Tag: police state

British universities paid security firm to ‘spy’ on pro-Palestine students

Twelve British universities paid a private firm run by former military intelligence officials to “spy” on student protesters and academics, including those who have expressed solidarity with Palestine, it can be revealed.

A joint investigation by Al Jazeera English and Liberty Investigates has uncovered evidence that Horus Security Consultancy Limited trawled through student social media feeds and conducted secret counter-terror threat assessments on behalf of some of Britain’s most elite institutions.

Horus, which describes itself as a “leading intelligence” firm, has been paid at least 440,000 pounds ($594,000) by universities since 2022.

Among those monitored were a Palestinian academic invited to give a guest lecture at Manchester Metropolitan University and a pro-Gaza PhD student at the London School of Economics, according to internal documents.

In October 2024, the University of Bristol provided the firm with a list of student protest groups it wished to receive alerts about, an internal university email suggests. It included pro-Palestinian and animal rights activists.

In total, 12 universities paid the firm to monitor campus protest activity. Others include the University of Oxford, Imperial College London, University College London (UCL), King’s College London (KCL), the University of Sheffield, the University of Leicester, the University of Nottingham and Cardiff Metropolitan University.

There is no suggestion that this activity is illegal.

These findings have come to light after Al Jazeera English and Liberty Investigates submitted freedom of information (FOI) requests to more than 150 universities.

All the institutions named in this article were approached for comment by Al Jazeera and Liberty Investigates.

The University of Oxford, UCL, KCL, the University of Leicester and the University of Nottingham did not respond to requests for comment.

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Elon Musk Is a No-Show for Questioning in French Court Hearing Into X Social Media Platform and Grok Chatbot

France is scrambling to censor free-speech X.

We have been reporting on how France is waging lawfare against free-speech X platform, and how US authorities refused to aid in the nefarious lawsuit, as you can read in DOJ Refuses Cooperation, Warns France to Back Off Censorship Probe Targeting X Platform.

Today (20), it arose that the platform owner, tech billionaire Elon Musk did not appear at a summons for questioning in a French probe into X and its AI ‌chatbot, Grok.

The investigation began looking into alleged abuse of algorithms and fraudulent data extraction, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office.

Reuters reported:

“The investigation, which has been expanded in past months to include suspected complicity in the distribution of child pornography and the creation of sexual deepfakes by Grok, has added to strains in relations between the U.S. and Europe over Big ​Tech and free speech.”

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‘Gas station heroin.’ TN passes full kratom ban after weeks-long debate over effects

Tennessee lawmakers have passed a full ban on kratom, derived from a Southeast Asian plant, following a weeks-long debate over its safety and effects.

“Kratom contains compounds that activate opioid receptors in the brain- mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH)– and is often referred to as gas station heroin,” said Rep. Esther Helton-Haynes, R-East Brainerd during a committee hearing in March.

Kratom supporters say, in its natural form, the plant can help curb opioid addiction and manage pain.

But Tennessee legislators sided with caution this week, aligning with advocates who argue kratom in any form can ultimately lead to addiction and potentially deadly overdoses.

Tennessee now joins about eight other states in banning kratom entirely, including its natural form.

“This bill addresses the growing public health and safety concern surrounding kratom, often marketed as a natural supplement,” Helton-Haynes said. “But natural does not mean safe.”

The kratom plant has been used as an alternative to opioids, sometimes as people wean off heroin, and as a natural pain reliever.

In recent years, however, kratom has been modified into a stronger form known as 7-hydroxymitragynine, or “7-OH,” often sold at gas stations and vape shops as a supplement or extract. Some experts say it is 13 times more potent than morphine.

“I never heard of kratom until the day we lost him,” said Karen Davenport, a mother from Chattanooga who is advocating against the substance, working with lawmakers to get the bill passed. “Like many families, we didn’t realize the risk because kratom is often marketed as a safe, natural product.”

Davenport’s 27-year-old son, Matthew, died after taking kratom, which interacted with his prescription medication. The bill has since been named “Matthew’s Law.”

“What he didn’t know was there’s an exhaustive list of more than 250 drug interactions that can cause a lethal reaction with kratom,” she said.

There remains ongoing debate over whether natural kratom is safe or beneficial. Some states are potentially revising bans. A petition circulating online includes testimonials from some of the estimated hundreds of thousands of kratom users in Tennessee, who say they use it to help with issues like arthritis, back pain and Sciatica.

Both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have maintained a generally negative stance on kratom and have not approved it for any medical use.

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3 Disasters That Legal Weed Didn’t Unleash—Despite the Forecasts

Happy 4/20 to the millions of people across the country who celebrate, including much of the Reason staff. As someone who’s never been interested in pot—save for one summer in college—or drugs in general, I’ve always found the day a bit strange. But as I’ve grown older (and more libertarian), I’ve come to appreciate it as a celebration of personal freedom. 

I’m not the only one who has changed his mind. In 2025, 64 percent of Americans thought marijuana should be legal for both medical and recreational use (up from 31 percent in 2000), according to Gallup. Meanwhile, 40 states have legalized medical use of cannabis, including 24 that also allow recreational use. Late last year, President Donald Trump ordered that marijuana be reclassified from Schedule I to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act, putting it in the same category as prescription drugs such as “ketamine, anabolic steroids, and Tylenol with codeine,” explains Reason‘s Jacob Sullum.

Prohibitionists warned that legalization would have dire consequences. Here are some of their predictions that have yet to come true. 

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Christian in Egypt Faces Terrorism Charges for Simply Declaring His Faith in Jesus in Legal Docs: Report

A Christian convert in Egypt faces a trial over his attempt to change his legal documents to reflect his newfound faith.

Said Abdelrazek, who turned from Islam to Christianity, has been accused of terrorism merely for trying to amend the papers, according to a report from International Christian Concern.

The ministry noted that Abdelrazek will therefore face proceedings before the First Criminal Terrorism Circuit in Badr — a court that is notorious for disappearing convicts and practicing other “opaque proceedings” — on April 21.

“The Badr court complex, where Abdelrazek’s hearing will take place, has drawn increasing concern from international observers,” International Christian Concern warned.

“Critics argue that its terrorism circuits operate with minimal transparency and routinely deny defendants basic legal protections.”

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Brussels’ New Age Verification App: Hacked in Two Minutes

The European Union’s age verification app arrived on Wednesday with a promise that it was “technically ready” for deployment across the bloc. Within hours, security researchers had torn it apart.

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen presented the tool in Brussels as the answer to a continent-wide push to keep minors off social media and adult websites. “It is fully open source. Everyone can check the code,” von der Leyen said. Researchers took her at her word. What they found has turned the launch into exactly the kind of security embarrassment that should make anyone think twice about digital identity systems.

Security consultant Paul Moore published a widely shared post on X documenting what he discovered after examining the GitHub repository. The app stores sensitive data on users’ phones and leaves it unprotected. Moore claimed he hacked it in under two minutes.

Brussels is standing by its product. “Yes, it is ready. Maybe we can add, ‘and it can always be improved’,” Chief Spokesperson Paula Pinho told reporters Friday. Digital spokesperson Thomas Regnier added a revealing clarification. “Now, when we say it’s a final version, it’s … still a demo version.” He said the final product is not yet available for citizens and “the code will be constantly updated and improved … I cannot today exclude or prejudge if further updates will be required or not.”

Moore led the technical takedown on X, describing the app’s architecture as broken at the foundation. The encrypted PIN the app stores locally, according to Moore, has no cryptographic link to the identity vault holding the actual verification data.

That gap enables a bypass that requires no exploit code or specialized tools. Delete a few specific values from the app’s configuration files, restart the app, set a new PIN, and the software happily hands over access to credentials that belong to the previous profile. Identity data gets reused under whatever access control the attacker defines.

The weaknesses deepen from there. Rate limiting, the standard defense against someone trying PIN after PIN until one works, lives in the same editable configuration file as a plain counter. Set it to zero and the app forgets every failed attempt.

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Digital Currency and the End of Financial Privacy

The push toward digital currency is being framed as innovation and efficiency, but when you strip away the marketing language, what is unfolding is a structural transformation of the financial system that shifts control away from individuals and concentrates it within governments and central banks. The Bank for International Settlements has confirmed that more than 90% of central banks are now actively researching, developing, or piloting central bank digital currencies, which is not coincidence or experimentation but a coordinated global direction. This aligns directly with what I have been warning, that when governments face a sovereign debt crisis they will turn to mechanisms that allow them to monitor and control capital flows because they cannot solve the debt problem through traditional means.

In the United States, more than 95% of transactions are already digital in some form, whether through credit cards, debit systems, ACH transfers, or mobile payment platforms, which means the infrastructure for surveillance is already largely in place. Cash has not been eliminated yet, but it has been marginalized, and that is the first step because once transactions become digital, every movement of money creates a permanent record. Governments already have the ability to access financial data through banks, but a central bank digital currency removes the intermediary entirely and places that visibility directly within a centralized system controlled by the state.

This is where the real shift takes place because a CBDC is not simply a digital version of existing currency, it is a programmable financial instrument. That means money itself can be controlled, restricted, or directed according to policy decisions. Transactions could be approved or denied in real time, spending could be limited to certain categories, and funds could even be given expiration dates to force consumption. These are not theoretical concerns as these capabilities have already been discussed openly in central bank reports and demonstrated in pilot programs around the world, including China’s digital yuan, which integrates payment systems with state oversight.

The connection to the sovereign debt crisis is critical because governments are reaching a point where they cannot sustain spending without either raising taxes, inflating the currency, or imposing controls on capital. Digital currency provides a mechanism to do all three simultaneously. Real-time taxation becomes possible because transactions can be monitored instantly, eliminating the lag between earning and reporting income. Capital controls can be enforced automatically by restricting transfers, preventing withdrawals, or limiting how funds are used. Inflation can be managed politically by directing spending into specific sectors or suppressing activity in others. This is the level of control that governments have never had before, and it changes the entire structure of the financial system.

The transition is being rolled out gradually because it cannot be imposed overnight without resistance. Digital systems will continue to coexist with cash and traditional banking for a period of time, but the direction is clear. As digital adoption increases, incentives will be introduced to encourage usage while restrictions on cash will slowly expand. Limits on cash transactions, reporting requirements, and regulatory pressure on banks are all part of this process. Eventually, participation in the digital system becomes not a choice but a necessity because alternatives are either restricted or eliminated.

There is also a geopolitical dimension to this shift because digital currencies can be used to bypass existing financial networks such as SWIFT, allowing countries to conduct transactions outside the traditional Western-dominated system. At the same time, within domestic economies, these systems give governments the ability to enforce policy at the individual level. This creates a dual structure where digital currencies are used externally to avoid sanctions and internally to impose control, and that combination is what makes this development so significant.

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California’s “Stop Nick Shirley Act” Would Penalize Journalism

California’s Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee voted 11-2 on April 7 to advance a bill that would let employees and volunteers at immigration service organizations demand the deletion of their images and personal information from the internet, backed by civil penalties starting at $4,000 and the threat of criminal charges.

AB 2624, authored by Assemblywoman Mia Bonta, is already being called the “Stop Nick Shirley Act.”

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

The bill arrives just weeks after investigative video creator Nick Shirley published a 40-minute video on alleged hospice fraud in California that racked up 42 million views on X.

Other investigations have found that a single program is causing the state to lose an alleged $6 billion in fraud annually. Shirley had already reported on over $110 million in Somali daycare fraud in Minnesota in December 2025, with empty facilities billing taxpayers while kids were nowhere to be found.

His California reporting uncovered an alleged $170 million in similar fraud in daycares and hospices, with ghost operations registered to empty lots and strip malls. Sacramento’s response to this flood of documented waste and abuse was not an audit, not an investigation into the programs themselves, but a bill to make it harder to film the people running them.

Under AB 2624, anyone affiliated with an organization providing “designated immigration support services” can send a written demand prohibiting the publication of their personal information or image online.

That demand remains effective for four years, even after the person leaves the organization. If the demand is ignored, the person can go to court for an injunction or declaratory relief.

Fines run up to three times the actual damages, with a floor of $4,000, meaning the minimum penalty triples to $12,000 in cases where a takedown demand is defied. If a journalist or anyone else is accused of posting information with the intent to incite harm, they face criminal charges and fines of $10,000.

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Louisiana advances bill to funnel homeless people into forced treatment and unpaid labor

Yesterday, the Louisiana House of Representatives took the dangerous step of voting in favor of a truly disgusting anti-homeless bill. This bill is an extreme take on the already extreme copy-paste legislation peddled by the Palantir-funded, billionaire-backed Cicero Institute. In addition to making it a crime to sleep outside, this bill forces homeless people charged with a crime to make the false choice between jail or at least one year of forced treatment. 

But it gets worse.  

This bill requires homeless people to pay for the very treatment they are forced into. And if the person cannot pay the cost of treatment, this bill requires them to perform unpaid labor for the government or a community organization to pay off their debt. Louisiana has a long history – and present – of chain gangs, prison labor, and entrenched white supremacy. This bill clearly evokes debtor’s prisons, convict leasing, and the ugliest day of Jim Crow.   

We can all agree that the creation of a two-tiered justice system, where people are punished differently for the same crime depending simply on whether or not they are homeless, is just too extreme.  

Louisiana Governor Landry cites Donald Trump’s anti-homeless policies to justify his support of this heinous bill.  But this is not just about Louisiana – it reveals just how far many states might be willing to go to align themselves with Trump’s extreme, anti-homeless agenda. Politicians from Donald Trump on down would rather blame homeless people than use their power to address the sky-high rents that are the leading cause of homelessness.  

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California’s ‘GTFO’ Act Disqualifies ICE Agents from Local Public Employment

California’s proposed “GTFO Act” is exactly what it sounds like: “Get the Feds Out.” Well, that’s what they claim it means.

Assembly Bill 1896 by Assemblyman Mark González (D-Los Angeles), would bar ICE agents or Department of Homeland Security employees who participated in immigration enforcement during the second Trump administration from holding any public employment in California. Gonzalez claims ICE agents ignored “unlawful orders.”

AB 1896 “Disqualifies individuals who engaged in immigration enforcement activity between January 20, 2025, and January 20, 2029 from holding state, county, or local public employment in California, with exceptions for allowed conduct already permissible under SB 54, California’s law protecting community trust.”

Assemblyman González calls ICE agents “killers, terror instigators, and kidnappers.”

In March, the Globe reported that California Democrats were already seeking to disqualify federal immigration and DHS agents from future employment as California state or local police, or sheriffs, and prevent them from applying for tax breaks, because they oppose President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.

In short, this is a retroactive and prospective bar on hiring people who participated in federal immigration enforcement work during the Trump administration for any California public job.

This is the rock-bottom state of politics in California. Democrats have nothing to offer California citizens – they already gave away all of the free stuff. So they are appealing to illegal immigrants instead, prioritizing those here illegally over legal citizens and residents of the State of California.

Federal immigration law is supreme under the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, meaning states cannot enact their own immigration codes, create conflicting criminal penalties for immigration violations, or directly regulate who may enter or remain in the country, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2012 in Arizona v. United States. The federal government holds primary authority over immigration and naturalization.

Apparently, Democrats have chosen take out their Trump Derangement Syndrome on federal law enforcement officers… because securing U.S. borders, protecting the American people against invasion, and guaranteeing the country protection against invasion displaces future Democrat voters and welfare recipients.

California is violating federal law with this bill, and many others.

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