The EU Commission is telling all 27 member states to deploy its age verification app by end of 2026. This is the same app a researcher bypassed in under two minutes back in April. Von der Leyen says platforms have "no more excuses." Show your digital passport to read a website.

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EU Pushes Age Verification App for All States

Brussels wants every member state shipping its age verification app by year's end, three months after a security researcher cracked it in unde...

Britain is running a public consultation on banning social media for under-16s, except ministers have already confirmed in parliament that the ban is happening no matter what the public says. The consultation is theater. Stopping a teenager from logging in means every adult uploads ID, which is exactly what the government ultimately wants.

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Britain's Pre-Decided "Consultation" on Banning Social Media for Under-16s

The verification system needed to keep teenagers off Instagram happens to be the same one needed to track everyone else.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

The Parents Decide Act makes Apple and Google verify every user's age at device setup. The bill doesn't say how. It hands that to the FTC, so a federal agency gets to decide whether your face scan, ID, or credit card is the price of turning on a phone. It's called the Parents Decide Act but parents don't decide anything. The FTC decides what counts as age verification, Apple and Google decide how to collect it, and every American hands over ID to turn on a phone. Parents lose power. The state gains it.

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US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

Buried in the definitions is a mandate that reaches every laptop, console, smart TV, and car infotainment system in the country.

"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.

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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.