Tag: police state

UK Government Dismisses Public Outcry, Pushes Ahead with Controversial Digital ID Plan

A UK government plan to introduce a nationwide digital identification system is moving ahead, despite a public backlash that saw more than 2.7 million people sign a petition urging its cancellation.

The proposal, first announced by Labour in September, would provide a digital ID to every UK citizen and legal resident aged 16 and above.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer claimed the new system would help strengthen border enforcement and reduce illegal employment, describing the ID, dubbed the “Brit Card,” as a tool to “make it tougher to work illegally in this country, making our borders more secure.”

The public response was overwhelmingly opposed. Warnings about centralized data collection, privacy intrusions, and increased state surveillance flooded public discourse.

Descriptions of the proposal ranged from a “dystopian nightmare” to fears of a gateway to “digital control.”

Not long after Labour’s announcement, a petition was created on the official UK Government and Petitions website.

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TDF secures legal victory for Amish client in Quarantine Act challenge

The Democracy Fund has achieved another significant win in its ongoing efforts to defend members of the Amish community facing convictions under the Quarantine Act. The convictions arose from tickets received by the Amish upon crossing the border during the COVID-19 pandemic: Crown prosecutors alleged that the Amish failed to provide information required by the ArriveCan app.

On September 25, 2025, the Niagara Provincial Court issued a suspended sentence with no fine ($0) for an Amish client whose conviction was previously overturned and reopened by TDF lawyers. The outcome ensures that a member of the Amish community is spared undue hardship caused by financial penalties and credit problems.

As previously announced, TDF filed reopening applications in Niagara Provincial Court on behalf of two Amish clients. The court granted the application for one client, overturning their conviction and scheduling a new trial, while denying the second application.

The clients, originally from an Ontario Amish community and now residing in the United States following marriage, were charged with non-compliance with COVID-19 regulations and failure to complete the ArriveCan app. These requirements posed significant challenges for the Amish, whose religious beliefs prohibit the use of modern technology. Many of TDF’s Amish clients face substantial fines and property liens, threatening their farms and traditional way of life. TDF remains unwavering in its commitment to safeguarding their homes and livelihoods.

TDF Senior Litigation Counsel, Adam Blake-Gallipeau, stated: “Obviously, the Amish have limited access to modern technology and live a Biblically-based lifestyle: this outcome upholds their religious freedoms. We’re pleased with the result since it ensures that our client is no longer threatened with the destruction of his credit rating and financial penalties.”

TDF proudly represents over 30 Amish clients across Ontario, advocating tirelessly for fair treatment under the law for these peaceful communities.

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‘A big freaking mistake’: Feds confirm investigation into arrest of reporter Nick Sortor at Portland ICE protest

Nicholas Sortor, an independent, on-the-street reporter who has become famous for his documentation of anti-government actions across America, has announced that the Department of Justice has assured him of an investigation into his arrest by Portland police late Thursday.

The Washington Examiner said the conservative influencer was arrested late Thursday, then released several hours later, early Friday.

He was accused by local police of “second-degree disorderly conduct” while he was documenting violent protests near an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Oregon’s largest city.

Other reports from the scene at the time said Sortor was defending himself from a woman who attacked him.

“Sortor, a 27-year-old resident of Washington, D.C., was arrested alongside two Oregon residents, according to a press release from the city’s police department. All three people were booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center on the same misdemeanor charge,” the Examiner reported.

But later Sortor confirmed the review of his “wrongful arrest” will be conducted by Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon.

He said Attorney General Pam Bondi called him personally with the news.

“The Trump DOJ WILL NOT allow Portland Police to continue to do the bidding of Antifa,” he wrote on X, telling Portland police to “f*** around and find out.”

The report said he explained he was recording footage of federal agents macing protesters when he was surrounded and assaulted, forced to defend himself.

“Nick says he swung back and missed, then disengaged and walked over to a group of Portland PD. He says he was then shocked to be arrested by them, and he sat in the back of a police cruiser while officers figured out what to charge him with,” a witness reportd.

Protests in Portland were triggered by the deployment of National Guard troops to crack down on rampant crime there.

The Gateway Pundit commented, “The woman who attacked him was not arrested.”

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UK Expands Live Facial Recognition as First Legal Challenge Targets Met Police Misidentification

Police forces across England are preparing to expand their use of live facial recognition (LFR) surveillance as the government moves forward with a national policy to guide deployments.

Policing minister Sarah Jones confirmed during the Labour Party conference that formal guidance is in development to instruct officers on when and where the technology should be used.

Funding from the Home Office has already been allocated to support LFR operations in seven additional regions: Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Bedfordshire, Surrey, Sussex, Thames Valley, and Hampshire.

Government officials have pointed to early deployments in London and Cardiff as successful, citing arrests.

Reflecting on those results, Jones stated:

“What we’ve seen in Croydon is that it has worked. We just need to make sure it’s clear what the technology is going to be useful for going forward. If we are going to use it more, if we do want to roll it out across the country, what are the parameters? Live facial recognition is a really good tool that has led to arrests that wouldn’t have come otherwise, and it’s very, very valuable.”

The software links live camera feeds to a watchlist of people wanted by police. When someone passes a camera, facial measurements are analyzed and compared against the database. If a match is found, officers are alerted to intervene.

However, the use of LFR has expanded sharply. In London, the number of people included on watchlists has more than doubled between 2020 and 2025.

The volume of facial scans during deployments has also grown, with single-day scans now reaching into the tens of thousands.

The Metropolitan Police insists it has safeguards in place and maintains that data from individuals not on a watchlist is deleted immediately.

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Telegram Founder Pavel Durov Slams French Investigation, Warns of Global Crackdown on Privacy and Free Speech

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov made no attempt to hide his frustration with French authorities during a wide-ranging conversation on The Lex Fridman Podcast, describing the French government’s investigation into him and his company as “Kafkaesque,” “absurd,” and deeply damaging.

He warned that efforts to undermine digital privacy are accelerating not just in France, but across Europe and beyond, using pretexts like child protection and election integrity to justify surveillance and censorship.

Throughout the interview, Durov painted a grim picture of what he sees as growing authoritarianism disguised as public safety.

“Every dictator in the world justifies taking away your rights with very reasonable-sounding justifications,” he said, warning that citizens often don’t realize the gravity of their loss until it’s too late. “Every message they send is monitored. They can’t assemble. It’s over.”

Durov flatly rejected the idea that any government, including France’s, could force Telegram to grant access to users’ private conversations.

“Nothing,” he responded when asked if there was any scenario in which French intelligence could gain a backdoor.

He emphasized that Telegram does not and will not use personal data to power ad targeting, saying, “We would never use…your personal messaging data or your context data or your metadata or your activity data to target ads.”

Despite facing legal pressure and travel restrictions stemming from the French case, Durov said Telegram remains firm in its refusal to censor political content or violate users’ privacy.

“The more pressure I get, the more resilient and defiant I become,” he said, accusing French authorities of trying to “humiliate” him and millions of Telegram users through coercive tactics.

Durov described encounters with French intelligence officials who allegedly tried to pressure him into shutting down Telegram channels during elections in Romania and Moldova, actions he said would have amounted to “political censorship.”

He recounted being approached while detained in France and asked to disable channels that criticized preferred candidates of Western-aligned governments. “If you think that, because I’m stuck here, you can tell me what to do, you are very wrong,” Durov said he told one official.

He made it clear that Telegram had only taken down content in Moldova that actually violated platform rules, refusing broader demands that lacked justification.

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California Ends Kamala Harris’s Truancy Law Punishing Parents

California parents will no longer face arrest if their children miss school following Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Oct. 1 decision to approve legislation repealing Kamala Harris’s truancy law.

The 2011 law that the former vice president sponsored when she served as the state’s attorney general made it a misdemeanor for parents if their children were chronically truant by missing 10 percent or more of school days, starting in kindergarten.

The law punished parents with a fine of up to $2,000 or one year in county jail. At the time, she said the bill was an “effective strategy” to reduce chronic elementary school truancy and a smart approach to crime prevention.

This week, Newsom signed into law Assembly Bill 461 to end the criminalization of truancy for parents and remove the 2011 law from the state’s penal code. Newsom did not explain why he signed AB 461 in his press release about legislation decisions on Oct. 1. The bill, one of 105 bills signed into law that day, takes effect on Jan. 1.

The bill’s author, Assemblyman Patrick Ahrens, a Silicon Valley Democrat, called the truancy law a “failed policy.”

“Thank you to Gov. Newsom for signing my bill to repeal this failed policy of criminalizing struggling California families for their children missing school,” Ahrens said in a statement. “Fining or imprisoning parents did nothing to get kids the education and support they need.”

While California’s truancy law remained on the books for more than a decade, school districts were becoming less likely to enforce the punitive measures against parents, according to EdSource, a nonprofit educational resource focused on the state’s school systems.

The first arrests under the law were of five parents in Orange County in 2011. The parents were handcuffed and taken to Orange County Jail before being released on their own recognizance for ignoring repeated requests to get their children to school.

While parents have been arrested in California under the truancy law, it was unclear how many cases resulted in criminal charges. Most school districts instead went beyond the law to reach out to parents with emails, letters, and phone calls to resolve truancy problems, according to the California District Attorney’s Association.

The new law was sponsored by End Child Poverty California, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) California, and the Western Center on Law and Poverty. Several justice and parent organizations, including the California State Parent-Teacher Association (PTA), also supported it.

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Economic Freedom Begins Recovery From COVID-Era Government Meddling

The good news is that the first 20 years of the millennium saw overall increases in economic freedom around the world—with continuous improvement through the second decade. The bad news is that not just the United States but most of the world lost ground during the massive government interventions of the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s unfortunate for individual liberty, but also for prosperity since the economic freedom of a country strongly correlates with higher incomes and lower poverty. The world appears to be recovering freedom and wealth, but it lost years of progress to government meddling.

The latest edition of the Economic Freedom of the World report, published by Canada’s Fraser Institute, the Cato Institute, “and more than 70 think tanks around the world” is out, and it finds the world digging itself out of a hole that started in 2020.

“Overall, the index shows that economic freedom has increased since 2000, but fell precipitously following the coronavirus pandemic, erasing nearly a decade of progress,” the authors note. “We take no position on the efficacy of the various public-health policies designed to deal with the coronavirus pandemic; they very well may have saved millions of lives, or they may have been completely ineffectual….Our concern is economic freedom, and on that margin, there is no question that government policies responding to the coronavirus pandemic have reduced economic freedom.”

While global economic freedom has started to improve again as the pandemic and its interventions fade into memory, the average across nations is back to where it was in 2012. Weighted for population, which accounts for large countries with statist governments including China, the world’s economic freedom is just a hair better than it was in 2013 and has yet to start recovery from the COVID-era dip.

The index shows North America experiencing the largest decline over the measured period, with Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and North Africa following. “The latter region’s decline is especially tragic given its low starting point,” comment the authors.

“In 2023—the latest year for which data are available—the 10 highest scoring nations were Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland, the United States, Ireland, Australia and Taiwan (tied for 7th), Denmark, and the Netherlands.”

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Portland Police Arrest Conservative Journalist Nick Sortor

Portland Police arrested conservative journalist Nick Sortor on Thursday night.

According to X user, C.K. Bouferrache aka Honeybadgermom:

“Looked like @nicksortor got jumped. We are on the lower roof at ICE but difficult to tell exactly what happened at this distance. Portland liaison officers stand nearby and watch.”

She added in the following post:

“I cannot believe they arrested this guy for defending himself. The woman that went after him has taken part in a few assaults this last week.”

X user Mark Wilson posted video footage of the arrest, writing:

“Portland PD arrested @nicksortor tonight. Unclear why, as he wasn’t doing anything criminal. This comes after Portland police refused to arrest the lady who assaulted @KatieDaviscourt.”

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Rogan Rages At Media Silence On UK’s “Orwellian Nightmare” Free Speech Crackdown

Podcaster Joe Rogan has blasted the media and leftists for ignoring a massive crackdown on free speech and a move toward total dystopian surveillance in the UK, while focusing instead on Jimmy Kimmel being suspended for a few days.

“The fact that our mainstream media is relatively silent on this is insane,” Rogan stated during a recent episode of his show.

“This is an Orwell nightmare coming to life right in front of our face,” he further warned.

“You’re seeing a complete, total attack on one of the most fundamental principles of the Western world, which is your ability to express yourself,” Rogan continued, adding “And your ability to call out that you think that the policies that are being implemented in your country are destructive.”

Referring to people who have been arrested and even imprisoned for social media posts, Rogan noted “These people are not calling for violence. They’re not. They’re being arrested for wild things. People are being arrested for liking posts. Some people were investigated for viewing posts.”

He further cautioned that “12,000 people arrested by the police in the UK, the same place that just implemented digital ID.”

“No one’s flinching, no one in America is freaking out about what’s happening in the UK at all,” Rogan urged.

“I mean, you get people online that are kind of freaked out by it, but they’re way more freaked out by nonsensical things like whether or not what Jimmy Kimmel said in his monologue was offensive. They’ll go to the ends of the earth to fight that,” he asserted.

As we have highlighted, Prime Minister Kier Starmer recently announced Chinese communist-style digital tracking is coming to the UK with a new mandatory “right to work” scheme in the form of a universal ID called the “Brit Card”.

It’s all predicated on the back of out of control mass illegal immigration, with the leftists using the crisis created by the previous Conservative government and amplified by Starmer’s cabal in an attempt to rollout Orwellian style surveillance and control.

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Local Tyrants: How Property Rights of Farmers in Battleground States are Victimized by Zoning Boards

A new report spearheaded by the Private Property Rights Institute (PPRI) has profiled different farmers in the battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, highlighting the stories of how zoning boards have prevented them from properly utilizing their land to stay afloat.

In an age of Biden-driven inflation, domination of the farming industry by ruthless Big Ag and a myriad of other economic challenges, these farmers have also had to deal with the mandates of zoning boards restricting their ability to develop their land as they see fit.

Bob Wackernagel, a third-generation farmer in Michigan, has watched community-based farming slowly die off in Michigan. At the age of 60, he reports being the youngest farmer in his area. To make ends meet and preserve his family’s way of life, Wackernagel leased approximately 100 acres for solar development upon the most arid portion of his farmland. As a result, he has received attacks from township officials.

“I use the ground that returns me the least investment back on my crops … I’ve replanted two or three times a season on that land, because of poor soil quality… They act like it’s their land … They don’t have to pay the property taxes; they don’t have to farm it,” Wackernagel said.

Dwight Ely, a seventh-generation farmer from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, can trace his roots on his family’s land back to the 1800s. He raises livestock and operates a meat-processing business with massive and growing energy costs. Ely invested in solar panels years ago to help bring down his energy bill to manageable levels.

“Sure, it helped this generation for sure … big savings… absolutely, it helped to continue the generational thing for sure,” he said. “We pay that thing off, and it’s been nothing but awesome … It’s just been a gift that keeps giving,” Ely said.

Ely worked with neighbors to add fencing, plant trees and make sure his solar panels did not cause blight within his rural area. However, his hopes to expand his solar fleet as part of a business expansion plan that would have provided value to the community were stymied by the local zoning board.

“Some little guy sitting up at a little office at the township building says… he wants to make it hard. That’s the ridiculous part,” he said.

Two local officials in Pennsylvania and Michigan – Leoni Township Supervisor Howard Linnabary and Bradford County Commissioner Doug McLinko – believe that misinformation and a poor understanding of property rights are causing barriers that result in bureaucratic pushback against solar panels.

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