Tag: privacy

Beyond Cookies – How To Stop The Invisible Browser Fingerprint That Tracks You Everywhere

For years, the privacy advice was simple: clear your cookies, use incognito mode, or click “Reject All” on those annoying consent banners. That advice is now outdated.

A groundbreaking study published last year has delivered the first peer-reviewed proof that the $600 billion online advertising industry has moved on from cookies. The new tracking method is called browser fingerprinting, and it works even if you never log in, never accept cookies, and have legally opted out under privacy laws.

Researchers from Texas A&M University and Johns Hopkins University built a tool named FPTrace to measure exactly how this works in the wild. They simulated real user sessions, systematically altered browser fingerprints, and watched what happened to the ads being served and the bids advertisers placed in real time. The results were clear: when the fingerprint changed, the price advertisers were willing to pay to target that “user” changed with it. Tracking signals dropped. The system was actively using the fingerprint to follow people across sessions and sites.

And crucially, this happened even in tests where cookies were fully deleted and users were in “opt-out” mode under GDPR and CCPA rules. The law’s exit door for cookies does not cover fingerprinting.

How Browser Fingerprinting Works (No Permission Required)

Every time your browser loads a page, it leaks dozens of tiny, seemingly harmless signals:

  • Screen resolution and color depth
  • Installed fonts
  • GPU model and graphics capabilities
  • Audio processing signatures
  • Browser version, plugins, and language settings
  • Time zone
  • Canvas rendering differences (how it draws hidden shapes)
  • Whether you run an ad blocker
  • Even battery level in some cases

Alone, each detail is common. Combined, they create a unique “fingerprint” that can identify your device with startling precision. No cookies. No login. No pop-up asking for consent. Just loading the page is enough.

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The Surveillance Accountability Act Demands Warrants for Data

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) have introduced the Surveillance Accountability Act, a bill that feels like someone took the Fourth Amendment and actually meant it.

The legislation aims “to ensure that all searches that significantly impinge on the privacy or security of a person require a warrant based on probable cause” and to create “a right of action for violations of Fourth Amendment rights.” That covers the kinds of searches federal agencies currently conduct without judicial oversight: pulling your financial records from banks, requesting your browsing history from ISPs, buying your location data from brokers, and harvesting your biometric information from surveillance cameras.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

The bill lands in the middle of a brutal Congressional fight over FISA Section 702, the surveillance authority that currently lets the FBI search Americans’ communications.

The new legislation goes much further than the various reform bills circulating around that debate. Where the SAFE Act and the Government Surveillance Reform Act target specific loopholes in FISA, the Surveillance Accountability Act tries to close all of them at once by rewriting the baseline rule: if the government wants your data, it needs a judge’s permission.

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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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‘Unprecedented Mass Surveillance’: Bipartisan Senators Warn Of Privacy Threat Tied To FISA Renewal

Bipartisan senators are warning that a privacy threat tied to artificial intelligence (AI) could result in mass surveillance of American citizens if the renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) does not include sufficient guardrails.

Efforts to renew the federal surveillance law ahead of its expiration have been complicated as House GOP leaders scramble to secure enough support to pass a clean 18-month extension aligned with President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson’s requests, according to a Politico report. Both are pushing to reauthorize the law without changes before Monday’s deadline.

The growing power of AI is driving new worries among both Republicans and Democrats about government agencies’ warrantless purchases of Americans’ sensitive data.

Commercially available information obtained from data brokers for criminal investigations, military operations and national security circumvents constitutional restrictions on information agencies can gather from Americans, Politico reported.

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FBI Recovers Deleted Signal Messages Through iPhone Notifications

The FBI successfully recovered private Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone even after the app was deleted. Learn how this security loophole works and the simple setting you must change today to keep your chats private.

Most of us prefer using the Signal app because it is supposed to be very secure with a remarkable end-to-end encryption system that hides our chats from everyone else. It also has a message-disappearing feature to help us set a message deletion time.

But the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) found a way to read private Signal messages on an iPhone, even after the app was deleted. This was revealed in a court case in Texas that these messages can stay hidden in the phone’s memory longer than we expected.

How the loophole works

The case involves a woman named Lynette Sharp and an attack on a Texas detention centre in July 2025. During the trial in April 2026, the FBI revealed they recovered her messages even when she had deleted the Signal app. The bureau, reportedly, retrieved the messages from the iPhone’s push notification database.

During the trial, FBI Special Agent Clark Wiethorn explained how investigators accessed the evidence. When a message arrives, the phone shows a little preview on the screen, which is handled by the phone’s operating system and not the Signal app.

Even if Signal deletes the message later, the phone’s system can save a copy of that preview in its own records. To read these saved messages from Signal, the FBI used Cellebrite, a forensic tool often used by law enforcement to scan seized devices.

A key finding is that the FBI could only see incoming messages, not the ones Sharp sent, which confirms the data came from the notification storage. It shows that while the app’s encryption is strong, the phone’s operating system keeps its own logs of everything.

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UK Southport Inquiry Pushes Mass Surveillance and VPN Restrictions

On July 29 2024, a teenager walked into a children’s Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, England, and murdered three young girls with a knife. He injured ten others.

It was, by any measure, one of the most horrifying attacks on British soil in recent memory, and what followed should have been a reckoning with the catastrophic state failures that let it happen.

Instead, the British government looked at the smoldering aftermath and decided the real enemy was the internet, and the solution just so happens to be the mass surveillance censorship proposals the government is already working on.

After the attack, outrage on social media turned to protests. Protests became riots. And the state’s response landed with a speed and ferocity that it had never managed to direct at, say, the agencies that let a known danger walk free for years.

A former childcarer named Lucy Connolly was jailed for 31 months for a single post on X. That is three months longer than the sentence given to a man who physically attacked a mosque during the same period of unrest.

The UK was already a country where arrests for “offensive” social media posts had nearly doubled in seven years, climbing from 5,502 in 2017 to 12,183 in 2023. The overall conviction rate for those arrests was falling at the same time. Police were locking people up for what they typed at a rate that was going up, while the number of convictions that actually stuck was going down.

The Southport riots became the accelerant. A House of Commons Home Affairs Committee report used the unrest to call for a “new national system for policing” with enhanced capabilities to surveil social media activity, framing public anger as a problem of online “misinformation” rather than a consequence of the state’s own failures.

The state was dodging accountability by demanding censorship and surveillance and blaming the internet for unrest.

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FISA Section 702 Extension Faces House Vote With No Privacy Reforms

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expires in days.

The bipartisan push to extend it without a single privacy reform is now accelerating, with House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, and President Trump all lining up behind an 18-month renewal that preserves the government’s ability to search Americans’ communications without a warrant.

The House Rules Committee met to consider H.R. 8035, the bill that would keep Section 702 alive through late 2027.

Johnson has refused to allow amendments, telling reporters that adding reforms would threaten the bill’s passage. That position blocks the one change that privacy-focused lawmakers in both parties have spent years fighting for: a requirement that the FBI get a judge’s approval before searching a database of Americans’ phone calls, emails, and text messages that were collected without individual court orders.

Trump posted on Truth Social today, calling on Republicans to “get a clean extension of FISA 702 through the House of Representatives this week.” He wrote, “I am asking Republicans to UNIFY and vote together on the test vote to bring a clean Bill to the floor. We need to stick together when this Bill comes before the House Rules Committee today to keep it CLEAN!”

The president, who told lawmakers to “KILL FISA” during the 2024 reauthorization debate, wrote in a March Truth Social post that “whether you like FISA or not, it is extremely important to our Military.”

Grassley announced his support for the clean extension this morning after the Department of Justice agreed to revise rules governing congressional oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The DOJ committed to rolling back a Biden-era policy from November 2024 that had restricted how members of Congress could attend and observe FISC and FISCR proceedings, including banning note-taking and allowing the DOJ to exclude lawmakers from certain sessions.

Those restrictions directly contradicted the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), which Congress passed in April 2024 and which explicitly required congressional access to the surveillance courts.

“I applaud DOJ for lifting its restrictions on congressional oversight of FISC and FISCR proceedings. With Congress’s access fully restored, the Trump administration has faithfully implemented the reforms Congress called for in its last FISA reauthorization and proven its commitment to transparency and the protection of civil liberties,” Grassley said.

“Section 702 is one of our nation’s most valuable national security tools. Especially given the current threat environment, it’s imperative Congress doesn’t allow this critical authority to lapse. We must ensure American lives aren’t put at risk by a potential Section 702 expiration on April 20. The best path forward is for the House to pass a clean, 18-month FISA extension.”

The DOJ agreed to stop excluding members of Congress from surveillance court proceedings, stop banning note-taking, and stop preventing lawmakers from sharing information with appropriately cleared colleagues. These were things Congress already required by law.

The DOJ was violating its own statute, got caught, and agreed to comply. Grassley is treating compliance with existing law as a reason to skip reforms that would protect 330 million Americans from warrantless searches of their private communications.

Nothing about the DOJ’s procedural fix addresses the core problem with Section 702: the FBI routinely searches a massive database of communications collected under the program to find and read Americans’ emails, texts, and phone calls, all without getting a warrant.

The FISA Court itself called the FBI’s compliance problems “persistent and widespread” in 2022. FBI queries targeting Americans’ data rose 35% in 2025, according to the latest transparency report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The agency asking Congress for more time is the same one running more warrantless searches than ever.

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Secret Grand Jury Convened to Unmask Anonymous Government Critic on Reddit

Federal prosecutors have ordered Reddit to appear before a grand jury in Washington, D.C., and hand over the personal data of an anonymous user who posted criticism of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The company has until April 14 to comply. Reddit has declined to say whether it plans to fight the order.

The user, identified in court filings as John Doe, is a US citizen in the Pacific Northwest. Doe’s attorneys reviewed the account’s post history and found nothing resembling criminal activity.

The most aggressive posts they could locate: sharing already-public biographical details about Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed Renee Good in Minneapolis in January; suggesting “Urine speaks louder than words” as an anti-ICE protest sign (a reference to a song); and writing “TSA sucks and we all know it.”

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Idaho Bans Mandatory Digital ID With New Privacy Law

Idaho just became one of the few states to draw a line against mandatory digital identification. Governor Brad Little signed Senate Bill 1299 on April 1, 2026, and the new law does something genuinely unusual in American state politics right now: it pushes back against digital ID rather than pushing it forward.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

The bill creates Section 67-2364 of the Idaho Code, prohibiting government entities from requiring “any person to obtain, maintain, present, or use digital identification.”

Approximately three-quarters of US states are currently offering or developing electronic driver’s licenses. The national momentum is clearly toward digital ID systems, with states like Arkansas, Texas, Georgia, and Utah all advancing their own versions in 2025 alone. Idaho is swimming against that current.

The bill, introduced by Senator Tammy Nichols, goes further than a simple opt-out. It prohibits public entities from denying, delaying, conditioning, or reducing “any service, benefit, license, employment, education, or access based on a person’s refusal or inability to use digital identification.”

That second clause, “or inability,” protects people who can’t use digital ID, not just those who won’t. Anyone without a smartphone, without reliable internet, without the technical literacy to navigate a digital wallet, keeps full access to government services. Physical, non-digital identification remains “valid for all governmental purposes” under the law.

The bill also addresses what happens when someone voluntarily shows a digital ID during a government interaction. A government entity cannot “require a person to surrender, unlock, or relinquish control of a personal electronic device for identity verification.” Handing your phone to a police officer or a clerk at the DMV is not the same as handing them a laminated card.

A phone contains your messages, your photos, your browsing history, and your location data. Presenting a digital ID “shall not constitute consent to search or access any other contents of a device.”

That’s a Fourth Amendment protection written directly into a state statute.

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UK Foreign Affairs Committee Calls for Government Agency to Police Online “Disinformation”

The UK’s Foreign Affairs Committee wants the government to build a new censorship agency. The proposed “National Counter Disinformation Centre” would be given the power to identify and act against speech the state considers “disinformation,” placed on a statutory footing, and modeled on bodies like Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency, which once ran a public campaign warning citizens about the dangers of memes.

The committee’s report, published on March 27 2026, goes further than a single new body.

It calls for new censorship rules in a forthcoming Representation of the People Bill to target AI-generated content and “the creation and dissemination of disinformation.”

It wants amendments to the Online Safety Act that would force platforms to publicly display where user accounts were created and whether the user connected through a VPN. It wants more money for the FCDO’s Hybrid Threats Directorate. And it wants the government to review the National Security Act’s foreign interference offense because, apparently, an existing law that carries up to 14 years in prison isn’t strict enough.

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