Australia is forcing Meta, Google, and TikTok to prop up News Corp, Nine and the ABC. Money is taken from the platforms people actually use and handed to the legacy giants people are moving away from. The Communications Minister calls it an "incentive." It's more of a subsidy for the giant incumbents.

Reclaim The Net

Australia Wants To Force Big Tech to Pay Legacy Media

The planned law privileges the biggest publishers.

Congress just renewed Section 702 for three more years, and the FBI can still search Americans' emails and texts without a warrant if the data was scooped up while spying on foreigners. Twenty Republicans tried to add a warrant requirement and lost. The program was sold as foreign surveillance, but it has always been a backdoor into Americans' communications, and Wednesday's vote made that backdoor permanent for the rest of the decade.

Reclaim The Net

House Renews FISA Section 702, Rejects Warrant Requirement

The reforms add paperwork and prison time for misuse, but they leave the part everyone has fought about for two decades exactly where it was.

Colorado’s AI law tells developers which kinds of discrimination the state likes and which it doesn’t, and the First Amendment may have something to say about that.

Reclaim The Net

DOJ Backs Musk's xAI in First Amendment Fight Over Colorado AI Law

Colorado's AI law tells developers which kinds of discrimination the state likes and which it doesn't, and the First Amendment may have s...

Court Forces German Chancellor Merz to Open Files on 300 “Insult the Chancellor” Cases

Reclaim The Net

Court Forces German Chancellor Merz to Open Files on 300 "Insult the Chancellor" Cases

The Chancellor who calls himself a defender of democratic norms now has roughly 300 prosecutors working to protect his feelings.

People are handing over their DNA, their scans, their health records to research projects, AI wellness apps, genetic testing kits. UK Biobank alone has leaked 198 times in a year. Once that data is out, it identifies your kids and siblings forever and you can't take it back.

Reclaim The Net

UK Biobank Failures Expose the Permanent Cost of Sharing Genetic and Medical Records

The promise of secure custodianship has failed 198 times in eleven months, and the volunteers who signed up in 2006 cannot take their DNA back.

Eurail demanded passport numbers to sell train tickets. Now 308,777 of those passports are on the dark web, and victims are paying out of pocket to replace them. Every mandatory ID scheme rests on this same fantasy: that the database won't get breached. They always do.

Reclaim The Net

The Eurail Breach and the Digital ID Problem

The stolen files include everything an identity thief would want and nothing Eurail ever needed to sell a rail ticket.

Tokyo just sent a guy to prison for 18 months because his website published movie reviews and summaries that contained spoilers. He didn't even write them himself, he just ran the site. The studios decided the descriptions were too thorough and the court agreed. Every entertainment writer in Japan is now guessing where the line is.

Reclaim The Net

Japan Jails a Man for Publishing Movie Spoilers

Describing a Godzilla movie in too much detail is now worth eighteen months in a Japanese prison.

Turkey is moving to ban anonymous VPNs. Approved providers must log everything and hand it over. Unapproved means illegal. Erdoğan is turning the tool Turks use to escape surveillance into another surveillance pipe.

Reclaim The Net

Turkey to Ban Anonymous VPNs

Ankara wants a VPN market where "approved" means logged and "unlicensed" means illegal, leaving Turkish users a choice between surveillance and a c...

France's government ID portal just lost up to 19 million records. Names, DOBs, addresses, phone numbers, logins. A third of the country, sitting in a criminal forum listing. This is the same government lobbying for encryption backdoors and mandatory digital ID. They can't protect what they already have.

Reclaim The Net

France's ID Portal Hacked: 19 Million Records Up for Sale

The breach puts roughly a third of France's population on a criminal forum just as the government lobbies for mandatory digital IDs.

Massie and Boebert's new bill effectively kills the third-party doctrine. No more warrantless access to your bank records, your browsing history, your location data just because it sits on a corporate server. The terms of service can't consent to surveillance on your behalf. Worth reading in full.

Reclaim The Net

The Surveillance Accountability Act Demands Warrants for Data

The silent handoff from your bank, your carrier, and your ISP to the federal government would finally stop happening behind your back.

California wants mandatory age verification for every chatbot user. ...Every Californian, ID'd by the state before they can talk to an AI. The bill even defines what tone of voice is legal for someone who has not proven themselves to be an adult. One of the authors calls it child protection. It's a digital ID speech regime.

Reclaim The Net

California Lawmakers Advance Bills to Impose AI Chatbot Censorship and Age Verification

California's new bills would let state lawmakers define, by statute, exactly how agreeable a chatbot is allowed to be.

A federal judge blocked Arkansas Act 900, a law that would have forced platforms to ID visitors, build parental surveillance dashboards, and kill notifications overnight. The state called it child safety. The judge called it unconstitutional and blocked it a day before it took effect.

Reclaim The Net

Federal Judge Blocks Arkansas Social Media Law on First Amendment Grounds

The same judge blocked the same state's second attempt to regulate online speech in as many years.

DOJ Blocks France’s X Probe, Citing First Amendment

Reclaim The Net

DOJ Blocks France's X Probe, Citing First Amendment

The refusal puts American mutual-assistance treaties off the table for European speech prosecutions, and Paris is the first to find out.

"Harvest now, decrypt later." Intelligence agencies are already hoarding encrypted files, betting quantum computers will crack them in ten years. Your medical records, legal docs, everything in Google Drive. Tuta Drive just launched to fix this.

Reclaim The Net

Tuta Announces Quantum-Resistant Encrypted Cloud Storage, Tuta Drive

Ten million users already trust Tuta with their email, and now the same quantum-resistant math covers everything they store.

Three of the world's biggest ad agencies just settled with the FTC over colluding to defund publishers they didn't like. Dentsu, GroupM, Publicis. $81 billion in ad-buying power agreeing on which outlets get starved. They called it "brand safety." It was a blacklist.

Reclaim The Net

FTC Settlement: Ad Agencies Agree to Stop "Brand Safety" Collusion to Defund Media Outlets

The agencies literally quoted Fight Club rules to keep their $81 billion blacklist quiet.

California just advanced a bill letting immigration nonprofit employees demand their faces and info be scrubbed from the internet. $4,000 minimum fine for journalists who don't comply. No exemption for reporters. It's already being called the "Stop Nick Shirley Act." Prior restraint is the exact thing the First Amendment was written to prevent...

Reclaim The Net

California's "Stop Nick Shirley Act" Would Penalize Journalism

The First Amendment was designed to prevent exactly this; a law that punishes speech before any court decides whether it was harmful.

Turkey is about to tie every social media account to a national ID number. Miss the three-month window and the account gets shut down. Justice Minister Gürlek says social media is "definitely not a space for freedom." The system he's building proves it.

Reclaim The Net

Turkey To Require National ID for Social Media Accounts

Turkey's government just found a way to put a national ID card on every tweet, post, and comment its citizens make online.

A San Francisco judge just locked a man out of ChatGPT without ever hearing from him, and the First Amendment question went unasked.

Reclaim The Net

A Court Banned a Man from ChatGPT. No One Asked If That's Constitutional.

A California judge just decided who gets to use ChatGPT, and the person banned from it wasn't even in the courtroom.

Von der Leyen says the EU's new age verification app will "shield children." What it actually does: routes every adult through a government ID check to use the internet. She compared it to the COVID pass. That's not reassuring.

Reclaim The Net

EU Launches Age Verification App

The Commission built the app on the same architecture as its planned continental digital identity wallet. That's not a coincidence.

Britain has developed a very specific institutional reflex. When its agencies fail catastrophically, the state responds by expanding surveillance of the general population. When the public expresses anger about those failures, the state responds by censoring the expression of that anger. UK Southport Inquiry Pushes Mass Surveillance and VPN Restrictions

Reclaim The Net

UK Southport Inquiry Pushes Mass Surveillance and VPN Restrictions

Every agency involved had the information to stop the Southport attacker, and the inquiry's answer is to track what the entire country browses...