Tag: police state

Senate Bill Would Put Age Checks in Every US Operating System

A bipartisan bill just introduced would build an age check into the operating system of every phone and computer sold in America. 

The Digital Age Assurance Act of 2026, S. 5090, from Senators Andy Kim, Cynthia Lummis, Adam Schiff, and John Barrasso, takes California’s age-signaling law and makes it the national standard.

The bill was referred to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on July 22, 2026, and would take effect 18 months after enactment.

We finally obtained a copy of the bill text for you here.

With the proposals, an operating system cannot be used without an account, and the account requires the user to “indicate the date of birth and age of the user.” 

For now, the user gets to declare their own age. A “covered device” is any computer, mobile device or other general-purpose computing device capable of running an operating system, so the requirement reaches practically everything. 

This is also backdated and accounts that already exist when the law takes effect are included.

The operating provider may skip the prompt where it already knows the age of the user from some other obligation, including a purchase authorization.

When a declaration is made into one of four brackets, under 13, 13 to 15, 16, or 17+. The system broadcasts only the bracket, which the bill defines as “non-personally identifiable data derived from a user’s date of birth or age.”

Apps, app stores, and even browsers would have to have the ability to request that bracket and use it as “the primary indicator of a user’s age.” 

Some websites would be included in this too. A “covered internet website” is one already “required under Federal or State law to verify the age of a user,” so the website obligations attach only where a state or federal age-verification mandate already exists.

With the first use of the browser on a device, it would request a signal from the operating system, and then it hands that signal to covered website operators on request. But the bill does not say how. 

Under the proposals, a “browser provider” is anyone who “owns, maintains, or controls a browser for use on a covered device.” No size threshold is attached. A small maintainer with a few thousand users would carry the same obligation as a big tech platform like Google.

Anyone under 17, which is the bill’s definition of a “child,” has to “link their account to the account of a parent or legal guardian.” The only exception is for emancipated minors. There’s no trusted adult option that can override this. A 16-year-old in an abusive household, or one researching a parent’s conduct, has no route that does not run through the person they need distance from. 

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UK High Court Moves To Ban Display Of English And British Flags

A Liberal Democrat council has secured a High Court injunction that effectively bans the unauthorised display of the St George’s Cross and Union Flag on lampposts and public highways across an entire English county.

What began as a grassroots campaign to raise the colours of the nation has been declared a threat to community safety, with the full force of the courts now deployed against it.

Oxfordshire County Council, run by the Liberal Democrats, won its landmark case after months of legal action against the Raise the Colours campaign.

Justice Dexter Dias granted the order prohibiting unidentified persons from attaching England or Union flags to highway infrastructure or painting flag imagery on roads. Breach carries the risk of imprisonment, unlimited fines, or asset seizure.

Council leader Tim Bearder celebrated the outcome, stating “This is a welcome judgement. We’re very pleased with the result,” adding “This sets a legal precedent and will hopefully deter people in not just Oxfordshire but around the country from partaking in this criminal activity.”

He described those involved as “very challenging people, not patriots.”

The council claims the flags created highway safety risks, trespass, and obstruction. It spent roughly £80,000 removing them and a further £40,000 on legal fees, costs it now intends to recover.

Staff tasked with taking the flags down reportedly faced hostility, to the point that some were instructed to wear face coverings and check their vehicles for tracking devices after one worker’s home address was published.

The judge noted that maintenance teams had been “working in fear” and that people directed by the council had been obstructed “to the extent that at times they have simply given up on the removal.” He concluded there was “little prospect absent an injunction that it will stop.”

The new order does not prevent flags on private property, and the council insists it flies both the Union Flag and St George’s Cross at County Hall.

This is the same Oxfordshire authority that earlier issued formal stop notices branding the widespread installation of national flags an “act of intimidation and division.”

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X Warns Australia’s Censor Wants Reach Beyond Australia

X has told the Australian Senate committee that a proposal expanding the powers of the nation’s top censor would let the regulator demand documents from people outside of Australia. The only connection that would be required for X to have to hand over documents to Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is that the person is “affiliated” with a platform.

The submission, published Tuesday, targets the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026. The bill cleared the House of Representatives on July 1 and hit the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee on the same day. That committee will report on August 25.

The changes would “compel any person outside Australia…to provide information and documents merely because they are ‘affiliated’ with a company,” X said in a filing.

X described that as being “in clear conflict” with international legal principles, warning that the amendment “raises potential for a severe impact on international comity.”

X said the plans gave no “due regard to procedural fairness, privacy, the broader impacts on online services, and Australia’s digital economy.”

A company that fails to take “reasonable” steps to keep under-16s off its platform currently faces a penalty of up to A$49.5 million or 30,000 penalty units. The bill doubles that to A$99 million, around US$69 million, for systematic breaches.

Under the bill, eSafety could also compel the records from the third-party digital ID vendors that platforms hire, as well as from app store operators.

Those vendors hold face scans, ID document images, and inference data drawn from Australians who handed over sensitive data in order to stay on the platform after Australia banned social media for under 16s.

The bill would give the government regulator a legal route into all of that data that it recently mandated to be collected.

eSafety complained to the panel that its current authority to compel documents lags behind that of other regulators and that it’s left to depend on “representations from providers about their own compliance.”

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Christian Parents Sue Oregon After State Brands Them “Child Abusers” for Refusing to “Affirm” Daughter’s Transgender Identity

A Christian mother and her husband are fighting back after Oregon officials effectively branded them child abusers because they refused to “affirm” their teenage daughter’s transgender identity.

Nicole and David Calaway filed a federal lawsuit on July 15 against their daughter’s former therapist and multiple Oregon Department of Human Services officials, accusing them of violating the couple’s First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

“It has destroyed our lives,” Nicole told The Daily Signal.

According to the lawsuit, Child Protective Services removed Nicole’s then-15-year-old daughter, identified as K.A., from the Calaways’ home on July 18, 2024.

The seizure occurred one day after Nicole and her daughter reportedly terminated the services of therapist Jennifer Forster. Court documents allege that Forster then contacted the child-abuse hotline after being encouraged by ODHS caseworker Rachel Woods.

Forster allegedly told authorities that Nicole had appeared “aggressive and angry” and intended to leave her daughter without mental-health support.

The Calaways contend those statements were false and created a “fabricated appearance of urgency” that Oregon officials used to remove K.A. from their home.

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Justice Carl Thibault upholds Quebec’s Covid curfew despite finding it violated Charter rights

The Quebec Superior Court has dismissed an appeal challenging Quebec’s controversial COVID-19 curfew, ruling that while the unprecedented measure violated several Charter rights, those infringements were justified under the Constitution because of the pandemic.

In a decision released July 29, Justice Carl Thibault upheld a lower court ruling involving Stéphanie Pépin, who was ticketed on January 9, 2021, after police stopped her while she was driving to attend a peaceful protest against Quebec’s newly imposed nighttime curfew.

Quebec was the only province in Canada to impose a province-wide curfew during the pandemic. Residents were barred from leaving their homes between 8 p.m. and 5 a.m., with fines ranging from $1,000 to $6,000 for violations. The curfew remained in force until May 28, 2021, before being reintroduced from December 31, 2021, to January 17, 2022.

According to evidence presented in court, roughly 46,000 pandemic-related tickets were issued in Quebec between September 2020 and October 2021, including approximately 22,500 curfew tickets, representing an estimated $30 million in fines.

Justice Thibault agreed with the trial judge that the curfew infringed Ms. Pépin’s rights to liberty, freedom of expression, and freedom of peaceful assembly under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The court also acknowledged that peaceful political demonstrations held during curfew hours were effectively prohibited because they were not exempted under the regulations.

However, the court concluded those infringements were justified under Section 1 of the Charter, finding the curfew was rationally connected to the government’s objective of slowing Covid-19 transmission and protecting the healthcare system. Justice Thibault emphasized that courts should exercise restraint when reviewing emergency public health decisions made during an unprecedented crisis.

During the original 2023 trial, constitutional lawyer Olivier Séguin cross-examined Quebec’s former National Director of Public Health, Dr. Horacio Arruda, and his strategic medical adviser, Dr. Richard Massé. Both acknowledged the curfew was intended not only to reduce virus transmission but also to reinforce compliance with other public health measures and send a strong message to the public.

“The Court again recognized that Quebec’s Covid curfew infringed fundamental Charter freedoms,” Séguin said following the ruling. “The central question was whether those infringements were justified during a public health emergency.”

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, which funded the litigation, said its lawyers are reviewing the judgment to determine whether to seek further appellate review.

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Permission to work: the Crown sends three prosecutors to scrutinize Tamara Lich’s work at Rebel News

When the story of the Freedom Convoy is told, one name keeps surfacing at the centre of the storm: Tamara Lich. In the winter of 2022, as vaccine mandates and lockdown rules stretched into a third year, she was at the forefront with the truckers who drove on Ottawa and parked there. She became a symbol of resistance not because she sought it, but because the system made her one.

And the system still isn’t letting go.

Fresh from the longest mischief trial in Canadian history, indeed in the entire Commonwealth, Lich’s case was back before an Ottawa court. There is a live application before the court seeking to vary her sentence so she can travel more widely to work for Rebel News. Ezra Levant filed an affidavit describing the work she has done over the past six months. The Crown’s response? Three prosecutors, not one, not two, but three, lined up to cross-examine him on it. That is how far things have come: a journalist made to seek the court’s permission simply to travel for her job, and three government lawyers dispatched to argue about it. 

Step outside the Ottawa bubble and the picture changes entirely. Earlier in the month, Ezra and Tamara spent more than twelve hours driving through southern Alberta, from Okotoks to Lethbridge to Medicine Hat. Crowds gathered not because the press told them to, but because they wanted to. People came out in the heat when they could have been doing anything else, just to say hello.

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Savannah Mayor Van Johnson’s Animal Farm – Pushes Globalist Flock Line…’It’s For Your Safety’

It’s always ‘for the children’, or ‘for your safety’, as they try and take away your Constitutional rights to install a tyrannical police state, full of corruption and decay. It’s now the Savannah hunger games.

We are all well aware of Savannah Mayor Van Johnson’s refusal to deal with the homeless problem in Savannah, going so far as to defy state law.

It is increasingly obvious that Johnson is simply another globalist puppet installed to enact the globalist agenda of surveillance, high crime, and societal destruction.

Johnson’s comments on the Flock Safety cameras installed throughout the city are just the latest example of this reality.

“On one end you can’t say, you know, ‘Keep us safe, do everything that you can to keep us safe,’ and on the other hand say, ‘But wait, we don’t want these cameras,’” Johnson said. “We’ve got cameras outside, we’ve got cameras of people walking up and down the street, you have cameras when you go into the airport, you have cameras when you walk into the stores, I mean, you know, public safety comes at a cost.”

Excuse us Mayor Johnson, but public safety should not come via a violation of our Constitutional rights.

We have questions for the Mayor.

  • Did you ask the citizens of Savannah if it was ok with them if you installed surveillance cameras throughout the city to track their movement?
  • Have you disclosed to the citizens of Savannah the full extent of the capabilities of the cameras, including blue tooth, audio, and phone surveillance?

Enquiring minds want to know.

We at The Georgia Record think good old fashion police work, and not Minority Report is the way to keep the residents of Savannah safe.

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Texas Orders Discord to Run UK-Style Age Checks for State Users

A Texas court has ordered Discord to turn on the age-verification system it built for the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act for every user in the state. Britain’s age-check regime has reached America by court order, and opening or keeping a Discord account in Texas can now mean a face scan or a government ID.

The agreed temporary injunction, signed by a Collin County judge, gives Discord 90 days to extend its age-assurance and default settings to Texas.

We obtained a copy of the temporary injunction for you here.

The company can still ask the court for more time if it shows the deadline is not feasible. Discord must serve the Texas Attorney General’s Office a confidential progress report every 30 days until it complies, and the order binds the company until final judgment, enforceable by contempt. The order lets Discord identify Texas users from data it already holds rather than gather new categories of personal information.

Today a Texan opens an account with an email address and a self-reported birthday, nothing more. The injunction imports that system instead. By Discord’s own published account, more than 90 percent of users are never asked to confirm their age, facial age estimation runs on the user’s own phone, and identity documents go to a third-party vendor rather than to Discord. The reassurance holds only for the users the system never questions. For everyone else, the account now comes with a face scan or a government ID handed to an outside company.

Under the order, Discord must route messages from strangers into a separate request inbox and block sensitive content for Texas teens unless it confirms the user is an adult. It must also close adult-only spaces to anyone it has not age-assured, according to the attorney general’s office. The state says these are the protections Discord already gives British children under the Online Safety Act and withheld from Texas.

Texas’s expert told the court that extending Discord’s existing safety features to the state was “just a matter of turning it on for Texas.” Discord runs the age-assurance system in the UK, Australia, and Brazil, its witnesses testified. In Texas the company still relies on a self-reported birthday at signup, a fact it did not dispute for the order.

Discord announced in February 2026 that it would roll its protections out worldwide, with the US launch only weeks away. Then it pulled back, telling the public the rollout would wait until the second half of 2026.

Attorney General Ken Paxton called the ruling a historic victory. “Discord built a platform where adult predators could hunt Texas children, then looked parents in the eye and told them it was safe,” he said in a statement. His office says Discord submitted 489,782 reports of suspected child sexual exploitation to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 2025, more than 1,300 a day. Under cross-examination, Discord’s lawyers drew out that those reports largely amount to the company flagging crimes it finds on its own platform and passing them to the center.

New Jersey sued before Texas did, and Nevada, Indiana, and Arkansas have taken their own legal action. Texas filed on May 22, 2026, and won a restraining order within weeks. The case heads to a trial on the merits set for June 2027, where the state will seek civil penalties under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which can reach $10,000 per violation.

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UK Committee Hears Calls to Expand the Online Safety Act’s Powers

A row of peers has gathered in Westminster to decide whether the Online Safety Act has been cruel enough to the internet yet. After some hours of evidence, the verdict came back: not nearly.

The Communications and Digital Committee has been quizzing stakeholders about how the law is going, and the charities it called have a grievance: Ofcom is too soft. Andy Burrows of the Molly Rose Foundation put it like this: “I do not get the impression that the companies are quaking in their boots at Ofcom’s enforcement approach.” The boots, by every account, stood steady.

The censorship law, for anyone who missed its arrival, will make Britain the safest place in the world to be online. It says so itself. The maximum fine runs to £18 million ($24M) or a tenth of worldwide revenue, whichever bites harder, which for the biggest platforms would reach into the billions. And still, no boots.

So the room reached for the obvious cure. More of it. Baroness Kidron of the 5Rights Foundation, defending Ofcom and filleting it in the same breath, allowed that “the act is wrong in certain places and does leave certain gaps, and will need some more work.” Some more work. The gaps, you understand, all run in the one direction.

Look at the machinery already bolted on. A platform that performs “Ofcom’s 44 measures, or whichever number it is now” — Kidron’s phrase — is safe. Do the 44 things, claim your safe harbor, go home. Try something cleverer and you forfeit the protection. The law rewards the box-tick over the better idea. A bold design.

And the boxes do get ticked. Nearly two-thirds of daily visits to Britain’s adult sites now pass through an age check. Lord Vaizey told the Lords that Ofcom had begun investigating 47 sites for non-compliance. Ofcom’s own spokesperson said 69. Enforcement is one of those two numbers.

Ofcom says the picture is better than that. Change was already happening, its spokesperson offered; platforms held to account, fast enforcement launched, more protections put forward. Burrows allowed that some of the action already under way might be supervisory, Ofcom working with a firm rather than fining it, though the process is opaque enough that nobody could say how industrious it was.

Meanwhile, the children the whole edifice was raised to protect. On the risk it already knew well, child sexual abuse, Burrows granted Ofcom was doing a good job. His worry was the newer harms. He kept returning to the Com groups; networks largely of teenage boys, whose reported numbers rose sixfold between 2022 and 2024, running a new kind of grooming pointed at suicide and self-harm. The Molly Rose Foundation carries the name of Molly Russell, fourteen, who viewed thousands of images promoting suicide and self-harm before she took her own life.

Rani Govender of the NSPCC laid out the trap: when a platform spots a harm the codes of practice never named, it carries no obligation to act on it. The law covers what the law already wrote down. More scope. More codes. More measures numbered 44, or whichever it is now.

One problem stayed off the agenda. The Act treats two hard engineering questions as things a statute can order into being. The first is reliable age estimation; in the opening days of the new rules, people strolled past the checks using video game avatars to pass as adults. The second is reading encrypted messages without breaking the encryption, which cannot be done, a point Signal made by offering to leave the country rather than build the back door. “If the choice came down to being forced to build a backdoor, or leaving, we’d leave,” its president wrote. A mandate is a wish with a fine attached.

The public has been voting with its downloads. When the age checks landed on July 25, Proton VPN clocked an hourly sign-up increase of over 1,400 percent. Ofcom’s answer was to tell the BBC it would be illegal for platforms to encourage VPN use. To Ofcom, a loophole to close. The verdict in it went unheard.

And the petition to repeal the whole thing has passed 550,000 signatures. Having heard all of this (the avatars, the VPN stampede, the third of a million names) the committee asked whether the age-check regime might also be extended to VPN providers.

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Fauci Bragged in His Diary About Forcing California and New York to Shut Down Schools After Years of Claiming ‘I Had Nothing to Do With It’

Newly released entries from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s personal diary show that the longtime NIAID director was not only deeply involved in closing down schools across the country but was actively proud of his role in getting California and New York to send millions of children home as he dictated the nation’s disastrous COVID response.

This directly contradicts Fauci’s repeated public claims that he had “nothing to do with” school closures, a lie he peddled for years even as American kids suffered catastrophic learning loss, mental health crises, and social isolation under the policies he helped create.

The bombshell comes from the 1,141-page “Tony’s Diary” package released this week by Senator Rand Paul, Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, ahead of Fauci’s sworn testimony before the panel on Wednesday.

Fauci has repeatedly insisted publicly that critics were wrong to blame him for the school closures.

“They always come back and say, Fauci was responsible for closing schools. I had nothing to do—I mean, let’s get down to the facts,” he claimed in 2022.

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