Tag: privacy

France’s Own Hack Is the Best Argument Against Its War on Encryption

Brussels and a run of European governments, France loud among them, have spent the past few years treating strong encryption as a problem to be solved.

The argument behind proposals like Chat Control is that the state needs a way to scan private messages to keep people safe and that it can be trusted to hold that kind of access without abusing it or losing control of it.

But France just handed that argument an awkward rebuttal. Tchap, the messenger the French government built for its own civil servants, got breached.

France’s National Cybersecurity Agency, ANSSI, detected the compromise on June 7, and DINUM, the digital affairs directorate that runs the platform, blocked the account involved and published an incident notice.

The intrusion broke neither the encryption nor the servers. Someone hijacked a legitimate user account, which is all an attacker needs when any one credential is a key to the same building.

That detail is the part the backdoor crowd keeps refusing to absorb. The encryption on Tchap did its job. DINUM says private conversations stay end-to-end encrypted even when an account is impersonated and that the attacker could reach only the unencrypted public chat rooms any authenticated user is able to find.

Security researchers were quick to note what that reassurance skips over. An attacker wearing a real user’s identity can see whatever that account sees in the moment, private rooms included.

A government backdoor is exactly that, an access path bolted on beside working encryption and France just demonstrated it cannot keep one of those paths shut for a single weekend.

DINUM has notified CNIL, the French data protection regulator, because personal information may have surfaced in whatever the attacker viewed. The directorate described its handling of the intrusion in a press release.

“At this stage, the account originating the malicious requests has been identified. It was immediately blocked to remove the attacker’s persistent access and allow for a thorough analysis of the data they were able to access. The investigation continues, including the study of event logs, to identify the conversations that the attacker was able to access and the nature of the exfiltrated data,” DINUM said.

The directorate also pushed responsibility back toward its own users, reminding them where the safe lines were supposed to be.

“A message has been sent to all Tchap users reminding them that a public chat room can be found and joined by any user and that its content is not encrypted. In accordance with Tchap’s terms of service, no personal, sensitive, or confidential information should be exchanged in public chat rooms: such exchanges should be reserved for private chat rooms.”

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UK Plans To JAIL Tech CEOs Who Refuse To SPY On Every Phone

New measures would compel client-side inspection of every photo, video and message on devices, escalating the digital ID lockdown already plotted for British smartphones in coordination with major technology firms.

Privacy advocates warn the “child safety” framing masks a broader drive to turn personal phones into mandatory surveillance endpoints, with criminal penalties aimed at any executive who resists.

Reclaim The Net, an organization dedicated to countering online censorship and digital surveillance, flagged the draft legislation in recent updates. 

The group described how UK authorities are preparing to imprison tech executives for up to five years under the Online Safety Act if companies refuse to build and deploy scanners capable of reviewing every piece of content on user devices.

The push targets expanded “client-side scanning” features, requiring devices to inspect material before it is sent or received.

Existing tools from Apple and Google, such as nudity detection in Messages or sensitive content warnings, would be broadened into comprehensive, always-active systems. Non-compliance would trigger direct penalties against company leadership rather than the firms alone.

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UK Encryption Backdoor Could Hit US Data, Jordan Warns

Britain has refused to let a US technology company brief Congress about a secret order to weaken encryption and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee is treating that refusal as a problem in its own right.

Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who leads the committee, wrote to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood on Friday warning that Britain may be using encryption powers to reach the private data of US citizens.

The underlying dispute is not new. For more than a year, the UK’s use of secret “technical capability notices” under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 has strained relations with Washington, ever since reports that Britain ordered Apple to open up encrypted iCloud data. What is new is the wall Jordan says he keeps hitting when he tries to learn more.

He met Sir Christian Turner, the British ambassador to the United States, in March, after a US company asked to brief members of Congress about one of these notices, something that would require Mahmood’s sign-off.

The ambassador suggested it could happen. Mahmood then refused.

“This denial is inconsistent with our understanding from Ambassador Turner and raises serious concerns about shared cooperation on these sensitive matters, particularly as Congress exercises its important oversight responsibilities,” Jordan wrote, the Telegraph reported, adding that it cast doubt on the “trust and effective partnership between our two countries.”

He asked Mahmood to “review this matter and grant the US company’s request to speak with Congress about an alleged technical capability notice,” which he said would “honour the representation made by the ambassador during our meeting and uphold the spirit of transparency and cooperation that is the foundation of our shared security relationship.”

The secrecy Jordan ran into is built into how these orders work and it is worth keeping in view.

The UK may be building “backdoors into their encrypted services,” he wrote.

A backdoor is a deliberately built flaw, a master key, or a hidden bypass that lets an intelligence agency read encrypted data without the user ever knowing. It defeats end-to-end encryption, the design that normally keeps a message readable only to the person who sent it and the person who received it.

A company served with a notice cannot tell its customers, the press, or apparently even a foreign legislature, without the express permission of the Home Secretary.

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Beware, AI cameras in the classroom filming your children and gathering personal data

There’s a new and dire threat to privacy that parents of school children need to be aware of and be prepared to fight against.

AI surveillance in the classroom.

Frank Landymore of Futurism.com reports, in a May 18 article, on a sinister plan hatched by the University of Washington to film pre-school children during class time. If this is going on in Washington, you have to believe it’s going on, at least in the planning stages if not already happening, across the 50 states.

The article reports that a planned University of Washington study would’ve had preschool teachers wear cameras to “record first-person footage of everything in the classroom,” including the children they were instructing, and use that footage to train AI models.

Remember, those behind the global technocracy movement believe the only value a human being will hold in the new society they are trying to create, is the data sets they produce. This was stated in the wide open a few years ago by World Economic Forum adviser Yuval Noah Harari. Without your personal data to be stolen, manipulated, and sold for profit, you are nothing to them but a useless eater.

Part of the plan is to create a “digital twin” of every person on earth as an anchor to the new digital control grid.

So why wouldn’t the Epstein class of entitled billionaire elites who harbor perverted, twisted views of children, want a daily video record of everything your child does in school? Every word uttered. Every facial expression. Every action and reaction. Year over year for comparison’s sake. Then they can use this data to create algorithms that predict everything your child will grow up to become before he or she is 10 or 12 years old?

Harari, an Israeli historian and chief adviser to the WEF, has said that if he had access to artificial intelligence when he was younger, he believes he would have discovered he was a homosexual at age 11 or 12 instead of at 17. In fact, a Newsweek article from September 8, 2017, made the case that AI can predict “with startling accuracy” whether a person is gay or straight.

But this particular story, in the case of Washington State, has a positive outcome. It exemplifies the kind of parental awareness and bold activism that is needed to shut down the illegitimate use of AI technology in the classroom.

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More License Plate Reader Mission Creep: School Residency Verification, Background Checks, and Noise Complaints

An EFF analysis of millions of searches of Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) data by police has uncovered a troubling pattern: in the absence of a warrant requirement to search ALPR databases, law enforcement agencies have moved beyond specific investigations to use these surveillance networks for virtually any whim.

Our findings suggest that the absence of a warrant requirement has fostered a culture of unrestricted access to sensitive location data, allowing agencies to leverage that data beyond the scope of specific criminal investigations.

As a refresher: Law enforcement agencies lease or purchase camera systems from Flock Safety and then mount them by the side of the road and at intersections to document every vehicle that passes, including the plate, make, model, color and distinguishing characteristics, along with the date, time and location of where it was seen.

Law enforcement’s talking points—often scripted by the company itself—trumpet their role in solving high-stakes crimes. But the data reveals a different story. What they’re not saying is that ALPRs are also frequently used for extremely low-level investigations, such as verifying whether a student lives within a particular school zone. In some cases, police have even used this tech to conduct employment background checks and investigations into loud music complaints. Recently, a motorcyclist was even targeted for simply holding a cell phone while riding.

The reach of this ALPR surveillance is amplified by the nature of the indiscriminate sharing these technologies encourage. Most agencies choose to share broadly, often as part of a nationwide pool, making it common for a single city’s system to be searched hundreds of thousands of times each month. By analyzing these “network audit logs,” privacy advocates and journalists have uncovered evidence of the technology being used to surveil protesters, abortion-seekers, immigrants, and even ethnic Roma populations.

While these high-profile abuses are shocking, the more mundane uses are also problematic, signaling a massive, unchecked mission creep that has turned an alleged “crime-fighting” tool into a universal tracker of everyone’s movements.

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Swiss Bank Accounts are DEAD – The New Banking Hub

For decades, Switzerland sold one thing better than perhaps any country on earth: privacy. That became its true export. People think of watches, chocolate, pharmaceuticals, or skiing resorts, but Switzerland’s real business was protecting capital from governments. That was the foundation of modern offshore banking.

Switzerland has destroyed the very industry that made it rich. Hong Kong has officially overtaken Switzerland as the world’s largest offshore wealth hub, managing roughly $2.95 trillion in cross-border wealth compared to Switzerland’s $2.94 trillion, according to the latest Boston Consulting Group report.

This was entirely self-inflicted. I warned years ago that Switzerland was committing financial suicide by surrendering banking secrecy under pressure from Washington, Brussels, the OECD, and the global tax authorities. Once Switzerland agreed to automatic information exchange treaties and effectively transformed Swiss bankers into tax informants for foreign governments, they destroyed the very reason international capital flowed there in the first place.

Offshore banking was never simply about taxes. It was about protection from political instability, confiscation, currency collapse, revolution, war, and predatory governments. Switzerland became wealthy because it remained neutral and outside the endless political insanity consuming Europe.

But after 2008, the entire Western financial system changed. FATCA turned foreign banks into enforcement agents for the IRS. CRS reporting standards spread globally. European politicians demonized offshore banking because governments drowning in debt cannot tolerate wealth escaping their reach. Suddenly, confidentiality itself became suspicious.

The politicians pretended this was about “fairness” and fighting tax evasion. Nonsense. This was about governments hunting capital because sovereign debt is spiraling out of control worldwide. Europe is collapsing economically under regulation, welfare spending, energy costs, migration pressures, and war expenditures. Once governments cannot sustain themselves honestly, they begin searching for private pools of wealth to confiscate.

Switzerland surrendered to that pressure completely. The famous Swiss numbered account became little more than mythology. Automatic reporting agreements gutted the entire purpose of Swiss banking secrecy. Once confidentiality disappeared, wealthy clients naturally began looking elsewhere.

That is where Hong Kong entered the picture. Hong Kong operates under an entirely different mentality. While Switzerland spent years apologizing to foreign governments and dismantling privacy protections, Hong Kong positioned itself as the gateway between Chinese wealth and global markets.

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Canada Moves to Destroy Encryption – Demands Backdoor Access to ALL Available Data

Canada is walking into extremely dangerous territory and most people do not understand the implications because governments always package surveillance laws as “public safety.” That is how this begins every single time historically. They sell fear first, then quietly expand state power behind the scenes while claiming only criminals should worry.

Now even Apple, Google, Meta, Signal, privacy experts, cybersecurity professionals, and members of the U.S. Congress are warning that Canada’s Bill C-22 could force technology companies to weaken encryption and build government access mechanisms directly into their systems.

People need to understand what encryption actually is. Encryption is not some toy used only by criminals. Encryption protects bank accounts, corporate systems, private medical data, government communications, journalists, dissidents, businesses, lawyers, and ordinary citizens. Every time you use secure banking, send a private message, or protect sensitive data online, encryption is standing between you and cybercriminals.

The government always frames these laws as targeting terrorists, child exploitation, organized crime, or national security threats. But the mechanism itself never stays limited. Once governments establish the legal right to force “lawful access” into encrypted systems, the infrastructure for surveillance already exists. The temptation to expand those powers becomes overwhelming.

Apple warned directly that Bill C-22 could allow Canada to “force companies to break encryption by inserting backdoors into their products.” Meta warned the bill could require companies to “break, weaken, or circumvent encryption” and potentially install government spyware capabilities directly into systems. Signal reportedly stated it would rather leave Canada entirely than compromise its encryption promises.

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Even Therapists Have Become a Data Mine

There was a time when people could still speak privately. You could sit across from a therapist, talk about your marriage falling apart, your depression, your fears, your finances, or the darkest moments of your life believing those conversations would remain between two human beings. That world is dying rapidly because everything now must be digitized, stored, analyzed, and monetized.

A woman using the therapy app Talkspace discovered that transcripts from her therapy sessions ended up being produced in court during litigation involving her former employer. Let that sink in for a moment. These were not vague notes scribbled down by a therapist. These were detailed digital records discussing her personal life, emotional state, relationships, and finances. The machine remembered everything.

This is what society has become. They tell people to seek help, open up, trust the system, use the apps, go digital, and then they quietly turn human vulnerability into searchable data.

People still fail to understand the danger because they continue believing these technology companies are merely offering services. They are not. They are harvesting human behavior at industrial scale. Every click, every message, every location, every search, every emotional breakdown becomes data to be stored forever.

Talkspace executives reportedly bragged to investors about building one of the largest mental health data banks in existence containing roughly 140 million exchanges between patients and therapists. Human suffering itself is now an asset class. Depression has become data. Trauma has become machine learning material. Your private thoughts are now inventory sitting on corporate servers.

When someone went to therapy, the therapist might keep handwritten notes locked away in a cabinet somewhere. Those notes were incomplete, temporary, and human. Today every word can be transcribed, archived, searched, copied, subpoenaed, breached, or fed into artificial intelligence systems. The conversation never dies because the machine never forgets. And people wonder why society feels colder and less human.

What happens when people realize their darkest thoughts may someday appear in court? What happens when employers, insurance companies, governments, or AI systems can gain access to deeply personal psychological information? You destroy trust itself. People stop speaking honestly. They stop trusting institutions. They begin living cautiously because they know every word may someday be weaponized against them.

This is where the entire digital age has been heading from the start. First they harvested shopping habits. Then browsing history. Then location data. Then biometrics. Now they are harvesting the individual’s inner psychological life. Nothing is sacred anymore because everything has a price.

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When Behavioral Health IT Turns Children Into Targets

Epic Systems is often presented as a neutral software company. But public reporting, court filings, and Epic’s own product materials show something far more consequential: one dominant health IT company now sits at the center of how sensitive behavioral-health information is stored, shared, and used for outreach across major health systems.

That concentration creates two urgent public risks: security and the marketing of diagnosis.

The security risk is straightforward. Behavioral-health records are among the most sensitive files in medicine, and EHR-related breaches remain a widespread problem across healthcare. When Medicaid and behavioral-health records for large child populations are concentrated in a small number of digital systems, the issue is no longer just privacy.

Lawmakers, behavioral health lobbyists, and drug companies use stigma, HIPAA, even on dead shooters to hide psychiatric drug involvement in mass shootings. When a few digital companies control Medicaid and behavioral health records for millions of children, this isn’t a privacy issue, it’s a national security threat. Psychiatric diagnoses, psychotropic medications, and prescribing doctors systematically vanish from every crime scene. The IT behavioral health companies themselves, appear to be the exact security risk HIPAA was meant to prevent.

The legal cases against Epic show why concentration matters. Particle Health alleged that Epic used its dominance in electronic records and data exchange to exclude a rival from the market. Epic got many claims dismissed, but not the most important ones. In September 2025, a federal judge allowed core monopolization claims to proceed, meaning Epic still had to defend against the central allegation that it used market power anti-competitively. Reuters and other outlets reported that Epic failed to secure full dismissal and remained exposed on the core monopoly theory.

The public should also understand who holds this influence. Epic is privately controlled by founder and CEO Judy Faulkner, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009 to the federal Health IT Policy Committee and served until 2014 as the representative of health IT vendors. This is not a partisan point. It is a power point. Faulkner had a seat inside the policy process while the modern national health IT framework was being built, and public reporting has described her as a major political donor with a net worth estimated at about $7.8 billion.

The second risk is how diagnoses become the basis for data-driven outreach. Epic has openly expanded into healthcare “consumerism” through its Cheers CRM platform, marketed as a tool for health systems to run campaigns using thousands of EHR data points. That may be called patient engagement. But when the underlying data include mental-health diagnoses, psychotropic medication histories, missed appointments, crisis visits, or suicide-risk flags, the line between care coordination and diagnosis-based marketing becomes dangerously thin.

This matters most in Medicaid behavioral health. Children in Medicaid often move through fragmented systems involving hospitals, school-based clinics, community mental-health centers, telehealth programs, and public agencies. Their records can travel across multiple settings while families have little visibility into how those records are used to trigger reminders, prompts, referrals, and program enrollment. This is a looks like a major breach on informed consent and certainly would be why HIPPA exists in the first place to protect the consumers medical records.

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Incoming Chief of UK Speech Regulator Takes Aim at VPNs

Ian Cheshire, the government’s pick to run the UK’s speech regulator, appeared before the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee on Wednesday and laid out what amounts to an acceleration plan for online censorship.

He pledged to take on the “big tech bros,” branded VPNs as a “technical problem,” identified YouTube as needing a whole new set of regulatory powers, and hinted that Ofcom will ask the Treasury for more funding.

Before the hearing, Cheshire had “reached out to the Molly Rose Foundation because I wanted to understand its perspective.”

He had “quite deliberately” not met any mainstream tech companies. The Foundation has called Ofcom “slow, defensive and risk-averse” and demanded a new, broader censorship law within the first two years of this Parliament. The companies that might have raised concerns about overreach? Cheshire chose not to hear from them.

On VPNs, he told MPs: “Parliament has chosen to legislate on online safety; therefore, we should be acting on it. That is subject to the joys of VPNs and the other technical problems we have, but there is no reason not to go after the key harms that are there. As soon as they are visible, there is no reason why we cannot to do something about them.”

VPNs are legal privacy tools used by millions of people. Calling them “technical problems” tells you how the incoming chair views individual privacy relative to the state’s power to police speech. To a growing number of bureaucrats, privacy tools aren’t part of rights to be protected. They’re obstacles.

Ofcom already monitors UK VPN usage using an unnamed third-party tool and a group of peers has proposed banning under-18s from using VPNs entirely.

Cheshire told the committee that Ofcom will “need to deal with” the perception that “Ofcom is too timid and not moving fast enough.”

The Online Safety Act already lets Ofcom compel platforms to censor content under vague categories of “harm” that the regulator defines. It can fine companies up to 10 percent of global revenue and hold executives personally liable.

He singled out YouTube as “the biggest single challenge” and suggested Ofcom may need a “different toolkit” to “regulate effectively something like YouTube.”

The OSA’s codes of practice are still being rolled out. Ofcom hasn’t finished writing the existing rules and the incoming chair is already signaling they won’t be enough.

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