Free Republic

ransomnote: Click the image of von der Leyen's post below to access her 24 minute public address (English).Paul Walsh@Paul__WalshUrsula von der Leyen announced this week that everyone in the EU must use the official EU age verification app to verify their age before they can log into or post on social media and other digital services.As an expert in online child safety, I'm here to expose the disinformation in each von der Leyen's statements. See below.The EU Kids Act is a pretext designed to enforce mandatory digital identity verification on everyone in Europe. The proposed legislation applies to any digital...

Mario Nawfal@MarioNawfal·17hResearchers spent 500 hours and $70,000 and found LG TVs logging plain text transcripts in standby, mapping every device in the house, and feeding it to LG's ad armUnplug the internet and it saves the files until you plug back in.LG says its TVs don't record ambient conversations.The evidence begs to differ.216 million of these are sitting in living rooms.Where are the regulators?Writer: Danielhttps://x.com/Braiinsforge/s~~~~Grok's explanatory summary:Mario Nawfal's post summarizes a Gamers Nexus investigation showing LG smart TVs scan home networks for devices like phones and smartwatches, log voice inputs as plain-text transcripts, and send data to LG Ad Solutions....

(Reclaim The Net)—Britain’s police arrested at least 62,199 people over five years under laws governing what people say online or over the phone.That’s a busy period for the written word. And the number of those charged over the same period is 18,510, while 12,292 people were convicted.The Big Brother Watch report, Britain’s Free Speech Problem: How Growing Restrictions Are Stifling Speech Online and Offline, covers the period between January 1, 2021, and December 31, 2025.The laws are Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, and Section 179 of the Online Safety Act...

A federal lawsuit claims the Waukesha County Sheriff’s Office used the Flock cameras without a legitimate government purpose and in retaliation against the vet for exercising his First Amendment right. {...} Jones was subsequently arrested "for resisting and obstructing," according to a federal lawsuit he filed against the arresting officers and police department. But after being held in custody for five hours, he was released with no citations or criminal charges. An internal post-arrest memorandum reviewed by Reason revealed that Shayhorn's supervisor informed him shortly after the arrest that he'd, in fact, illegally stopped Jones, and he therefore could not...

Comcast made Wi-Fi motion sensing a headline feature on millions of Xfinity gateways. It reads the ripples your body makes in the signal, through walls, no camera. Here’s the five-minute check, friend. 🤯 WOW! Comcast made Wi-Fi motion sensing a headline feature on millions of Xfinity gateways. Your router reads the ripples your body makes in the signal: which room you’re in, standing or lying down, through walls, no camera, no light. And the fine print says motion data can go to law enforcement “without further notice to you.” The Short Version: Open your router app, hunt for anything labeled...

ransomnote: The body of the post is about FLOCK cameras, but the video explains the service interupting her car bluetooth is likely Leonardo SignalTrace sensors which are being rolled out. GROK's analysis below seems to confirm this.Wall Street Apes@WallStreetApesAmerican says she always has the Bluetooth in her car cutout randomly for 1-2 seconds at a time, she couldn’t figure out whyShe finally figured it out. It’s the flock safety cameras. Every time she drives by a flock cameras whether it’s an intersection or parking lot, her Bluetooth temporarily cuts outShe believes the flock is reading the Bluetooth of her car,...

Snapchat’s automated system flagged a private DM to three contacts and triggered an FBI alert in under 60 minutes, ending her teaching career Sixty minutes. That’s how long it took for a private Snapchat message to travel from Kristen Volpe’s phone to the FBI to the deputies standing in her elementary school hallway. On January 29, 2025, the 22-year-old student teacher at John L. Hensey Elementary in Washington, Illinois, vented to her boyfriend and two roommates — three people total — after a student closed her laptop mid-class and wiped her lesson plan. She referenced shooting the student or the...

His novel “1984” captured the tactics of totalitarianism back in 1949. A startling new documentary from Raoul Peck looks at Orwell’s life.“The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude,” George Orwell wrote in 1946, a year after the end of the World War II. That line appears early in “Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5,” an essayistic documentary from Raoul Peck that surveys its title subject’s life and work, using them as a lens to explore authoritarian power in the past and the present. Densely packed, the movie is a whirlwind of...

In a year as chaotic, violent, and economically destructive as this one has been, it is interesting that, to many Americans, the great villain of 2026 is turning out to be a traffic camera.But, indeed, we are seeing visceral, cross-partisan opposition to so-called Flock cameras—named after the leading manufacturer of these automated license plate readers—take hold in communities across the country. And that opposition is, to be sure, entirely legitimate.Flock’s camera networks are based on the idea that, while it would obviously be illegal and unconstitutional for law enforcement at any and all levels to put GPS trackers in everyone’s...

On Dec. 13 last year, a stranger in a Brown University bathroom noticed a man dressed head to toe in black, wrong for the weather, mere hours before that same man opened fire on Brown University’s campus, killing two and wounding eight before vanishing. Investigators had almost nothing: no name, no plate, just a tip describing a gray Nissan with Florida plates. But that was enough: Providence police ran it through a network of more than 70 Flock Safety cameras, which reached back through 30 days of history, and found the car had passed 14 times since Dec. 1. “We...