Digital ID is coming: Will Americans lose freedom in the name of security?



America was founded on liberty and rights, but Big Tech and Big Government keep trying to take them away.

The latest example comes from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, whose National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence is currently working to develop wide-reaching digital IDs. More specifically, NIST is collaborating with tech companies and banks to link mobile driver’s licenses with people’s finances. The broader purpose is to work toward developing a digital ID for everyone that centralizes all their personal information, supposedly to boost cybersecurity and provide more convenience for financial transactions.

The more digital ID is developed in America, the more alternatives to digital ID will become rarer, more complex to use, and, eventually, outlawed or severely restricted.

Working with various associations, the California DMV, the Department of Homeland Security, Microsoft, iLabs, MATTR, OpenID Foundation, and various large financial institutions, including Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase, NIST has now contracted various digital identity specialist companies to implement the project.

According to NIST digital identity program lead Ryan Galluzzo, NIST’s advances are about allowing people to present ID in the most convenient and secure way possible while still allowing them to rely on traditional physical ID.

“We want to open up the use of modern digital pathways while still allowing for physical and manual methods whenever they may be necessary.”

By linking banking information with mobile driver's licenses, NIST will move one step forward to implementing a central digital ID that contains people’s private information. NIST promises that this new digital ID acceleration “will address ‘Know Your Customer/Customer Identification Program Onboarding and Access’ which will demonstrate the use of an mDL and/or Verifiable Credentials (VC) for establishing and accessing an online financial account.”

The project will move forward in three main steps. According to NIST, it will aim to standardize and promote “digital ID standards” while still respecting and maximizing “privacy and usability.” This digital ID project is currently in the build phase.

With technology that now analyzes how people walk and breathe and their irises, to identify them beyond a shadow of a doubt, and phones and GPS systems geolocating individuals at almost every moment of the day, digital ID is ripe for abuse by an authoritarian government or malicious actors. The easier it becomes for a citizen’s important data to be accessed by law enforcement, government, or bad actors, the closer we get to a digital panopticon in which citizens are constantly tracked and subject to potential suspicion while having no recourse to alternative methods of payment or identity.

This move forward linking mobile driver's licenses with banking is bigger news than it appears on the surface. While it can be easily justified and explained as necessary, innovative, and forward-thinking, the more digital ID is developed in America, the more alternatives to digital ID will become rarer, more complex to use, and, eventually, outlawed or severely restricted. What starts as an incentive or benefit all too often becomes a mandate and a requirement down the road. NIST’s moves to build up a more powerful and connected digital ID will inevitably lead to Americans becoming less free, regardless of how these policies are framed or how much of a positive spin they are given.

Why religion will save us from automated warfare in the digital age



The technology now exists to render video games in real, playable time computationally — a first achieved with the classic pixelated first-person shooter Doom.

Don’t yawn — this isn’t just a footnote in the annals of nerd history. Elon Musk promptly chimed in on the news in the replies to promise, “Tesla can do something similar with real world video.”

We are now governed by people who seem hell-bent on preserving their power regardless of the cost — people who are also getting first dibs on the most powerful AIs in development.

The military applications of this latest leap forward are obvious enough. A person at a terminal — or behind the wheel — enters a seamless virtual environment every bit as complex and challenging as a flesh-and-blood environment … at least as far as warfare goes. Yes, war has a funny way of simplifying or even minimizing our lived experience of our own environment: kill, stay alive, move forward, repeat. No wonder technological goals of modeling or simulating the given world work so well together with the arts and sciences of destruction.

But another milestone in the computational march raises deeper questions about the automation of doom itself. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced that the company has “witnessed our first AI-to-AI crypto transaction.”

“What did one AI buy from another? Tokens! Not crypto tokens, but AI tokens (words basically from one LLM to another). They used tokens to buy tokens,” he tweeted, adding a 🤯 emoji. “AI agents cannot get bank accounts, but they can get crypto wallets. They can now use USDC on Base to transact with humans, merchants, or other AIs. Those transactions are instant, global, and free. This,” he enthusiastically concluded, “is an important step to AIs getting useful work done.”

In the fractured world of bleeding-edge tech, “doomerism” is associated with the fear that runaway computational advancement will automate a superintelligence that will destroy the human race.

Perhaps oddly, less attention flows toward the much more prosaic likelihood that sustainable war can soon be carried out in a “set it and forget it” fashion — prompt the smart assistant to organize and execute a military campaign, let it handle all the payments and logistics, human or machine, and return to your fishing, hiking, literary criticism, whatever.

Yes, there’s always the risk of tit-for-tat escalation unto planetary holocaust. But somehow, despite untold millions in wartime deaths and nuclear weapons aplenty, we’ve escaped that hellacious fate.

Maybe we’re better off focusing on the obvious threats of regular ordinary world war in the digital age.

But that would require a recognition that such a “thinkable” war is itself so bad that we must change our ways right now — instead of sitting around scaring ourselves to death with dark fantasies of humanity’s enslavement or obliteration.

That would require recognizing that no matter how advanced we allow technology to become, the responsibility for what technology does will always rest with us. For that reason, the ultimate concern in the digital age is who we are responsible for and answerable to.

As the etymology of the word responsible reveals (it comes from ancient terminology referring to the pouring out of libations in ritual sacrifice), this question of human responsibility points inescapably toward religious concepts, experiences, and traditions.

Avoiding World War Autocomplete means accepting that religion is foundational to digital order — in ways we weren’t prepared for during the electric age typified by John Lennon’s “Imagine.” It means facing up to the fact that different civilizations with different religions are already well on their way to dealing in very different ways with the advent of supercomputers.

And it means ensuring that those differences don’t result in one or several civilizations freaking out and starting a chain reaction of automated violence that engulfs the world — not unto the annihilation of the human race, but simply the devastation of billions of lives. Isn’t that enough?

Unfortunately, right now, the strongest candidate for that civilizational freakout is the United States of America. Not only did we face the biggest shock in how digital tech has worked out, but we also have the farthest to fall in relative terms from our all-too-recent status as a global superpower. We are now governed by people who seem hell-bent on preserving their power regardless of the cost — people who are also getting first dibs on the most powerful AIs in development.

Scary as automated conflict indeed is, the biggest threat to the many billions of humans — and multimillions of Americans — who would suffer most in a world war isn’t the machines. It’s the people who want most to control them.

White House defends censoring Facebook content 'to protect public health'



A White House spokesperson said the Biden administration encouraged Mark Zuckerberg's Meta platform to be responsible, despite the tech entrepreneur saying he was "pressured" to "censor" specific content.

The House Judiciary Committee recently published a letter from Zuckerberg about repeated demands from the Biden-Harris administration to censor content, even satire, related to COVID-19 and vaccines.

'This administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety.'

Zuckerberg wrote that in 2021, "senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree."

When asked, the White House washed its hands of the ordeal and declined to acknowledge Zuckerberg's use of terms regarding censorship and pressure.

"When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety,” a White House spokesperson said, per the Guardian.

The White House official then attributed responsibility to tech platforms for making "independent" choices about the content posted on their apps.

"Our position has been clear and consistent," the statement continued. "We believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present."

— (@)

The White House provided the same statement to media members across the board.

The administration's denial of any form of censorship flies in the face of what social media companies such as Elon Musk's X platform, which released the Twitter Files, have learned. Those documents exposed the federal government's interest in suppressing certain stories, such as those related to the Hunter Biden laptop.

Zuckerberg also complained about the same issue in his letter to Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

Zuckerberg wrote the "FBI warned" his company about "potential Russian disinformation" regarding the Biden family and Ukrainian energy company Burisma in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.

The CEO admitted that his team "temporarily demoted" stories posted on his platforms.

He also said it had since been made clear that "the reporting was not Russian disinformation."

Also, during the same term, the Biden-Harris administration attempted to form a Disinformation Governance Board to monitor speech. In 2022, the Department of Homeland Security shut down its controversial disinformation board after widespread backlash that it was reminiscent of Soviet-style control of public discourse.

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Google, Gavin Newsom, and a woke university will partner on news and journalism. What could go wrong?



Last Wednesday, California’s state legislature announced a $250 million deal to partner with the big tech giant Google to fund local journalism and artificial intelligence research. In a draft summary released to Politico, the bill aims to “strengthen democracy and the future of work in an Artificial Intelligence future through a public-private partnership between Google and the state of California. Canada, France, and others have passed similar legislation to fund newsrooms in their countries, but California’s marks the first of these public-private partnerships in America.

Amidst declining demand for journalists and increasing layoffs in the industry, Google will contribute $55 million and California’s taxpayers will contribute $70 million toward the University of California, Berkeley, School of Journalism’s “News Transformation Fund” to provide financial resources to local newsrooms over the course of five years.

Instead of being charged for utilizing local news outlets’ content, Google acts as a quasi-investor, allowing the company to potentially advocate for its big tech agenda by shaping the direction of journalism to fit its narrative.

Google will also continue to provide $10 million annual grants to newsrooms, in addition to millions more for an AI accelerator program that proponents of the legislation claim will allow journalists to use and adapt to new technologies.

In a statement, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) wrote, “This agreement represents a major breakthrough in ensuring the survival of newsrooms and bolstering local journalism across California — leveraging substantial tech industry resources without imposing new taxes on Californians," and added that "the deal not only provides funding to support hundreds of new journalists but helps rebuild a robust and dynamic California press corps for years to come, reinforcing the vital role of journalism in our democracy."

However, others worry that the current iteration gives too much power to Google and that the added funding for the AI program will do more harm than good to journalists.

Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project, a nonprofit advocating for aggressive antitrust and anti-monopoly policies, threw shade at the deal, calling it a “backroom deal” that “is bad for journalists, publishers, and all Californians.”

Union leaders, including leaders of the Media Guild of the West, the NewsGuild-CWA, and others also released a statement titled, “California's journalists do not consent to this shakedown” to voice their opposition to the bill since “the future of journalism should not be decided in backroom deals.”

“After two years of advocacy for strong antimonopoly action to start turning around the decline of local newsrooms, we are left almost without words,” they stated. “The publishers who claim to represent our industry are celebrating an opaque deal involving taxpayer funds, a vague AI accelerator project that could very well destroy journalism jobs, and minimal financial commitments from Google to return the wealth this monopoly has stolen from our newsrooms.”

Previously, Google staunchly opposed iterations of the bill and claimed that it would “put support of the news ecosystem at risk.” The original bill would have forced Google and other big tech giants to contribute a portion of their advertising revenues to local journalists and newsrooms in exchange for their content, whereas the current bill relies on a public-private partnership.

Jaffer Zaidi, Google’s vice president of global news partnerships, said that the previous bill would “create a ‘link tax’ that would require Google to pay for simply connecting Californians to news articles. … If passed,” Zaidi added, the bill “may result in significant changes to the services we can offer Californians and the traffic we can provide to California publishers.”

So Google decided to retaliate and temporarily blocked and blacklisted local outlets’ content from appearing in its searches, emulating its own tactics in response to similar legislation in other countries.

Later, California gave up and stripped the bill of its tax and replaced it with the current public-private partnership. As a result, Google and other big tech giants cheered for the bill’s success since the current iteration essentially grants Google access to influence local news outlets’ content in exchange for some funding, further expanding the company's monopoly power.

Instead of being charged for utilizing local news outlets’ content, Google acts as a quasi-investor, allowing the company to potentially advocate for its big tech agenda by shaping the direction of journalism to fit its narrative.

Kent Walker, president of global affairs and chief legal officer for Alphabet, Google’s parent company, praised California lawmakers and the tech and news industry for collaborating to support local journalism. “This public-private partnership builds on our long history of working with journalism and the local news ecosystem in our home state, while developing a national center of excellence on AI policy,” Walker said.

Similarly, Jason Kwon, chief strategy officer for OpenAI, stated, “A strong press is a key pillar of democracy, and [OpenAI] is proud to be part of this partnership to utilize AI in support of local journalism across America.”

The elites dream of turning America into China. Sadly, they're succeeding.



This week, Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, took advantage of a new meme to make an old point that is gaining new importance: “You can’t make us China if we China ourselves first.”

The idea, which goes back at least to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s infamous 2010 China-for-a-day daydream, is simple enough: The Chinese seem to have figured out how to harmonize technology with unity, resulting in massive growth for the people and massive privilege for elites; can’t we take a cue from Beijing and do that too?

The solution there is to overthrow America with a new, digital-age America, one that borgs up the country and its people just as much as China and the Chinese, but in our own unique way.

The joke is that, of course, Friedman didn’t really want to become China; he wanted to have his American cake and eat it too, and so does just about everyone else who looks over the sea with envy at China’s apparent mastery of political reorganization on digital-age terms. Because the quickest way to become China is to let China remake us in its image, and well ...

The wishcast takes on a different tenor: If only our elites could “pull a China” here, all on their own! But here, the obstacles morph too. It’s sinking in that we’re not very good at becoming China, and for this, our elites are happy to blame the American people, who are proving harder to pacify than expected, and time is running out.

There’s another obstacle: China is trying to unseat the U.S. as the dominant, definitive global power. This suggests the things our elites envy about China can only be achieved by overthrowing America’s global dominance, which, in turn, threatens American elites.

For us in the West, there’s really only one path to that kind of collectivist unity. Many insist that’s communism, but communism — at least as we’ve known it — is just a halfway step.

Communism, as we’ve known it, gained power and adherents by positioning itself against not just Christianity but all religions. That proved to be reasonably effective for a time — for about as long as radio and television dominated our technologically mediated environment.

That environment made human imagination the most powerful force in the world — a world where, of course, the soft atheist communist song “Imagine” became the most popular, echoing John Lennon’s earlier contention that “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I'll be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now. I don't know which will go first — rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary."

America’s imagineering elite built digital technology to consummate post-religious America’s capitalist-powered communism around the world. Yet alarmingly, that project failed, and China’s post-religious capitalist-powered communist project started to really take off.

This is because digital collectivism vibes very well with the religious frameworks established at the origin of the Chinese civilization-state. After the end of the Cold War, Chinese elites began putting effort into demonstrating to themselves and their people that, basically, Western communism suffered from certain internal problems that China didn’t have to deal with because of its deep civilizational anthropology and cosmology.

America certainly does not share this deep origin, to say the least. The spiritual origins of American civilization are Protestant, and since the beginning, the anarchistic tendencies of the Southern colonists and the theocratic tendencies of the Northern colonists have created a complex and conflicted identity that only leaves one absolute path toward authentic “native” collectivism at the national scale: that of the established church.

Of course, that’s squarely at odds with our Constitution. So the real challenge faced by American elites trying to beat China at its own game of usurping American global dominance in the digital age is to answer the riddle, “When is a church not a church?”

It is deeply sensed, if rarely ever articulated, that the answer to this question will unlock the ultimate cheat code — imposing a theocracy on Americans that will allow the elite to digitally collectivize quickly and powerfully enough to replace the old America’s global dominance with that of the new, boxing out China before it can win the world.

And for the elite, this approach had better work, because no other alternative seems to exist. It’s an all-or-nothing gamble.

And so, in the struggle among different elite factions for control over deciding which theocracy is established through the church that is not a church, two candidates for institutionalized worship, drawn from the deep religious substrate of the West, have swiftly risen to the top of the pack.

The first is Justice, the god of the woke, a queered version of Zeus who’s all about bringing infinitely prideful yet interoperable identities under one perfect arbiter to rule them all. The second is Enlightenment, the god of tech, which increasingly worships the convergence of all interoperable things into a single, infinitely illuminating intellect.

You can see that interoperability and infinity dominate both these creeds, and as we all see, most techies are willing to worship the god of Justice so long as the god of Enlightenment (and its priests) has pride of place, and most wokies are willing to worship the god of Enlightenment so long as the god of Justice (and its priests) has pride of place.

After all, true absolute justice on Earth requires a superhuman intelligence capable of constantly computing, adjudicating, and ruling on all micro-injustices. Only the merger of the human and the machine into a cyborg collective allows this. The outlines of a church unlike any other begin to emerge. Woke and tech harmoniously combine into one big cyborg theocracy ... one big enough even to ingest China itself.

That’s the plan! And that’s why, without being able to turn to a church that is a church yet does not establish a theocracy, Americans trying to rescue their country and their humanity will find themselves falling back darkly on only what weapons they manage to cling to.

Big Brother Ford awarded patent to snitch to cops when you speed



Ford, once an icon of American innovation, now wants to take the lead on another emerging and upcoming trend — mass surveillance.

In January 2023, Ford filed a patent application for a new technology that would allow it to track the driving behavior of vehicles on the road and report speeding violations to law enforcement. Vehicles would have cameras that activate if they detect speeding vehicles nearby and capture high-quality images of the offending vehicle and its identifying features, such as license plates or accessories attached to the offending car. Then, those images and GPS data would be shared with local law enforcement to decide whether to initiate a chase.

Many believe that these cameras violate drivers’ privacy. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise that corporations and governments worldwide already have methods to spy on their citizens. Governments have been found to hack into private individuals’ phones through software provided by corporations, and the NSA admits to purchasing Americans’ sensitive data.

Local law enforcement has always partnered with corporations to surveil the public by installing cameras to detect speeding and running red lights. These cameras have come under fire for their questionable legality and efficacy, spurring some states to ban them.

Car makers already have a habit of violating drivers’ privacy. A New York Times reporter found that General Motors 'tricked millions of drivers into being spied on' by tracking detailed driving data and adjusting insurance rates accordingly; those with supposedly poor driving behavior would see their rates increase.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill to ban red-light cameras in 2019, two years after KXAN, an Austin-based NBC affiliate, reported that almost all cities with red-light cameras had illegally issued traffic tickets. Their investigation also found that drivers paid the city of Austin over $7 million in fines since the cameras were installed, and cities in Texas made over $500 million from the cameras since 2007.

For now, Ford’s new camera idea remains a patent application, so it's not certain whether we’ll see F-150s snitching on you for going five mph over the limit, even if Ford is granted the patent. But if it does become reality, we’ll probably see F-150s snitching on you for no reason at all. After all, if red-light cameras are faulty, why won’t Ford’s camera be?

A bad habit

Car makers already have a habit of violating drivers’ privacy. A New York Times reporter found that General Motors “tricked millions of drivers into being spied on” by tracking detailed driving data and adjusting insurance rates accordingly; those with supposedly poor driving behavior would see their rates increase.

As a result, lawmakers urged the Federal Trade Commission to crack down on car makers’ privacy violations. In a letter to the FTC, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) accused GM, Honda, and Hyundai of spying on drivers and selling data for pennies. In the letter, they claim that Honda sold data from 97,000 cars, at a rate of 26 cents per car, to Verisk, a data analytics provider for insurance companies, between 2020 and 2024. Between 2019 and 2024, Hyundai sold data from 1.7 million vehicles, at a rate of 61 cents per car, to Verisk.

“The FTC should hold accountable the automakers, which shared their customers’ data with data brokers without obtaining informed consent, as well as the data brokers, which resold data that had not been obtained in a lawful manner,” the two senators urged.

Car makers aren’t the only ones scheming to snitch on drivers, though. Popular apps like Life360, a location-sharing app popular for families with teens, are accused of selling families’ data to insurance companies. Despite being advertised as an app that helps improve families’ safety, it violates families’ privacy. In 2021, one former X-mode employee claimed, “Life360 had the ‘most valuable offerings due to the sheer volume and precision’ compared to other sources of data,” according to the Verge.

MyRadar, a weather forecast app, and GasBuddy, which finds the cheapest gas stations, are also accused of violating privacy for profit.

Some insurance companies are finding ways to gather driving data without buying it from someone else. Progressive, for example, has a product called the Progressive Snapshot. Drivers voluntarily attach the device to their vehicles, allowing Progressive to track their driving behavior. Each time the device detects a hard brake, it will beep, encouraging drivers to alter their behavior on the road.

Progressive claims that safe drivers will be rewarded with discounts, but it's uncertain whether it will benefit most drivers. People who work in big cities must deal with bumper-to-bumper traffic during rush hour, causing them to brake harder or unexpectedly. Even though frequent hard braking is out of their control, they may see their insurance rates increase.

Fortunately, Progressive Snapshot is a voluntary program. However, insurance companies already have ways to track driving behavior without alerting their customers. In an era that feels eerily similar to Orwell’s "1984," it's only a matter of time until all Americans realize they’re being spied on.

Post of the day: What tech can’t live without



Many people have come to feel or believe — even against their will — that technology is now the one unstoppable force in the world.

I think that the root of this techno-fatalism, which is the animating force behind both the optimist and pessimist versions on display today, is a judgment that tech wins out over everything else because, unlike everything else, tech stands on its own shoulders — it’s reliant on no foundation other than its own.

We’ll continue to spin around in confusion until we understand that tech is not the ouroboros. It is not perfectly recursive, self-reliant, and self-referential. The ground truth about tech is that it depends — like all else, when you look carefully — on faith.

Looking deeper, lurking around the heart of this judgment that tech is uniquely self-propagating or recursive is a still more radical idea: Technology simply is the recursively self-propagating, that which exists and grows and advances without having to rely on, defer to, or pay tribute to its origins.

You can think here of George Soros’ famous recursivity theory, which led him to his unique position of power, wealth, and influence today. At a more ancient level, you can think of the ouroboros, the mythical snake eating its tail, a pre-eminent alchemist and occultist symbol.

The post of the day belongs to @vikhyatk, formerly of Amazon Web Services and now at Moondream AI. In it, he suggests an old entry in Sam Altman’s blog “fully explains OpenAI’s vibe.” The line from Altman is this:

Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.

But it’s a quote, or at least a citation. Here’s the rest of Altman’s 2013 post:

I heard this from Qi Lu; I'm not sure what the source is. It got me thinking, though – the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so.

In general, the big companies don't come from pivots, and I think this is most of the reason why.

Now is the right time to resurface that old post.

Some of us have been warning for years now that the unfolding of events today depends on technological and theological matters because these are interlinked in a way that digital tech specifically reveals in new and dramatic ways.

More Americans are catching on to this, but many still struggle to make heads or tails of the phenomenon, much less come to grips with it and coordinate an effective response.

We’ll continue to spin around in confusion until we understand that tech is not the ouroboros. It is not perfectly recursive, self-reliant, and self-referential. The ground truth about tech is that it depends — like all else, when you look carefully — on faith.

And the question facing all tech companies is exactly what faith they demand of you: faith in what, exactly, to be precise. Some insist that it’s just faith in tech itself, but that’s a parlor trick. From a certain distance, the ouroboros looks like a deity. But it’s really a simulation of one — a perpetual evasion of our created origin and therefore of our Creator.

The longing for a meta-religion that overcomes all the pesky details and commitments concerning our origins and our Creator can be powerful, in tech as much as anywhere else, and the occult worship of alchemically powerful recursivity feeds that longing as much as anything else.

But tech's reliance on the longing for religions — for gods to worship, on the one hand, and for the power and authority that comes from inventing new systems and structures of worship — reflects a deep-seated human longing for something much more visceral and specific than a meta-religion that spins you forever in a cosmic Möbius strip.

The simulation of the infinite isn’t enough to satisfy — or even spiritually nourish — human hearts. For tech really to advance in a direction that strengthens and protects our hearts and their deepest, purest longings, it will have to receive with humility the reality that the temptation to keep churning out new gods, new cults, and new spiritual scams will lead more to ruin than spiritual riches. It will have to locate its religious foundations somewhere spiritual seeds can grow and the spiritual footing is firm. On rock, so to speak, and not sand, silicon or otherwise.

US government and Soros team up with Ukrainians to attack Blaze Media, Musk, and Tucker



Yesterday, Blaze News reported that a shadowy Ukrainian NGO called “Texty.org” had placed Blaze Media and Glenn Beck on its enemies list for supposedly spreading “Russian propaganda and disinformation.” While masquerading as an independent journalism organization, the outlet tweeted "claims that […] Texty.org’s editorial team is trained or funded by the U.S. government are outright lies.” Last night, Return uncovered this to be a demonstratable lie by the organization and that it is, in fact, funded with U.S. tax dollars by several American agencies and funding and partnerships tied to the George Soros-led Open Society Foundations.

Screenshot from Global Investigative Journalism Network

Texty.org operates under another name, the Data Journalism Agency, and that organization shares the same employees and email addresses as Texty.org. The Data Journalism Agency is a member of the Global Investigative Journalism Network. While claiming to be an organization promoting the free press, it is part of a network of Soros-funded NGOs promoting globalism and color revolutions around the world. The George Soros-backed Open Society Foundations has funded the GIJN to the tune of 2 million dollars in direct grants, which it then disburses to its members.

Screenshot from Open Society Foundations

It would be disconcerting enough for a foreign outlet, funded by Soros, to be creating a domestic enemies list of American Congress members and media outlets. But there is clear evidence that it is receiving money directly from the U.S. government. The Data Journalism Agency (Texty.org) openly brags about its partnerships with these agencies on its partners page. I’m linking to an archived version of its site in case the outlet chooses to scrub the evidence. On that page, it lists the Eurasia Foundation as a funder through the Transparency and Accountability in Public Administration and Services. TAPAS is directly funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Screenshot from Data Journalism Agency (Texty)

These organizations love to hide behind a series of complex funding operations to obscure their true purpose. So for clarity’s sake: The State Department is funding an NGO compiling a list of Americans with the wrong opinions about giving billions of dollars in funding to Ukraine through USAID.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is an independent agency of the United States government that is primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance. With a budget of over $50 billion, USAID is one of the largest official aid agencies in the world and accounts for more than half of all U.S. foreign assistance — the highest in the world in absolute dollar terms.

It’s been alleged that USAID has a close working relationship with the CIA going back to the 1960s. It has been accused of trying to undermine governments throughout South America as well as leading a program to forcibly sterilize over 200,000 Peruvian women in the late 1990s.

Screenshot from Data Journalism Agency (Texty)

According to its website, the Data Journalism Agency (Texty.org) is also funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which is directly tied to the CIA.

Christine Bednarz, writing in the New York Review of Books, summed up its modus operandi:

The National Endowment for Democracy, which receives nearly all its funds from Congress, is a conduit through which the US government has given millions of dollars to political and other protest groups in countries from Albania to Haiti. Some may argue that it makes sense for the US to seek to undermine unfriendly governments and to replace them with new ones aligned with American interests. It is less honest to pretend that this is not the mission of the National Endowment for Democracy.”

To summarize, a Ukrainian NGO compiled a list of media organizations and individuals and, without proof, accused them of spreading Russian disinfo. This included Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Rand Paul, Glenn Beck, Tucker Carlson, and the Daily Wire, among 400 others. It is clearly marking as domestic enemies within the United States those merely asking questions about funding a war against a nuclear superpower.

We’ve known for decades that the CIA and the State Department, in collusion with globalist organizations like the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation and through NGOs, have funded color revolutions to destabilize and overthrow countries from Egypt to Libya to Ukraine. What we’re seeing now is the redirection of these weapons to aim directly at the American people.

— (@)

Can we trust Signal to keep out government spying?



In City Journal, conservative activist and author Chris Rufo takes aim at the leadership of secure messaging app Signal, asking: “Is the integrity of the encrypted-messaging application compromised by its chairman of the board?” This article follows in a line of recent criticism of embattled NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who chairs the Signal Foundation board, and Signal Foundation President Meredith Whittaker. The article also raises concerns — echoed by Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey — about the app's trustworthiness, given its links to left-wing activists and U.S. government seed funding.

While we share Rufo’s concerns about Signal's leadership's outspoken leftist views and activism, we disagree with his alarmism over the app's core security and broad mischaracterization of internet freedom programs as vectors for domestic surveillance and censorship.

In contrast with Signal’s aloof anarchist founder, Moxie Marlinspike, Meredith Whittaker and Katherine Maher are both unapologetic progressive activists with radical views on the information ecosystem, online speech, and what values the tech industry should support. Before Signal, Whittaker was notable as a lead instigator of employee walkouts and activism at Google, attempting to stop the company from working with the Pentagon and leading an effort to purge then-Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James from its AI advisory board.

Maher, who previously worked at Wikimedia Foundation, Web Summit, and progressive advocacy group Access Now, has a similar ideological record. As Reason magazine puts it:

Maher's past tweets would be hard to distinguish from satire if one randomly stumbled across them. Her earnest, uncompromising wokeness — land acknowledgments, condemnations of Western holidays, and so on — sounds like they were written by parody accounts such as The Babylon Bee or Titania McGrath.

Here, Rufo’s criticism is entirely fair, and Signal’s board would likely benefit from picking less controversial leaders while fostering intellectual diversity to reflect its global user base better.

Enemies of your enemies

But the fact that Signal is run by an outspoken anti-government, anti-corporate, privacy maximalist like Whittaker, who built her career opposing collaboration between tech and government, also makes it an unlikely tool of the surveillance state (not to mention that an avowed anarchist founded it). Rather than being evidence of any particular conspiracy, the involvement of leftists like Maher and Whittaker is best explained as a reflection of tech’s coastal elite cultural bubble.

Let’s look closer at Signal’s alleged ties to the government. Open Whisper Systems, the initial developer of its protocol, received a series of seed grants from a State Department-funded initiative called the Open Technology Fund, a nonprofit that gives grants to support open-source internet freedom projects. OWS was later dissolved and incorporated under the Signal Foundation. However, its open-source encryption protocol was widely adopted, vetted by security researchers, and integrated into apps including Facebook Messenger, Skype, and WhatsApp.

The OTF’s programs have supported numerous internet freedom tools, including virtual private networks, the Signal protocol, and Tor. What’s more, other government funding programs have supported the creation of the internet, GPS, and the core technologies in our smartphones, as do Silicon Valley giants like Intel, Tesla, Qualcomm, Apple, and Google.

The federal government has many legitimate policy interests in funding technology tools unrelated to surveillance, including foreign policy, geopolitical security, and economic competitiveness. In particular, the U.S. government’s internet freedom programs are directly from Cold War-era anti-communist radio and television.

Ronald Reagan 1950s Crusade for Freedom commercial soliciting funds for radio Free Europewww.youtube.com

Today, these tools lend support to journalists, opposition parties, and dissident movements operating under authoritarian regimes like China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. For instance, during the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, Signal rocketed to become the number-one downloaded app. Similarly, Signal usage has surged during the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. Used in concert with VPNs, secure messaging access is a powerful freedom tool. Citing an anonymous source, Rufo’s article asserts the State Department and OTF “wield open source internet projects made by hacker communities as tools for American foreign policy goals.” Indeed. This is a feature, not a bug.

The OTF has its origins in a project of Radio Free Asia, the sister organization to Radio Free Europe, set up in response to the Tiananmen Square massacre and the growing threat of communism in Asia. Later, the OTF was spun off under the Trump administration as an independent nonprofit funded by the U.S. Agency for Global Media and chartered by Congress under 22 U.S.C. § 6208a. With a mission to “advance internet freedom in repressive environments by supporting … technologies that counter censorship and combat repressive surveillance to enable all citizens to exercise their fundamental human rights online,” the OTF is at the tip of the spear, helping support pro-freedom movements worldwide.

In the 20th century, America used radio and television broadcasts to spread freedom behind the Iron Curtain. In the 21st century, the OTF is breaking the Great Firewall and allowing people living in authoritarian states to access free and open information from around the world. The OTF’s funding of internet freedom projects such as VPNs, Tor, and yes, Signal, is intended to ensure that journalists and dissidents have “unrestricted access to uncensored sources of information via the internet.” To guarantee communications security over the technologies it supports, the OTF is legally required only to support fully open-source and auditable technologies. The OTF’s authorizing statute requires “comprehensive security audits to ensure that such technologies are secure and have not been compromised.”

If this isn’t enough, any attempt by the government to embed a secret back door would also have to get past its robust technical community and global security researchers, who can review and verify its source code on Github. Maher, a non-technical executive who joined the board in 2023, is unlikely to have had any involvement in its codebase.

For federal agencies like the State Department, knowledge of a back door would trigger the Vulnerability Equities Process, which requires federal entities, including law enforcement and intelligence agencies, to undergo independent review and disclose known exploits under certain circumstances where there is a significant risk of abuse by foreign governments, criminals, and other bad actors. On the black market, Russia-backed hackers are offering as much as $1.5 million for a Signal zero-day vulnerability.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

To argue that Signal is insecure or untrustworthy because of indirect funding from the State Department is to fundamentally misunderstand the origins, mission, and practices of both Signal and the U.S.’ internet freedom programs. Critically, such thinking risks pushing people to far less secure alternatives like Telegram, SMS, and iMessage. While Telegram’s CEO has been an avid Signal critic, messages on its platform are still not encrypted by default. In addition to being open source and end-to-end encrypted, Signal has the added benefits of encrypting metadata, obscuring phone numbers, and employing quantum-resistant cryptography.

Internet freedom programs and their analog predecessors have historically enjoyed strong bipartisan support, including Republican champions like Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan. Here, Rufo’s criticism should be a warning to internet freedom advocates against placing lightning-rod activists in leadership or cultivating a partisan ideological monoculture.

Considering the federal government’s long history of abusing surveillance tools — from J. Edgar Hoover to the Patriot Act — a base level of skepticism or even paranoia is understandable. Civil liberties proponents on both sides of the aisle are right to question and challenge the security of their communication platforms, including Signal. However, as an indirect instrument of U.S. policy, Signal's role extends beyond just an app for secure messaging; it bolsters American values and safeguards the freedoms that define open societies.

Because it was created as open-source software designed to minimize what it collects and operate on hostile servers, who’s on its board or where its funding came from actually don’t matter that much. What matters is how it gets used in the world. On this count, Signal — and related programs like Tor, VPNs, and the OTF — have been a massive policy success and a worthy digital successor of programs efforts that helped bring down the Berlin Wall and end the Soviet Union.

Free Samourai: The deep state's attack on Bitcoin



Last month, the United States Department of Justice arrested two men for operating a money-transmitting business utilized, it said, to launder money for criminals in amounts upwards of $100 million. These men are currently being charged by the Southern District of New York, one of whom is already incarcerated on the East Coast of the United States. At the same time, the other was apprehended in Portugal and will likely be extradited imminently. Ok. So what? Presumably, people get arrested all the time for laundering money — why should you care about these two guys? What makes this any different from the run-of-the-mill financial crimes often spotlighted on your favorite true-crime podcast or some NPR bulletin?

Well, these men didn't transfer any money and weren't running a money-transmitting business. Secondly, they weren't using money at all — not in the sense defined by previous precedents in the U.S. court systems. The two men accused were the open-source developers behind a popular Bitcoin wallet called Samourai that simply allows users to coordinate the timing of the publication of their transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain to help obfuscate the revealing of certain payment details when settling on an open ledger. You've most likely heard of Bitcoin by now, with its anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, and its legion of ardent supporters who can never seem to shut up about it. But what is Bitcoin, and why have regulatory bodies such as the SEC, the CFTC, and the DOJ — not to mention the House and the Senate — continued to bring it up in their discourse about the state of the economy?

Bitcoin is speech. Jailing those who write code that dares to facilitate the exchange of 1s and 0s to update a ledger is an attack on free speech, on everyone and everything this country supposedly stands for.

Bitcoin is a database, decentralized in write permissions and distributed among the node operators spread across the planet. Every Bitcoin transaction is simply an entry inscribed into the most recent state of a ledger, known as the blockchain. Each block is filled with thousands of new data entries, with each transaction consisting of three basic components: an input (where the coin comes from), an output (where the coin is going), and cryptographic signatures that ensure the sender has a claim to the coin being sent. But in reality, nothing is really “sent” at all.

Unlike your checking account, there are no accounts, or even balances, native to Bitcoin. A piece of wallet software written to interact with the Bitcoin network can tally up the coin held by a certain Bitcoin address and make the appearance of an account balance, but it is much more akin to the wallet in your back pocket stuffed full of differing denominations of bills — two 1s, two 5s, a 10, and a 20 — adding up to $42. The major difference, however, is that in spending Bitcoin, you don't physically transfer the bills or coins; you simply sign the spending rights off to another party, updating the state of the Bitcoin ledger with zero items moving peer-to-peer within the eventual settlement. Now, it is important to clarify that when one initiates a new transaction, this string of bits containing the information needed to update the ledger is propagated between nodes, but nowhere within a Bitcoin transaction are “Bitcoins” ever transferred — simply the property rights to future updates on the universal ledger that is the blockchain.

A right to compute

Andy/Getty

Bitcoin is speech. Bitcoin is code. Bitcoin isn't money, despite its ability to operate as a medium of exchange and a store of value, and it certainly isn't money under the jurisdiction of the United States. The compliance-driven statists within the Bitcoin community will tell you we must ask permission from our local governing offices to embrace Bitcoin to pay our taxes in Bitcoin and service our legal debts. But no matter the lobbyist's efforts to incorporate the protocol into the legacy system of litigation and tax, the Bitcoin protocol is technically — in a literal sense — incapable of transferring criminal proceeds between parties. This framework allows us to conclude that Samourai Wallet did not operate “a money laundering service”; it could not even operate a “by-the-books” money-transmitting business using Bitcoin.

They wrote code: code that users across the globe, within a myriad of legal jurisdictions, utilized to exchange certain alphanumeric strings of data over the internet incapable of doing anything other than updating a spreadsheet. The United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York claims Samourai has executed over “$2 billion in unlawful transactions” while facilitating “more than $100 million in money laundering transactions.” This accusation contains a complete misunderstanding — not to mention a simply unconstitutional reframing — of what a Bitcoin transaction is and how our elected officials should treat it.

Writing code is not a crime. Even when said code was written with the express purpose of enabling the committing of a crime, the criminal action takes place when actualizing said intention, not at the onset of the authoring or even distribution of the code. Code is speech and should be protected as such. Distributing code is an expression between parties of bytes reduced to bits, eventually to ones and zeroes. Any precedent that establishes anything other than this directly violates the First Amendment and, further, is against the should-be-obvious natural code of freedom of expression.

There are PLENTY of ways that Bitcoin the network can spread itself across the globe and how Bitcoin the asset can monetize to astronomical heights without bringing an ounce more freedom to the populace of the world. Bitcoin's definition has been gaslit by the state to be within the purview of the red, white, and blue regulatory moat, and thus, Bitcoin is in dire need of a redefinition. Bitcoin was never about embracing the state and furthering the reach and influence of the elected officials, who were obsessed with changing the definition of speech, expression, code, and numbers. We have spent the last decade sitting back, watching the bookkeepers take their red felt pens and continually change the meaning of words, slowly bringing the frogs — and their dictionaries — to a boil.

A dangerous precedent

If updating a ledger can be reconstituted as a crime, any expression between humans can be labeled as such.

Bitcoin is a tool of empowerment, and Bitcoin is for enemies. Well, now our enemy, the state, is empowered, and its regulatory goons are barking like wolves at the gate. We must stay clever and arm ourselves with the rhetoric needed for the oncoming onslaught against those who dare to build tools that threaten the spellings of the state.

Writing code is not a crime.

Whispering numbers to a loved one cannot be redefined as a criminal act.

Bitcoin is not money but just a ledger.

A database.

Bitcoin is speech. Jailing those who write code that dares to facilitate the exchange of 1s and 0s to update a ledger is an attack on free speech, on everyone and everything this country supposedly stands for.

If you care about free speech, the time is now to stand up and use whatever remaining public squares we have to fight for the right to speak and express. The precedent made downstream of this case will set many of the state's parameters to snuff out wrong-think on the internet.

You don't have to care about Bitcoin; just know that freedom is being extinguished — not just the two young men incarcerated but the freedom to exchange information.

Free Samourai.

Bitcoin Magazine, the most trusted voice in Bitcoin, stands proudly at the forefront of technology and economics, telling the stories and platforming the people using code to liberate humanity from government money. It will be collaborating with Return on a series of articles about Bitcoin and its essential place in the modern world.