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. The post The Right Way to Hide Your Email Address 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. French investigators pulled Pavel Durov back into a Paris courtroom last week for a fourth round of questioning, holding the Telegram founder for more than six hours in a case that has run for nearly two years without producing evidence of a crime. Durov’s legal team told AFP that “almost two years after the indictment of Pavel Durov, there is still no evidence to establish the validity of the charges.” They have filed appeals in France and before European courts, and they intend to keep contesting how the case has been run. France is not prosecuting Durov for anything he wrote or posted. Prosecutors accuse him of complicity in crimes that other people committed on Telegram, tying the charges to what they call weak moderation and a reluctance to hand over user data on demand. The theory makes the builder of a communications tool answerable for the private messages that pass through it. The ordeal started at Le Bourget airport in August 2024, when police detained Durov as he stepped off his plane and hit him with a dozen charges. The most serious, running a platform that enabled illegal transactions by an organized group, carries up to ten years in prison and a 500,000 euro fine. A judge set bail at five million euros, ordered him to report to a police station twice a week, and barred him from leaving the country. France eased those conditions in July 2025 and lifted the travel ban entirely last November, restoring his freedom to move. The investigation never closed. Wednesday’s session shows prosecutors still hunting for something to justify the charges they filed first. Telegram described the grind. “The only change since Durov’s detention in France is that French authorities have started properly drafting requests to Telegram,” the company said. The platform says it follows European law and answers valid legal requests. Durov has called the arrest and the charge “absurd” and cast the case as an attack on speech itself. Governments across Europe have shifted from chasing the people who break laws online to pressuring the engineers who build private channels for everyone else. Durov sits at the sharp end of that shift. He made the point again in May, backing Elon Musk’s X while French authorities investigated that platform too. Durov argued that the French government was doing “the very things” it accused X of, and predicted a “major political shift in 2027 will expose their misdeeds.” Paris, he suggested, is scrambling to silence “free speech platforms” before that reckoning arrives. The case comes down to one question. If a founder can face prison for messages he never sent, on a service built to keep conversations private, every encrypted platform in Europe is operating on borrowed time. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Durov Questioned a Fourth Time in France’s Telegram Case 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. Eight Greeks whose phones were cracked open by Predator spyware want the company that made it to pay. Last week they filed suit in Athens against Intellexa and 13 people tied to the firm, founder Tal Dilian among them, asking for one million euros each. The claim adds up to roughly €8 million, about $1.1 million per person, for the years someone spent reading their lives without permission. Their lawyer, Zacharias Kesses, said the eight are seeking damages for “the unlawful violation of their private life, the confidentiality of their communications, and their personal data.” Each of them had a device infected between 2020 and 2021, when Predator was slipping into Greek phones with help from inside the state. Predator does not need its target to tap anything because once it lands, it turns a phone into a live microphone and an open file drawer, handing over messages, photos, passwords, and location to whoever is paying for the feed. The wider scandal earned the name Predatorgate. Around 87 people were caught up in it, some through old-fashioned state wiretaps, others through Predator infections that sometimes took hold and sometimes only got as far as an attempt. The targets were not fringe figures. They included Nikos Androulakis, who now leads the opposition PASOK party and ran the third-largest party in the country when his phone was marked. Journalists were on the list. So were military officers, business figures, and Artemis Seaford, an executive at Meta. When the story broke in 2022, it cost Greece the head of its EYP intelligence service and the prime minister’s chief of staff, both pushed out as the trail ran toward the government. Predator, sold as a tool for chasing criminals and terrorists, had been turned on a sitting politician, on reporters, and on people whose only offense was standing close to power. A criminal court reached the makers first. This February, judges in Athens found Dilian and three associates, Sara Hamou, Felix Bitzios, and Yiannis Lavranos, guilty of breaching the confidentiality of telephone communications and illegally accessing information systems. Each drew a sentence of 126 years and eight months, capped at eight years under Greek law and frozen while they appeal. John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, called the ruling a first. “This is the first time that an executive at a mercenary spy company has been convicted and sentenced to prison,” he said. For an industry that sells silence and deniability as selling points, a courtroom reading out names is the outcome it has spent years and a lot of money avoiding. The civil case running alongside asks a different question, not whether the surveillance happened but what a stolen private life is worth. All eight plaintiffs are people whose phones tested positive for the spyware, which gives their claim a forensic spine that is hard to wave away. Dilian and his co-defendants plan to appeal the criminal verdict. The damages suit is expected to be heard in April 2027. Money will not un-see what Predator saw. The messages, locations, contacts, and calls it pulled off those phones are already gone, copied and handed down a chain that ran through private contractors and, the evidence suggests, parts of the Greek state itself. A one-million-euro demand puts a number on a business model that always assumed the bill would never come. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Predator Spyware Victims File €8 Million Damages Suit in Athens 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. Mainstream payment apps know exactly who you pay, when, and for how much. Cash App, Venmo, PayPal, and WeChat built their convenience on that visibility, holding your balance and logging every transfer as a condition of use. Radar, a new messenger from the team behind Cake Wallet, is a bet that you can move money to the people you already talk to without handing any one company that full record. “Apps like PayPal and Cash App made sending money easier, but they’re centralized services,” said Vikrant Sharma, who founded Cake Wallet and serves as chief executive of both firms. “They hold your money, they can freeze your account, and they see every transaction you make. Convenience came at the cost of control.” Radar launched on July 7 for iOS, with an Android APK available now and a Google Play release still to come. It runs on Signal’s open-source protocol and network, so the encrypted messaging people already rely on carries over intact. You log into an existing Signal account inside Radar, and your contacts, chats, groups, and username all follow. The addition fits right beside the message box, a Bitcoin button that turns a conversation into a way to pay. You tap it, enter an amount, and the sats land in the thread. “The idea behind Radar is that the people we talk to and the people we pay are often the same people, yet messaging and payments still live in separate places,” Sharma said. The payments run on Spark, a Bitcoin layer-2 network, using the Breez SDK to handle the wiring. Transfers between two Radar users clear Spark to Spark in under a second, and because they settle that way, a recipient can be offline and still collect them. Radar speaks Lightning too, so you can pay any outside Lightning wallet or refill your balance from one. Accounts come with a Lightning address you can rename, and funds stay in your custody behind a standard twelve-word seed phrase. By default, Radar encrypts your keys into your Signal account, which lets a newcomer who never writes down a seed phrase still recover their money. That convenience carries a familiar cost, though. Whoever holds your phone number and Signal PIN holds the road to your funds, which is why the company treats the Signal backup as a floor and the seed phrase as the real safeguard for anything past spending cash. The privacy design rests on cutting up knowledge so no party sees the whole transaction. Radar says it gathers nothing, no analytics on who you are or what you send. Signal hosts the messaging, so it sees your phone number and username, yet it reads payments only as ordinary encrypted messages, with no way to tell they carry money. Spark clears the value of a transfer without ever learning your phone number or Signal identity. That’s three parties, three partial views, and no single ledger tying your chats to your coins. Those seams hold only while the three stay separate, and the phone number that Signal still demands for spam control remains the one identifier threaded through everything. Radar’s answer is that this beats the arrangement it replaces, where a lone custodian watches every message and every payment side by side. Sharma said Radar has tested payments up to $5,000, with the ceiling set by Lightning liquidity rather than any cap in the app. There is no technical maximum on what you can hold, though the company is direct that this is hot-wallet territory. Keys live on a phone, so real savings belong on hardware kept elsewhere. Radar takes no cut today. The only costs are Spark network fees, roughly two sats per transfer, plus whatever Lightning routing runs on an outside payment. Revenue is meant to arrive later, when the app lets newcomers top up with a debit card, credit card, Apple Pay, or Google Pay, the kind of on-ramp that reaches people who never held Bitcoin. There’s something else to consider, though. The whole model leans on Signal, tolerating an outside client on its servers. Signal’s code is open, yet the Foundation controls who reaches its infrastructure and could block Radar’s users by their client signatures if it wanted to. Seth For Privacy, Radar’s chief operating officer, has said such a move is possible while adding that he hopes it never comes. Radar has begun donating to the Signal Foundation every month and plans to raise those payments as it grows. A client called Molly has used the Signal network for years without trouble, which the team treats as precedent. Cake Wallet grew with no venture money after Sharma started it in 2018. Radar is taking the other road as a separate company with shared leadership, backed by Ego Death Capital as its first investor and in talks with a few more. Whether people will accept a phone number welded to a messenger as the price of holding their own keys is the question Radar now gets to answer. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Radar Chat Brings Bitcoin Payments to Signal Messaging 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 Commission wants the power to force a redesign of the apps on your phone. Regulators in Brussels said Friday that Instagram and Facebook break European law because the products are built to hold your attention. They are ready to fine Meta as much as 6 percent of its global revenue, more than $12 billion, until the company rebuilds the apps to Brussels’ liking. The preliminary findings target the ordinary machinery of a modern feed, from infinite scroll and autoplay to push notifications and the recommendation systems that decide what you see next. The Commission’s proposed remedy seems like a product spec written by a government. It wants autoplay and infinite scroll switched off by default, real screen time breaks built in, and the algorithm retuned so it stops working so hard to keep you around. The finding falls under the Digital Services Act, the law Brussels uses to police what Europeans can post and see online. The machinery now aimed at button placement and video autoplay is the same machinery built to decide which content stays up and which comes down. Once a regulator can order how an app is designed, the distance between design and speech runs short. Someone has to define “addictive,” and under this law that someone is the government. The Commission says Meta pushes users into “autopilot mode” and failed to weigh the risks its design poses to minors and what it calls vulnerable adults. The behavior it describes, opening an app and scrolling longer than you meant to, is familiar to anyone with a phone. The question is who gets to name it a harm and prescribe the cure. “Protecting the physical and mental health of Europeans must be a priority for social media platforms. The Digital Services Act provides a clear framework to hold platforms accountable for the addictive design and effects of their services. We are fully committed to enforcing our legislation in Europe,” said Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy. The title alone shows how wide the mandate has grown. One official holds a brief that spans “tech sovereignty, security and democracy,” and from that chair rules that a scrolling feed threatens public health. Meta rejects the finding. “We disagree with these preliminary findings, which don’t accurately take into account the significant steps we’ve taken to protect teens. We share the European Commission’s commitment to providing teens with safe, positive online experiences and will continue to engage constructively with them,” the company said. It points to Teen Accounts, rolled out over the two years the investigation has run, which switch on by default for minors and let parents block nighttime use and cap daily screen time. The Commission was unmoved. It said Meta’s existing guards fall short. Time limits for teens can be dismissed with a tap, parental controls only help parents with the time and technical skill to set them up, and mental health tips sit on a separate “safety center” page where few will find them. None of this ends with a fine yet. The findings are preliminary, and Meta can read the Commission’s files and reply in writing before any decision. The European Board for Digital Services gets consulted along the way. What arrives ahead of any penalty is the precedent. A government body has claimed the authority to set the default settings of a service used by hundreds of millions of people, backed by a threat large enough to make compliance the only rational choice. This is not the Commission’s first move against Meta under the same investigation, which opened in May 2024. Brussels already issued findings over how the company checks the ages of children under 13, and it is still probing what it calls the “rabbit hole” effect of the recommendation engine on young users. The features under review are small, like autoplay and a feed that never ends. The authority being claimed to reach them stretches a great deal further. Brussels writes the definition of “harm,” and the design of the products follows. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Brussels Has Opinions About Your Social Media Feed appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.