Tag: police state

Oregon Lawmakers Consider Banning Marijuana Edibles With More Than 10 Milligrams Of THC

Oregon lawmakers are considering a bill to prohibit the sale of individual edibles that have more than 10 milligrams of THC.

The proposal, Senate Bill 1548, comes as lawmakers grapple with responding to increasing reports of children seeking medical attention after consuming edibles resembling cookies, brownies and gummies. In 2023, children aged 0 to five made up one-third of all cannabis-related cases reported to the Oregon Poison Center.

And in May, experts recommended lawmakers implement a THC cap to cannabis products, similar to alcohol and tobacco, as data shows most Oregon youth believe there’s little to no risk in smoking marijuana once a month.

“We need to reckon with this a little bit,” said Sen. Lisa Reynolds, a Portland Democrat and pediatrician who chairs the Senate Early Childhood and Behavioral Health Committee. The committee met Tuesday morning for a public hearing on the bill.

Reynolds said the topic is of particular interest to her because she believes her brother’s habitual marijuana use in the ’70s contributed to his admission into psychiatric hospitals nearly 50 times throughout his life. He now lives in a nursing home with severe schizophrenia, she said.

Four doctors testified in favor of the bill, including Dr. Rob Hendrickson, the medical director of the Oregon Poison Center. Hendrickson shared an example of a toddler he cared for recently who consumed two muffins that contained 50 milligrams of THC each. Within an hour, the child turned blue and unconscious. She had a seizure and was put on life support for 36 hours.

There’s strong evidence that the policy would reduce child poisonings, according to Dr. Julia Dilley, a Multnomah County epidemiologist who has been leading research on the public health effects of cannabis legalization in Oregon and Washington.

Oregon’s bill is similar to a 2017 Washington law requiring that single servings of edibles don’t exceed 10 milligrams. That law was associated with 75 percent fewer hospitalizations and half as many poisonings reported to poison centers, Dilley told the committee.

Four people in the cannabis industry testified in opposition to the bill, including business owners and cannabis manufacturers who said many products already have child-resistant packaging, as well as meet marketing and advertising standards to make sure products aren’t attractive to children.

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“Kids Off Social Media Act” Opens the Door to Digital ID by Default

Congress is once again stepping into the role of digital caretaker, this time through the Kids Off Social Media Act, with a proposal from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna that seeks to impose federal rules on how young people interact with the world.

The house companion bill (to go along with the senate bill) attempts to set national limits on who can hold social media accounts, how platforms may structure their systems, and what kinds of data they are allowed to use when dealing with children and teenagers.

Framed as a response to growing parental concern, the legislation reflects a broader push to regulate online spaces through age-based access and design mandates rather than direct content rules.

The proposal promises restraint while quietly expanding Washington’s reach into the architecture of online speech. Backers of the bill will insist it targets corporate behavior rather than expression itself. The bill’s mechanics tell a more complicated story.

The bill is the result of a brief but telling legislative evolution. Early versions circulated in 2024 were framed as extensions of existing child privacy rules rather than participation bans. Those drafts focused on limiting data collection, restricting targeted advertising to minors, and discouraging algorithmic amplification, while avoiding hard access restrictions or explicit age enforcement mandates.

That posture shifted as the bill gained bipartisan backing. By late 2024, lawmakers increasingly treated social media as an inherently unsafe environment for children rather than a service in need of reform. When the bill was reintroduced in January 2025, it reflected that change. The new version imposed a categorical ban on accounts for users under 13, restricted recommendation systems for users under 17, and strengthened enforcement through the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general, with Senate sponsorship led by Ted Cruz and Brian Schatz.

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Congress Suspects ATF Has Gun Registry With 1.1 Billion Records

A group of 27 members of Congress, led by Representative Michael Cloud of Texas are sounding the alarm on the expansion of ATF’s illegal registry of guns and gun owners.

According to a recently released letter, addressed to ATF Deputy Director Robert Cedaka, ATF has not responded to a previous inquiry regarding the expansion of the registry. These Congressmen are concerned that ATF may now have over a billion records in their registry.

Originally, in 2021, Gun Owners of America revealed that the ATF was “processing” over 54.7 million “out-of-business records” per year.

Following this revelation, a Congressional investigation was started. This investigation uncovered the shocking reality that ATF had over 920 million gun registration records in a centralized, searchable, digital database- in total violation of federal law.

In 1986, Congress passed the Firearm Owners Protection Act, or FOPA. A portion of this act bans the federal government from ever keeping a searchable database of gun owners.

The exact text of the law reads like this:

No such rule or regulation prescribed after the date of the enactment of the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act may require that records required to be maintained under this chapter or any portion of the contents of such records, be recorded at or transferred to a facility owned, managed, or controlled by the United States or any State or any political subdivision thereof, nor that any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or dispositions be established.

Every tyrannical government on earth has first disarmed its population before committing terrible atrocities upon them.

From Nazi Germany to Communist Russia, to even as recent as Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, once populations are disarmed the Government is free to do as it pleases, often at the great peril to its own citizens.

Knowing this, a provision banning the US Government from creating a centralized registry was placed into the Firearm Owners Protection Act.

But the bureaucrats at ATF didn’t like that and decided to go around the law and create a registry anyway.

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Florida Officials Miss Counting 54,000+ Signatures for Cannabis Legalization Petition

Florida election officials appear to have short-changed an adult-use cannabis legalization campaign by more than 54,000 valid signatures.

Local election officials from roughly half of Florida’s 67 counties validated more signatures for Smart & Safe Florida’s initiative petition than what state officials gave those counties credit for, according to a Cannabis Business Times analysis of Florida’s county supervisors of elections’ websites.

The state-versus-county discrepancies for valid signature tallies come after Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd’s office announced Feb. 1 that Smart & Safe Florida’s proposed constitutional amendment to allow those 21 and older to access cannabis failed to meet the signature requirements for placement on the 2026 General Election ballot.

According to the Florida Division of Elections’ website, Smart & Safe Florida filed 783,592 valid signatures ahead of the Feb. 1 deadline, coming 96,470 signatures short of the 880,062 needed to qualify for the ballot.

However, with the extra 54,000-plus signatures reported by local election officials and another 70,646 disqualified signatures being contested in court, Smart & Safe Florida could overcome that shortfall (more on the lawsuit below).

Smart & Safe Florida organizers challenged the state’s valid signature tally on Feb. 1, with a campaign spokesperson telling Florida Politics that the Division of Elections’ website doesn’t match what the 67 county supervisors of elections verified at the local level.

“We believe the declaration by the secretary of state is premature, as the final and complete county-by-county totals for validated petitions are not yet reported,” the spokesperson said. “We submitted over 1.4 million signatures and believe when they are all counted, we will have more than enough to make the ballot.”

The 67 county supervisors of elections’ websites now show that local officials validated more than 833,000 signatures and deemed roughly 900,000 invalid, meaning they reviewed more than 1.7 million signatures from Smart & Safe Florida.

At the time of Byrd’s Feb. 1 declaration that the campaign failed, some county supervisors of elections had yet to post signature tallies from their final week’s reporting periods.

Under Florida Statute Section 100.371(15), Byrd is responsible for “the purely ministerial duty of calculating the total number of verified signatures,” based on valid counts from the 67 supervisors of elections, Leon County Judge Jonathan E. Sjostrom ruled last month.

This prompted CBT’s 67-county analysis.

Nearly 48,000 of the 54,000 valid signatures from county websites that were not reflected in the state’s tally came from five counties: Broward, Seminole, Pinellas, Polk and Alachua.

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New Mexico Dems Could Pass Broadest Gun Ban in U.S. This Week

For the past several years, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has been demanding the Democrat-controlled legislature deliver an “assault weapon” ban to her desk, and each and every session her fellow Democrats have declined to do so. In Grisham’s last year in office, though, Democrats are poised to deliver exactly what she wants; a bill that would take almost every semi-automatic long gun off the market in the Land of Enchantment.

New Mexico is in the middle of a 30-day session that’s supposed to be limited to budgetary issues only. Instead, Democrats are pushing a number of policy proposals, including SB 17, which would ban the sale and transfer of every gas-operated centerfire rifle that can accept a detachable magazine (along with those guns that have fixed magazine capacity of more than ten rounds), detachable magazines that can hold more than ten rounds of ammunition, and .50 BMG rifles, along with imposing a host of new regulations and restrictions on federally licensed firearms retailers. 

On Saturday afternoon the state Senate approved SB 17 along mostly party lines and sent the constitutional abomination on to the House, where it could come up for a vote as early as this week. 

“We have data that shows a lot of the gun crime in New Mexico is coming from guns sold at our local dealers, and we want the state to be able to also regulate and ensure those sales at our gun dealers here are responsible, are not straw purchases, and are happening as they should,” said state Sen. Heather Berghmans.

She says it would require gun shops to have more security measures, more training, keep thorough reports of sales and inventory, and their employees must be 21 years or older.

Yes, most guns used in crimes were originally sold by an FFL. That doesn’t mean, however, that New Mexico gun stores are doing anything wrong. That figure accounts for guns that are stolen or given to criminals by family and friends, along with straw purchases (which also can and do take place without the willing involvement of FFLs). 

Imposting these new requirements on FFL’s isn’t about stopping criminals from getting ahold of guns. It’s about making the process of being a gun store owner more difficult to navigate, more expensive to conduct business, and more legally dangerous to help people exercise a fundamental civil right. 

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EU Law Could Extend Scanning of Private Messages Until 2027

The European Parliament is considering another extension of Chat Control 1.0, the “temporary” exemption that allows communications providers to scan private messages (under the premise of preventing child abuse) despite the protections of the EU’s ePrivacy Directive.

A draft report presented by rapporteur Birgit Sippel (S&D) would prolong the derogation until April 3, 2027.

At first glance, the proposal appears to roll back some of the most controversial elements of Chat Control. Text message scanning and automated analysis of previously unknown images would be explicitly excluded. Supporters have framed this as a narrowing of scope.

However, the core mechanism of Chat Control remains untouched.

The draft continues to permit mass hash scanning of private communications for so-called “known” material.

According to former MEP and digital rights activist Patrick Breyer, approximately 99 percent of all reports generated under Chat Control 1.0 originate from hash-based detection.

Almost all of those reports come from a single company, Meta, which already limits its scanning to known material only. Under the new proposal, Meta’s practices would remain fully authorized.

As a result, the draft would not meaningfully reduce the volume, scope, or nature of surveillance. The machinery keeps running, with a few of its most visibly controversial attachments removed.

Hash scanning is often portrayed as precise and reliable. The evidence points in the opposite direction.

First, the technology is incapable of understanding context or intent. Hash databases are largely built using US legal definitions of illegality, which do not map cleanly onto the criminal law of EU Member States.

The German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) reports that close to half of all chat control reports are criminally irrelevant.

Each false positive still requires assessment, documentation, and follow-up. Investigators are forced to triage noise rather than pursue complex cases involving production, coercion, and organized abuse.

The strategic weakness is compounded by a simple reality. Offenders adapt. As more services adopt end-to-end encryption, abusers migrate accordingly. Since 2022, the number of chat-based reports sent to police has fallen by roughly 50 percent, not because abuse has declined, but because scanning has become easier to evade.

“Both children and adults deserve a paradigm shift in online child protection, not token measures,” Breyer said in a statement to Reclaim The Net.

“Whether looking for ‘known’ or ‘unknown’ content, the principle remains: the post office cannot simply open and scan every letter at random. Searching only for known images fails to stop ongoing abuse or rescue victims.”

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Massive TikTok Fine Threat Advances Europe’s Digital ID Agenda

A familiar storyline is hardening into regulatory doctrine across Europe: frame social media use as addiction, then require platforms to reengineer themselves around age segregation and digital ID.

The European Commission’s preliminary case against TikTok, announced today, shows how that narrative is now being operationalized in policy, with consequences that reach well beyond one app.

European regulators have accused TikTok of breaching the Digital Services Act by relying on what they describe as “addictive design” features, including infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and personalized recommendations.

Officials argue these systems drive compulsive behavior among children and vulnerable adults and must be structurally altered.

What sits beneath that argument is a quieter requirement. To deliver different “safe” experiences to minors and adults, platforms must first determine who is a minor and who is not. Any mandate to offer different experiences to minors and adults depends on a reliable method of telling those groups apart.

Platforms cannot apply separate algorithms, screen-time limits, or nighttime restrictions without determining a user’s age with a level of confidence regulators will accept.

Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier described the mechanics bluntly, saying TikTok’s design choices “lead to the compulsive use of the app, especially for our kids, and this poses major risks to their mental health and wellbeing.” He added: “The measures that TikTok has in place are simply not enough.”

The enforcement tool behind those statements is the Digital Services Act, the EU’s platform rulebook that authorizes Brussels to demand redesigns and impose fines of up to 6% of global annual revenue.

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Homeland Security Spying on Reddit Users

Homeland security field agents are scouring the social media site Reddit, monitoring the communications of law-abiding Americans critical of the agency.

The spying is revealed in a January intelligence bulletin produced by the Border Patrol and leaked to me. The subject of the report is Reddit user “Budget-Chicken-2425,” who is not a narco-trafficker, gang member, or terrorist. Just someone concerned about federal overreach.

The report centers on Budget-Chicken’s call for a protest near a Border Patrol facility in Edinburg, Texas. Though the report acknowledges that anti-ICE protests throughout Texas have been “generally lawful” and that there’s no evidence of any threat posed by Budget-Chicken’s call, any protest whatsoever near the border patrol facility is said to “warrant continued monitoring.”

To quote directly from the intelligence bulletin:

“At this time, there is no specific reporting of planned violence targeting DHS personnel or facilities linked to this protest call; however, any demonstration in proximity to USBP [United States Border Patrol] RGV [Rio Grande Valley] facilities may present operational, safety, and reputational risks that warrant continued monitoring.”

Budget-Chicken’s offending Reddit post was on the r/RioGrandeValley channel. Titled “Join me in protest against ICE,” the post is just a few sentences long, calling on “neighbors, family and community” to “be witnesses and to spread awareness” by protesting a Border Patrol station.

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New York Budget Bill Proposes Mandatory File-Scanning Tech and In-Person Sales for 3D Printers

New York’s latest budget proposal would place new obligations on manufacturers of 3D printers and other digital fabrication equipment, tying the operation of these tools to mandatory software controls.

The 2026–2027 executive budget bill, S.9005/A.10005, directs that devices sold in the state include “blocking technology” capable of scanning every design file and stopping production when a “firearms blueprint detection algorithm” flags a file as a potential gun or gun component.

The bill, similar to the ones we recently reported on in Washington state, treats file scanning as a workable technical safeguard, even though digital design files only describe shapes.

Many ordinary objects share the same geometric traits as regulated firearm parts. Pipes, housings, brackets, mounts, and mechanical connectors all overlap with components that appear in firearms.

Software that evaluates geometry alone cannot reliably separate lawful designs from prohibited ones. Such systems inevitably interrupt legitimate work while offering little resistance to deliberate misuse.

Although public discussion often centers on consumer 3D printers, the statutory language reaches much further.

The definitions extend to any machine capable of making three-dimensional changes to an object from a digital design using subtractive manufacturing. That scope covers equipment found in repair businesses and small manufacturing firms throughout the state.

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Arkansas Supreme Court Ruling Could Let Lawmakers Roll Back Medical Marijuana Access

Emily Williams struggled to find medication that alleviated chemotherapy side effects like nausea and loss of appetite following her 2010 cancer diagnosis. Eventually, she tried marijuana and it provided relief.

“I was just grateful,” she said. “I just felt grateful.”

The experience prompted the Fayetteville retiree to advocate for a citizen-led constitutional amendment voters approved in 2016 to create Arkansas’ medical marijuana program.

That program has since grown into a billion-dollar industry, with more than 115,000 patients using marijuana to treat conditions from Crohn’s disease to post-traumatic stress disorder. But an obscure legal fight over who can change citizen-led amendments to Arkansas’ Constitution casts uncertainty on the program’s future.

The court ruling is part of a nationwide battle playing out in states like Missouri and Nebraska over citizen-led ballot measures. Arkansas is one of 24 states that allows citizens to propose state laws, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Since the state’s first dispensary opened in 2019, thousands of Arkansans have accessed the program, including Christopher Duffy, a 35-year-old Fayetteville resident who said medical marijuana helped his anxiety and sobriety. Duffy said he’d remain committed to sobriety if marijuana becomes less accessible, but he worries about others.

“I’m lucky to have such a support system where were things to get tough or I started struggling, I could reach out,” he said. “There are those that don’t have that and I fear for them.”

Williams, 69, is afraid of losing access to medical marijuana, which she uses to manage ongoing complications from her illness.

“If I am not able to use this, my life would be completely, negatively impacted,” she said.

These concerns were sparked by the Arkansas Supreme Court upending 74 years of precedent in December with a ruling that declared lawmakers can amend citizen-led constitutional amendments with a two-thirds vote — 67 votes in the House and 24 votes in the Senate.

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