If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Keir Starmer wants to regulate what British people see online, and he wants to do it fast, with as little parliamentary involvement as possible. The British Prime Minister told The Mirror he backs a Budget-style annual update process for online censorship rules, a mechanism designed for speed rather than scrutiny. Budget updates are expedited by convention, with MPs given limited time and opportunity to pick apart what’s being pushed through. Starmer wants the same treatment applied to the government’s ability to control what appears on social media. When asked about this, he said: “We’re going to have, we’ll have to think of a device of whether it’s rolling provisions or something like that. But what we can’t have is a government that is stumbling to keep up because it keeps needing to pass provision that takes years before it goes in. People who’ve got children now want to know you’re going to do something that actually helps my child, not something which might take years in the making.” If you hadn’t noticed, “rolling provisions” is a polite term for a permanent, fast-tracked legislative pipeline where the government gives itself new censorship and surveillance powers year after year, and Parliament barely gets to debate it. The model Starmer is describing here is sometimes called a “Henry VIII clause,” where ministers can amend primary legislation through statutory instruments that limit debate and bypass the usual parliamentary process. The government has already tabled amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill and the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that would allow senior ministers to modify the Online Safety Act and restrict children’s access to specific online services, all without the need for full parliamentary approval. The justification, as always, is children. Starmer also told The Mirror he now considers himself “open-minded” about banning under-16s from social media entirely, and declared that “addictive algorithms” should be prohibited. He made similar comments in an interview with The Observer, published the same weekend. He told The Mirror: “This is the platforms trying to get children to stay on for longer, to get addicted. I can’t see that there’s a case for that, and therefore I can see we’re going to have to act.” He added: “We’ll go through the consultation, but I think I’ll be absolutely clear things will not stay as they are. This is going to change. I don’t think the next generation would forgive us if we didn’t act now.” Children are always the justification. They were the justification for the Online Safety Act, which has already blocked UK users from accessing support pages for alcohol addiction, child sexual abuse survivor resources, and sexual assault survivor communities on Reddit, along with political and legal content, including parliamentary speeches. They were the justification when the government said “no platform gets a free pass” and went after Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot. And they are the justification now, as Starmer pushes for a system where the next round of speech controls gets expedited through Parliament every year, like a line item in the tax code. Starmer’s timing is telling. A jury in Los Angeles recently ruled that Meta and YouTube were negligent in the design of their platforms, awarding $3 million in compensatory damages and $6 million in punitive damages to a 20-year-old woman who said childhood social media use had contributed to depression, anxiety, and body dysmorphia. Meta and Google both plan to appeal. Starmer has said the decision could mark “a turning point” leading to “much stricter content restriction,” and his government source told reporters: “Nothing is off the table when it comes to protecting children online.” “Nothing is off the table” is the kind of phrase that should make anyone paying attention uncomfortable. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Starmer Pushes Fast-Track Online Censorship Powers appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The German government just drafted a law that would make it a criminal offense, punishable by up to two years in prison, to create or share AI-generated content that “appears to reflect an actual event in relation to another person” and is “likely to cause significant damage to that person’s reputation.” There’s no requirement that the content be pornographic, violent, or defamatory in the traditional legal sense. The government gets to decide what counts as “reputation damage,” and the person who shared the meme gets a potential prison sentence. Federal Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig (SPD) pushed the draft legislation forward after allegations by actress Collien Fernandes against her ex-husband, Christian Ulmen, involving non-consensual deepfake pornography. The bill that Hubig pulled out of the ministry’s drawer goes so far beyond protecting victims of sexual deepfakes that the connection feels like a pretext. The draft law creates three new or expanded criminal provisions. A reformulated §184k of the Criminal Code would cover non-consensual pornographic deepfakes, with penalties of up to two years in prison, but a new §201b would criminalize non-pornographic deepfakes that are “likely to cause significant damage to reputation.” And a new §202e would target unauthorized digital tracking and spying using stalkerware. Punishing people who install hidden tracking tools on someone else’s phone without their knowledge is reasonable law enforcement. That provision, though, is covering for everything else in this bill. Because the real problem is §201b, the provision that has nothing to do with pornography and everything to do with political speech. As criminal defense attorney Udo Vetter wrote on his law blog, the proposed §201b “punishes with up to two years’ imprisonment whoever makes accessible to a third person content created or altered by means of a computer program that gives the appearance of reflecting an actual event relating to another person and that is likely to significantly damage that person’s reputation.” That language is broad enough to cover a satirical meme of a politician, a parody video, or a doctored image used for political commentary. Vetter calls the bill “a Trojan horse, freshly polished.” His central observation is damning. The proposed §201b “does not require that naked people or body parts be shown or that persons be placed in sexually degrading positions. The paragraph requires no degradation, no glorification of violence, no incitement to hatred. It simply targets ‘significant reputational damage’ from a meme or video,” a standard that reaches well beyond deepfake pornography and into the core of political discourse. The bill does include an exemption clause for satire and political art. On paper, that looks like a safeguard. Vetter argues the exemption is “structurally useless” for a central category of political satire, because the whole point of a political deepfake is that it mimics reality. The satirical value comes from the resemblance to real events. A court ruling that a given meme qualifies as protected satire might come years later. The police raid on the meme creator’s home comes at six in the morning. That is the chilling effect, and Vetter names it explicitly. Not the conviction. The process. “Seizure of all computers and devices, legal costs, and months of stigmatization from an ongoing criminal investigation are punishment enough,” he writes. “Legitimate, sharp criticism falls silent out of sheer fear of repression, before any court has decided anything.” People stop making political memes not because they’re found guilty, but because they can’t afford to find out. Germany already has direct experience with exactly this kind of abuse. The 2021 law against insults to politicians (§188 StGB) led in 2024 to a home raid on a man who had shared an ironic image montage online calling then-Economy Minister Robert Habeck a “Schwachkopf” (idiot), styled in the font of the cosmetics brand Schwarzkopf. A law designed to protect local council members from harassment was used to send police into someone’s home over a joke about a federal minister. The proposed deepfake law would give prosecutors even wider latitude. The German Bar Association (DAV) has already said the bill “overshoots the mark.” Ali B. Norouzi, chair of the DAV’s criminal law committee, warns against a “legislative snap reaction” following “media-accompanied public outrage.” DAV board member Niko Härting previously told LTO that the existence of gaps in criminal liability around deepfakes that would justify new legislation “must be doubted,” noting that personality rights are already protected under existing defamation statutes. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Germany Drafts Law Making AI Deepfake Memes a Crime 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 The Fourth Amendment Has a VPN Problem appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The WHO, its Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, and the Singapore-based Temasek Foundation have launched a three-year program to replace paper health records across Southeast Asia with digital health wallets. The stated purpose is to give people portable, verified access to their medical information. But this is the same WHO that spent the COVID pandemic building a global censorship apparatus with Silicon Valley, pushing vaccine passport systems that restricted citizens’ freedom of movement, and amplifying Chinese authorities while demanding the power to police everyone else’s speech. The organization now wants to be trusted with the digital health records of hundreds of millions of people across ASEAN. The program targets ASEAN member states, moving them from paper-based records like vaccination Yellow Cards and child health booklets to cryptographically verified digital wallets processed through WHO’s Global Digital Health Certification Network (GDHCN). Countries will start with digital vaccination certificates, then expand into routine immunization records, maternal and child health data, and eventually broader personal health summaries. Each phase widens the scope of what gets digitized, collected, and made verifiable across systems and borders. Mr Kee Kirk Chuen, Head of Health & Well-being at the Temasek Foundation, said, “The COVID-19 pandemic showed how important it is for health records to be trusted, verifiable and able to travel with people across borders.” He added, “Through our partnership with WHO, the Temasek Foundation hopes to support countries in moving from fragmented paper records to secure Digital Health Wallets that individuals can carry with them wherever they go. By testing this approach in pilot ASEAN Member States, we aim to demonstrate how trusted digital tools can strengthen health systems, improve continuity of care – including for families and children – and build the local capabilities needed for governments to scale these systems nationally. If successful, this effort can help turn global digital health standards into practical solutions that benefit communities across the region.” The GDHCN that underpins these wallets isn’t new technology built for a new purpose. The WHO adopted the European Union’s digital COVID vaccine passport framework to create this global network of digital health certificates. The EU’s COVID certificate system was issued to over 2.3 billion people and became the backbone of a checkpoint society that conditioned basic freedoms, from entering a restaurant to boarding a flight, on vaccination status. That system is now being repurposed and expanded well beyond its original scope into a permanent platform for digitizing all personal health information. What started as emergency pandemic infrastructure is becoming the default architecture for how governments manage their citizens’ health data. The WHO’s record as custodian of this kind of power deserves serious scrutiny. During the pandemic, the WHO partnered with YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, and other platforms to censor or label COVID-19 content it deemed “misinformation.” YouTube alone deleted over 800,000 videos for contradicting the WHO. Many of those deletions targeted content that turned out to be accurate, including claims about vaccinated people being able to transmit COVID and the possibility that the virus leaked from a laboratory. The WHO’s post-pandemic posture has done nothing to rebuild trust. A senior WHO official, Andy Pattison, has publicly advocated for a permanent partnership between global health authorities and major tech platforms, proposing what he called “a health online collective” designed to replicate COVID-era levels of corporate cooperation on a constant, institutional basis. The stated goal isn’t merely distributing information. Pattison acknowledged that “the actual proof of the pudding…is actually behavior change,” making clear that the WHO’s metric for success is influence over people’s decisions, not just visibility. This is the organization now asking ASEAN nations to hand over their populations’ health data to a system it controls. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post WHO Pushes Digital Health Wallet Rollout 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 new £1 billion ($1.3m) pandemic strategy treats a future outbreak as a “certainty” and proposes building a contact tracing system that would feed on real-time location data harvested with the help of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies. The plan, published by the Department of Health and Social Care, also calls for PPE stockpiles, new emergency legislation, and a biosecurity research hub in Essex. But the centerpiece that deserves the most scrutiny is the contact tracing proposal, which would create a surveillance architecture designed to track the movements of millions of people, ready to switch on at a moment’s notice. The UKHSA will run the new system, which the strategy document says will use “live location data” and artificial intelligence to provide “a more rapid, large-scale detection and alert system during pandemics.” The agency plans to “explore options to work with ‘big tech'” to build it, with deployment targeted for 2030. The government is pre-building a location surveillance system in partnership with companies whose entire business model depends on harvesting as much personal data as possible. The strategy doesn’t name which companies, what data-sharing agreements would look like, or what happens to your location history once the pandemic ends. The UK government has already tracked its own citizens through their phones without telling them. A 2021 report by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviors (SPI-B) revealed that government-funded researchers tracked one in ten people in Britain via their mobile phones in February of that year, without the users’ knowledge or permission. Researchers used cell phone mobility data to select over 4,200 vaccinated individuals, then monitored them through 40 call data records with corresponding location observations. The data was used for behavioral analysis, tracking radius of movement on vaccination day, whether people visited businesses during opening hours, and whether they went straight home afterwards. None of this was made public at the time. When the tracking came to light, a spokesperson for Big Brother Watch said citizens would be “disturbed to discover they were unwittingly tracked and subjected to behavioral analysis via their phones.” “No one expects that by going to get a vaccine they will be tracked and monitored by their own Government,” the spokesperson said. “This is deeply chilling and could be extremely damaging to public trust in medical confidentiality. Between looming Covid passports and vaccine phone surveillance, this Government is turning Britain into a Big Brother state under the cover of Covid. This should be a wake up call to us all.” The government’s defense was that the data was collected at cell tower level, not the individual level, and that it was “GDPR-compliant” data provided by a company that “collected, cleaned, and anonymized” it. A government spokesperson said “the mobile phone location data used is GDPR-compliant and has been provided from a company that collected, cleaned, and anonymized the data” and that “the data is at cell tower rather than individual level and the researchers were granted access to the dataset under a research contract with ethical approval provided to the researchers from the University of Oxford, working on behalf of SPI-B.” That defense tells you everything about how the government thinks about location surveillance. It tracked millions of people and called it ethical because a private company “anonymized” the data first. It monitored the movements of vaccinated individuals and called it acceptable because the tracking happened at cell tower resolution rather than GPS precision. The distinction between “cell tower level” and “individual surveillance” is thinner than the government wants you to believe. Cell tower data can still reveal where you live, where you work, and what you do on a given day, especially when cross-referenced with other datasets. The fact that a private company sat between the government and the raw data doesn’t change what happened: people went to get vaccinated, and their government secretly tracked where they went afterwards. That history makes the new strategy’s contact tracing plans look less like pandemic preparedness and more like the next step in normalizing population-level location surveillance. The 2021 tracking was done covertly, without legislation, using data purchased from a private company. The new strategy proposes formalizing this kind of capability, building it into permanent government systems, and enlisting “big tech” to run it at scale. What was done secretly during Covid is now being written into official policy. During the pandemic, the UK’s first attempt at a centralized contact tracing app collapsed under its own privacy problems. The government’s original NHSX app tried to store user data on a central server, a design so invasive that Apple and Google refused to let it run properly on their operating systems. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post UK’s New Pandemic Plan Would Turn Big Tech Into a Mass Location Tracking Network appeared first on Reclaim The Net.