If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Here is a fun fact to keep in your back pocket the next time a politician appears on the morning TV sofas to explain that the government’s new face-scanning and digital ID regime is really, deep down, about protecting your children. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, spent the first half of his career as a human rights lawyer and the second half running the Crown Prosecution Service. He has argued for the individual against the state and he has aimed the full weight of the state at the individual. He has, in other words, seen this particular movie from both seats. So when he tells you he has stumbled, blinking and innocent, into the most comprehensive surveillance apparatus in British peacetime history, do not extend him the courtesy of believing it. He spent twenty years learning precisely what these powers do to a person. He is not building this in his sleep. And what he is building is a country in which you must ask permission to exist online. Not ask the platform. Ask the state. Before you read, post, store a photo, or send a message, you are expected to step up to the booth, show your papers, and prove you are a citizen the government has pre-approved. The default setting of a free society, that you are left alone until you give the state a reason, is being flipped on its head. The new arrangement is that you are a suspect with a phone until you prove otherwise, and you prove it constantly, because proving it has been welded onto the act of going online and speaking at all. That is the whole game. Everything else is set dressing. Monday’s headline was a ban on under-16s using social media which, to some, sounds about as sinister as a wholesome ribbon-cutting until you ask the obvious question nobody in Downing Street wants asked aloud: how, precisely, do you stop a fourteen-year-old from opening Instagram without first checking the age of the forty-year-old? You don’t. You can’t. So everyone gets carded. Britain is lifting the system wholesale from Australia, where a computer first scans your face and guesses your age from your cheekbones, then, failing that, surveils you to death, studies your browsing habits and the hours you keep, and then, when the algorithm throws up its hands, simply demands your passport. The face scan is sold to you as the polite option, the velvet rope. It is, in fact, the funnel and, at the bottom of the funnel, sits the national identity check that three million people already told this government, in no uncertain terms, to scrap. In September 2025 Starmer stood at a lectern and announced a mandatory digital ID scheme with the confidence of a man who assumed it would be popular. The British public’s response was to reach for the rhetorical equivalent of a cricket bat. Nearly three million signatures on a single petition, the fourth-biggest in parliamentary history. Public support belly-flopped from positive thirty-five to negative fourteen in the time it takes to renew a passport. Big Brother Watch branded the whole thing “wholly unBritish.” His own MP Rebecca Long Bailey, is warning of “an infrastructure that can follow us, link our most sensitive information and expand state control over all our lives,” which is a sentence you do not expect to hear from the governing party about its own flagship policy. This was more than the usual rent-a-mob. This was the nation telling its Prime Minister, with rare unanimity, to take a hike. A normal politician takes that hint. A human rights lawyer, in theory, frames the petition and hangs it on the wall as a cautionary tale. Starmer did something else entirely. He kept the goal and ditched the honesty. The mandatory card was quietly dropped in January, the ambition was not, and the operation simply moved from the front door, which the public had bolted, to the tradesman’s entrance round the back, which they had not thought to lock because who breaks into their own house? The trick is almost elegant in its cynicism. You cannot sell the public a surveillance dragnet, so you stop calling it a surveillance dragnet and start attaching it to causes that make opposition look like a personality defect. Don’t ask “may we build a national biometric database?” because the answer is a resounding no. Ask “would you like us to protect children from pornography,” and watch the same people who hated the ID card nod along, because the alternative is being presented as the weirdo at the dinner party defending kids’ access to Pornhub. Which, by the way, is exactly where the government ran its pilot scheme. Age checks for adult content went live last July, Pornhub’s UK traffic promptly fell off a cliff by 77 per cent (most switched to a VPN), the image site Imgur switched off the entire country rather than play along, and the great public uprising against it amounted to roughly nobody, because marching for your right to watch pornography is not a hill most people will plant a flag on. Lesson learned, filed away, reused. First, the embarrassing door, then the children’s door, and this week the door to the phone in your actual pocket, where Apple and Google have now been ordered to install spyware that pokes through your photos, on pain of criminal liability if they decline. Different doormat, same burglar. Knowing who you are is only act one. Act two is reading what you keep, and here the children conveniently evaporate, because there is no cuddly justification for the next bit, which is why it was done in the dark like most things you would be ashamed of. The Home Office served Apple with a secret order to tear a hole in iCloud encryption, an order so secret that Apple was forbidden by law from admitting it had even received it. The ambition is something to behold: a government wanting to force a company to break encryption in secret and then wanting the court case about the secret order to also be a secret. Apple told them where to go and yanked its strongest encryption from every British user instead, meaning the government reached for one company’s lock and ended up ripping the door off millions of phones. The French still have the protection. The Germans have it. The Americans have it. Britons do not. If Apple breaks end-to-end encryption for people in Britain, it breaks it for everyone, and the power to do it all again, to any company it fancies, remains fully loaded and pointed at the room. Act three was already humming along before anyone was paying attention. British police arrested over 12,000 people in a single year for things they typed online, more than thirty a day, and managed to convict fewer than one in ten of them. When the conviction rate is that feeble, the arrest stops being a step toward justice and becomes the punishment itself, the knock at the door and the phone in the evidence bag doing the work no courtroom ever will. Over 133,000 “non-crime hate incidents” have been logged since 2014, which is the state’s charming term for keeping a permanent file on something you said that wasn’t actually illegal. This is what speech policing looks like once the government already knows your name and can read your post. It doesn’t need to win. It just needs you nervous. Bolt the three acts together and the production reveals itself. A state that checks who you are before you log on, reads what you store once you have, and arrests you for what you say if it doesn’t care for your tone. Identity, surveillance, punishment, each ushered in through its own tear-jerking side door, each defended by a minister with their hand on their heart, swearing it’s really about the kids. No single piece is a jackboot. Assembled, they quietly abolish the notion that a British adult can read, think, or speak online without the government’s full knowledge and explicit say-so. And none of it unbuilds. Every future Home Secretary inherits the encryption power. Every future government inherits the identity plumbing and the speech laws. The ratchet has precisely one direction, and Starmer the former prosecutor, knows that better than you do, because prosecutors are the people who get to turn it. To be scrupulously fair, since the government will not be: there are of course some harms on social media. All true, and all completely beside the point, because a real problem is the finest gift wrapping an illegitimate power ever received. It lets the state answer a question you never asked. “Are children at risk online?” is not the question on the table. “Should the British government be able to identify, monitor, and punish every adult who uses the internet” is the question on the table, and it has already been answered, by three million furious people, which is the entire reason it is never the question they put to you. None of this was ever really about social media. Starmer tried to sell people the identity state openly, the public broke his fingers in the door, and he came back through the backdoor with a child in his arms. So here is the only thing worth remembering as the announcements keep coming. Nobody voted for any of this. It was not in the Labour manifesto. No party put facial scanning, biometric databases, broken encryption, and identity checks for the entire population to the electorate and won a mandate for it. There is no democratic permission slip for the biggest expansion of state surveillance in British peacetime history. There is only a government that asked once, got refused, and decided to take it anyway under a friendlier name. And over the coming weeks, the British people are going to be told, by ministers and by a media that prints the narrative as gospel, that this is about keeping children safe, and that anyone who objects must therefore be on the wrong side of it. That is the trap. Falling for it means handing your government a machine it will never give back, in exchange for a feeling. The children are the reason you are being asked to stop thinking. They are not the reason this is being built. The moment to notice the difference is now, while saying so still costs you nothing, and not later, when it costs considerably more. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Starmer’s Social Media Ban, the Reinvention of the Surveillance State appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The ancestry profiles and family data of nearly seven million people, stolen in 2023 and scattered across the dark web, now carry a court-approved price tag of $46.8 million. A Missouri bankruptcy administrator approved the fund Wednesday, settling the largest claims against the company once known as 23andMe and now operating under the name Chrome Holding Co. What the hackers took cannot be reset. A password gets changed after a breach and a stolen credit card gets canceled within hours. Your ancestry and ethnic background do not change and neither does the web of relatives you connect to, which exposes people who never signed up for anything. The ancestry estimates, predicted family relationships, birth years and self-reported locations they harvested are enough to identify someone and the people related to them and that information stays true for life. This was the data 23andMe failed to protect, starting around April 2023 and running for roughly five months before the company disclosed the intrusion in an October blog post. Attackers reused login credentials harvested from earlier breaches on other sites, slipping into a sliver of accounts whose owners had recycled their passwords. From there the damage spread through DNA Relatives, an opt-in feature built to let customers find genetic kin. The hacker reached 5.5 million DNA Relatives profiles and pulled information on another 1.4 million people who used a tool called Family Tree, turning a feature designed for connection into a map of who is related to whom. Victims who filed claims will divide $32.5 million of the fund, with individual payouts running from $50 to $10,000 for extraordinary losses such as identity fraud and mental health treatment. The administrator has resolved more than 255,860 claims so far, and thousands remain pending. The remaining $14.29 million goes to Kroll, the firm processing the claims and roughly $13 million of that was covered by cyber insurance policies from Allied World, Tokio Marine’s Houston Casualty, Berkshire Hathaway’s Landmark American, and underwriters at Lloyd’s. The people whose data was exposed carry the permanent risk, and the insurers carry most of the bill. Plaintiffs had asked for $48 billion. The administrator landed on a figure several orders of magnitude lower, citing a federal court’s finding that an earlier $30 million deal was “reasonable in light of the Company’s dire financial condition.” The administrator called the result an “equitable outcome” that avoids more litigation and reflects what the company can actually pay. The final number sits $3.25 million under the $50 million ceiling that Judge Brian Walsh authorized back in January. The harm was never evenly distributed. After the breach, compilations of stolen profiles surfaced for sale on the dark web. Ancestry data sorted by ethnicity and offered to buyers is the kind of exposure no payout reverses. The company that gathered all of this is mostly gone. 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 in March 2025, sold most of its assets for more than $300 million, and was bought back by co-founder Anne Wojcicki over objections from regulators. California tried to block the sale, arguing that its Genetic Information Privacy Act required opt-in consent before genetic data could change hands, and lost. Late in May, the state sued Chrome Holding Co. for failing to protect customer data in the first place. The corporate shell keeps changing names. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post 23andMe’s Stolen Data Gets a $46.8 Million Payout appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Britain’s Labour government wants image-scanning software on every phone in the country and this last week the government confirmed it will not stop at new devices. It will reach the old ones, the secondhand ones, and the phone a parent wipes before handing it to a child. During a House of Lords exchange, Conservative peer Lord Markham asked whether teenagers would just dodge it by staying on older software. “What assessment has been made of the risk that younger users will simply remain on old operating systems, and of the practical challenges of implementing these measures across different manufacturers?” he asked. Baroness Lloyd of Effra, the technology minister, stretched the plan across nearly every device in use. “It applies to both old and new smartphones and tablets, and we expect tech companies to set up controls so that, if a parent hands down a phone, for example, all they have to do is reset it to enact this operating-level facility,” she said. That commits Apple, Google, and every manufacturer to wiring a scanner into the operating system, then switching it on across phones they sold years ago. To catch one banned photo, the software has to inspect all of them, which posts an automated examiner inside the camera of a device you own outright. The real damage falls on encryption. Reading an image on your phone before the encryption seals it walks around the protection while leaving the padlock looking untouched. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood tried to drain the alarm out of it. “There is no reporting, no data collection, no monitoring, and no images leaving the device. All adults will be able to switch off the protections if they are over 18,” she said. The promise collapses on its own logic. A scanner that recognizes nude images is a trained model and someone off the device has to keep building it, updating it, and telling it what to flag. The escape hatch is worse. An adult can switch it off only after proving their age to a verification scheme, which means handing over your identity to use a camera you already own. Tyranny aside, mandating all this on old phones runs into a basic problem the minister’s “reset it” line glosses over. A factory reset restores whatever operating system the phone already runs. It does not install a capability that version never shipped with. Getting the scanner onto an old device means getting a newer OS onto it first, and Apple and Google stop pushing operating-system updates to their devices after a handful of years. The minister is describing a switch that, on many of the phones she named, has nothing to switch. The hardware compounds it. On-device nudity detection relies on machine-learning models that lean on the dedicated silicon built into recent phones, and older devices lack the neural processing and memory to run that kind of model without wrecking battery life and speed. That is the reason these features ship on new hardware and skip the old stuff in the first place. The picture gets worse once you leave Apple’s walled garden. Android runs across thousands of models from dozens of manufacturers, plenty of them on forked or abandoned builds that stopped getting security patches years ago, some stripped of Google services entirely. There is no single control the government can reach in and flip across all of them. The teenagers this policy targets also happen to be the group most able to route around it, whether by flashing a community-built version of Android with no scanner, keeping a phone on old software on purpose, or buying a handset that never had the feature. A rule that cannot reach most old phones and can be sidestepped on the ones it does reach is an expensive way for the government to show it does not understand technology. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post UK Even Wants Image Scanners on Millions of Unsupported Devices appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Senator Marsha Blackburn wants video platform Kik to verify the age of everyone who signs up and there is no way to do that without first identifying everyone who signs up. Kik runs on usernames instead of phone numbers, so confirming that a user is over 18 risks attaching that account to a real person. The Tennessee Republican sent the demand to MediaLab CEO Michael Heyward on June 12 and gave the company until June 19 to answer a list of questions about how it screens its users. We obtained a copy of the letter for you here. Blackburn’s letter follows a report from the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, which created a fake test account posing as a 12-year-old girl under the username “Im12BeNice.” The group alleges the account drew sexually explicit messages and nude images from adult strangers “within seconds,” even with Kik’s explicit-content filter switched on. NCOSE Executive Director Haley McNamara said the test “indicates that the platform fails to protect children and remains a ‘predator’s paradise.'” Blackburn’s letter points to recent prosecutions, including a repeat offender sentenced on May 20 to 15 years for sharing child sexual abuse material on Kik, a man who pleaded guilty the same day to forcing a child to produce such material, and a former teacher arrested in March for uploading it. Blackburn accused Kik of running the same script as other platforms, advertising safety while ignoring or enabling abuse. “Children are being abused on your platform, and it appears you are doing little to stop it,” she wrote. If the abuse the report documents is real, a system that ignored an account openly labeled as a child is an issue. The fix Blackburn is reaching for though does something the original problem does not. It forces every adult on Kik to identify themselves in order to keep talking and fits right into Blackburn’s overall agenda. Blackburn’s legislative record is a growing stack of bills that use child safety and copyright protection to build surveillance and censorship tools. Her TRUMP AMERICA AI Act, a 291-page draft introduced in March, would repeal Section 230 entirely, expose platforms and AI developers to open-ended liability for “reasonably foreseeable harms,” and fold KOSA’s age-verification mandates into a single federal framework enforced by the FTC, DOJ, and state attorneys general. Without Section 230’s protections, platforms face lawsuits for hosting user speech and the rational business response is to remove anything that might attract one. She also co-sponsored the Block BEARD Act, which would give federal courts the power to order ISPs, search engines, and potentially VPNs to block entire foreign websites accused of piracy, a site-blocking authority the US government has never held at that scale. The child-safety framing on Kik is one piece of a broader push toward an internet where users carry digital IDs, platforms pre-screen speech to avoid liability, and the government can make websites disappear by court order. Blackburn signs the letter as chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. She is also leading negotiations with the White House over a package that would trade limits on state regulation of artificial intelligence for a set of kids-safety bills, among them her Kids Online Safety Act and a federal age-verification requirement that lawmakers and the technology industry have fought over for years. KOSA aims at general social media, which is exactly the ground the Paxton ruling left unsettled, so the constitutional fight that decision postponed is the one this package would start. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Senator Blackburn Demands Kik Verify the Age of Every User appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Federal subpoenas hit JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo this week, ordering the banks to name every customer they cut off and to say why. The legal fight is about fraud statutes and prosecutorial reach. A blunter question sits underneath it. When a bank shuts your account over your politics, where are you supposed to go? The demands came from the US Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., run by Jeanine Pirro. Her prosecutors asked the banks for lists of people who were “debanked” and for the reasons behind shutting them out. Some of the subpoenas reach back more than a year. The investigation tests whether the account closures violated the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989, a law built to chase bank fraud. Debanking amounts to financial exile. A private institution decides your views, or your line of work, make you a liability, and your access to checking accounts, payroll, and credit can vanish. There’s no hearing, no judge, and often no warning beyond a card that stops working. The power to do this sits with the bank, and the person on the other end rarely gets to argue back. Last August, President Trump signed an executive order telling banking regulators to root out “politicized or unlawful debanking” and to penalize it. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency later reviewed the nine largest banks and reported it had found early signs of the practice. Pirro’s office went further on its own, opening the criminal probe without waiting for a referral from those regulators. The banks’ defense is the one you’d expect. They say they shut accounts only over legal, regulatory, or financial risk, never over belief. That explanation is convenient and hard to check because the standards live inside the banks and the people affected almost never see them. When the threshold for losing your account is “risk” defined by the institution that benefits from defining it loosely, almost any disfavored customer can be folded in. For the crypto industry, the probe puts a name to a years-old grievance. Digital-asset firms watched their accounts close across 2022 and 2023 and called it “Operation Chokepoint 2.0,” a nod to a 2013 Obama-era program that pushed banks to drop industries the government disliked. The pattern repeats because the method works. You don’t have to outlaw an activity if you can cut off the money that keeps it alive. That is the chilling effect in its purest form. People and businesses learn that the wrong affiliation can cost them a bank account, so they grow careful about what they say, fund, or build. The punishment never needs a courtroom to land, and it teaches everyone watching to keep their heads down. JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo have mostly declined to comment on the subpoenas. JPMorgan has disclosed that it faces “reviews, investigations and legal proceedings” tied to the executive order. The records Pirro wants would show, customer by customer, who the banks decided to drop and why. People shut out of the financial system for their views have spent years being told it never happened. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post DOJ Probes JPMorgan, Bank of America, Over Political Account Closures appeared first on Reclaim The Net.