If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer strode onto a stage at London Tech Week and handed Apple, Google and friends a three-month ultimatum with all the menace of a substitute teacher confiscating phones at the door. Build us controls that stop children from taking, sharing, or viewing nude images, switch them on by default across every phone and tablet already humming away in the nation’s pockets, and look sharp about it. “This government will not stand by while children are put at risk online,” he announced, before adding the line every tech executive in the room heard as a polite threat. “Today I am calling on the tech companies to introduce device-level controls to prevent children from taking, sharing or viewing nude images. And if they don’t act, we will.” Stirring stuff. Nobody wants children harmed, and saying so out loud is the cheapest applause line in British politics. The trouble is the two innocent-looking words tucked into the speech like a wasp in a picnic basket, the words “device-level.” Here is what “device-level” means once you peel off the cuddly branding. To catch one naughty photo on your phone, something has to inspect every photo on your phone. All of them. It is software that leans over your shoulder the instant you raise your camera, squints at whatever you are making, and decides whether you may keep it or it gets reported to authorities. Engineers named this trick years ago, client-side scanning, and even Apple, a company that would happily sell you the air inside its packaging, built a version of it in 2021 and then sprinted away from the idea the moment people worked out what it did to private messaging. The worst part is what it does to encryption. End-to-end encryption is meant to mean nobody in the middle can read your stuff, not the app, not your internet provider, not a bored government with a search warrant fetish. Client-side scanning waltzes around all of that by reading your photo on your own device first, before the encryption clicks shut. The lock on the front door stays bolted. There is just a man with a clipboard standing in your hallway, jotting notes before you turn the key. The math survives. The privacy, meanwhile, is dead. Step back and admire how casually people are treating this. A government politely asking every phone maker to install a tiny invigilator inside the camera lens, marking your snapshots as they form, would have been thrown out of a Black Mirror writers’ room a decade ago for being too on the nose. Picture a painter glancing up mid-brushstroke to find a man from the Home Office at the easel, tutting and scraping off the bits he disapproves of. That is the energy on offer, rolled out across roughly every handset in Britain and wired, in theory, to phone home about what it spots. Ah, but adults will be fine, we are assured. Officials promise the controls will not bother devices “owned and used by adults who verify their age.” The opt-out for surveillance is, gloriously, more surveillance. To switch off a child-lock on a phone you bought with your own money and legally own, you must first march up to the state and prove who you are. Self-described panopticon enthusiast, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, is having precisely none of this doom-mongering. “I make no apologies for doing the right thing to protect children from paedophiles. This is about stopping the coercion and sextortion of children, not surveilling or policing people’s phones,” she insists, with breezy confidence. The tech already exists, she reckons, and the companies merely need to flip a switch as through the death of civil liberties were a bedside lamp. Her headline reassurance arrives wrapped in magnificent certainty. “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.” Nothing leaves the device. None of it. Pinky promise, says the secretary from the government who asked Apple to secretly install backdoors to iCloud. The EU spent two years building almost exactly this contraption, christened it “Chat Control,” and then watched it die a richly deserved death. The European Parliament finally pulled the plug this March, rejecting blanket scanning of private messages by a single vote. For now. Even Germany, a country with a long and unhappy memory of governments steaming open the mail, refused outright on constitutional grounds, and its justice minister compared mandatory message scanning to “opening all letters as a precautionary measure.” Signal announced it would simply pack up and leave the continent rather than gut its own encryption. As we previously reported, working from Germany’s own federal police figures, found that 48 percent of the chats flagged by automated scanning turned out to be completely innocent. Family holiday photos. Medical pictures sent to a doctor. All hoovered up and forwarded to police as suspected child abuse because a robot got the jitters. Here is the part that should make your eye twitch. A parent who wants a child-lock on their kid’s phone can switch one on today. For free. They just have to turn it on. It requires parenting, not state control. If you are tempted to extend the government some benefit of the doubt, cast your mind back over the past year. This same Home Office served Apple with a secret order, a Technical Capability Notice, demanding a backdoor into end-to-end encrypted iCloud backups, first for every human on the planet and later, after Washington threw a tantrum, for British users alone. Secret being the operative word, since the law gagged Apple from so much as admitting the order existed. Apple’s answer was to rip its strongest encryption out of the UK entirely rather than build the thing, sniffing that it has “never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services,” and the fight is still grinding through the courts. That is the track record of this government, one that asks one company, in the dark, to dismantle encryption for an entire nation is not a government you hand a camera-side scanner and trust to use it gently. So spare a thought for what this little inspector gets up to once it tires of policing teenage selfies. A system that can read every image on every phone, sold to you today as a babysitter for the under-18s, is exactly the system a future minister could repoint at protest photos, leaked documents, unflattering memes, or whatever sets off the moral panic of the week. Nobody has explained how you age-verify tens of millions of adults without assembling the enormous identity database ministers swear blind they are not building. Nobody has explained how “nothing leaves the device” survives in the same room as a snooping model that someone in an office has to keep trained, updated and told what to flag. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Starmer Calls for Spyware on All Phones appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Britain has refused to let a US technology company brief Congress about a secret order to weaken encryption and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee is treating that refusal as a problem in its own right. Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who leads the committee, wrote to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood on Friday warning that Britain may be using encryption powers to reach the private data of US citizens. The underlying dispute is not new. For more than a year, the UK’s use of secret “technical capability notices” under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 has strained relations with Washington, ever since reports that Britain ordered Apple to open up encrypted iCloud data. What is new is the wall Jordan says he keeps hitting when he tries to learn more. He met Sir Christian Turner, the British ambassador to the United States, in March, after a US company asked to brief members of Congress about one of these notices, something that would require Mahmood’s sign-off. The ambassador suggested it could happen. Mahmood then refused. “This denial is inconsistent with our understanding from Ambassador Turner and raises serious concerns about shared cooperation on these sensitive matters, particularly as Congress exercises its important oversight responsibilities,” Jordan wrote, the Telegraph reported, adding that it cast doubt on the “trust and effective partnership between our two countries.” He asked Mahmood to “review this matter and grant the US company’s request to speak with Congress about an alleged technical capability notice,” which he said would “honour the representation made by the ambassador during our meeting and uphold the spirit of transparency and cooperation that is the foundation of our shared security relationship.” The secrecy Jordan ran into is built into how these orders work and it is worth keeping in view. The UK may be building “backdoors into their encrypted services,” he wrote. A backdoor is a deliberately built flaw, a master key, or a hidden bypass that lets an intelligence agency read encrypted data without the user ever knowing. It defeats end-to-end encryption, the design that normally keeps a message readable only to the person who sent it and the person who received it. A company served with a notice cannot tell its customers, the press, or apparently even a foreign legislature, without the express permission of the Home Secretary. Jordan’s letter does not name the company, though Reclaim The Net has previously reported that Britain served Apple with such a notice, ordering it to build a way into iCloud that would let officials decrypt any user’s data, anywhere in the world, not only suspected criminals and not only UK citizens. The order targeted Advanced Data Protection, the optional setting that encrypts iCloud backups so thoroughly that even Apple cannot read them. Rather than build the bypass, Apple pulled Advanced Data Protection from the United Kingdom in early 2025, leaving British users with weaker protection than they had before the demand arrived. Whether Apple is the firm now seeking to talk to Congress remains unconfirmed. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post UK Encryption Backdoor Could Hit US Data, Jordan Warns appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Japan wants social media companies to work out how old their users are and one method floated in a new government proposal would tap the growing data that mobile carriers already hold on their customers. The proposal came from a panel of “experts” convened by Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, which released its draft measures on June 2 with the stated goal of reducing young people’s dependency on social media. The panel stopped short of the blanket under-16 ban Australia brought into force in December 2025, saying social media has become too embedded as a communication tool to wall off by age. Instead, the government would work with platforms and carriers on, per a report by The Japan Times, “methods of age verification based on feasible technologies and systems.” Reaching for carrier records is where the privacy cost hides and Japanese operators already know how old subscribers are because customers verify their identity at signup. Routing that into social media checks would connect the phone account tied to your legal name with the platforms you use, building a verified link where none existed. Identity data collected for one purpose gets repurposed for another and tied to everything you say, read, and consume. Verification today mostly runs on self-reported information, which anyone willing to lie can get around. The Asahi Shimbun reports platforms would be required by law to assess their own services for risk and carry out stricter identity checks. The shift is away from declaring your age toward proving it, and proving it means handing over something you would rather keep. The draft enters public comment before being finalized this summer. Japan joins Australia, Malaysia and Indonesia, which already ban under-16s, plus France, Greece and Denmark. At the end of May, G7 ministers in Paris agreed seven principles calling for age assurance described as privacy-preserving. That label promises more than any age-checking design can deliver. A system that reliably confirms someone’s age has to learn something true about that person, and the more reliable it gets, the more it knows. Support in Japan stays low, with 38% of parents and 28% of Gen Z backing an under-16s ban. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Japan Plans Social Media Age Checks via Carrier Data appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. “Think of the children” is the oldest skeleton key in the political toolbox and the British government has just jammed it into the lock on every phone in the country. Ministers are reportedly drafting a law that would force Apple, Google, and the rest to make it impossible for a child to send, receive, view, or share a single nude image, with the executives who refuse facing up to five years in prison. The children are the headline but the surveillance is the product. Peel off the press release and the demand turns out to be impossible to meet without doing the exact thing the government has wanted to do for years. You cannot block every naked picture someone might stumble across without inspecting every picture, every message, every video call, every streamed film, on every device, all the time. A filter that total requires surveillance that total. The nudity is the excuse and the unbroken view into your phone is the actual prize, with “protecting kids” chosen as the wrapping paper precisely because nobody dares unwrap it in public. The industry calls the method client-side scanning, a phrase engineered to sound like a checkbox in Settings rather than what it is, a permanent informant living on hardware you paid for. Frame it as catching predators and it sails through. Frame it honestly, as government-mandated spyware on tens of millions of phones, and it sinks. So the framing stays welded to the children, where objection is made to feel indecent. The enforcement is lifted from the Online Safety Act, that gift that keeps on taking, which already lets the state jail technology bosses for five years. Sold to the public as a shield for children, it’s behaving more like a crowbar, and the government has now found the wall it most wants to lever open, which is the inside of your phone. Jess Phillips, the former Home Office safeguarding minister, resigned in May after concluding ministers would only ever “encourage” firms to comply, a word that in Whitehall binds about as tightly as a strongly worded birthday card. “It has taken me a year to get you to agree to even threaten to legislate in this space,” Phillips wrote to Prime Minister Keir Starmer. “Not legislate, just threaten.” As usual, she kept going. “The announcement was meant to be in March, I’m still on a promise this will happen in June, I’ve given up believing it,” she added, before asking, “How many children were left without a safety net in the time we dilly dallied and worried about tech bosses?” Phillips plainly means every word, and that sincerity is exactly what makes her cause so useful to the people who don’t. The giveaway is that the government isn’t inventing any of this. It’s ordering a louder remix of tracks the tech giants already cut. Apple switched on device-level age checks for UK users earlier this year and now runs two relevant systems. Its Web Content Filter bars adult websites across Safari and every other browser. Its Communication Safety feature rifles through AirDrop, FaceTime, Messages, and Photos for nudity and blurs whatever it catches. Google shipped its own version, branded Sensitive Content Warnings, which paws through Google Messages doing the same chore. According to The Times, ministers want all of it fused together and cranked up. A program clever enough to recognize a naked body in any image, message, or video stream is more than a modest little nudity detector. It’s a general-purpose content scanner pointed at one target this year and swivelable toward any other the next, a flyer for the wrong march, a banned book, a face the Home Office has taken against. Retargeting it won’t require a new law, a vote, or a podium. It’ll take a software update you never agreed to and almost certainly won’t be told about. The nudity ban is the foot in the door and doors have a habit of staying open once a government’s boot is wedged inside. When Apple turned on age verification in March, roughly 35 million UK iPhone users restarted their phones and learned they now had to prove they were adults to keep using devices they already owned. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post UK Wants Message Scanning on Phones, Jail CEOs Who Refuse 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 What to Like and What to Question About Europe’s New Open Source Office Push appeared first on Reclaim The Net.