June warned you the anti-freedom dragnet was widening. July showed you the border is where the Constitution is sent to die. August is the month the system’s mask publicly slipped. They are no longer nibbling at your private life. They are actively criminalising the act of keeping one.
I have spent more than three decades in this work, the child of people who fled a system that treated a private thought as a police matter. We did not flee that Soviet gulag so I can now watch Western governments rebuild it with better cameras, purchased databases, and a catchy child-protection slogan.
What is being done to ordinary people is not “modernisation.” It is sheer, outright contempt; contempt for your correspondence, your associations, your movement, and the basic idea that the state must justify itself before it strip-searches you.
Private enterprise builds the eye. The government’s statute tells it where to look. The regime’s prosecutor invents a crime when you blink.
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IMPORTANT: While this article gives a full breakdown of August’s developments, the full report, with deeper analysis and explanations, more long-term predictions, and an expanded list of recommended actions you can take to protect yourself right now, are available for our members. Find out more…
North America: Speech, Travel, and Everyday Privacy at Risk
United States: Jail The Locksmith. Subdue The Herd
As we wrote back in July, Samuel Tunick used a GrapheneOS duress PIN at Atlanta rather than hand Customs a phone containing his readable life. In late August he told Decrypt and the New York Times the rest of the story:
He was already on a terrorism watchlist for alleged association with the movement against Cop City.
No bomb. No plot. Just Association.
Now he faces five years in prison because his phone wiped itself. The Department of Justice wants to make a public example by turning “The government doesn’t own our data.” into a felony. That is not policing. It is the state taking terminal offence at individual efforts to protect residual privacy and punishing them with a cage.
Having persecuted the dissenter, the regime went shopping for everyone else.
On 26 August ICE officially sought a contractor to hoover up1 voter files nationwide.
Say what you will about mass migration; the government’s own deportation agency compiling the electoral roll through a government-stooge contractor is nothing but a blanket-targeting list with a flag draped over it.
404 Media reported ICE is paying LexisNexis so the data obtained can be fed into the Palantir systems. Thomson Reuters already sells ICE addresses, plates, utilities and location. Meanwhile Congress blatantly lets the agency buy what a warrant would forbid.
In other news, FISA 702, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, “lapsed” in June. However, the intercepts did not lapse at all because the secret surveillance court quietly recertified the same programmes into 2027.
They announced the tap was dead but left it running. It’s all just Theatre, insulting theatre.
Speech, not free but cheaper. The EFF published a list of ICE and DHS subpoenas to Meta, Google, X, Reddit and PayPal, aimed at people had the poor taste to protest against them or even just those who just filmed those protests.
So a deportation agency now simply “deputises” online platforms with a form letter.
The First Amendment is has become a marketing slogan, not a door the government has to knock on before walking through.
On America’s roads Flock’s plate readers have stitched a network of malls, HOAs and municipal poles into a national movement log. A parking-lot vendor knows where you were on Tuesday. Police just log in. The panopticon has become a subscription service.
One piece of good news, so nobody can accuse me of seeing only the knife. FinCEN killed beneficial-ownership reporting for US persons.
One deleted spreadsheet does not balance a watchlist, a Palantir feed and a road grid. We’ve been thrown a bone. The abattoir is still open.
Canada: Cut The Line. Tap The Rest. Call It Safety.
Bill C-8 is law as of 15 June. A minister may now order a carrier to “cut a named person” off the network, often under a gag order.
Ottawa’s slogan is “protecting critical infrastructure.”
The reality is sending inconvenient voices into exile without a trial.
Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act, sits in the Senate: Providers must run customer checks on mere government suspicion, subscriber data is accessible on the same low threshold. The bill orders providers (cloud, mail, messengers, VPNs) to build “intercept capability” and keep metadata for six months.
“No systemic vulnerability” is just a lie dressed as a safeguard. Signal has said it will leave if this bill passes. That is the adult response which more platforms need to make to the regime’s intrusion.
And while all this is going on Bill C-34 is still in the nursery: under-16 bans, age-gates, “hatred” left undefined as a catch-all bucket.
They always start with “Think of the children!”
They always end with “Show me your papers.”
Mexico: Register the SIM. Fuse the body. Skip the judge.
The government’s controversial “SIM-to-identity” stagger now runs 15 August to 31 December. Officials swear that only the carriers hold the data. President Sheinbaum repeatedly preached her “anti-crime sermon.”
R3D, Mexico’s main digital-rights group, is not buying it. The same package includes Ley Espía, “The Espionage Act”: biometrics, tax, health and telecom metadata in one pot, AI “crime prevention,” often without a judge.
Of course “Prevention” is the oldest permission slip in the authoritarian handbook and underneath now sit the biometric CURP and Llave MX, your “CONVENIENT” digital ID.
The Pegasus Affair was not simply a scandal in Mexico. It was a mass-surveillance prototype. Nine years later, these new laws are the product launch.
Europe: Scan The Message. Then Take The Name
Chat Control 1.0 is not coming. It is here from 3 August 2026 to 3 April 2028.
At the vote back in July most voting MEPs said no. The procedure said “Yes” anyway. Now we have “Voluntary” scanning of unencrypted private messages. “Voluntary,” in Brussels, means the large platforms will do it and call it compliance.
Just ask my friend and colleague Sasch what happened with Google when the EU rolled out GDPR back in 2016.
So far encryption was exempted on paper, but then “The Line ALWAYS moves” and “Temporary” becomes permanent with time, doesn’t it?
After they scan your message, they want your name.
We’re looking at digital Identity Wallets by year’s end and age-proof tools Union-wide by 31 December 2026, legislatively forced onto large platforms for “Child safety.” Because in order to treat a child differently from an adult, the platform must know who everyone is. Face-reading or a government credential; pick your humiliation ritual.
Anonymity and the right to privacy are not being regulated. They are being abolished as an inconvenience.
Britain left the Union and kept the appetite.
Sainsbury’s will keep spreading Facewatch surveillance after yet another innocent shopper was thrown out on a biometric whim.
A private blacklist. A public block.
Your weekly shop is now a line-up of suspects. Palantir still sits on NHS patient records while the “promised cost and efficiencygains” are being constantly rewritten. Greater Manchester also refused the full swallow and didn’t move its patients onto the Palantir system.
There’s no ambiguity here. Putting the sick under a US intelligence contractor, a firm whose products have walked hand-in-hand with Israeli government surveillance and military overreach, is not a software upgrade. It is a surrender.
Australia: Offer An Eraser. Build The Ledger.
On 30–31 August Canberra unveiled a right to ask large platforms to destroy your data.
If it is real, use it.
I will not spit on a deletion right.
However, I will not clap for the rest of this farce.
IDLock turns the state into the verification-control for your passport. The under-16 ban gets doubled fines and a hungrier eSafety Commissioner. A Digital Duty of Care means platforms are punished unless they know who you are.
This is the “Your papers-please.” internet, marketed as parenting.
China and Hong Kong: Refuse The Key. Collect the sentence.
China’s Great Firewall already censors the open internet. It did not need a new August law to keep doing that. What August did expose is the fake privacy exit: store-listed “15” apps sold as a way around the wall. Proton showed that a grotesque share of mobile “VPNs” are packed with trackers, many of these are owned by Israeli companies with military connections, and that dozens of store-listed apps are also Chinese-owned.
People paid for a privacy tunnel and bought a listening post.
State overreach wearing a cheerful icon.
Hong Kong no longer even pretends to be the exception. Refusing a device password in a “national-security case” is now a crime of its own. Transit passengers who clear immigration are also fair game.
I said in July that Tunick was the warning.
Hong Kong has written that warning into the code and called it procedure. Social Control still devours speech, books and even restaurant licences.
The old lullaby “Hong Kong is not the mainland” is just a nostalgic souvenir of the olden days.
And if you go there, carry a clean device or do not carry a life you don’t want them to unlock.
What They Are Doing To You
Association becomes their watchlist.
The watchlist becomes a windowless room.
The room becomes a demand for the plaintext of your life.
If you answer that demand with a lock, the lock becomes the crime.
Atlanta and Hong Kong are one method, spoken in two accents.
Under that method they force an identity layer: EU wallets, Australian myGov, Mexican CURP, Canadian age-gates, Brazilian child-ID, each sold as protecting children or stopping fraud.
When handing over your credentials is mandatory, anonymity is not a right you declined. It is a right they withdrew.
Do not award these firms the dignity of your reluctance or compliance. Flock, Facewatch, Clearview, LexisNexis, Palantir and the store “VPN” racket are the surveillance-data factory. Governments simply buy what courts would never let them build in open daylight.
You are not the customer. You are the inventory.
Practical Steps You Can Take
Despair is what they want after this briefing. Do not give it to them.
- Harden the basics. Unique passphrases, a manager or a notebook, two-factor that is not SMS.
- Travel as if the windowless room is the plan. A device that holds nothing you cannot rebuild. A clean handset, restored from backups after you clear immigration, is the only polite response to a state that has announced it will punish your privacy lock.
- Stop feeding their factory. Revoke permissions. Skip the mall-camera grid. Do not install a random store “VPN.” Use audited tools: Signal or Session, Proton or mail you host yourself, Tor, hardware keys, GrapheneOS on a Pixel you control.
- Compartmentalise. Separate identities they would like to stitch together. Give plate readers and shop-face systems less exposure.
- Read like an adult. Primary documents. Independent sources. Not the scroll they use to exhaust you.
The longer report, with deeper insights and explanations of every statute and citation, along with more detailed recommendations for steps you can take is for members only.
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This is the public warning. DO NOT COMPLY!
Compliance is how they finish the job.
What is most urgent for you? The windowless room, the Canadian tap, the VPN, or the camera on the utility pole? Tell me and I’ll deal with it in detail.
Stay sovereign and stay informed.
1 Notice for the Non-British “Hoover Up” equals “Vacuum,” as in “Vacuum Cleaner”
