Tag: police state

Britain Has Officially Criminalized Journalism

The moment the British government began proscribing political movements as terrorist organisations, rather than just militant groups, it was inevitable that saying factual things, making truthful statements, would become a crime.

And lo behold, here we are.

The Terrorism Act 2000 has a series of provisions that make it difficult to voice or show any kind of support for an organisation proscribed under the legislation, whether it is writing an article or wearing a T-shirt.

Recent attention has focused on Section 13, which is being used to hound thousands of mostly elderly people who have held signs saying: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” They now face a terrorism conviction and up to six months in jail.

But an amendment introduced in 2019 to Section 12 of the act has been largely overlooked, even though it is even more repressive. It makes it a terrorism offence for a person to express “an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation” and in doing so be “reckless” about whether anyone else might be “encouraged to support” the organisation.

It is hard to believe this clause was not inserted specifically to target the watchdog professions: journalists, human rights groups and lawyers. They now face up to 14 years in jail for contravening this provision.

When it was introduced, six years ago, Section 12 made it impossible to write or speak in ways that might encourage support for groups whose central aim was using violence against people to achieve their aims.

The law effectively required journalists and others to adopt a blanket condemnatory approach to proscribed militant groups. That had its own drawbacks. It made it difficult, and possibly a terrorist offence, to discuss or analyse these organisations and their goals in relation to international law, which, for example, allows armed resistance — violence — against an occupying army.

But these problems have grown exponentially since the Conservatives proscribed Hamas’ political wing in 2021 and the government of Keir Starmer proscribed Palestine Action in 2025, the first time in British history a direction-action group targeting property had been declared a terrorist group.

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Victoria Moves to Force Online Platforms to ID Users and Expand State Powers to Curb “Hate Speech”

Victoria is preparing to introduce some of the most far-reaching online censorship and surveillance powers ever proposed in an Australian state, following the Bondi Beach terror attack.

Premier Jacinta Allan’s new five-point plan, presented as a response to antisemitism, includes measures that would compel social media platforms to identify users accused of “hate speech” and make companies legally liable if they cannot.

Presented as a defense against hate, the plan’s mechanisms cut directly into long-standing principles of privacy and freedom of expression. It positions anonymity online as a form of protection for “cowards,” creating a precedent for government-mandated identity disclosure that could chill lawful speech and dissent.

During her announcement, Premier Allan said:

“That’s why Victoria will spearhead new laws to hold social media companies and their anonymous users to account – and we’ll commission a respected jurist to unlock the legislative path forward.”

Under the proposal, if a user accused of “vilification” cannot be identified, the platform itself could be held responsible for damages. This effectively converts private platforms into instruments of state enforcement, obligating them to expose user data or face financial risk.

The Premier also announced plans to accelerate the introduction of the Justice Legislation Amendment (Anti-vilification and Social Cohesion) Act 2024, which had been due to take effect in mid-2026. It will now be brought forward to April 2026.

The law allows individuals to sue others for public conduct, including online speech, that a “reasonable person” might find “hateful, contemptuous, reviling or severely ridiculing” toward someone with a protected attribute. These protected categories include religion, race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability, among others.

This framework gives the state and private citizens broad interpretive power to determine what speech is “hateful.” As many civil liberties experts note, such wording opens the door to legal action based on subjective offense rather than clear, objective harm.

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Land of Confusion: The Great Reset in Motion

The global disruptions we have seen in recent years are frequently presented as a chaotic sequence of events: a ‘pandemic’, inflation, energy shortages and war. Little wonder that most people are confused. However, a structural analysis reveals a more deliberate controlled demolition of the 20th-century social contract.

We are witnessing a transition from a productive capitalist model, which required a healthy mass labour force, to what Yanis Varoufakis calls a techno-feudalist order.

The engine of this transition was a desperate financial stabilisation strategy carried out by means of a public health event. As identified by Professor Fabio Vighi, the global financial system reached a point of terminal instability in late 2019, evidenced by the collapse of the US repo market (where banks lend to each other).

By freezing the real economy through lockdowns, central banks performed massive liquidity injections to save the banking-finance tier. If that money had entered a functioning economy, it would have triggered hyper-inflation. By keeping the population at home, the elite performed a stealth bailout that preserved the dominance of the financial class by sacrificing the productive middle class.

However, a geopolitical reset also had to take place. For decades, Germany’s economy relied on three pillars: cheap Russian gas, high-tech exports to China and a US security umbrella. By late 2025, all three have been fractured. As Prof Michael Hudson notes, the ‘sabotage’ of the Nord Stream pipelines was a structural necessity for the Western financial elite.

If Germany continued to integrate with Russia and China, it would have created a power pole independent of the US dollar. The conflict in Ukraine served a purpose: it resulted in Germany replacing Russian pipeline gas and being forced into a massive build-out of liquefied natural gas (LNG) infrastructure and reliance on LNG from the US. Unlike pipeline gas, LNG must be super-cooled, shipped and re-gasified, a process that is inherently 3–4 times more expensive.

The result is that, in 2025, German industrial output is at its lowest since the 1990s. Heavy industries like BASF (chemicals) and ThyssenKrupp (steel) are relocating to the US or China. Meanwhile, Germany is pivoting from an industrial giant by betting on creating jobs in the likes of the green energy sector (including becoming a ‘hydrogen hub’), semiconductors and microelectronics, robotics and biotech and diverting its capital into a €150 billion annual defence spend.

At the same time, while Germany collapses, the City of London thrives on global volatility. Among other things, the City is the global hub for war risk insurance and energy brokerage. When a pipeline is destroyed or a strategically important shipping lane is threatened, the price of war risk insurance triples. The London insurance market (Lloyd’s) extracts these ‘risk premiums’ from the global economy.

The City’s brokers treat geopolitical instability as a volatile asset class. Even as British households are crushed by energy bills, the financial centre remains profitable by extracting wealth from the very chaos that foreign policy helps to manufacture.

Moreover, the City of London has secured its position as the indispensable middleman of the transatlantic energy pivot. While the physical gas originates in the US and is consumed in Europe, the financial and legal architecture of this trade is almost entirely managed in London.

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Google and Substack Warn Britain Is Building a Censorship Machine

Major American companies and commentators, including Google and Substack CEO Chris Best, have condemned the United Kingdom’s censorship law, the Online Safety Act (OSA), describing it as a measure that risks censoring lawful speech while failing to make the internet safer for children.

They argue that the law normalizes digital surveillance, restricts open debate, and complicates how global platforms operate in the UK.

Their objections surfaced through The Telegraph, which published essays from Best and from Heritage Foundation researchers John Peluso and Miles Pollard, alongside new reporting on Google’s formal response to an Ofcom consultation.

That consultation, focused on how tech firms should prevent “potentially illegal” material from spreading online, closed in October, with Ofcom releasing the submissions in December.

Google’s filing accused the regulator of promoting rules that would “undermine users’ rights to freedom of expression” by encouraging pre-emptive content suppression.

Ofcom rejected this view, insisting that “nothing in our proposals would require sites and apps to take down legal content.” Yet Google was hardly alone in raising alarms: other American companies and trade groups submitted responses voicing comparable fears about the Act’s scope and implications.

Chris Best wrote that his company initially set out to comply with the new law but quickly discovered it to be far more intrusive than expected. “What I’ve learned is that, in practice, it pushes toward something much darker: a system of mass political censorship unlike anywhere else in the western world,” he said.

Best describes how the OSA effectively forces platforms to classify and filter speech on a constant basis, anticipating what regulators might later deem harmful.

Compliance, he explained, requires “armies of human moderators or AI” to scan journalism, commentary, and even satire for potential risk.

The process, he continued, doesn’t simply remove content but “gates it” behind identity checks or age-verification hurdles that often involve facial scans or ID uploads.

“These measures don’t technically block the content,” Best said, “but they gate it behind steps that prove a hassle at best, and an invasion of privacy at worst.” He warned that this structure discourages readers, reduces visibility for writers, and weakens open cultural exchange.

Best, who emphasized Substack’s commitment to press freedom, said the OSA misdiagnoses the problem of online harm by targeting speech rather than prosecuting actual abuse or criminal behavior.

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UK Police Pilot AI System to Track “Suspicious” Driver Journeys

Police forces across Britain are experimenting with artificial intelligence that can automatically monitor and categorize drivers’ movements using the country’s extensive number plate recognition network.

Internal records obtained by Liberty Investigates and The Telegraph reveal that three of England and Wales’s nine regional organized crime units are piloting a Faculty AI-built program designed to learn from vehicle movement data and detect journeys that algorithms label “suspicious.”

For years, the automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system has logged more than 100 million vehicle sightings each day, mostly for confirming whether a specific registration has appeared in a certain area.

The new initiative changes that logic entirely. Instead of checking isolated plates, it teaches software to trace entire routes, looking for patterns of behavior that resemble the travel of criminal networks known for “county lines” drug trafficking.

The project, called Operation Ignition, represents a change in scale and ambition.

Unlike traditional alerts that depend on officers manually flagging “vehicles of interest,” the machine learning model learns from past data to generate its own list of potential targets.

Official papers admit that the process could involve “millions of [vehicle registrations],” and that the information gathered may guide future decisions about the ethical and operational use of such technologies.

What began as a Home Office-funded trial in the North West covering Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Cheshire, Cumbria, Lancashire, and North Wales has now expanded into three regional crime units.

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Bipartisan Bill Seeks to Repeal Section 230, Endangering Online Free Speech

A proposal in the US Senate titled the Sunset Section 230 Act seeks to dismantle one of the core protections that has shaped the modern internet.

Put forward by Senator Lindsey Graham with bipartisan backing from Senators Dick Durbin, Josh Hawley, Amy Klobuchar, and Richard Blumenthal, the bill would repeal Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, a provision that has, for nearly thirty years, shielded online platforms from liability for the actions of their users.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Under the plan, Section 230 would be fully repealed two years after the bill’s passage.

This short transition period would force websites, social platforms, and hosting services to rethink how they handle public interaction.

The current statute stops courts from holding online platforms legally responsible as the publishers of material shared by their users.

Its protection has been instrumental in allowing everything from local discussion boards to global platforms such as YouTube and Wikipedia to operate without being sued over every user comment or upload.

The legislation’s text removes Section 230 entirely and makes “conforming amendments” across multiple federal laws.

“I am extremely pleased that there is such wide and deep bipartisan support for repealing Section 230, which protects social media companies from being sued by the people whose lives they destroy.

Giant social media platforms are unregulated, immune from lawsuits, and are making billions of dollars in advertising revenue off some of the most unsavory content and criminal activity imaginable,” said Senator Graham.

“It is past time to allow those who have been harmed by these behemoths to have their day in court.”

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DHS Says Recording or Following Law Enforcement ‘Sure Sounds Like Obstruction of Justice’

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says recording or following federal law enforcement “sure sounds like obstruction of justice,” despite federal circuit courts repeatedly ruling that such activity is core First Amendment speech.

In response to a question from Reason asking if the department considered following or recording a federal law enforcement officer to be obstruction of justice, the DHS Office of Public Affairs said in an emailed statement attributed to an unnamed spokesperson: “That sure sounds like obstruction of justice. Our brave ICE law enforcement face a more than 1150% increase in assaults against them. If you obstruct or assault our law enforcement, we will hunt you down and you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

It’s one of the most direct public statements yet from DHS articulating a policy that treats following, recording, and revealing the identities of federal immigration officers as illegal activity. There have been months of news reports and viral showing federal immigration officers threatening, brandishing weapons, and violently detaining people for following and recording them in public. 

David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, collected dozens of these instances in a report released earlier this month. Bier concluded that the amount of video evidence, in conjunction memos and public statements from DHS leadership, amounts to “an official, nationwide policy of intimidating and threatening people who attempt to observe and record [DHS] operations.”

Civil libertarians say it’s an unconstitutional policy. Although the Supreme Court has declined to address the issue, seven federal circuit courts have firmly upheld the right to record and monitor the police, as long as one doesn’t physically interfere with them. 

“Observing, following, and recording law enforcement are unambiguously protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution,” Bier tells Reason. “They are not obstruction of justice. The right to record helps guarantee justice by ensuring accountability and an accurate record of events.”

For example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit concluded in 2017 that “First Amendment principles, controlling authority, and persuasive precedent demonstrate that a First Amendment right to record the police does exist, subject only to reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit joined the club in 2022, when it ruled that a Colorado man had presented a clear First Amendment retaliation claim against a police officer who prevented him from filming a traffic stop.

Likewise, courts have frequently ruled that the First Amendment protects the right to warn others of police activity, such as flashing one’s headlights to warn of a speed trap ahead. In 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled that a Connecticut man’s First Amendment rights were violated when police arrested him for holding a sign warning drivers of police activity ahead.

“The right to record publicly visible law enforcement activity is a core First Amendment right,” says Scarlet Kim, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “It creates an independent record of what officers are doing, and it is no accident that some of the most high-profile cases of misconduct have involved video recordings. The burning question is why ICE officers feel the need to hide who they are and what they do from the public—masking their faces, lacking visible ID, driving unmarked vehicles, and now attacking those who document their activities.”

The guiding First Amendment principle behind these court decisions was most memorably expressed in the 1987 Supreme Court ruling in Houston v. Hill, which struck down a Houston ordinance that made it unlawful to oppose or interrupt a police officer: “The freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state,” Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote.

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Shein Can’t Sell Sex Toys Unless It Checks IDs, French Court Says

Shein, a cheap-stuff superstore based in China that is popular worldwide, cannot sell sex toys unless it checks purchaser IDs, a French court has ruled. The case comes after the French government tried to shut down Shein for three months.

International attention on the case has focused on the fact that Shein—through its third-party vendor marketplace—was temporarily selling what’s been described as “childlike sex dolls.” That’s appalling, of course. But understandable disgust and anger about that aspect has overshadowed a bigger story.

According to the BBC, the court ordered age verification measures to be enacted for the sale of all “adult” items, with a potential fine of €10,000 (about $11,700) for each breach.

Sex Toys: Age Verification’s Next Frontier?

“I don’t live in France and I don’t shop at Shein,” you might be thinking. “Why should I care?”

Because, my friends, this is another sign about where online age verification is going.

Politicians and activists—in the U.S. and around the world—initially pushed age verification measures as a requirement for porn websites. Who could be against stopping kids from watching hardcore pornography? they asked anyone who objected (conveniently eluding the facts that these bans are often broad enough to cover all sorts of sexuality-related material, and that they won’t affect just children but will invade the privacy of countless adults trying to access protected speech).

Then we started hearing about the need to implement age verification measures—checking IDs or requiring facial scans and so on—on all social media platforms. Now we’re hearing about age verification for video games, age verification for vibrators, age verification for everything.

Texas lawmakers earlier this year introduced a measure that would have mandated age verification for sex toy sales online. It failed to advance, but at the rate things are going I don’t think that will be the last we hear of it.

Measures like these could mean anyone who wants to purchase sex toys or sexual wellness devices online will have to attach their identity to the purchase—opening them up to surveillance, hackers, and so on.

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Citizens In Eastern Ukraine Will Not Be Allowed To Vote, Zelensky Says

President Volodymyr Zelensky has confirmed that Ukraine and Washington are in talks about holding elections, after earlier this month he much belatedly said while under pressure from Trump that he’s ready to allow national elections, so long as they can be done fairly and freely.

Zelensky indicated current discussions also hinge on the US and other partners helping set the conditions so Ukrainians can vote in safety. He previously stated the country could hold a vote within 60 days – but only if there are security guarantees.

Already over the weekend he erected more barriers to holding a vote, stipulating that citizens in Eastern Ukraine would not be able to participate. 

“Any election in Ukraine can not be held in Russia-occupied parts of the country,” Zelensky has been quoted in international press as saying, and he once again added that a proper voting process can take place only if security is ensured.

He has also lately said that Ukraine’s foreign minister had started the initial work on the infrastructure needed for Ukrainians living abroad to participate.

The four oblasts that President Putin has called “our four new regions” and “our citizens forever” include Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions – and were annexed after a popular referendum during the first year of the war.

Putin has blasted Zelensky’s rule as illegitimate given the canceled elections based on enacting a state of martial law, and President Trump has expressed increasing agreement with this perspective.

Still, Zelensky’s new ‘openness’ with holding an election has been coupled with plenty of caveats and likely immense barriers. For example last week he said—

…that a ceasefire with Russia must be in place before elections can be held in Ukraine, “at least for the duration of the election process and voting”. Ukrainian law forbids wartime elections but US President Donald Trump is pressuring Zelensky, whose term ended last year, to hold a vote.

But Trump this month finally put some real pressure on him, it appears. Given Zelensky had put the brakes on the US-proposed pace plan by definitively rejecting the territorial concessions aspects to the document, the US president’s assessment in a recent Politico interview was blunt and highly critical, going so far as to basically call Ukraine not a democracy.

“They haven’t had an election in a long time,” Trump said. “You know, they talk about a democracy, but it gets to a point where it’s not a democracy anymore.”

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The Surveillance State Is Making a Naughty List—and You’re On It

The Surveillance State is making a naughty list, and we’re all on it.

Unlike Santa’s naughty list, however, the consequences of landing on the government’s “naughty list” are far more severe than a stocking full of coal. They can include heightened surveillance, loss of privacy, travel restrictions, financial scrutiny, police encounters, or being flagged as a potential threat—often without notice, explanation, or recourse.

What was once dismissed as a joke—“Santa is watching”—has morphed into a chilling reality. Instead of elves, the watchers are data brokers, intelligence agencies, predictive algorithms, and fusion centers. Instead of a naughty-or-nice list, Americans are sorted into databases, risk profiles, and threat assessments—lists that never disappear.

The shift is subtle but profound.

Innocence is no longer presumed.

Everyone is watched. Everyone is scored. Everyone is a potential suspect.

This is the surveillance state in action.

Today’s surveillance state doesn’t require suspicion, a warrant, or probable cause. It is omnipresent, omniscient, and inescapable.

Your smartphone tracks your location. Your car records your movements. License plate readers log when and where you drive. Retail purchases create detailed consumer profiles. Smart speakers listen to everything you say. Home security cameras observe not just your property, but your neighbors, delivery drivers, and anyone who passes by.

In a dramatic expansion of surveillance reach, the Transportation Security Administration now shares airline passenger lists with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, enabling ICE to identify and arrest travelers at airports based on immigration status.

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