If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Preston Byrne is a dual-qualified English solicitor and American attorney. He is currently suing the British speech regulator on behalf of 4chan in US federal court. And when Britain’s internet regulator, Ofcom, sent his client a £520,000 fine for the crime of not checking the age of every visitor, Byrne responded by emailing them an image of a giant hamster dressed as Godzilla, holding a peanut. The hamster’s name is Nigel J. Whiskerford. He is the giant cousin of Mr. Whiskers, the regular-sized hamster Byrne sent Ofcom the last time they tried to fine 4chan. The email also noted that 4chan “reserves all rights and waives none,” including “the right to sue you again and/or to respond to future correspondence with an even larger rodent, such as a marmot.” This is the funniest thing to happen in international regulatory law since, well, ever. But the hamster was never the point. The point was that the British government spent £169 million building an online censorship apparatus, staffed it with hundreds of bureaucrats, gave it the power to fine companies up to 10% of their global revenue, and the first time it tried to use those powers against someone who could fight back, it was defeated by a picture of a rodent in a lizard costume. Which brings us to the Free Speech Act 2026, published this week by the Adam Smith Institute. Byrne wrote it, along with two co-authors named Elijah Granet and Michael Reiners, and it is, without exaggeration, a proposal to burn down the entire British censorship state and salt the earth where it stood. Seven Acts of Parliament repealed. Ofcom’s online safety empire dismantled. Every conviction under the repealed laws annulled. The whole lot. Gone. Finished. Replaced with a simple statutory right that says: the state cannot punish you for speaking. It is magnificent. And it will be fought with every weapon available by every institution that currently profits from telling you what you’re allowed to say. Britain Pretends It Has Free Speech “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom, and it will last for a very, very long time.” That was Prime Minister Keir Starmer, speaking to US President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance in the Oval Office in February 2025. Seven months later, five armed police officers arrested Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport. Linehan is an Irish comedy writer. He created Father Ted. He created The IT Crowd. His crime was posting three tweets from Arizona. His original bail condition was that he could not use X while in the UK. Even Starmer admitted the police might have gone a bit far. He did not, naturally, change the law that sent them. This is what “free speech” looks like in Britain, and it has looked like this for quite some time. Nobody was paying attention because the people being arrested were usually not famous comedy writers who could generate international headlines. They were ordinary people. The sort of people governments find it very easy to prosecute because nobody important will kick up a fuss. Freedom of information requests compiled by The Times found that over 12,000 people were arrested under the Communications Act and the Malicious Communications Act in 2023. Twelve thousand people. That is 30 arrests a day, every day, for posting things on the internet that someone, somewhere, found “grossly offensive.” The maximum sentence is two years in prison. For writing something rude on Facebook. You could burgle a house and get less. And these are just the arrests. The real damage is invisible. Polling by YouGov for Prospect magazine found that nearly half of Britons say they cannot say what they think about important issues. In 2026. In a country whose Prime Minister flew to the White House to announce, with a straight face, that free speech is one of Britain’s “founding values.” A Brief History of Britain Not Having Free Speech Starmer’s claim that Britain has “had free speech for a very, very long time” is, to put it charitably, historically creative. It is the kind of statement you make when you are confident that nobody in the room has read a book. The first law against free expression in England was the Statute of Westminster in 1275. It made it a crime to say anything that brought the King into “hatred or contempt.” The Treason Act of 1351 made criticizing the Crown punishable by death. When the printing press appeared, the Crown immediately established a licensing monopoly to control it. Tom Paine published The Rights of Man in 1791 and was convicted of seditious libel in absentia. He had to flee to France to avoid prison. Over 200,000 copies of his book sold anyway, because the British people have always been more committed to free speech than the British state. After the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, Parliament passed the Six Acts, which tightened seditious libel laws and imposed taxes on newspapers to prevent the working class from reading them. Richard Carlile was jailed for three years for publishing articles about Peterloo. His wife kept publishing while he served his sentence. The British spirit of free expression has never been a gift from the government. It has always been an act of defiance against it. The Bill of Rights of 1689, which everyone likes to wave about as evidence of Britain’s ancient liberties, guaranteed freedom of speech in Parliament. Not outside it. MPs could say what they liked. Everybody else could shut up or go to prison. Seditious libel was not formally abolished until 2009. Blasphemous libel survived until 2008. When Parliament finally repealed them, the Ministry of Justice cheerfully acknowledged that their existence had been used by authoritarian governments around the world as justification for their own speech laws. Well done, Britain. Medieval censorship stayed on the books until the year the iPhone 3GS came out, and dictators were copying the homework the entire time. The honest version of Starmer’s Oval Office pitch would have been: “Britain has had a culture of people bravely speaking despite the law for a very, very long time, and a state apparatus dedicated to punishing them for it for roughly the same period.” The Machine That Ate People’s Rights The modern version of the censorship state didn’t appear overnight. It was assembled piece by piece, each component presented as a reasonable response to a genuine problem, each one drafted broadly enough to catch everything from death threats to bad jokes. The Public Order Act 1986 made it a crime to use “threatening, abusive or insulting” words likely to cause “harassment, alarm or distress.” Note the word “insulting.” Not threatening. Not violent. Insulting. The standard was the feelings of the person who heard you. If they were distressed, you were a criminal. If they were a particularly delicate soul who found everything distressing, you were especially criminal. Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 criminalized sending “grossly offensive” messages. The Malicious Communications Act 1988 covered “indecent or grossly offensive” material causing “distress or anxiety.” Each of these laws came with comforting rhetoric about harassment and public safety. Each one gave police the power to arrest someone for posting something rude on the internet. And arrest they did. Enthusiastically. The numbers doubled between 2017 and 2023. Less than one in ten arrests led to a conviction, which tells you everything about the real purpose. The arrest was the punishment. The knock on the door at six in the morning. The seized laptop. The months of uncertainty. The mugshot. The chilling effect, which is the polite term for terrorizing an entire population into silence by publicly destroying a handful of them. Then came the Online Safety Act 2023. This was supposed to be the Rolls-Royce of internet regulation. Parliament spent years on it. It turned out to be a clown car. The government gave Ofcom an estimated £169 million to build the enforcement machine. They hired hundreds of staff. They wrote codes of practice that run to thousands of pages. They gave themselves the power to fine companies up to £18 million or 10% of global revenue, whichever was higher. Criminal liability for directors. Business disruption measures. The works. Ofcom’s enforcement director, Suzanne Cater, declared that “2025 is the year of action” and promised to “drag them kicking and screaming into compliance.” The first major target was 4chan. 4chan’s lawyer sent back a hamster. Then sued Ofcom in federal court. Then, it started writing legislation to make it illegal for Ofcom to do what it was doing. The hamster went more viral than any Ofcom enforcement notice in history. It would be funny if it weren’t so expensive. British taxpayers paid for this. They paid for the staff, the investigations, the codes of practice, the enforcement programs, and the fines that will never be collected from a man who responds to regulatory correspondence with pictures of rodents. Meanwhile, the same taxpayers are being arrested at a rate of 30 a day for saying things on the internet that someone found offensive. Why They’ll Fight to Keep It The Free Speech Act would end all of this. And that is precisely why it will face the most ferocious opposition from the people who should be most ashamed of the current system. Start with Ofcom. You don’t spend £169 million building an empire and then let someone repeal it. Ofcom has staff. Ofcom has budgets. Ofcom has enforcement programs and codes of practice and a director who goes on the record promising to drag people kicking and screaming. They will, of course, frame it as being about the children. This is the rhetorical equivalent of a human shield. “If you repeal the Online Safety Act, children will see terrible things on the internet.” The Free Speech Act actually addresses this directly. It imposes a mandatory obligation on platforms to detect and remove child sexual abuse material and report it within 24 hours. What it removes is Ofcom’s power to censor legal speech. But that distinction, the difference between protecting children and controlling adults, is one that censors have spent the entire history of civilization trying to blur. Then there’s the government. Labour supported the Online Safety Act. Well, technically, the Conservatives passed it, but Labour has embraced it with the fervor of a convert who has just discovered religion. Admitting the whole thing was a mistake, that the censorship apparatus should be scrapped, that thousands of people were arrested for things that should never have been crimes: that would require a level of honesty from politicians that does not exist in nature. The Conservatives, meanwhile, had 14 years in government to do something about speech prosecutions. They did nothing. Rishi Sunak publicly opposed Scotland’s hate crime law. He did not repeal it. He did not pass alternative legislation. He made a disapproving face and moved on. The Conservative Party’s contribution to free speech in Britain has been roughly equivalent to expressing concern about a house on fire while holding the matches. And then there are the quiet beneficiaries. The lobbying groups that have discovered it’s much easier to get their opponents’ speech classified as “harmful” and deleted than to win an argument. The university administrators who have built entire departments around speech codes and training that the Free Speech Act would render illegal. The compliance industry, which makes a very comfortable living telling organizations how to avoid running afoul of speech laws that shouldn’t exist. These people are not going to send a letter saying “please don’t repeal the censorship that keeps me employed.” They’re going to send a letter saying, “if you repeal these laws, people will be harmed.” Same letter. Different gift wrap. The American Comparison They Don’t Want You to Make The Free Speech Act is modeled on the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. This comparison is useful because it immediately exposes the absurdity of every argument against it. The United States has 350 million people, more guns than people, a political culture that sometimes makes a Premier League locker room look civilized, and social media platforms that host every conceivable variety of unpleasant opinion. It manages all of this with a 45-word constitutional amendment that says, essentially: the government cannot punish you for speaking. America prosecutes genuine threats. America prosecutes fraud, perjury, and incitement to imminent violence. America protects children from exploitation. America does all of this without arresting comedy writers at airports or jailing women for tweets they deleted and apologized for. The argument that Britain cannot do what America has done for over two centuries is, when you think about it, an argument that the British people are somehow less mature than Americans. That they are too fragile to handle disagreement. That they need the government to protect them from opinions, like children who might hurt themselves if left alone with scissors. Anyone should find this argument deeply insulting, which in the current legal climate may actually be a criminal offense. What Happens Next The Bill was published this week. Any MP can pick it up. Byrne says a couple of parliamentarians know it’s coming. He told GB News that “this bill is designed to do something very simple: It gets the Government out of the business of policing the opinions of the British people.” The Bill’s authors frame the question as binary. “Do you want the UK to have a free speech right that is equivalent to the First Amendment?” Yes or no. No “yes, but.” No “in principle, subject to safeguards.” Yes or no. This will drive the political establishment absolutely insane, because the political establishment has spent decades perfecting the art of answering that question with a paragraph that sounds like yes but means no. The whole infrastructure of modern British censorship has been built on the proposition that free speech is wonderful, in theory, but that in practice there need to be rules about what people can say, and the rules need to be flexible, and someone needs to enforce them, and that someone needs a budget and a staff and the power to fine you into oblivion, and before you know it the country is spending £169 million and arresting 12,000 people a year and sending five armed officers to Heathrow to intercept a comedy writer who posted something rude from Arizona. The Free Speech Act says: stop. All of it. Now. Replace it with a right. Define the narrow exceptions. Let the courts handle the edges. Trust the British people to be adults. This is, admittedly, asking a great deal of a political class that has spent two decades building the opposite system. Ofcom will not go quietly. There are hundreds of people in Whitehall and beyond whose careers depend on the continued existence of laws that criminalize speaking your mind. The newspapers will fill with op-eds warning of the terrible consequences of allowing British people to say what they think without first checking whether someone, somewhere, might be upset. But half the population is afraid to speak. Twelve thousand people a year are arrested for words. A man was convicted for praying silently. A woman got 31 months in prison for a tweet she deleted within two hours. The Prime Minister tells the world Britain protects free speech fiercely, while the country he governs has been downgraded by international monitors to below “Open” status for the first time in history. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Britain’s Free Speech Crisis and the Bill That Would Fix It appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Police organizations across Illinois are fighting to preserve their access to facial recognition databases and other biometric surveillance tools. House Bill 5521, introduced by state Rep. Kelly Cassidy, would ban state and local law enforcement from using biometric identification technology, and 227 opponents have formally registered against the bill through the Illinois General Assembly’s witness slip system, compared with a single proponent. We obtained a copy of the bill for you here. The lopsided opposition count tells a familiar story. When biometric surveillance faces legislative limits anywhere in the country, police agencies and their allies flood the process. What it doesn’t tell you is why Illinois residents might want these protections, or what happens to the millions of people whose biometric data sits in government databases with no meaningful restrictions on how it gets used. HB 5521 would bar law enforcement from obtaining, retaining, possessing, accessing, or using biometric identification systems. That includes facial recognition, iris scanners, voiceprints, and fingerprint-matching software. The bill also closes a workaround that agencies currently exploit, prohibiting them from contracting with third parties, other government agencies, or federal agencies to access biometric data on their behalf. Fingerprints remain part of the bill’s definition of biometric identifiers, but the ban carves out specific exceptions: police can still fingerprint someone after an arrest or conviction, collect forensic evidence at crime scenes, run employment background checks, and verify their own identity on work devices. What they can’t do is trawl fingerprint databases as a general investigative tool, searching for matches against the biometric data of people who haven’t been arrested or charged with anything. The bill would also shut down one of the most significant surveillance pipelines in the state. The Secretary of State’s facial recognition database has long been a go-to resource for police agencies across Illinois. Every person who gets a driver’s license or state ID has their photograph fed into that system, which law enforcement can currently search without the knowledge or consent of the person being identified. Under HB 5521, the Secretary of State could only use facial recognition for verifying someone’s identity when issuing a mobile driver’s license or ID card. That means millions of Illinoisans would no longer have their license photos treated as entries in a police surveillance database simply because they wanted to drive legally. More: Angela Lipps Spent 108 Days in Jail Because a Facial Recognition Algorithm Was Wrong Illinois already has one of the strongest biometric privacy laws in the country, the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which regulates private-sector use of biometric data but does not restrict government or police agencies. The state told corporations they couldn’t harvest your face scan without consent, then left a gap wide enough for every police department in Illinois to scan that same face through a government database with zero oversight. HB 5521 closes that gap. It grants individuals a private right of action to sue for violations, allowing for damages and the deletion of their biometric data, and empowers the Attorney General to enforce the provisions. Cassidy also pushed back on the argument that facial recognition is reliable enough to justify mass biometric surveillance. “Rather than look at anecdotes, we should know that facial recognition technology is demonstrably inaccurate. It is curious that in discussing this issue, we hear about particularly heinous and troubling crimes, but nothing about people being misidentified by facial recognition technology and held for hours (if not days) based on system errors. House Bill 5521 does not limit state and local police from investigating crimes. It simply protects the privacy of millions of Illinois residents simply because they have an Illinois driver’s license.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Illinois Police Fight Bill to Ban Facial Recognition Use appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Mexico’s government wants you to believe that handing over your fingerprints, iris scans, and facial data is voluntary. President Claudia Sheinbaum has said so publicly. But by July 2026, every one of the country’s roughly 130 million mobile phone lines must be linked to a biometric national ID, and unregistered numbers get suspended on July 1. Refuse the biometric credential and lose your phone. The CURP Biométrica upgrades Mexico’s existing population registry code, the Clave Única de Registro de Población, from an 18-character alphanumeric string into something far more personal. The updated system captures face, fingerprint, and iris biometrics, packages them with a QR code and digital signature, and produces what amounts to a mobile-readable identity document tied to your body. Registration happens at RENAPO and Civil Registry offices, where staff scan all ten fingerprints, both irises, take a facial photograph, and record a digital signature. You’ll need a valid photo ID, a certified CURP, and an original or certified birth certificate just to walk in. The government has framed this primarily as a tool for addressing Mexico’s crisis of forced disappearances. The biometric data feeds into a Unified Identity Platform connecting the National Population Registry with the National Forensic Data Bank and records held by prosecutors and intelligence agencies, enabling real-time identity searches. That’s the stated purpose. The actual system being built does considerably more than locate missing people. The legislation gives broad access to biometric and personal information to law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and the National Guard, and the law doesn’t require authorities to notify citizens when their data gets accessed. You won’t know who’s looking at your biometrics, or why, or how often. The SIM registration mandate is what turns a theoretically optional credential into an effectively compulsory one. Mexico enacted its mandatory mobile registration law on January 9, 2026, requiring all cell phone numbers, including prepaid and postpaid lines as well as physical SIM and eSIM, to be verifiably linked to an individual with a government-issued credential. Carriers must verify subscriber identity against the national biometric database. That means anonymous prepaid SIMs, long relied on by domestic abuse survivors, journalists, and political activists, will simply stop working for anyone who doesn’t complete biometric registration before the deadline. This is Mexico’s third attempt at linking phone numbers to identity. The track record should concern anyone paying attention. Mexico’s first cell phone registry, called RENAUT, was launched in 2008 and required users to register their numbers with their CURP. Within months, the private information of millions of cellphone users was leaked and allegedly sold by high-ranking corrupt officials within the federal government. RENAUT was abandoned by 2012. The second attempt, PANAUT, required biometric data including fingerprints and facial recognition. Digital rights organization R3D and others challenged the law, and in 2022, Mexico’s Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional, citing privacy violations. More: Federal Tribunal in Yucatán Suspends Biometric Data Collection for Mexico’s National ID System So here we are at attempt number three. The biometric CURP collects the same categories of sensitive data that the Supreme Court found unconstitutional just four years ago, except now it’s attached to a much larger identity platform with far more access points for government agencies. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Mexico Speeds Up Biometric ID Rollout appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Apple pulled several custom VPN clients from the Russian App Store last week, including Streisand, V2Box, v2RayTun, and Happ Proxy Utility. These aren’t the big-name commercial VPN providers that Apple already removed in 2024 at Roskomnadzor’s request. These are tools that let users connect to their own private servers and configure manual proxies, the kind of apps that give technically savvy Russians the ability to route around state censorship without depending on any company’s infrastructure. Russian tech outlet Kod Durova first reported the removals, noting that the same apps remain available through Google Play on Android. Days before the removals surfaced, Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadayev announced the Kremlin’s most aggressive anti-VPN campaign yet. “We have an obligation to fulfill the tasks that have been set before us. In this case, the task is to reduce the use of VPNs,” Shadayev said on the state-backed messenger Max. He linked the push to what he called “long, difficult and ultimately unsuccessful” talks with foreign tech companies over compliance with Russian law. More: VPNs Keep the Lights On in a Darkening Web What “reduce the use of VPNs” means, translated into policy, is a coordinated effort to make circumventing state surveillance either technically impossible or financially punishing. Shadayev has asked mobile carriers to start charging customers who exceed 15 gigabytes of international data traffic per month, starting May 1. Because VPNs route connections through servers abroad, they surcharge target VPN users specifically. Russian tech companies like Yandex and Wildberries have reportedly been told to block access to their platforms entirely if they detect VPN traffic. The government wants the commercial internet itself to become an enforcement mechanism. The financial squeeze extends further. Starting April 1, mobile operators must disable the ability to top up Apple ID accounts using mobile phone balances. The stated purpose is to cut off a common payment channel for VPN subscriptions, which, according to officials, account for more than 80% of App Store purchases in Russia. The minister publicly acknowledged that the proposed VPN penalties have “sparked a storm of emotions” but defended them as a “difficult compromise.” He added that “We understand all the consequences, but all other options are significantly worse.” Officials apparently discussed making VPN use a criminal offense subject to administrative fines, which Shadayev dismissed as a “blunt solution which we categorically dislike.” The preferred approach, it turns out, isn’t criminalization. It’s financial strangulation paired with technical enforcement, a model that lets the Kremlin avoid the political cost of open punishment while achieving the same result through carrier fees, platform restrictions, and app store removals. VPN adoption surged in Russia after authorities began blocking Western social media and independent news outlets following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The government ran a public campaign in 2023 warning about the supposed dangers of VPN use, and a 2024 law now criminalizes sharing information about how to bypass internet restrictions. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Apple Removes Private VPN Apps From Russia App Store appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The US State Department has settled a lawsuit brought by The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and the State of Texas, accepting a consent decree that bars it from using, financing, or promoting technology designed to suppress or “fact-check” the constitutionally protected speech of American citizens and domestic media outlets. The settlement also prohibits the Department from working with foreign governments or NGOs for those purposes, whether through formal agreements or informal arrangements. We obtained a copy of the joint motion for you here. The New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represented The Daily Wire and The Federalist, secured what amounts to a binding admission that the government had been doing exactly what it was accused of. The Department now acknowledges that its plaintiffs’ speech on COVID-19, sexual ethics, the biological nature of sex, and election integrity was constitutionally protected all along. It took three years of litigation to get the government to say that out loud. The consent decree runs until 2036. The Daily Wire and The Federalist will serve as compliance monitors, receiving annual reports from the State Department on its activities. If violations surface and go uncorrected, a federal judge in Texas has the authority to force the Department into compliance. The agreement is binding on future administrations, meaning the next president, whoever that is, inherits the same restrictions. The mechanism that made all of this possible was the Global Engagement Center, a State Department office originally tasked with countering foreign propaganda. The GEC funded, marketed, and promoted roughly 300 “Countering Propaganda and Disinformation” tools. Some of those tools were aimed at foreign adversaries. Others targeted American news outlets that published stories the government didn’t like. Companies like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index received GEC-linked funding and used it to brand domestic outlets as unreliable or risky. The effect was financial. Advertisers were encouraged to pull spending from outlets that appeared on these blacklists, and the outlets that kept showing up were the ones running stories that challenged government messaging on Covid-19, vaccines, and elections. The Daily Wire and The Federalist were among them. The GEC didn’t delete their articles. It tried to starve them of revenue instead. Secretary of State Marco Rubio first confirmed the core allegations in an April 2025 op-ed published, pointedly, at The Federalist, where he announced plans to abolish the GEC entirely. Congress had already declined to renew the GEC’s funding in late 2024. The Biden Administration responded by moving its operations to a different office inside the State Department and giving it a new name, the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference framework. Same people, same activities, different letterhead. The settlement also requires the State Department to remove specific material it funded, including “media literacy training” videos produced by Media Literacy Now that targeted The Daily Wire and The Federalist by name. “Media literacy” has become a preferred euphemism for government-adjacent efforts to tell people which outlets they should and shouldn’t trust. These particular videos, funded with taxpayer money, told viewers that two specific publications were not to be believed. The State Department will train all employees in 2030 and 2035 on how the First Amendment limits the government’s ability to suppress Americans’ speech. This settlement lands less than a week after the NCLA settled Missouri v. Biden, the companion case that barred the CDC, CISA, and the US Surgeon General from threatening social media companies into censoring protected speech on Facebook, Instagram, X, and YouTube. The two consent decrees represent the most significant legal constraints placed on the federal government’s censorship apparatus since it was first exposed. The pattern these cases revealed should worry anyone who values free expression, regardless of political alignment. Government agencies used taxpayer money to fund private companies that rated and suppressed domestic media. They encouraged social media platforms to censor viewpoints that contradicted official messaging. They did all of this while claiming to fight “disinformation,” a category that the government itself got to define, redefine, and apply at will. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post US State Dept Settles Free Speech Suppression Lawsuit appeared first on Reclaim The Net.