Tag: police state

Russia Moves to Mandate State Biometric ID for Online Age Verification

Russian lawmakers are moving forward with a proposal that would make the country’s biometric and e-government systems the mandatory gatekeepers for online age verification.

If implemented, the measure would tie access to adult or “potentially harmful” content directly to a person’s verified state identity, dissolving any remaining expectation of online anonymity.

The plan, discussed on October 28, is being marketed as a child protection initiative. Officials insist it is designed to keep minors away from dangerous material, yet the scope of what qualifies is remarkably broad.

According to TechRadar, one official included pornography, violent or profane videos, and even “propaganda of antisocial behavior” in the list of restricted content.

The main part of the proposal is the use of the “Gosuslugi” digital services portal, which already functions as Russia’s main interface for state verification.

This system connects directly to the Unified System of Identification and Authentication (ESIA) and the national Unified Biometrics System (UBS), both of which are controlled by the government.

State Duma deputy Anton Nemkin, a former FSB officer, suggested that these networks “could be used to verify age without directly transmitting passport data to third-party platforms.”

In effect, the state would become the universal intermediary between citizens and the internet.

Legal experts specializing in digital rights argue that this initiative continues a long-established trajectory.

Since 2012, when Russia began constructing its online censorship framework under the pretext of protecting minors, each new regulation has chipped away at personal privacy while expanding government visibility into everyday digital life.

The current proposal also fits neatly within Moscow’s broader strategy of “digital sovereignty.”

Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy Andrei Svintsov recently claimed that every Russian internet user will lose their anonymity within “three years, five at most,” TechRadar reported.

This vision aligns with another state project approved in June, the development of a national “super app” integrating digital ID, government services, and payment systems, which would even let users “confirm one’s age to a supermarket cashier.”

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AI drones used in Gaza now surveilling American cities

AI-powered quadcopter drones used by the IDF to commit genocide in Gaza are flying over American cities, surveilling protestors and automatically uploading millions of images to an evidence database.

The drones are made by a company called Skydio which in the last few years has gone from relative obscurity to quietly become a multi-billion dollar company and the largest drone manufacturer in the US.

The extent of Skydio drone usage across the US, and the extent to which their usage has grown in just a few years, is extraordinary. The company has contracts with more than 800 law enforcement and security agencies across the country, up from 320 in March last year, and their drones are being launched hundreds of times a day to monitor people in towns and cities across the country.

Skydio has extensive links with Israel. In the first weeks of the genocide the California-based company sent more than one hundred drones to the IDF with promises of more to come. How many more were delivered since that admission is unknown. Skydio has an office in Israel and partners with DefenceSync, a local military drone contractor operating as the middle man between drone manufacturers and the IDF. Skydio has also raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Israeli-American venture capitalists and from venture capital funds with extensive investments in Israel, including from Marc Andreessen’s firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z.

And now these drones, tested in genocide and refined on Palestinians, are swarming American cities.

According to my research, almost every large American city has signed a contract with Skydio in the last 18 months, including Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, Cleveland and Jacksonville. Skydio drones were recently used by city police departments to gather information at the ‘No Kings’ protests and were also used by Yale to spy on the anti-genocide protest camp set up by students at the university last year.

In Miami, Skydio drones are being used to spy on spring breakers, and in Atlanta the company has partnered with the Atlanta Police Foundation to install a permanent drone station within the massive new Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Detroit recently spent nearly $300,000 on fourteen Skydio drones according to a city procurement report. Last month ICE bought an X10D Skydio drone, which automatically tracks and pursues a target. US Customs and Border Protection has bought thirty-three of the same drones since July.

The AI system behind Skydio drones is powered by Nvidia chips and enables their operation without a human user. The drones have thermal imaging cameras and can operate in places where GPS doesn’t work, so-called ‘GPS-denied environments.’ They also reconstruct buildings and other infrastructure in 3D and can fly at more than 30 miles per hour.

The New York police were early adopters of Skydio drones and are particularly enthusiastic users. A spokesman recently told a drone news website that the NYPD launched more than 20,000 drone flights in less than a year, which would mean drones are being launched around the city 55 times per day. A city report last year said the NYPD at that time was operating 41 Skydio drones. A recent Federal Aviation Authority rule change, however, means that number will undoubtedly have increased and more generally underpins the massive expansion in the use of Skydio drones.

Prior to March this year, FAA rules meant that drones could only be used by US security forces if the operator kept the drone in sight. They also couldn’t be used over crowded city streets. An FAA waiver issued that month opened the floodgates, allowing police and security agencies to operate drones beyond a visual line of sight and over large crowds of people. Skydio called the waiver ground-breaking. It was. The change has ushered in a Skydio drone buying spree by US police and security forces, with many now employing what is called a ‘Drone As First Responder’ program. Without the need to see the drone, and with drones free to cruise over city streets, the police are increasingly sending drones before humans to call outs and for broader investigative purposes. Cincinnati for example says that by the end of this year 90% of all call outs will be serviced first by a Skydio drone.

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Police raid nightclub in Ukraine over Russian song

A nightclub in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa was raided by police over the weekend after reports that a Russian-language song was played and that many of the guests were singing along, according to local media.

Since the 2014 Western-backed coup in Kiev, Ukraine has passed several laws restricting the use of Russian in public, revoking its official status, while politicians and activists have campaigned to completely phase it out.

A video of the performance – published by Strana.ua along with photos showing police inside the Palladium nightclub – shows a DJ playing the Russian-language track ‘Glamour’ by Belarusian rappers nkeeei, uniqe, ARTEM SHILOVETS, and Wipo in front of hundreds of guests. The song reportedly prompted the police raid.

Odessa Regional Governor Oleg Kiper denounced the incident, adding that the relevant departments of the Regional Military Administration were instructed to investigate and provide a legal assessment of the nightclub’s actions.

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UK Lords Debate Impact of VPNs on Censorship Laws

It began as a plan to “keep children safe online.” It has become a national realization about how far the government can reach into the digital lives of its citizens.

The UK’s Online Safety Act has turned into a case study in how a law written for protection can give no protection and end up with mass surveillance.

When peers in the House of Lords met this week to examine its effects, they sounded little like guardians of youth safety, and it was easy to tell they don’t have enough self-awareness to realize they’ve helped unleash a monster.

Lord Clement-Jones, the Liberal Democrat technology spokesperson, noted that young people are already avoiding the law’s controls.

VPNs, he said, are now used on a “widespread” scale, which “risks rendering age-assurance measures ineffective.”

The statement revealed a central problem: the people being protected are already finding their way around the digital ID rules. They always will.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales expressed the issue plainly. Calling the Act “very poorly thought-out legislation,” he told The House magazine: “We will not be age-gating Wikipedia under any circumstances, so, if it comes to that, it’s going to be an interesting showdown, because we’re going to just refuse to do it. Politically, what are they going to do? They could block Wikipedia. Good luck with that.”

Wales’s refusal is part of a natural broader discomfort with the idea of regulating access to information through identification.

Under the new law, platforms must verify users’ ages through ID checks or similar systems. Millions of users will have to prove their identity before they can post or browse. Privacy groups describe this as a national identity program introduced without open debate.

With data breaches still frequent across both government and corporate systems, the setup creates an environment where every login carries potential exposure.

VPN use has increased in response. These tools, once associated with cybersecurity professionals, now serve anyone who prefers to maintain privacy online. They allow people to move through the internet without revealing personal data.

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Minnesota Cop Who Fabricated a Sex-Trafficking Ring Won’t Be Held Accountable

A police officer had a woman jailed for over two years on false charges in connection with a bogus sex-trafficking ring. But the officer, Heather Weyker, cannot be sued, because a court ruled in July that she was acting under color of federal law.

For years, Weyker, an officer in St. Paul,
Minnesota, gathered evidence, cultivated witnesses, and testified under oath in connection with an interstate sex-trafficking ring run by Somali refugees. She did all that while allegedly fabricating the very ring she was investigating. Her efforts resulted in 30 indictments, nine trials, and exactly zero convictions.

In 2011, Hamdi Mohamud, then just 16 years old, found herself arrested after a woman named Muna Abdulkadir attacked her and her friends at knifepoint. Inconveniently for Mohamud, Abdulkadir was crucial to Weyker’s bogus investigation.

After a call from Abdulkadir—during which she reportedly informed Weyker she had carried out a knife attack and was worried her arrest was imminent—Weyker advised other members of law enforcement
that Abdulkadir was a federal witness. She had information and documentation, Weyker noted, that Mohamud and her friends were out to intimidate Abdulkadir.

“The first part was true, but everything else Weyker said was false,” summarized
Judge David Stras for the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the 8th Circuit. “There was no ‘information’ or ‘documentation’ that anyone was trying to intimidate Abdulkadir. Nevertheless, based on what Weyker told him, Officer [Anthijuan] Beeks arrested Mohamud and the others for witness tampering.”

The government would dismiss those trumped-up charges, but only after Mohamud spent 25 months in custody.

Mohamud sued—and succeeded. A federal court in 2018 declined to give Weyker qualified immunity, finding it was already clearly established at the time of her arrest that Weyker’s alleged misconduct violated the Fourth Amendment.

Two years later, however, Mohamud’s luck soured on appeal. Though the 8th Circuit conceded that Weyker’s sex-trafficking investigation was “plagued with problems from the start” (the trial judge found, for example, that she fabricated information and lied multiple times under oath), the court said she was, in fact, immune.

That wasn’t because she was entitled to qualified immunity. Rather, although Weyker was a St. Paul police officer, she had been cross-deputized on a federal task force to carry out the investigation. That gave her the legal protections afforded to federal law enforcement—a much higher bar for alleged victims to clear.

Lawsuits against federal employees are subject to the Bivens doctrine. Named after the landmark 1971 Supreme Court case Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the ruling allowed a man to sue the federal agents who conducted a warrantless raid on his home and then strip-searched him at a courthouse.

But the Supreme Court has made it almost cartoonishly difficult for plaintiffs to make use of their very good decision. In 2017, the Court ruled in Ziglar v. Abbasi that Bivens claims against federal agents can survive only if they clear a two-pronged test.

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Will The AfD Party Be Banned In Germany?

There are once again efforts to ban the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the Bundestag, with the far-left Social Democrats (SPD) leading the way. However, there is some difficult math facing the proponents of an AfD ban, which makes it unlikely — but not impossible — for the party to be banned.

In order to understand why a ban is unlikely, let us first look at what would actually happen if a ban of the AfD went forward.

The AfD is currently the most popular party in the country, according to multiple polls, scoring between 25 and 27 percent of the vote. This alone makes a ban unthinkable to many, but the German establishment does not especially care what the electorate thinks on a number of key issues, so why not just ban the party?

For starters, and most importantly, a ban of the AfD would radically reshape the German electorate in favor of the left. This would translate into the Christian Democrats (CDU) losing a massive amount of power, and potentially being relegated to the political dustbin. Due to this cold, hard reality, a ban could be suicidal for the CDU.

How one local elections tells us about the federal election

What happened in the local mayoral election in Ludwigshafen tells us what the likely outcome of an AfD ban would be for the country at the federal level. In Ludwigshafen, the AfD’s Joachim Paul was leading the polls to become mayor before he was banned from running through backroom bureaucratic channels, a move later confirmed by judges during a number of appeals. The judges all argued Paul would have to challenge the ban after the election. Paul is still filing legal actions against the decision, but the outcome of the appeal could take months or even years.

Regardless of the outcome of Paul’s appeal, the election had some interesting outcomes.

First, the voter participation rate crashed to a record low of just 29.3 percent. In 2017’s mayoral election in Ludwigshafen, the then-SPD candidate Jutta Steinruck won with 60.2 percent participation. That means voter turnout was cut in half from that election.

That is not all. For those who did vote, many of them appear to have submitted “spoiled” ballots. A record-high number of ballots were ruled invalid, at 9.2 percent. Eight years ago, that number was just 2.6 percent. The number of “spoiled ballots” jumped by nearly 400 percent.

If this same outcome occurred at the federal level, including a dramatic crash in the voter participation rate as AfD supporters boycott the election, it would be a disaster for the CDU’s electoral chances.

The way the German system works means that the pool of right-wing voters would shrink dramatically, leaving CDU voters and the left as the only remaining voting pool. However, this remaining, much smaller pool, would then feature a dramatically larger share of left-wing voters consisting of the SPD, the Greens, and the Left Party.

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California’s Mileage-Based Road Charge: What It Is, How It Would Work, and Why Privacy Risks Increase

As I’ve been investigating California’s mileage-based road charge, it’s clear this isn’t just a policy about road funding. It’s the quiet rollout of a system built to track, record, and bill movement itself. The state says it’s about fairness and modernization, but the deeper I look, the more it resembles a permanent surveillance and revenue network disguised as transportation reform. What’s being tested today through Caltrans and the State Transportation Agency is the blueprint for total mileage monitoring tied to personal identity.

California is advancing a plan to replace the state gas tax with a mileage-based road charge that taxes drivers by distance traveled. The effort is led by the California State Transportation Agency and Caltrans under a multi-year Road Charge program first authorized by SB 1077 in 2014 and extended and refined by SB 339 in 2021. The state’s stated purpose is to stabilize road funding as fuel-tax revenue declines.

As of October 2025, the program is still in the pilot and data-gathering phase. No statewide mandate or rate schedule has been enacted, but Caltrans has already built the structure necessary for full implementation. What is being called a “test” now is the foundation for what will later become mandatory reporting.

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Google Adds Age Check Tech as Texas, Utah, and Louisiana Enforce Digital ID Laws

Google is preparing for a new era of digital age checks as state-level rules in Texas, Utah, and Louisiana begin to reshape how app stores operate.

To get ahead of these requirements, the company has introduced the Play Signals API in beta, a system built to help developers adapt to laws that will soon mandate age-based controls.

Starting in early 2026, each of the three states will enforce its own version of the App Store Accountability Act.

Texas’s law takes effect first, followed by Utah and Louisiana a few months later. Each statute requires app marketplaces to confirm the age range of their users through “commercially reasonable” verification methods.

Developers will be responsible for interpreting those signals and tailoring their apps accordingly. In some regions, they will also have to inform Google Play if a product update could require new parental consent.

For testing purposes, the company is providing a FakeAgeSignalsManager so that developers can simulate data before the laws officially apply.

Google’s rollout of its new Play Signals API is part of a broader shift toward a verified internet, one where digital access is increasingly tied to proof of identity.

The company’s beta API is being framed as a neutral compliance tool, but its function sets the stage for a more monitored web.

While the stated purpose is child safety and regulatory compliance, the architecture being built threatens to erode one of the internet’s core principles, pseudonymity.

The data points that determine whether someone is over 13 or over 18 can easily evolve into a persistent set of identifiers, linking activity across apps, accounts, and even devices. Once these signals are standardized, nothing prevents them from being combined with advertising, analytics, or behavioral tracking systems.

The result could be a world where age verification quietly becomes identity verification, and where “commercially reasonable” checks amount to permanent user profiling.

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Trump’s National Guard Plan Edges the U.S. Closer to a Permanent Federal Police Force

The Pentagon is directing every state and U.S. territory to create “quick reaction forces” within their National Guards, which will be trained to respond to civil disturbances and emergencies, according to a recently leaked memo obtained by The Guardian. 

The memo instructs the National Guard Bureau to train these forces in riot control tactics, rapid deployment procedures, and the use of nonlethal weapons. The federalized forces will complement the National Guard Reaction Forces, which have existed for decades to provide emergency relief, reports The Washington Post. 

Most states and territories (excluding Washington, D.C.) will supply 500 National Guard members. These units are expected to fully mobilize within 24 hours of activation, with an initial contingent of roughly 200 troops that will be pulled from the guard’s unit that specializes in chemical and nuclear disaster response, ready by New Year’s Day. By April, the new quick reaction force will reach 23,500 soldiers strong, according to the Post. 

These new forces could signal the Trump administration’s readiness to expand federal control over local policing, with one anonymous Pentagon official telling the Post that the administration is “revising plans for the employment of [National Guard Reaction Forces] to guarantee their ability to assist federal, state and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances.”

Critics see the move as establishing a permanent, federally coordinated crowd-control infrastructure. Janessa Goldbeck, a Marine veteran and CEO of Vet Voice Foundation, told The Guardian that the memo represents “an attempt by the president to normalize a national, militarized police force.”

It’s unclear whether the new order—or any future deployments under it—would pass legal muster. Federal law generally prohibits the use of federal troops in civilian law enforcement, while the Insurrection Act allows exceptions only under narrow circumstances.

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Killing the Canada Goose

Canada’s conservative outlet Juno News depicts Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as an incompetent, narcissistic leader who has done nothing to improve our country’s image on the world stage or to legislate for solvency and freedom of expression in the domestic realm. He is now at the helm of a faltering country that has little hope of struggling back on its feet.

Indeed, it is hard not to suspect that Carney and his Liberals, like the sinister Democrats in the U.S., are driven by a double agenda against the welfare of their own citizens: to deprive them of their political rights and freedoms via legislative and policy initiatives on the one hand, and to render them destitute by eviscerating the economy on the other. These actions are almost certainly deliberate.

As United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, Carney crafted global carbon-pricing initiatives, describing carbon taxes as the “linchpin of responsible climate governance.” His book Value(s) leaves no doubt respecting his globalist and green-industrial objectives at the cost of national sovereignty. 

Now he is bruiting several market-driven changes to his preferred agenda to ensure popular support, but still claims “I’m the same me. I’m focused on the same issues…What we need to do is to be as effective as possible in terms of addressing climate change while growing our economy.” It has been proven worldwide that you can’t do both. The dogma of climate change kills not only the climate, the environment, the water table, and the avian cohort. It destroys the economy as well.

As a Western Standard commenter writes, “Despite Canada slipping into third world economic status, Carney’s first proposed bills deal with censorship and control of people’s speech/internet posts. That really says where his priority lies. Carney will go down in history as the last Canadian prime minister presiding over 10 provinces and 3 territories.” Or the first Canadian prime minister ruling over a garrison regime.

Carney, the technocratic, oxymoronic, inept globalist banker, who capered into the Liberal leadership, is thus serving up reheated Trudeau goop — more debt, more bureaucracy, more excuses, more anti-pipeline propaganda, more affordability crunch, more Keynesian spending-and-borrowing, and more anti-Trump invective, all of which has led to what plainly appears to be intentional national failure. Canada is merely his laboratory to test his theories for national implosion. Regarding Carney’s first six months in office, Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre has summed up the outcomes thus far, posting that “after six months, everything is worse. Crime, tariffs, inflation, deficits, immigration, housing — all spiralling out of control.” The plan is working. 

The key element in his program is to strip away individual rights so that Canadians will be censored and restrained in “a digital gulag” where a series of bills he is proposing—Bill C-8 on cybersecurity, Bill C-9 on combating hate, and Bill C-2 on presumably secure borders—are currently making their way through parliament.

The intention is made to sound noble but is really as black as an old kettle’s arse. Bill C-8 can cut off phone and internet service to political dissidents and opponents of the realm without a court order, depriving them of personal and political access to information and leaving them effaced from “the conversation.” Bill C-9 allows the government to prosecute for “hate crimes,” which have no strict definition and are completely arbitrary, erasing freedom of expression in the public square; people can be arrested for something that hasn’t yet been said or for hurting someone’s feelings. Bill C-2 enables government to open mail parcels and computer files without a warrant. John Carpay of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms has argued that  “Canada will be a police state by Christmas if Parliament passes Bills C-2, C-8, and C-9 in their current form.”

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