Tag: police state

Europol Ran Secret Data Platforms on Millions of Innocents

Europol built and operated secret data analysis platforms stuffed with passport photos, phone records, financial transactions, and geolocation data belonging to people never suspected of any crime.
The systems ran for years without the security or data protection safeguards EU law requires, and the agency concealed parts of them from its own privacy regulator.

A joint investigation by CORRECTIV, Solomon, and Computer Weekly, based on leaked emails, internal documents, and whistleblower testimony, reveals that these parallel platforms became the backbone of Europol’s analytical work. “They protect the law while breaking it,” one former senior official said.

The main system, called the Computer Forensic Network (CFN), was set up in 2012 to handle digital evidence. After the 2015 Paris attacks, Europol’s cybercrime unit EC3 repurposed it into a mass analysis platform operating outside IT controls.

By 2019 it held two petabytes of data, roughly 420 times larger than Europol’s official databases. The agency’s own data protection officer found that 99 percent of operational data sat in this unregulated environment, with no adequate logging of who accessed or modified anything.

Alongside the CFN, a second covert system called the “Pressure Cooker” let staff store and analyze operational data without the constraints of EU law. A leaked 2022 email marked “Importance: High” warned that the regulator might discover the “irregular situation with the Pressure Cooker.” Europol claims it was just an internal nickname for a lawful system. Former officials say it was a separate platform hidden from the EU’s data protection watchdog for years.

The EU’s privacy regulator, the EDPS, spent nearly a decade trying to bring Europol into compliance, then closed its monitoring in February 2026 with 15 out of 150 recommendations still unimplemented, including core security safeguards.

British Conservative MP David Davis said the findings, “if true, point to serious failures of oversight, legality and data protection.”

He demanded the UK Home Office explain “whether any personal data of entirely innocent British citizens is being stored in Europol’s systems and, if so, why it is being stored and why the UK government is allowing it to be stored.”

The European Commission is now preparing legislation to double Europol’s budget and expand its mandate. It wants to hand broader surveillance powers to an agency that ran an unaccountable data warehouse for the better part of a decade and still can’t guarantee the personal data of innocent people inside its systems hasn’t been tampered with.

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San Francisco plots outdoor smoking ban as locals erupt

San Francisco is rolling out a sweeping outdoor smoking ban that would snuff out cigarettes on bar patios and parklets across the city.

The move has ignited outrage among local business owners, who argue the draconian measure is just the latest example of government overreach putting neighborhood bars at risk.

The controversial ordinance, being crafted by Supervisor Myrna Melgar and Dr. John Maa of the San Francisco Marin Medical Society, would require bars and taverns to follow the same smoke-free outdoor regulations already imposed on restaurants under state and local law, KTVU reported.

If passed, customers would no longer be allowed to smoke while enjoying drinks at outdoor bar spaces across the notoriously left-leaning city.

Maa, a surgeon backing the proposal, insisted the crackdown is necessary to protect patrons, workers and pedestrians from secondhand smoke.

“This is to protect the patrons of these establishments and also importantly, the employees and anyone who might be exposed to secondhand smoke,” Maa told the outlet.

He argued San Francisco should put public health ahead of business profits.

But furious bar owners have slammed the proposal as an example of heavy-handed government meddling.

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Bahrain Intensifies Crackdown On Shia Communities, Arrests Dozens Over Alleged IRGC Links

Bahrain’s Interior Ministry announced on Saturday the arrest of 41 citizens, including multiple Shia religious leaders, over alleged ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The ministry said security services uncovered the alleged network through “investigations, security reports, and previous Public Prosecution cases related to espionage involving foreign entities.” The detainees are accused of “espionage involving foreign entities and sympathy with blatant Iranian aggression.”

Around 30 Shia Muslim clerics were among the 41 arrested, as the Gulf monarchy intensifies a campaign of raids and arrests predominantly targeting Shia religious figures and seminary teachers in Bahrain.

The arrests mark a new security escalation by Manama and form part of a continued policy of restrictions against clerics in the country. The Bahrain News Agency reported that legal proceedings are now underway against the 41 detainees.

Earlier this week, Bahrain stripped three lawmakers of their seats in parliament after they publicly criticized the monarchy’s crackdown on dissent over its support for the US–Israeli war on Iran:

In a vote in Manama on Thursday, the Bahraini House of Representatives revoked the memberships of Abdulnabi Salman, Mahdi al-Shuwaikh, and Mamdouh al-Saleh. The three lawmakers publicly opposed the monarchy’s move last week to revoke the citizenship of 69 Bahrainis and their families, accusing them of “sympathizing with Iran.”

Bahrain has a majority Shia population but is ruled by the Sunni Al-Khalifa royal family. The kingdom hosts the largest US naval base in the region, home to the US Fifth Fleet.

That decision came less than two weeks after Bahrain revoked the citizenship of 69 people over alleged support for Iranian retaliatory attacks on the country.

The Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy described the move as “dangerous” and a “blatant abuse of power,” saying the individuals had not been publicly named and that their legal status remained unclear.

Since the launch of the US-Israeli war on Iran on February 28, Bahrain has escalated a sweeping domestic crackdown tied to alleged support for Tehran and opposition to the country’s western alignments.

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Paris Prosecutors Move to Criminally Charge Musk and xAI

Paris prosecutors announced Thursday that their investigation into Elon Musk’s social platform X has been upgraded to a full criminal probe.

The Paris prosecutor’s office is now asking investigating magistrates to formally charge Musk, former X CEO Linda Yaccarino, and three companies linked to the platform, including xAI and X.AI Holdings Corp. If they refuse to appear for those charges, prosecutors say judges can issue warrants that carry the same legal weight.

The charges cover a long and growing list of alleged offenses: Complicity in possessing and distributing sexual images. Nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes. Denial of crimes against humanity. Fraudulent extraction of user data. Violation of the secrecy of electronic correspondence. Manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group. Illegal collection of personal data without adequate security.

The announcement came just three weeks after the US Department of Justice refused to cooperate with the French investigation, calling it an attempt to regulate American speech through foreign criminal law. France pushed ahead anyway.

The investigation did not begin with deepfakes or child safety. It began with politics.

French Member of Parliament Éric Bothorel, a member of President Macron’s centrist Renaissance party, filed a complaint in 2025 alleging that X’s algorithm had been manipulated for the purpose of “foreign interference” in French politics.

Bothorel accused the platform of narrowing “diversity of voices and options” after Musk’s takeover and cited Musk’s “personal interventions” in moderation decisions.

A second complaint, from a senior official in French public administration, alleged the same thing, claiming to observe a surge of “hateful, racist, anti-LGBTQ” content aimed at skewing democratic debate.

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Bold New Billboard Warns Violent Criminals: ‘Welcome to Mississippi – Where the Firing Squad Is Legal. Think Twice’

A new billboard has gone up in Mississippi, warning would-be criminals crossing the state line from Tennessee that firing squads are legal there.

The billboard is on I-55 southbound, where drivers enter Mississippi from Memphis, and was put up by DeSoto County District Attorney Matthew Barton.

“WELCOME TO MISSISSIPPI. WHERE THE FIRING SQUAD IS LEGAL. THINK TWICE,” the billboard states.

The billboard is part of Barton’s aggressive public campaign to deter violent crime.

It directly references Mississippi’s 2017 law that authorizes execution by firing squad as a legal method of carrying out the death penalty when lethal injection drugs are unavailable.

Mississippi is one of only a handful of states that still permits this method, alongside electrocution and, more recently, nitrogen hypoxia.

District Attorney Barton is not mincing words in his reasoning for putting up the billboard.

“This campaign has one purpose: deterrence,” Barton told the Desoto Times. “We are going to be loud and clear that DeSoto County does not coddle violent criminals. If you bring violence across our state line, we are going to prosecute you aggressively and hold you accountable.”

“People on death row are the losers of life’s lottery,” Barton said. “If violent criminals are looking for a state that coddles crime, Mississippi is not it. They better think twice before they act here.”

Baron explained that “Safety is achieved through enforcement.”

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4 Baltimore Police officers will not face charges after San Francisco investigation

San Francisco prosecutors declined to bring charges against four Baltimore Police officers who have been under investigation in the California cityafter a woman says she reported a sexual assault that took place there.

The officers, including the commander of the Eastern District, have been suspended with pay and assigned to administrative duties by the Baltimore Police Department since November of last year while the Special Victims Unit of the San Francisco Police Department investigated. The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office told The Banner this week that the evidence in the case was deemed insufficient to file charges.

“Although the San Francisco Police had probable cause to submit an arrest warrant for review in this case, after careful review of all of the evidence gathered, we do not believe we can meet our higher burden of proof,” the office said in a statement, adding that it would reevaluate if additional evidence emerged.

The accuser, a 39-year-old California woman, contacted the Banner saying she was frustrated with the outcomein a case she says dates to September 2024. She also shed light on the circumstances that she said led her to contact police.

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France Moves to Break Encrypted Messaging

France’s intelligence delegation in parliament has formally backed breaking the encryption that protects WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram conversations, recommending that magistrates and intelligence agents be granted what lawmakers describe as targeted access to messages that platforms currently cannot read even themselves.

The delegation, an eight-member body composed of four deputies and four senators, published its conclusions on Monday after months of work on a question that keeps returning to the French Parliament. “The inability to access the content of encrypted communications constitutes a major obstacle for the work of the justice system and intelligence services,” the delegation wrote, framing end-to-end encryption as a problem to be solved rather than a protection to be preserved.

The technology end-to-end encryption uses is precisely the thing the delegation wants weakened. Decryption keys live on user devices, not on company servers, which means the platforms holding your messages genuinely cannot read them. That’s the design and the point. Strip that property away and the protection collapses because a system that lets investigators read messages on demand is also a system that can be abused, leaked, subpoenaed, or hacked.

French police and intelligence services have spent years complaining about this tech. They can still intercept old-fashioned phone calls and SMS messages with a judge’s warrant but encrypted platforms route around that capability entirely.

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Globalism Is Totalitarianism

Consider these recent news stories from Europe and North America:

(1) Germany’s government is considering a new law that would allow its spy agency to investigate and block citizens from buying homes if the would-be owners hold political views that conflict with the government’s official policies.  In effect, political dissent would disqualify a person from owning a home.

(2) London Mayor Sadiq Khan is pushing for a government-run “disinformation unit” to investigate and silence online criticism of the mayor’s policies.

(3) British police are doing more to crack down on citizens’ “politically incorrect” speech than they are to prevent Islamic rape gangs from targeting women and girls.

(4) Under the guise of “protecting the children,” unelected queen (some say European Commission President) Ursula von der Leyen has announced the rollout of Europe’s mandatory digital IDs which will eliminate online privacy, anonymity, and, eventually, all public dissent to official government policies.

(5) North American and European intelligence agencies continue to downplay the threats from Islamic terrorism and overstate any threats from “white supremacy” and “right-wing extremism.” 

(6) For the nineteenth time, Ukrainian hold-over president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has submitted legislation to Ukraine’s hold-over parliament to extend a decree of martial law, which suspends elections, bans opposition parties, prohibits media organizations from criticizing government policy, and empowers the government to conscript men into military service and confiscate civilian resources for the war effort.

(7) In support of secret “gender transitions” at taxpayer-funded schools and taxpayer-funded “gender reassignment” surgeries, Nova Scotia Education Minister Brendan Maguire lambasted Canadian parents who believe that they “deserve rights over” their children.  Maguire made it clear that Canadian citizens have no parental rights.

(8) In France, 60% of voters believe that “a replacement of the French population by non-European populations” is occurring right now.  66% see this as bad for France.

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Europe Wants To Ban VPN Privacy

The European Union is now openly discussing restricting VPN access as part of its expanding online age-verification system, which demonstrates precisely where the entire digital agenda has been heading from the beginning. They always introduce these systems under emotionally untouchable justifications such as child safety or combating terrorism, but once the infrastructure is in place, the scope inevitably expands.

According to a new European Parliament briefing, officials are concerned that users are bypassing online age-verification requirements via VPNs, and the report notes a surge in VPN usage in countries implementing stricter digital controls. The proposal being discussed is to potentially restrict VPN access itself to those above a so-called “digital age of majority.” In other words, they are now targeting the very tools people use to protect their privacy online.

For readers who may not use these services personally, a VPN simply encrypts your internet traffic and masks your location, preventing internet providers, corporations, and governments from monitoring everything you do online. Businesses use them constantly, financial institutions rely on them, journalists use them, and ordinary people use them simply to avoid being tracked across the internet.

The problem from the government’s perspective is that VPNs interfere with surveillance. Europe’s Digital Services Act has already pushed platforms toward mandatory age-verification systems that increasingly require identification documents, facial scans, or biometric verification simply to access online content. Once users began using VPNs to avoid those systems, regulators immediately shifted toward framing the VPN itself as the threat. This is how these systems always evolve, because the objective is never merely regulation, it is compliance and visibility.

What they are building is effectively a digital identity system where access to information requires permission. People fail to understand how dangerous this becomes once connected to the broader European agenda involving CBDCs, centralized digital IDs, online speech regulation, and financial monitoring. These are not isolated policies appearing randomly at the same time. They are interconnected components of a single structural transition toward centralized digital control.

First they regulate speech under the justification of misinformation. Then they regulate platforms under the justification of safety. Then they require identity verification under the justification of protecting children. Finally they target anonymity itself by restricting the tools people use to avoid surveillance.

This fits perfectly within the broader cycle unfolding in Europe, where declining economic confidence and political instability lead governments toward greater centralization and control. Historically, governments facing crisis do not voluntarily reduce authority, they expand surveillance, tighten restrictions, and attempt to maintain control over information and capital flows.

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Soviet Style Trial in Michigan for Criticizing a Politician – A Horrifying True Story

There is an ongoing case in Michigan that should terrify everyone. Marc Aisen was arrested near his home in December of 2023, extradited to Michigan, and has been held pretrial for over two and a half years.

Most Americans don’t believe the system can be weaponized against ordinary citizens. Judges and prosecutors are given the presumption of innocence and good faith, while criminal defendants are given the presumption of guilt because, “if the government went after them, they must have done something wrong.”

The case of The People of Michigan v. Marc Aisen demonstrates just how far the system can crush a person with the process.

Marc Aisen was gainfully employed and lived independently in Massachusetts. In his spare time, he did what countless Americans have done for generations: he wrote messages to politicians, nonprofit boards, and charity officials, on behalf of himself and others, calling them out for what he sincerely believed was complicity in crimes, immorality, and threats to public safety. He volunteered with various organizations within his religious community and the parents’ rights movement to advocate for policies.

On July 26, 2023, from his apartment in Massachusetts, Aisen sent an email to Bloomfield Township, Michigan, Treasurer Michael Schostak. The subject line was: “Michael Schostak Covered Up Child Sexual Exploitation in Jewish Nonprofit.”  The email was not posted on social media. It was sent directly to 56 email addresses, including 23 official local government emails, 14 officials from community boards and homeowners associations, and 19 private individuals. Here is the full text of that July 26 email:

Michael Schostak’s pedophile buddies are recommending child sex “change” experiments to kids and their parents, bespoking their tiny bodies with genital mutilation to make them more sexually appealing to the gay predators they are introducing them to. Michael Schostak is personally complicit in this evil scheme through his role at the “Secure Communities Network”. He doesn’t deny it. They advertise it on the JewishBoston.com website. “Jewish?” No. Faggotry is against the Jewish religion and this is precisely why.

Schostak received the email and forwarded it to Bloomfield Township Police Chief James Gallagher with the message: “Another email this morning. What are my options here?”

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