Category: privacy

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First Amendment rights privacy regulation

The War Against Anonymity

Mexico, privacy, cell phone

The Mexican government wants to stop people from using cellphones anonymously.

Every mobile phone number in Mexico — some 127 million — must now be biometrically tied to the owner’s identity. Cellphone owners must register their numbers by June 30 or lose signal.

The ID card to which numbers must be linked will in turn be linked, via QR code, to a national registry of biometrically verified records.

Who needs anonymity? Just criminals?

Criminals do use throwaway “burner” phones when committing crimes. They won’t necessarily be stymied now. Would they hesitate to steal other people’s cell phones, treat them as burners, then throw them away?

Maybe victims would act fast enough to get lost and stolen phones deactivated before thieves could use them, maybe not. Criminals may have several ways to circumvent the new law. 

We must remember, after all, that criminals are willing to commit crimes.

The safety of journalists, dissidents hiding from other governments, targets of abusers and stalkers, and anyone with good reason to keep his identity separate from his phone will be endangered by Mexico’s new mandate.

Some may say that Mexico’s ID database is inaccessible by all but authorized, benign, unbribable government personnel. One problem with this fairy tale is that not long ago, a cyberhacker used AI to steal 195 million taxpayer and other records from the Mexican government.

Not the first time hackers have grabbed “secure” data. And what has happened again and again and again and again, can happen again.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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privacy regulation too much government

All Your OS Are Belong to Us

California, law, Operating System, OS, privacy

The always-wrong California legislature has unanimously passed — and the state’s always-wrong governor has signed — legislation to compel makers of computer operating systems to verify the owner’s age. The information from Linux, MacOS, Windows, iOS and Android would then be transmitted to the software (“apps”) running on each respective platform.

Reclaim the Net observes that in a “different timeline, wiring an age-surveillance layer into the boot sequence of every computing device in California is an idea that would have died in committee.”

AB1043 doesn’t require any upload of government ID or facial scan, just that the user report age when setting up the OS. I am not relieved.

All the shmexperts eager to erode our privacy say that requiring web surfers to type a number into a box to report age is insufficient. If California’s new law is allowed to stand, perhaps in part because it seems fairly innocuous — any plucky 12-year-old could type “89” when ordered to report age — would the politicians stop there?

Some kind of ID verification would be mandated sooner or later. Then use of fake IDs would lead to calls for biometric confirmation. Etc.

Reclaim the Net explains that Linux distributions don’t even have a way to comply with the silly California law. Decentralized Linux exists for people who don’t want to be surveilled when doing their computing, and “there’s no entity to mandate, no account system to modify, no API to build.”

These and many more objections appear to me to be just common sense — now illegal in California.

I’m Paul Jacob.

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defense & war privacy too much government

AI Within Limits

AI, artificial intelligence, war, department of defense, guardrails

I’ve never consulted “Claude.” It’s an artificial intelligence (AI), and these things give me the creeps. But I must soldier on.

Anthropic, the maker of Claude, is in a special position: it’s currently the only frontier AI model cleared for use on classified U.S. military systems. But Anthropic limits use of Claude by the government: no mass domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens (such as tracking protesters or political opponents) and no development of fully autonomous weapons (where AI makes lethal decisions without human oversight).

Two cheers for Claude?

Regardless of your Huzzah level, being in a special position puts Anthropic in the crosshairs: The Pentagon demands unrestricted “all lawful use” access, rejecting any such safeguards or limits. 

According to Elizabeth Nolan Brown, writing in Reason, the “U.S. Department of Defense is in a standoff with artificial intelligence developer Anthropic over the company’s refusal” to play along with the federal government’s willingness to press beyond the limits of the Constitution. 

“This refusal hasn’t gone over well with the Trump administration,” explains Ms. Brown, going on to write that Secretary of War Pete“Hegseth has reportedly demanded that Anthropic remove its restrictions on certain military uses or else face consequences.”

In recent years we’ve witnessed too many companies complying with out-of-control government. And while it has become common to “lash out at big corporations, we should focus our anger on the actual root of these problems: the government,” the Reason article concludes. 

As it turned out in the social media de-platforming scandal, “the real enemy of civil liberties here is the government actors who are doing the bad deeds, demanding that tech companies go along with them. . . .” 

As our previous president used to say, “Don’t.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment government transparency privacy

Transparency, Weaponized

Jeffrey Epstein, law, transparency, privacy

Transparency is usually a good thing. But so is privacy. And so, too, are limits on government power. 

Which bring me to the Epstein files — or, more accurately, those files bring me here. 

“I don’t think we’ve had a scandal like this in this country,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) offered yesterday on Meet the Press, “and what we’re asking for is justice for those survivors.” 

I want justice, too — that is, the prosecution of any crime grand juries honestly believe was likely committed. 

By anyone! No matter how powerful that suspect might be.

On the other hand, the Epstein File Transparency Act, which will be voted on this week in the U.S. House of Representatives and for which Khanna is a primary sponsor, “would require the Justice Department to declassify and release all files pertaining to the prosecution of the late sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein.”

The public has a right to know! 

But does it? 

And if so, does that ‘right’ mean we permit the federal Department of Justice to use prosecutorial power to grab incriminating evidence on “suspected criminals” and then weaponize and deploy that information not to prosecute a crime in a court of law, but rather to publicize the damaging dirt discovered in the court of public opinion?

From then-FBI Director James Comey’s ridiculous public preening over the non-prosecution of Hillary Clinton in 2016 to the demanded release of the Epstein files today, we must be careful the DOJ does not become an opposition research firm for the party in power, using badges and guns. Or the world’s most outrageous doxxing scheme.

Our criminal justice system should do one thing and only one thing: Prosecute crimes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights privacy

Permit to Harass, Interrupted

Minnesota, surveillance, abortion, privacy

Minnesota’s permit to harass has been interrupted — not halted, because a federal court has granted only a preliminary injunction.

Nancy Brasel, the district judge, has for now blocked Minnesota’s law requiring grassroots advocacy groups to publicly disclose the names and addresses of their vendors because she expects that this requirement will indeed be ultimately thrown out.

Violating, as it does, freedom of speech.

One of the targets of the law is Minnesota Right to Life. One of its vendors dropped MRL with a thud in the middle of a campaign. As MRL’s executive director, Ben Dorr, notes, the challenged law mostly hands “a ready-made ‘enemies list’ to our political opponents.” He counts seven vendors who refused to work with his organization after being harassed by abortion rights proponents.

This harassment is the apparent reason for the disclosure regulation’s existence. When the names and locations of vendors who facilitate spread of political messages is forcibly disclosed, this allows opponents of the message to stoop to any low, such as harassing companies that provide services to organizations trying to get the word out.

What the harassers hope to accomplish, and sometimes do, is frighten vendors into dropping clients who engage in advocacy.

The thugs who would impede speech any way they can sometimes speak of “transparency” as if it were an end in itself. Whether transparency is desirable depends on the context. Citizens have every right to know how much government spends, and on what, and why — transparency is necessary there, because governments belong to citizens. But no crook or bully has an inalienable right to all the information about innocent people that he needs in order to go after them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights international affairs privacy

Private Chat, Back Now in Europe?

European Union, EU, Germany, surveillance, censorship, civil liberties

We seem to have Germany — not a typo: Germany — to thank for the fact that one of the most intrusive EU gambits attacking freedom of speech is about to fail.

The proposal would let governments monitor all private chat messages, via mandatory back doors, without bothering with such trivialities as warrants, probable cause, evidence.

The European Union centralizes many assaults on liberty that member countries are supposed to supinely accept once enacted. But it can’t ignore individual members as proposals are still en route to becoming law. And the German government, often not exactly a beacon when it comes to free speech, has now made its opposition to this particular mode of surveillance and censorship loud and clear.

As Germany blocked the plan, first announced in 2022, German Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig said that “unprovoked chat control must be taboo in a constitutional state. . . . Germany will not agree to such proposals at EU level.”

Parliamentary leader Jens Spahn of the Christian Democratic Union also uttered some common sense, explaining that warrantless monitoring of chats “would be like opening all letters as a precautionary measure to see if there is anything illegal in them. That is not acceptable, and we will not allow it.”

Although the proposal is not yet quite dead, the German opposition makes it extremely unlikely that EU bosses can go further with it.

Great spirit, German officials. Cheers to now applying this principle consistently — as is required of principles.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights international affairs Internet controversy privacy

Apple to Keep Encryption

UK, British, surveillance, censorship, iphone, Apple

Thanks, United Kingdom.

Following pressure on UK officials by the Trump administration and some congressmen, British censors have caved — the U.S. Director of National Intelligence confirmed that the UK was abandoning its demand that Apple burn a hole in its iPhone encryption.

So Apple may continue providing its flagship smartphone with robust encryption. Cyberhackers and autocratic regimes (including snoopy British officials) — who’d love a crashable gate into everyone’s private iPhone information — must now endure their extreme disappointment.

Director Tulsi Gabbard reported on X that the UK will “drop its mandate for Apple to provide a ‘back door’ that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens and encroached on our civil liberties.”

Such a back door would have rendered the encryption close to pointless, presenting a vulnerable target to all bad guys in addition to all “good” guys in the UK holding backdoor keys.

Under an agreement in effect since 2019, U.S. companies are obliged to comply with requests from UK officials for data relevant to criminal investigations.

The agreement prohibits surveillance of Americans. But this year British officials secretly demanded that Apple install a back door to enable the UK government to extract data from any iPhone. Yes, that’s any iPhone anywhere in the world. 

The British Government also planned to initiate these back-door intrusions without even needing to show relevance to a UK criminal investigation, let alone provide a warrant.

How long will the reprieve last? Maybe only until we get another U.S. administration as eager to censor everything as the last one was.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Fourth Amendment rights privacy too much government

What Does the FBI Do?

FBI, surveillance, censorship, religion, church

“The FBI began surveilling a Catholic priest in 2023,” wrote James Lynch last week, “after the clergyman refused to divulge details about a recently arrested parishioner who was converting to Catholicism and seeking spiritual guidance.”

The agency’s Richmond Field Office “tracked the priest’s movements and coordinated with several other FBI offices and a foreign law enforcement agency to gather intelligence on the clergyman and his priestly organization,” Lynch summarizes.

This is all based on a new House Judiciary Committee report entitled “How the Biden-Wray FBI Manufactured a False Narrative of Catholic Americans as Violent Extremists.” *

“The FBI attempted to violate the priest-penitent privilege,” the report continues, “on the faulty reasoning that the Richmond subject under investigation seeking spiritual guidance had not been baptized or completed catechism.”

You may be asking yourself, is the FBI out of its mind?

Certainly, out of this hemisphere. Consider that FBI agents have also extended their reach way beyond U.S. borders to focus on wrongthink elsewhere.

According to investigative journalist David Ágape, “the FBI has helped Brazil censor its citizens,” working with the Soros’ Open Society Foundation to promote censorship in Brazil and a secret judicial police force targeting “people deemed to be spreading false information.”

Was the FBI nurturing censorship in foreign lands to later re-import them here?

From its beginning, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has had trouble staying within constitutional limits. I guess we should not be shocked that it doesn’t obey jurisdictional limits, either. 

Hopefully, Director Kash Patel will rein in the agency. It won’t be easy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* According to the committee, “The report reveals that contrary to testimony from former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray, the 2023 Richmond memorandum that derisively labeled traditional Catholics as ‘racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists’ was not an isolated incident. Under the new leadership of Director Kash Patel, the FBI has cooperated considerably with the Committee’s subpoena, and has produced over 1,300 pages of additional documents related to the Richmond memorandum that the Biden-Wray FBI did not disclose.”
Note: You can also mouse-over the asterisk in the main text to see the footnote.

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national politics & policies privacy

The State vs. Our Privacy

encryption, privacy, surveillance, censorship

The policies of the new Trump administration have given us only partial reprieves from the war on freedom of speech.

The war is still chugging along. It extends even to our most private communications, including those now hidden from prying eyes by encryption. Revived legislation in the U.S. Senate threatens the providers of such encryption.

Reclaim the Net’s Dan Frieth observes that under the STOP CSAM Act of 2025 (S. 1829), which targets “child sexual abuse material,” providing a “secure, privacy-focused service could be interpreted as ‘facilitating’ illegal activity, regardless of whether the provider can access or verify the content being transmitted.”

The legislation stipulates that providers may defend themselves from charges of “facilitating” illegal activity by showing that it is “technologically impossible” to remove CSAM without disabling their encryption. But firms would still often have to go to court to make this case, and “many platforms may adopt invasive scanning out of fear, not necessity, just to avoid liability, with real consequences for privacy and user trust.”

Defaulting to routine invasive scanning means an end to providing users with encryption, including users threatened by despotic regimes.

Current law already requires platforms to report known examples of material that entails the sexual abuse of children.

Any good or service that can be put to good use can also be put to evil use. Just as we shouldn’t penalize the makers of knives, forks, mail, curtains, roads, and guns for their use by criminals, the makers of encryption services should also not be so punished.

Nor should we grant to government bodies such a frightening dystopian power, accumulated to override our basic freedoms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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privacy

Big Ugly Border Bill

Canada, surveillance, privacy, metadata

The price of liberty may be more than eternal vigilance. Must we also employ all-knowing vigilance? Encyclopedic knowledge of all possible dirty tricks freedom’s enemies may employ?

One such is burying the latest assault on liberty in legislation about an unrelated matter in hopes that nobody will notice.

In Canada, a controversial effort to sabotage online privacy has wormed its way into a bill supposedly about strengthening border security: the Strong Border Act (Bill C-2).

It’s not exactly new, since, as Reclaim the Net reports, it’s something “law enforcement agencies have been pursuing since the late 1990s.”

As with populations south of the border, the people themselves hate such interference. “Despite being repeatedly rebuffed by public opposition, parliamentary committees, and Canada’s highest court,” observes Ken Macon, “the drive to erode digital privacy protections continues.”

In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that Canadians have a right to expect that their subscriber information will be kept private. In 2023, the courts affirmed that users’ IP addresses were also entitled to protection. Investigators couldn’t simply rummage through a Canadian’s subscription details and surfing history without a warrant.

But the new legislation would entitle authorities to make warrantless “information demands” on service providers.

If this legislation ostensibly about the border is enacted, service providers would, on demand, have to identify particular users and whether the provider possesses his transmission data. The actual data itself would not have to be handed over, but Macon stresses that permitting such indirect searches would “effectively sidestep the very privacy protections the courts have upheld.”

Vigilance, indeed, knowing our governments’ lust for omniscience about us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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