you here. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented. Her words were a reminder of how ordinary the underlying act had been. “This case implicates one of the most basic journalistic practices of them all: asking sources within the government for information. Each day, countless journalists follow this practice, seeking comment, confirmation, or even ‘scoops’ from governmental sources,” she wrote. “This was a blatant First Amendment violation. No reasonable officer would have thought that he could have arrested Villarreal, consistent with the Constitution, for asking the questions she asked.” She described the outcome as “a perverse scheme in which officials can arrest someone for protected activity, decline to appeal a trial court’s decision declaring the statute unconstitutional (as the county did here), and use qualified immunity to avoid liability by citing back to that statute.” The structure revealed by the case is difficult to ignore. An arrest is made under a questionable law. Charges are later dropped. No definitive ruling emerges on the arrest itself. When challenged, officials point to the lack of prior rulings as protection. The result is a kind of legal loop. The act may be unconstitutional, yet no one is held accountable for treating it as if it were not. What remains is the ripple effect. Journalism depends on questions. Sometimes, persistent and inconvenient ones. When asking those questions carries even a distant possibility of arrest, the calculation changes. Not dramatically, not all at once, but enough. Enough to hesitate. Enough to reconsider sending the message at all. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post SCOTUS Rejects Citizen Journalist’s Case Against Officials Who Arrested Her for Asking Police Questions appeared first on Reclaim The Net.