Privacy, and our basic freedoms, are under attack from all sides. Incredibly, the so-called 'liberal democracies' are now leading these attacks; arresting their own citizens for posting online, rolling out facial recognition cameras, and moving to ban VPNs. "What can men do against such reckless hate?" And are we losing this battle? Absolutely not. There's still time to fight back, and we have much in our arsenal. We at @bitcoinpolicyuk have put together a 'Privacy Toolkit', that should let anyone, whatever their skill level, take a few small steps towards improving their privacy and their freedom, and making themselves just a little bit harder for governments to track and to oppress. This isn't comprehensive, and we'll continue to update it as time goes by. We hope it's useful to everyone and serves as a handy guide to help us all push back against government overreach, wherever we find it. Link in the thread and comments welcome! 👇

This all seems to be a ploy to link IP addresses and online activity directly to an identifiable person to make them easier to catch and track down. The government falsely assumed that everyone watches porn and they thought they would get everyone that way. It obviously did not work as well as they were hoping so they are now expanding it. (I have always said that initial laws are just a foot in the door, those laws will always be expanding after the fact into their true original intended purpose). So their plan now is if you want to use any social media or much of the internet in any way, you will need to prove that you are over 18 which means submitting an ID. This will require far far more ID submissions which will massively expand the government database, which was the real plan all along, not the safety of children. The funniest thing about this is after all the fuss about the Online Safety Act, this blanket ban on kids using social media pretty much renders the entire act pointless and made it a giant waste of time. Which to be honest, proves that the act was never about protecting children but was really about building a giant database that links all online activity directly to a person. This database would then be constantly poured over by AI to flag "citizens of concern" to the government who may be potential political dissidents, saying naughty anti-government things etc so the government can pre-emptively act against them. Minority Report. This is literally the plot of Minority Report.

We need to get everyone who cares about privacy in the UK rn, that is in any kind of position to take a form of constructive action of some kind, together in some way. LIGHT THE BEACONS

Gab and 4Chan and others will never obey this, and there is nothing that Tracksuit Starmer can do about it, because they are 100% protected by the Constitution of the United States of America. The only thing INGSOC can do is instruct ISPs to block those services, but ISP blocks are trivially easy to circumvent and 16 and 17 year olds have the time and flexible intelligence to learn about thes and the other tools they need, and they have the peer networks to spread them. What Tracksuit Starmer is doing is giving birth to a generation of super hackers who don't take anything they see on their phones as, "The way it is" but see instead, something to be hacked, circumvented, worked around and broken open. They will take this mentality and apply it to everything in "The Real World", and they will see that everything is hackable and wide open. First to be probed will be ubiquitous things like Oyster and other train and bus ticketing systems. Who knows; maybe this is the way INGSOC creates a generation of global industry leaders for the "digital age"!

The last sentence is the real meat and potatoes of this. What's being promoted as a 'social media ban for children', is really an ID check for every adult.

Plan B tech can finally use Oceania as a test ground for effective Big Brother resistance. Signal will probably be banned too soon, due to disappearing messages. Nostr, Keet (hopefully soon open sourced), Element/Matrix, Whitenoise and Bitchat the projects to check out. Appstores and mobile OSs blocking PWAs will also be an important battle. Let's hope UK kids are slightly less retarded than the their age average.

Nostr.com and others are going to take off. Completely censorship resistant and assessed over a VPN. The government really are clueless. So first the online safety act and now outright bans. Kids nowadays are internet geniuses and are laughing at the pathetic UK state interventions 'for their own safety'

Thanks to @AlecMuffett for a little ray of hope for those of us who still care about free speech, free thought and actually preventing harm to kids, rather than driving them straight to the darkest and least well known corners of the net. Which this social media ban will do.

For those who feel anguished at our government’s slide into totalitarianism: some words of possible comfort

I’ll confirm for the UK in advance that none of my American clients will be implementing any sort of ban on accessing their services or digital ID. So, don’t bother asking them to. Any such requests will be rejected out of hand.

Can’t stop the youth from using nostr…

It's a great thing that everyday people can spin up a lightning node on their own if they choose

Implication: all these services will require ID verification, which will end up being used to arrest dissidents.

A big thanks again to @vexl for having me give a last minute talk about CBDCs at @BTCPrague. And a big thanks to the people who came to listen. Using freedom tech like Vexl is one of the ways that we fight back against mass surveillance and control.