Tag: mass surveillance

The KIDS Act: A Bipartisan Mass Surveillance Megabill

Just weeks after Americans criticized the United Kingdom for imposing intrusive and heavy-handed social media rules, Congress is now advancing legislation that raises strikingly similar concerns about government overreach, privacy erosion, and the expansion of online surveillance.

A bipartisan agreement on children’s online safety legislation unveiled by House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders would impose new obligations on social media platforms, while creating powerful incentives for companies to end online anonymity.

The proposal is part of the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act), an omnibus package that bundles together multiple bills, including the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), the SCREEN Act, the SAFE BOTs Act, COPPA 2.0, the SPY Kids Act, and more, as well as data broker provisions and research and education initiatives.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone announced Monday that they had reached agreement on the legislation, which would require social media companies to provide additional safeguards and parental tools for minors. The lawmakers said it would “hold Big Tech accountable.”

“We worked across the aisle for many months and have now found common ground on policies to significantly improve the digital environment for kids,” Guthrie and Pallone said in a joint statement.

As always, under that framing lies a familiar and deeply controversial approach: imposing broad obligations on platforms that hinge on whether companies know a user is a minor, without clearly defining how that knowledge is supposed to be obtained.

Congress has tried for years to set national rules for social media and youth safety. Those efforts have repeatedly stalled, in part because of unresolved tensions between child protection goals and fundamental privacy rights. In the absence of federal action, states have moved ahead with their own laws, often pushing even more aggressive requirements.

One of the main disputes appears to have been resolved in favor of House Republicans. According to a committee spokesperson, the agreement does not include a “duty of care” provision, a requirement backed by many child-safety advocates and several Senate lawmakers.

The bill text states that nothing in it may be construed to “impose a duty of care on a provider of a covered platform.”

Keep reading

ALPRs are a tool of the police state to track your every move

Every time you pull out of your driveway, you probably still harbour the illusion that you are a free person going about your business. The reality is far more grim: your vehicle is bleeding data into a massive, unregulated dragnet the moment you pass the neighbourhood entrance. Automated Licence Plate Readers (“ALPRs”) and Flock cameras have infested our communities, quietly transforming the American landscape into an open-air panopticon.

You are no longer just a traveller; you are a heavily tracked data point in a system designed to treat every peaceful citizen as a suspect. The apologists for the police state are always quick to play the devil’s advocate when these surveillance grids face public scrutiny. They will breathlessly point out that ALPRs do sometimes help law enforcement track the plates of a stolen car or a violent suspect.

Police departments and the corporate salesmen hawking this gear parade these isolated victories in front of gullible city councils to justify millions in taxpayer funding. We are constantly told that solving a fraction of property crimes requires us to surrender our basic human dignity and privacy. But this statist narrative entirely ignores the tyrannical caveat that makes the whole operation illegitimate.

For every single actual criminal apprehended, the daily movements of tens of thousands of peaceful, innocent people are meticulously logged, tracked and stored in massive databases. You have committed no crime, yet the State knows exactly when you dropped your kids off at school, which doctor you visited and what political rally you attended. It is a pre-emptive strike by a paranoid ruling class against the very people they claim to serve.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, these automated systems do much more than just read numbers on a bumper. They capture the time, date and precise coordinates of every passing vehicle, storing this highly sensitive location data for months or even years. This allows law enforcement to retroactively hit “rewind” on anyone’s life without ever setting foot inside a courtroom to obtain a warrant.

The American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”) has thoroughly documented how this dragnet operates, revealing that the overwhelming majority of people swept up in these databases are completely innocent of any wrongdoing. Despite this glaring fact, the data is pooled and shared across thousands of jurisdictions, essentially creating a national tracking system operated by private entities.

Taxpayers are literally being extorted to fund the infrastructure of their own surveillance. Nefarious corporate groups, like Flock Safety, are getting extraordinarily wealthy from this unconstitutional model. They sell fear to local politicians and walk away with lucrative contracts, deepening their network of unlawful data collection as we have consistently covered here at The Free Thought Project. The public is forced at gunpoint to foot the bill for a corporate-state partnership that actively violates their inherent rights.

This panopticon is being built piecemeal through thousands of localised contracts quietly approved by city councils, police departments and even private homeowner associations. Flock Safety alone has embedded itself in over 6,000 municipalities, operating a staggering network of more than 80,000 cameras nationwide to indiscriminately log the movements of peaceful people.

The financial windfall generated by this unconstitutional dragnet is nothing short of extortionary. Weaponising the public’s fear of crime, Flock Safety has ballooned into an $8.4 billion empire, siphoning massive amounts of wealth directly from the taxpayers they are constantly monitoring. With local governments shelling out up to $3,500 per camera annually, this corporate-state partnership raked in over $300 million in recurring revenue by early 2025. The public is literally being forced under the threat of state violence to finance their own digital incarceration, enriching corporate entities while fundamental rights are casually discarded.

To grasp the true, dystopian scale of this operation, consider that these private systems are performing over 20 billion scans of vehicles across the country every single month. They have successfully privatised the police state, transforming the basic, unalienable right to travel into an endless and highly profitable data extraction industry. We are witnessing the systematic abolition of privacy in real-time, orchestrated by corporate profiteers and rubber-stamped by local politicians who view citizens as nothing more than trackable data points. No wonder these people want to build hundreds more data centres despite already having more data centres than the next 14 top countries combined.

Keep reading

Trump Turns the Tables, Says He Will Not Approve FISA Extension Without Save America Act – Pulte Will Remain as Acting DNI Until US Attorney Pick is Approved

President Trump checkmated the Democrats and RINOs early on Wednesday morning, announcing that the Senate hearing on Jay Clayton to serve as Director of National Intelligence will be canceled, and that Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director Bill Pulte will remain in place to serve as acting DNI. 

This comes amid the ongoing debate over FISA Section 702, which the Intelligence Community uses for warrantless surveillance on national security threats– as well as innocent Americans.

“The Republicans agreed with Dumocrats to remove very fair, and talented, William Pulte, from serving as Acting DNI in return for getting FISA approved by the Dumocrats,’ Trump said in a statement this morning.

“However, the Republicans moved so fast with the hearings of the Great Jay Clayton, current U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, that Pulte would be gone before the Dumocrats would vote on FISA. Now, the Dumocrats are saying they will vote against FISA — So, the Republicans wound up having fulfilled their commitment, but Dumocrats broke the Deal.”

Keep reading

UK’s Social Media Ban: The Monumental Pretext For Total Digital Surveillance 

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s announcement of a social media ban for under-16s represents one of the most sweeping advances of the surveillance state in modern British history. 

Framed as “giving children their childhoods back,” the policy demands that big tech implement mandatory age verification across major platforms. In reality it forces every adult in the UK to surrender identity documents, facial scans, passports or credit card details simply to post, scroll or communicate online. 

What begins as a restriction on minors quickly becomes a national digital ID regime, device-level monitoring on every phone and tablet, and the effective end of anonymous speech. 

The move builds directly on years of incremental power grabs and aligns with identical efforts now rolling out in Canada, Australia and the EU. It ignores the government’s own evidence of no causal harm from social media while accelerating the very infrastructure that hands the state permanent visibility into private lives. 

This is not reform. It is the construction of a permissioned internet where access itself requires state-approved identity.

The scale is breathtaking. Age verification will not stop at one app. It will require systems capable of checking every user on Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. 

Additional rules turn off livestreaming and stranger communication by default for under-18s on gaming platforms, and impose overnight curfews plus infinite-scroll ‘breaks’ for under-18s. 

Keep reading

Congress’s Failure Is Liberty’s Gain

Congress accidentally protected the American people’s liberty this week when it failed to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Section 702 authorizes warrantless surveillance of foreign citizens. However, it has been “interpreted” by the FISA court to allow US intelligence agencies to wiretap conversations between a US citizen and a foreign target of Section 702 surveillance. The intelligence agencies can then conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans who communicate with that American.

Section 702 has been promoted to the American people by promising that the warrantless wiretapping it authorizes would be used to protect Americans from terrorism. However, Section 702 warrantless surveillance is used for investigations of non-terrorist crimes like drug war crimes and is shared with the FBI.

An additional threat to privacy is contained in Section 622 of this year’s Intelligence Authorization Act. This new provision requires the president to share with Israel intelligence related to “cybersecurity threats, terrorism, sanctions evasion, plans and intentions of state and nonstate actors, adversarial technology proliferation, missile threats, unmanned aerial systems, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, air and space domain awareness, and other aerial threats.” Requiring the president to share intelligence with a foreign government is unprecedented and arguably violates the president’s constitutional authority as commander-in-chief. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who is the sponsor of this bill, is the type of military hawk who usually supports giving the president absolute power in foreign and military affairs, even when the president’s actions are blatantly unconstitutional.

There is nothing in Section 622 prohibiting US intelligence agencies from giving Israel intelligence information regarding American citizens collected via warrantless wiretapping. This provision may lead to increased surveillance of Americans who are working to end to US government’s uncritical support for Israel on the grounds that they may pose a security threat to the United States or Israel.

One reason Congress did not extend Section 702 last week was controversy over President Trump’s nomination of Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte as interim director of national intelligence. Some Democrats, and Republicans, objected to Pulte’s lack of experience in national security and intelligence. A reason Democrats opposed Pulte’s nomination is concern he will use the position to target the president’s political enemies similar to the way he Pulte used his current job to launch high-profile federal investigations into foes of President Trump like Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

President Trump and some of his aides and supporters claim they were targeted for unconstitutional surveillance as part of the “Russiagate” investigation. Also, several members of Congress have been targeted for warrantless surveillance. Yet President Trump and a bipartisan majority in Congress still support the surveillance state.

According to a declassified report, US intelligence agencies failed to implement reforms to minimize the collection and use of US citizens’ information. The agencies promised to make these reforms following Edward Snowden’s revelations of the extent of warrantless surveillance of US citizens.

The only way to protect the American people’s liberty is to dismantle the surveillance state and stop trading real liberty for phantom security. True security comes from replacing militarism and authoritarianism with liberty and peace.

Keep reading

Starmer’s Social Media Ban, the Reinvention of the Surveillance State

Here is a fun fact to keep in your back pocket the next time a politician appears on the morning TV sofas to explain that the government’s new face-scanning and digital ID regime is really, deep down, about protecting your children.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, spent the first half of his career as a human rights lawyer and the second half running the Crown Prosecution Service.

He has argued for the individual against the state and he has aimed the full weight of the state at the individual. He has, in other words, seen this particular movie from both seats.

So when he tells you he has stumbled, blinking and innocent, into the most comprehensive surveillance apparatus in British peacetime history, do not extend him the courtesy of believing it. He spent twenty years learning precisely what these powers do to a person. He is not building this in his sleep.

And what he is building is a country in which you must ask permission to exist online. Not ask the platform. Ask the state. Before you read, post, store a photo, or send a message, you are expected to step up to the booth, show your papers, and prove you are a citizen the government has pre-approved.

The default setting of a free society, that you are left alone until you give the state a reason, is being flipped on its head. The new arrangement is that you are a suspect with a phone until you prove otherwise, and you prove it constantly, because proving it has been welded onto the act of going online and speaking at all.

That is the whole game. Everything else is set dressing.

Monday’s headline was a ban on under-16s using social media which, to some, sounds about as sinister as a wholesome ribbon-cutting until you ask the obvious question nobody in Downing Street wants asked aloud: how, precisely, do you stop a fourteen-year-old from opening Instagram without first checking the age of the forty-year-old?

You don’t. You can’t. So everyone gets carded. Britain is lifting the system wholesale from Australia, where a computer first scans your face and guesses your age from your cheekbones, then, failing that, surveils you to death, studies your browsing habits and the hours you keep, and then, when the algorithm throws up its hands, simply demands your passport.

The face scan is sold to you as the polite option, the velvet rope. It is, in fact, the funnel and, at the bottom of the funnel, sits the national identity check that three million people already told this government, in no uncertain terms, to scrap.

Keep reading

A Nation of Suspects

Some of the recent legal challenges to the use of surveillance by the Department of Homeland Security upon Americans have resulted in the revelation of truly terrifying behavior by the government, in direct defiance of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. We now know that the federal government spies on innocent Americans without suspicion and without warrants.

The spying seems to fall into several categories. The National Security Agency, which is in the Department of Defense, employs about 60,000 domestic spies. These are the folks who want us to believe that they go through the trouble of making applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for warrants to spy on foreigners.

Actually, from time to time they do go to this court, but their travels there — where judges are frisked upon entering and leaving the courthouse by the NSA agents who appear before them — serve as fig leaves for their massive warrantless spying on Americans. The FISA Court is unconstitutional because it issues warrants based on probable cause of communicating with a foreign person, rather than on probable cause of crime as the Fourth Amendment requires.

The courts have ruled consistently since the 1960s that spying — surveillance, as the feds call it — is a search, and the capture of data from a surveillance is a seizure.

The Fourth Amendment protects all persons in America — not just Americans — from warrantless searches and seizures of their “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” There are some well-recognized exceptions to this constitutional baseline, such as evidence that will quickly vanish or be seriously degraded, but those exceptions do not apply here as the NSA captures in real time all keystrokes on all digital devices and all fiber optic data transmitted into, out of and within the United States.

The judges of the FISA Court surely know that the Department of Justice lawyers and NSA agents who appear before them are going through a charade, and the court has been made a part of it. The charade is the pretense that all spying is done pursuant to the warrants that FISA Court judges issue. Former NSA agents have revealed publicly that this is hardly the case.

Nevertheless, the lowered standard from probable cause of crime to probable cause of communicating to a foreign person was crafted by Congress — in another of its many moments heedless of the Constitution. After a few years of this, the FISA Court began to issue warrants for spying on the Americans who communicate with foreigners, out to the sixth degree. A sixth grader can do the math, as this leads to hundreds of millions of Americans whose communications are captured.

A second category of spying is employed by the DHS. The DHS — now a 250,000-person strong federal police department nowhere countenanced by the Constitution — has sophisticated software that can read fingerprints at 15 feet and irises at 15 inches. So, if you wave goodbye or good riddance to an ICE agent, and he holds up his mobile phone, and you are in the federal system for any benign reason, he has captured your bank, health, legal and commercial records on the spot. If he talks to you in your car and is within 15 inches of your face, he can capture the same data.

Keep reading

A Requiem for Privacy

When President Donald Trump appointed an obviously unqualified friend, a home builder executive, to be acting director of national intelligence, he inadvertently triggered attention to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The director of national intelligence is the head of the umbrella agency that gathers intelligence from the 17 federal spying agencies and from that data prepares and delivers the president’s daily briefing. Sec. 702, which permits warrantless spying, expires this month.

Trump prefers to receive his briefings directly from the CIA and its foreign colleagues, leaving the DNI as an appendage with little to do. Nevertheless, the DNI employs hundreds of spies and analysts, and most of them have national security clearances that permit them to view the nation’s most closely guarded secrets and to invade anyone’s privacy.

Section 702 of FISA theoretically permits federal agents to spy without warrants or suspicion on foreign persons. In reality, it is used as a fig leaf to spy on Americans.

A few years ago, Department of Justice lawyers persuaded the FISA court secretly to permit the National Security Agency — America’s domestic spies — to spy on Americans with whom foreign persons communicate; even suspicionless Americans whose communications with foreigners are benign; even Americans removed by six degrees from conversations with foreigners.

Before 9/11, no one in law enforcement was permitted access to data obtained outside the restraints imposed by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Those restraints prohibit searches and seizures — in the modern parlance, surveillance and data acquisition — without a search warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of crime, sworn to under oath. And the warrant itself must specifically describe the places to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.

Since 9/11, the wall between surveillance and law enforcement has collapsed even though the feds still maintain that the Fourth Amendment only regulates law enforcement and not surveillance. This wild proposition is defied by the plain language of the amendment, which protects all persons from all government, and by the history of the colonists dealing with British government agents executing general warrants issued by a secret court in London.

Those warrants permitted the bearers to arrest whomever they wished, to search wherever they chose and to seize whatever they found. Under the pretext of looking for evidence of crimes, like failing to comply with the Stamp Act, these agents were truly looking for what the king considered subversive, like a draft of the Declaration of Independence.

James Madison and his colleagues who drafted the Fourth Amendment surely knew that history and shared the near universal colonial revulsion at general warrants. Hence the requirements in the amendment for probable cause of crime sworn to before the warrant-issuing judge, and specificity in the warrant itself.

All of this was crafted to outlaw general warrants, and protect all persons in America from warrantless government assaults and invasions of their “persons, houses, papers, and effects.”

Now, back to FISA. FISA was crafted in reaction to President Richard Nixon’s use of the CIA and FBI for warrantless domestic surveillance purposes. This was spying on Americans — opponents of the Vietnam War and Nixon’s political opponents — which as we all now know came crashing down on Nixon in the Watergate scandal.

Keep reading

Britain Goes Full ‘Airstrip One’

In George Orwell’s 1984, Great Britain was just a province of Oceania named “Airstrip One” as a none-too-subtle nod to the U.K.’s role as host to the heavy bombers of U.S. Eighth Air Force during World War II.

Four decades past the real 1984, and there’s still no Oceania. But Britain looks more and more like Airstrip One as Parliament considers a bill opening up everyone’s smartphone to government supervision — and jail time for tech execs who don’t submit.

You had to figure this was probably coming, right?

Right.

Reclaim the Net reports that “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.”

That might sound all well and good, but as usual, For the Children™ is little more than the government’s justification for total surveillance.

“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,” Reclaim noted, with nudity serving as “the excuse and the unbroken view into your phone is the actual prize.”

The industry term is “client-side scanning,” which sounds much nicer than “a government mandated app that looks at everything on your phone all the time.”

And even that sounds better than “Big Brother is Watching You,” which is exactly what it is.

As already required by Britain’s Online Safety Act, Apple and Google forcibly install age verification on every iPhone and Android device in the UK via app store updates.

No, it can’t be uninstalled.

Keep reading