Tag: police state

Australia’s Under-16 Social Media Ban Fails: 73% Ignore It

Australia’s under-16 social media ban has been in force for four months and the headline finding from a new working paper out of the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute is that around three-quarters of the teenagers it targets are ignoring it.

The paper, “Why Bans Fail: Tipping Points and Australia’s Social Media Ban,” surveyed 746 Australian teenagers between March and April 2026. Among 14- and 15-year-olds covered by the ban, only about 27% are complying. The other 73% are still using Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Threads, or Kick, the ten platforms the law designates off-limits to anyone under 16.

The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 took effect on 10 December 2025, making Australia the first country to outlaw teenage social media accounts at the federal level.

More than a dozen other countries and numerous US states are now considering versions of the same approach. The Australian model places enforcement entirely on the platforms, which face penalties of up to A$49.5 million for failing to take “reasonable steps” to keep under-16s off their services. Teenagers themselves face no legal sanction.

The teenagers know this. According to the survey, only 22% of banned teens believe they personally face any consequence for using a banned platform.

47% correctly understand that the consequences fall on the companies. Awareness of the ban is near-universal at 86%. The teens aren’t confused about what the law says. They’ve simply concluded, accurately, that the law isn’t aimed at them.

Getting around the restrictions takes minimal effort. 75% of banned teens describe circumvention as easy or very easy.

The most common workarounds are the obvious ones: lying about age on verification prompts (57%), entering false birthdates at sign-up (44%), borrowing a parent’s or older sibling’s account (42%), and routing through a VPN (30%). 64% of 14- and 15-year-olds in the survey have not had their accounts removed at all. The platforms haven’t found them. A quarter of non-compliers report that a parent, older sibling, or other adult helped them sign up for a new account after a previous one was deactivated.

The researchers also asked teenagers a more interesting question. What share of your peers would need to stop using social media before you stopped? The average answer was 69%. Some teens placed the threshold even higher. The result holds across every way the question was framed, whether the reference group was age peers, classmates, the wider school, or “a typical person your age.” The numbers came out between 62% and 69% in every variant.

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No, Zelensky Is Not ‘The Leader of the Free World’

Just when sensible people might conclude that American or European members of Ukraine’s sycophantic fan club cannot become even more detached from reality, a prominent member of the club proves the opposite.  This time, it is conservative pundit David French, who wins the prize in his April 26, 2026, New York Times column, “Meet the New Leader of the Free World.”   That leader is Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

French contends that “A remarkable thing has happened on the world’s battlefields. Ukraine – a nation that was supposed to dissolve within days of a Russian invasion – has fought Russia to a stalemate, revolutionizing land warfare in the process.  It has become an indispensable security partner in the Western alliance, including in the war against Iran.”

But according to French, such military resilience barely begins to measure the extent of Volodymyr Zelensky’s achievements. He also “is taking the next step, one that would have been unthinkable even as recently as 2024. By word and deed, he’s showing Europe and the world how the post-American free world can preserve its liberty and independence.” French then delves into well-worn episodes in which Donald Trump’s administration has alienated, antagonized, and berated America’s longtime NATO allies, thereby provoking Europe to become more self-reliant, as one manifestation of the “post-American” free world.

French seems downright awestruck at Ukraine’s alleged military prowess. “This might be difficult for many readers to grasp – given our nation’s longstanding military supremacy – but the largest and most battle-hardened land force in the Western world may well be the Ukrainian Army.”  He adds that “It’s also worth noting that the U.S. forces have much less combat experience than Ukraine forces – especially when it comes to combat with a great power.”

But there’s more!  Ukraine’s military “is the only Western force that has fully adapted to modern drone warfare.  Indeed, Ukraine is arguably the world’s leader in drone warfare.”

Observers who recall the Western news media’s hyped propaganda offensive during the prelude to the Persian Gulf War may be experiencing a sense of déjà vu.  Prominent news correspondents insisted (while maintaining sober expressions) that Iraq was a borderline military superpower.  Of course, in that case the purpose of the propaganda was to generate fear of Iraq as a military threat.  In this case, the propaganda is an attempt to convince a skeptical global audience that Ukraine is a surprisingly capable military bulwark against Russia, Iran, and other authoritarian threats.  The current disinformation is nearly as flagrant, however, as during the earlier episode.

Russia continues to make gains on the battlefield, slowly conquering additional Ukrainian territory. The bloodied Ukrainian forces appear increasingly beleaguered, and Russia (because of its much larger population and military reserves) is better positioned for a continuing war of attrition.  Western officials and their media allies have gone to great lengths to obscure the fundamental reality that Russia is winning the war, albeit in a costlier and more grinding fashion than the Kremlin had assumed.  The credibility of arguments that Moscow cannot continue to sustain the drain on its manpower is not enhanced by the continuing refusal of Western analysts to provide even a rough estimate of Ukrainian casualties.  Such clumsy attempts at concealment suggest that the actual news about that issue is not good.

If the battlefield situation were not worrisome enough for Ukraine, major domestic political fractures have occurred over the past year.  Zelensky’s latest moves also alienated some of his most reliable supporters and apologists in the West.  When prominent establishment media outlets such as the Financial Times, the Spectator, and Politico all began to publish stories critical of the Ukrainian leader’s undemocratic moves in late 2025, there was a sense that attitudes even among pro-Ukraine Western elites were shifting.  That trend has quietly continued in 2026.

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The Trump Surveillance State

The Fourth Amendment protects all persons from warrantless government searches and seizures of their persons, houses, papers and effects. It requires that warrants be supported by probable cause of crime and specifically describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.

Last week, for the first time in the modern era, the government argued to the Supreme Court of the United States that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution did not outlaw general warrants. General warrants were issued in the colonial era by a secret court in London. They were not based on probable cause of crime or even on articulable suspicion about a potential defendant. They did not identify a target or state what crime was being investigated.

Rather, general warrants were based on governmental need; a meaningless standard as whatever the government wants it will tell a court it needs. The warrants authorized the bearer of the warrant to search wherever he wished and seize whatever he found.

The stated motivation for the general warrants was the British government’s enforcement of the Stamp Act. That legislation required all colonists to have stamps affixed to all papers, books and newspapers in their possession. The enforcement of the Stamp Act was the government’s fig leaf for spying.

We know that the true reason for the Stamp Act was to conduct surreptitious searches for revolutionary materials. We know this because during the one-year existence of the Stamp Act — 1765 — a group of enterprising students at the College of New Jersey, now known as Princeton University, calculated that more revenue was spent to enforce the act than was collected by the sale of the stamps.

Historians believe that the use of general warrants for the enforcement of the Stamp Act pushed many colonists into the independence camp 10 years later in 1775. The use of general warrants also motivated James Madison and his colleagues in 1791 to craft the Fourth Amendment whose specificity requirement “particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized” poignantly did away with search where you wish and seize whatever you find.

Until now.

Now, in one week on Capitol Hill, the right to privacy is facing its gravest challenges since pre-colonial days, in Congress and the Supreme Court. Congress will wrestle with Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expires in just days, and the court will hear a claim that general warrants are still viable.

Sec. 702 permits warrantless surveillance on Americans by permitting federal agents to use software that allows them to conduct surveillance of all fiber optic means of communication — mobile phones, message texting, emails — based on the lawful communications of some Americans to foreign persons and then their subsequent lawful communications to other Americans. The “other Americans” can include all 340 million of us.

Theoretically, the data gathered from these warrantless searches cannot be used for criminal prosecutions, since even the feds who do this spying have told members of Congress that they recognize the need for search warrants to access the content of the data. There are at least two reasons that no one should believe what the feds have said. The first is the feds lie. In 2023, they accessed the content of the data thousands of times without warrants. The second reason is that Madison and the Fourth Amendment’s ratifiers did not believe the government would restrain itself, hence the specificity requirement.

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House Renews FISA Section 702, Rejects Warrant Requirement

The House voted 235 to 191 on Wednesday to keep Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act running for another three years, declining once more to require federal agents to get a warrant before searching Americans’ communications scooped up under the program.

Around twenty Republican privacy hawks broke with leadership and joined Democrats in opposition, but the bill cleared the chamber with hours to spare before the Thursday midnight expiration.

Section 702, first authorized in 2008, lets intelligence agencies intercept the electronic communications of foreign nationals outside the United States without a warrant.

The catch, and the part that has driven nearly two decades of reform fights, is that those intercepts routinely sweep up the texts, calls, and emails of Americans who happen to be in contact with the roughly 350,000 foreign targets surveilled each year. That data sits in a federal database, and the FBI can search it for Americans’ information without going to a judge first.

The reforms attached to the renewal do not change that. They tinker around the edges. Federal agents will need an attorney’s sign-off before targeted reviews of Americans’ data, each query will require written justification submitted to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and misuse can now carry up to five years in prison.

The FBI will also have to file monthly reports to oversight officials defending searches involving Americans.

None of this requires a judge or forces the government to articulate probable cause before reading what an American wrote or said.

A bipartisan bloc has pushed for almost twenty years to require specific court approval before agents can pull up an American’s communications from the 702 trove, arguing that anything less is a Fourth Amendment workaround.

The bill that passed Wednesday explicitly references the Fourth Amendment in its text. It just does not require a warrant to honor it.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

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Biden admin ‘zealously’ probed ‘traditional’ Christians — even keeping tabs on priests: DOJ report

The Biden administration “zealously” investigated, penalized, and engaged in “aggressive prosecutions” of Christians “with traditional biblical views” — ignoring their conscientious objections and even secretly keeping tabs on Catholic priests, a Department of Justice task force found.

The DOJ-led Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias released 14 findings Thursday, confirming the 46th president’s officials “forc[ed] Christians with traditional biblical views to choose whether to live in accordance with their faith or risk violating federal law.”

In a 200-page report, the task force concluded: “The Biden Administration generally tolerated religious beliefs that were privately held but zealously pursued actions to limit Christians’ ability to act in accordance with their faith.”

That included prosecutions of pro-life Christians who were given longer sentences than their pro-abortion peers for violations of a federal law protecting access to abortion clinics or pregnancy resource centers.

The report also unearthed new details about a January 2023 FBI memo sent to multiple field offices that called for the targeting of “radical-traditionalist” Catholics as a result of “baseless allegations” from the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center.

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Miliband Bans Tumble Dryers in Net Zero Drive

The sale of traditional tumble dryers is to be stamped out in a Net Zero drive that will push consumers toward more expensive heat pump machines that take longer to dry clothes. The Telegraph has the story.

Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, is introducing new laws that will phase out the sale of condenser tumble dryers and promote heat-pump alternatives to help cut carbon emissions.

The move, condemned as a “mad” form of “Soviet control” by the Tories and Reform, will align Britain more closely with the European Union which has already implemented similar rules.

Traditional dryers use a heating element to warm air, which passes through your clothes and removes moisture. That moisture is then condensed into water and collected in a reservoir, before being drained away.

A heat-pump dryer uses a closed-loop system that recycles warm air and runs at a lower temperature – around 50°C instead of the standard 70-75°C.

Heat-pump dryers cost £40 more to buy on average than traditional dryers, with premium heat-pump machines costing as much as £1,650.

They can take as much as half an hour longer to dry clothes, with users on consumer forums complaining that they are spending far longer drying multiple loads for their families.

While the Government believes the more modern and cheaper-to-run heat-pump dryers will save consumers in the long run, critics say they can fail in very cold conditions. Others have raised concerns about how much noise they make, complaining about a droning hum akin to the sound of an air-conditioning unit.

Advocates say they do less damage to clothes over time, but some users have complained their clothes feel cold and as if they are still damp after the lower-temperature drying cycles finish.

On top of this, certain models have been affected by technical faults that have caused the machines to burst into flames.

Plans for a de facto sales ban were quietly confirmed in documents published by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero on a Sunday earlier this month, with new regulations published on Friday.

The department has already instigated bans on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030, as well as on gas boilers in new homes and has mandated solar panels to be installed on all new properties.

Richard Tice, Reform UK’s Business, Trade and Energy Secretary, described the latest move as ludicrous.

“Mad Miliband’s latest Net Zero push to get rid of the traditional tumble dryer and force a more expensive alternative is utter madness. This new ludicrous move will not only push bills even higher in the short term, but it will also take longer to dry clothes and come with a huge fire risk.

“At a time when families are struggling with household costs, Labour is choosing to focus on tone-deaf green ideologies rather than listening to what the public wants.

“Reform UK will scrap the failing and disastrous Net Zero agenda and focus on bringing energy bills down.”

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UK Gov’t Promises More Social Media “Restrictions”

While embattled PM Sir Keir Starmer takes a pointless grilling on the even more pointless existence of Peter Mandelson, other members of his cabinet were busily paving the way for the next construction phase of our increasingly dystopian society.

Speaking to Sky News earlier today, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson promised…

“more action to keep young people safe online, including around social media”.

Which is delightfully vague.

Education Minister Olivia Bailey kept her cards similarly close to her chest, whilst trying to sound forceful:

“It is a question of how we act, not if, but to put this beyond any doubt, we are placing a clear statutory requirement that the Secretary of State ‘must’, rather than ‘may’, act […] We are clear that under any outcome, we will impose some form of age or functionality restrictions for children under 16.”

So we know they’re going to do something…we just don’t know what. And, if I had to guess, neither do Bridget or Olivia. Neither seems like the kind of people that get kept in the loop, and that flavour of waffle is usually the reserve of those who have no idea what’s going on.

Many commenters – both for and against – have interpreted this promised action as an Australia-style social media ban for children. Certainly, that’s what Conservative MP Laura Trott seems to think in her champagne-popping tweet:

…but the signs might be pointing in another direction.

After all, the Social Media Ban is practically on the books. It was introduced as an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill, and has already passed the Lords four times. It could have become law already, but Ministers and MPs have repeatedly overturned the vote, declaring the need for further consultation.

Then, earlier today and coinciding with this government pledge to take action, the Independent published a report that suggests Australia’s social media ban doesn’t work.

Two thirds of Australian teens still using social media despite under-16s ban

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Federal In-car Monitoring Mandate Expands Data Collection and Control Powers

A federal mandate rooted in a 2021 bipartisan law is set to reshape every new car sold in the United States, and potentially the boundaries of personal mobility itself. By the 2027 model year, vehicles will be required to include systems that monitor drivers for impairment and can intervene if necessary. Supporters frame it as a safety breakthrough. Critics call it a “kill switch.”

The policy has broad political backing. It passed with support from both Democrats and Republicans and has remained intact across administrations, including under the recent Consolidated Appropriations Act, which preserved both funding and the mandate. In January, that support was tested when the House voted down an amendment that would have stripped funding for the requirement, effectively keeping the rule on track.

One of the most persistent critics is Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who continues to lead opposition alongside a small group of lawmakers. Massie warns that Congress is normalizing continuous monitoring inside privately owned vehicles, a shift he argues carries implications far beyond roadway safety.

The Law

The requirement comes from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, specifically Section 24220. The law directs regulators to establish a safety standard for what it calls “advanced impaired driving prevention technology.”

The statute defines that technology as a system that can

(i) passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired; and
(ii) prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected;

It also allows for systems that can “passively and accurately detect whether the blood alcohol concentration of a driver … is equal to or greater than” the legal limit, with authority to intervene. The law sets the objective, not the method.

It also cites research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) estimating that such technology “can prevent more than 9,400 alcohol-impaired driving fatalities annually.”

The mandate and its funding were reaffirmed in early 2026, when President Donald Trump signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act, ensuring the requirement remains in force.

From Safety Feature to Standard Equipment

Driver monitoring is not new. It is already embedded in many modern vehicles, especially those equipped with advanced driver-assistance systems.

General Motors says its Super Cruise system “tracks the driver’s head position and/or the driver’s gaze” and alerts the driver when attention drifts. Chevrolet describes the system as using a camera mounted on the steering wheel to track “head and eye movement.”

Similarly, Ford’s BlueCruise uses “a driver-facing camera and infrared lighting” to confirm that the driver remains focused on the road. Subaru’s DriverFocus system uses comparable technology, capable of alerting occupants if the driver appears drowsy or distracted.

Today, these systems primarily issue warnings. Under the federal rule, similar technology could become standard in every new vehicle. It would not simply prompt the driver. It could help determine whether the vehicle should start or continue operating.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) describes the current landscape in similar terms. Its 2026 report to Congress explains that indirect systems infer driver state “through camera-based monitoring and vehicle inputs.” It also notes that most current systems are designed to detect “drowsiness, inattention, and sudden sickness,” not alcohol impairment.

That distinction matters. A system designed to detect distraction is not automatically capable of reliably identifying intoxication. Yet the mandate moves in that direction, turning optional in-cabin monitoring into a required compliance system.

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Connecticut Democrats Move Bills To Force Vaccines On Unwilling Residents

he supermajority Democratic legislature of Connecticut has passed a radical “vaccine standards” bill in an apparent display of power directed at President Donald Trump and Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“This legislation ensures that our state immunization standards are grounded in the consensus professional judgment of the nation’s leading medical and public health practitioners, not the ideological agenda of the Trump regime,” State Senate President Martin Looney, D-New Haven, and State Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, said Thursday following passage of HB 5044, “An Act Establishing Connecticut Vaccine Standards.”

The fiercely debated bill now heads to Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont for signature.

While Democrats are insisting the bill does not mandate any vaccines — but will simply ensure all Connecticut residents have access to them — State Sen. Rob Sampson, R-Cheshire, called it out Thursday as an “anti-freedom vaccine mandate.”

“They’re trying to actually send a message to Connecticut residents, particularly Connecticut residents that value freedom: gun owners, homeschoolers, people concerned about religious freedom,” he explained on Newsmax. “And they’re sending a message to them that they’re just not welcome in our state, and that’s why we keep seeing these bills one after another, just empowering the government and basically making a threat to people that value liberty.”

Pushing Vaccines

According to Bill Track 50’s “AI Summary” of the legislation, its key provisions include expanding the power of the unelected commissioner of public health to “establish the standard of care for immunization for residents of this state;” requiring “health insurance policies to cover immunizations within the established standard of care;” updating “regulations for nursing homes to ensure residents are protected by adequate immunization against respiratory viral diseases;” establishing that “religious freedom protections do not apply to certain vaccine requirements;” and introducing a “’standing order’ provision allowing the commissioner to authorize medical interventions, including vaccinations, during public health emergencies.”

Additionally, the bill will expand the state’s power to buy and distribute vaccines, a provision that is apparently based on Democrats’ fears that the Trump administration will not make vaccines available to those Americans who want them.

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New Digital ID Bill Ties Your Identity to Your Phone—and Everything You Do Online

Republicans are once again teaming up with Democrats to ram Digital ID through at the federal level.

The bill they’ve just introduced is, if you can believe it, worse than all the others before it.

HR 8250, deceptively named the Parents Decide Act, doesn’t just force everyone to link their identity to use apps on their phones, it mandates that they must do it to use ANY operating system. That means Apple, iOS, Windows, Google, Android, even Samsung—basically everything.

And once that’s in place, there’s nowhere to step outside of it.

But one brave group is refusing to go along.

GrapheneOS has made a statement saying: GrapheneOS will remain usable by anyone around the world without requiring personal information, identification, or an account.

Glenn and Eric Meder from Privacy Academy have been working to educate people on how to escape the digital control grid, including how to put GrapheneOS on your phone—for free. And they have a solution to Digital ID right now.

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