Cindy Harper
Cindy Harper blogs mostly about social media censorship and culture stories. [email protected]
Republican Lawmakers Demand Answers on UK’s iCloud Encryption Backdoor Order
Britain’s demand that Apple build a backdoor for everyone on earth, then quietly reframe it as a domestic matter after Washington pushed back, is the kind of legal gymnastics that makes intelligence lawyers nervous on both sides of the Atlantic.
Twitch Forces Partners to Show ID to Persona to Collect Earnings
Twitch is asking streamers to hand over a government ID and selfie to a controversial third-party service to collect money they’ve already earned.
Germany’s SPD Pushes Mandatory Government ID Verification for Social Media
The SPD is selling this as child protection, but the architecture they’re building looks a lot more like a checkpoint than a parental control.
The FSB Has a New Word for Encryption: Terrorism
The man who outlasted a French arrest now faces a Russian prison threat from the country he left behind two decades ago.
UK’s Reddit Fine Forces Users Into Mass Biometric Surveillance
Reddit’s fix for protecting children’s data requires adults to hand their face and government ID to a third-party system that runs 269 verification checks per person.
Colorado Senate Bill Would Require Apple and Google to Embed ID Checks in Operating Systems
Colorado’s OS-level age verification bill sidesteps the failures that killed its predecessors by making Apple and Google do the heavy lifting and outsourcing the problem to a more powerful set of defendants.
X Challenges EU’s $140 Million Digital Services Act Fine in Court
No outside arbiter, no independent review, no appeal before the fine lands; just the Commission, its definitions, and a $140 million bill. X is pushing back.
FBI Wins Court Ruling to Keep Twitter Payments Secret
A federal judge just ruled that the public can’t know exactly how much the FBI paid Twitter during the years it was also telling Twitter which Americans to censor.
Berlin Court Orders X to Hand Over Hungarian Election Data to Researchers
The court gave researchers what they asked for, but the same institution that fined X for refusing is also the largest funder of the group that sued to make it comply.
Spanish Court Orders NordVPN and Proton VPN to Block Piracy Streams
The same blocking system that once took down Amazon, GitHub, and Cloudflare is now targeting the tools Spaniards used to get back online.
Macron Calls Online Free Speech Argument “Pure Bullshit”
The pro-censorship French president is now the most eloquent voice in the West for the idea that free speech, unregulated, is a problem to be solved.
Germany’s CDU Pushes Real-Name Social Media Mandate and ID Checks
The party could ask Germans to show their papers before they can post a tweet.