The so-called National Security Law that the Hong Kong government ratified back in 2020 strikes again. This law, which broke the agreement made when the UK handed Hong Kong back to the Chinese government three decades ago, has since been used to jail and silence all kinds of pro-democracy voices that cause communists to shiver in fear. We’re not talking about guerilla groups or well-organized NGOs here. We’re talking about everyday protestors, artists, and musicians. Calls for a rollback to these kinds of anti-speech, anti-human rights actions have been met with blank stares and obstinance.

We’ve talked about Joshua Wong here at Techdirt before. He was one of the pro-democracy voices that chose to stay in Hong Kong after the NSL was passed, despite the danger it put him in. He also was a creative force in organizing protests, not only engaging in traditional peaceful protests on the streets, but figuring out ways to rally support and organize through online spaces like multiplayer video games as well. The Chinese government, always willing to drive a semi truck when a clown car would suffice, banned some video games as a result.

That didn’t deter Wong. He kept protesting. And, predictably, he was jailed for his activities in 2020. Having served most of his sentence without controversy, Wong was slated to be released from prison at some point early next year. That is no longer the case, since the Chinese government just now decided to bring more charges against him for activities that occurred before he was imprisoned, resulting in an additional 10 year sentence in prison.

Wong is already serving time for subversion and was due to be freed early next year when he was handed the latest charges, to which he pleaded guilty in September. Two months and two days of the 10-year term will be served concurrently with his ongoing sentence, the judge said on Thursday.

Prosecutors said Wong had conspired with other campaigners, including self-exiled activist Nathan Law, to lobby for foreign sanctions and blockades against Beijing. These activities took place between July and late November 2020, the court heard.

Again, all of this occurred before he was convicted of the crimes for which he is already imprisoned. The government claims he is undermining Hong Kong’s future, creating instability, and is a national security threat. The details of those crimes are advocating for democracy in Hong Kong and pleading with foreign governments to put pressure on Beijing to help it come to be.

That the law used to imprison Wong can also be used to stack charges like this on him just before he is due to be released tells you all you need to know about it. It’s a farce, used solely by Beijing to silence voices it doesn’t like. That Wong pleaded guilty to the charges is meaningless. Prisoners in a system like this one can be made to confess to being a purple people eater if the government tries hard enough. This is obviously just being used to keep Wong in jail longer than his original sentence.

According to the US consulate in Hong Kong, the sentencing showed Beijing “will go to extraordinary lengths to silence those who advocate for fundamental freedoms” in the Chinese territory.

Human Rights Watch described the sentence as “cruel and unjust”.

“To keep Hong Kong society subdued, and to reduce the chance of an international outcry, the Hong Kong government appears to have adopted the tactic of stacking charges against influential pro-democracy leaders,” said its Asia director Elaine Pearson.

The rights of the people of Hong Kong continue to be purposefully eroded. The world ought to be paying attention, because the eventual takeover by Beijing is going to be attempted, either militarily or through a slow-creeping coup via laws like this.

Developers of virtual private network (VPN) apps are reporting that their products are again being pulled from Apple’s App Store in Russia. This is an unacceptable crackdown on a vital tool to protect privacy and speech online.

Why? VPNs give people a way to control their own online activities. When you visit a website through a VPN, that website only sees the VPN server’s location (well, IP address) rather than your actual location. It’s like sending a letter through a P.O. box so the recipient doesn’t know where you really live. It can also disguise where you’re accessing information from, which can make it possible to access information banned by your government.

Going after tools that give people the space to communicate and access information freely is a common tactic from the totalitarian playbook. This latest demand comes after several steps the Russian government’s taken to surveil speech specifically on Apple products. In 2024, the Moscow Times reported that Russia’s state media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, went after VPN apps on the Apple App Store, after banning access to Western social media platforms and blacklisting opposition media sites. Russia then blocked Apple’s FaceTime software in 2025, according to Apple Insider.

Bloomberg also recently reported that the Russian government has added Apple and Microsoft to its state surveillance registry. This gives Roskomnadzor access to local users’ correspondence, Apple Insider reported, and puts both companies in a position to turn over customer information to the country’s security services as required.

With government control encroaching on their devices and less access to tools that give them alternate methods, people in Russia are left with shrinking options to communicate online or find information that isn’t state-sanctioned.

While Russia’s actions offer a more extreme vision of what happens when the government tries to enforce speech rules by attacking vital privacy tools, it is far from the only government doing so. Several states in the U.S., bent on making it difficult to circumvent invasive age-gating laws, have suggested banning VPNs—either to access certain content or in some cases to simply ban them outright. EFF has publicly (and loudly) criticized these proposals, because going after VPNs is a dangerous step down the road of censorship.

Attacks on speech and privacy online are deeply troubling, no matter where they happen. What those in power may see as a “loophole” in their invasive laws is actually an expression of user control. We’ll continue to speak out when we see governments going after them to take that control away.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Sure, this administration isn’t just tone-deaf, but life-deaf. But it must be pointed out that what AG Todd Blanche is doing here comes in opposition to members of his own party.

Every since it became readily apparent that hundreds of law enforcement officers were regularly abusing access to ALPR (automatic license plate reader) databases to do things like stalk their ex-wives and keep tabs on people engaged in First Amendment activity, politicians on both sides of the massive American bipartisan divide began expressing concern, if not actually demanding (and creating!) legislation meant to keep ALPRs from becoming the KGB they generally didn’t want to see in the (US) world.

Even politicians who generally offered up shrugs when cops went rogue suddenly had something to say as the rest of the (un-elected) nation focused some their considerable ire on license plate readers, especially those provided by Flock Safety.

The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, directed police departments last week to stop spending state money on Flock Safety cameras, the license-plate readers that have drawn bipartisan backlash around the country.

Days later in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration ordered the systems removed from state roads. Mr. DeSantis has described the surveillance technology as “out of control.”

Both governors are tough-on-crime Republicans with deep backing from law enforcement agencies. Yet their moves underscore how the political winds are shifting against Flock and other plate-reading systems that have been embraced by police departments.

Given all of this, it’s seriously pretty weird for AG Todd Blanche to offer up this defense of ALPRs — even if we factor in Abbott’s recent election loss and DeSantis’s even more recent attempt to try on a size 6 pair of “anti-MAGA” boots.

Everything Trump is doing now seems to be stuff that most Americans hate, ranging from immigration raids to the new forever war in Iran to his inability and/or unwillingness to do anything that might bring down the prices of consumer goods. (And that’s without mentioning his extremely unpopular embrace of AI and data centers…)

Enter Todd Blanche, Trump’s latest kept man in the DOJ, to tell Americans to shut the fuck up about pervasive, easily abused surveillance tech:

Speaking at a press conference in Florida on Friday to announce a $74 million federal investment in the state, Blanche waved off surveillance fears as “misinformation.”

“The technology around license plate readers does not affect the privacy of American citizens,” the attorney general said. “It may someday, and if the technology advances to where we need to take a look at it and figure out a way to address and draw it back, we should do that.”

It’s the usual Trumpian horseshit: call facts you don’t like “misinformation” and imply that Americans are too stupid to know what’s good for them. That plan of attack certainly worked out well at the polls last week. And yet, no one in the administration seems to have learned anything from the nation’s resounding rejection of MAGA ideals.

Bro, these cameras already “affect the privacy of Americans.” Just ask any number of stalking victims whose antagonist was a law enforcement officer. Just ask any number of GOP officials who are (correctly, if not always honestly) concerned about the implications of massive ALPR networks capable of capturing millions of plate/location records a day and storing them indefinitely.

Blanche insists this a privacy issue can he can just kick down the road to the next administration. But even if that’s a luxury he can afford, it’s nothing the American public should be willing to accept. Blanche is completely in the wrong here. It’s already a problem. Pretending it isn’t is just convenient cowardice. And pretending someone in the future might be able to close an Overton Window opened years earlier is self-deception Blanche apparently expects the rest of US to believe as well.

Bullshit.

Blanche — much like Trump himself — is not representative of the people they can’t even be bothered to pretend they represent. Blanche’s statement just makes it clear this administration prefers an unbridled surveillance state and it’s not going to stand in the way of tech companies that have the willingness to make this happen.

Back during the Arab Spring in 2011, in which youth protests against various governments were celebrated in much of the Western World, we saw countries like Egypt move to shut down the internet in an effort to keep the public from communicating. I’ve been thinking about that a lot while following a series of stories regarding France, a democratic country, that has been undergoing a series of protests across the country. There were three separate stories I saw that paint quite an alarming picture of how France is willing to attack the internet.

The first story actually has nothing (directly) to do with the protests, but matters just as much. On October 22nd, the Swiss non-profit DNS resolver organization Quad9 announced they needed to leave France altogether. The issue wasn’t about protests, but copyright (the world’s most popular censorship law). Quad9 has been targeted before by copyright holders who demand that its DNS not resolve certain sites they claim are “pirate” sites. This time it was beIN Sports, a Qatari-based company that operates a bunch of sports channels around the world. They sued Quad9 in France because some pirate streams were operating from some websites and people could reach them via Quad9’s resolver.

To be clear, Quad9 had nothing to do with these pirate sites or streams. It didn’t host them. It didn’t carry any of their traffic or streams. All it did was answer when people asked “where is thisrandomwebsite.com?” by pointing them to the website they had asked about. But to beIN Sports, this had to be stopped. And a French court agreed. But Quad9 noted there was no reasonable way to enforce this on just French users, meaning a Qatari sports broadcaster could effectively break a fundamental part of the internet (asking a resolver “where do I find this domain?”) for everyone. Quad9 pointed out that they can’t abide by this:

We cannot comply with this ruling over the long term while remaining faithful to our mission to protect your privacy, defend you against cyber threats, and preserve the integrity of the internet. For us, recursive DNS resolution is a neutral and passive service. We categorically refuse to alter or lie to you about the DNS responses you receive in a way that opposes your expectations.

This ruling forces an untenable position upon us. Compliance is technically unfeasible, and implementation directly contradicts our mandate to serve the public. As a result, we have made the difficult decision to withdraw Quad9 services from France as of Tuesday, November 24. We deeply regret that French internet users will be left without an alternative that can adequately protect their cybersecurity while remaining compliant with European privacy law.

This seems bad for people who want (1) a functioning internet and (2) a safe internet, since that’s what Quad9 provides. But it is what happens when governments hunt up and down the network stack to find the choke points they can control.

That takes us to the second story. That same day — October 22nd — the French Prime Minister’s office sent a “confidential letter” to basically all of the French mobile operators, asking them to get ready to block TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and X if the protests got too out of hand. Basically, the French government was prepping a slightly more targeted version of what Hosni Mubarak’s government did in Egypt during the Arab Spring — though thankfully, not yet implemented.

The link above, from CircleID, points out that the telcos pointed out that this was a bad plan:

During an October 23 meeting, telecommunications representatives reportedly warned that implementing geographically targeted DNS restrictions on short notice would be difficult. They also noted that virtual private networks and alternative DNS resolvers could circumvent such filtering.

That last line is what connects the two stories for me. The telcos pointing out that people will get around any such DNS blocks by using “alternative DNS resolvers.” You know, like Quad9, the alternative DNS resolver that just announced it’s leaving the country entirely due to stupid copyright laws.

But France was not done. On October 26th, a new “Amendment” was submitted in the Senate, which would allow government officials — with no judicial review — to order platforms to pull down certain content the government objects to, specifically around what the government claims is “incitement” to violence, theft, destruction or sexual assault. If the specific content remained online for one hour, the government authorities could escalate (again with no judicial review) and order the entire site to be blocked (DNS again) and to have it removed entirely from search engines. After some concerns, a “softened” version was passed, though it is expected to be challenged. It still requires takedowns and still without judicial review, though one single government bureaucrat will be charged with reviewing all the takedown demands.

This came just a few days after the French government demanded that employees from six different websites, including TikTok and eBay get lectured in person by government officials about steps they needed to take to stop people from using the internet to organize protests. If you’re wondering why eBay (not necessarily a hotbed of protest organizations) was included, apparently the government feared that if shops were looted, the looters would try to sell their ill-gained goods via eBay.

The companies apparently agreed to act as an investigative arm of the French government, according to Serge Papin, France’s “minister for small and medium-size enterprises”:

Platforms agreed to forward reports to investigators, monitor ads for goods stolen specifically during the protests, and send the government reports of their actions, with the first one coming within 48 hours, according to Papin.

Three different stories, but all an example of the same basic thing: the French government using key internet choke points to try to exert control over how people used the internet, whether it’s to watch sports streams, organize protests, or sell off some looted goods. This is part of the reason I’ve been warning about how centralized platforms become targets of governments for control.

It’s good to see Quad9 push back and say that it will not give in, but would rather leave the country instead. But that’s a real loss for the people of France. And, yes, there is no doubt that some people are breaking the law. But the answer to that cannot be “well, just get the internet to shut it down,” because that path leads to the end of the open internet entirely.

It’s also a reminder of how closely linked copyright law and “site blocking” legislation are to direct government censorship of speech. They’re really two sides of the same coin.

But what’s most striking to me in all of this is that when Egypt and other countries sought to shut down the internet in response to the Arab Spring in 2011, many other countries around the globe spoke up about the importance and power of the internet to allow young activists to communicate and organize. But here we are, just a decade and a half later, and it’s a democracy like France reaching for the same tools, and there’s been very little public outcry or discussion outside of France. During the Arab Spring, the world was watching. Now, it’s just another day when a government looks to commandeer the internet’s choke points.

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Texas governor Greg “Piss Baby” Abbott lost his office during the mid-terms. What a shame. The guy who spent years engaging in attacks on free speech when not trying to turn all of Texas into a thin blue line finally got kicked to the curb by residents who were sick of both his shit and that of his MAGA benefactor, Donald Trump.

Abbott = Trump = ICE. With Abbott leaving office, replaced by Democratic Party candidate Gina Hinojosa, other state officials are now feeling a bit more free to throw off the MAGA shackles and get back to doing what’s best for their own constituents.

Houston’s mayor is done with ICE’s bullshit, now that the governor is no longer capable of throwing his bigoted, anti-constitutional weight around, as the New York Times reports:

Mayor John Whitmire of Houston said he was directing city police officers on Friday to limit their cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement during traffic stops, bucking a policy imposed on Texas’s largest city by Gov. Greg Abbott.

Under an executive order from the mayor, Houston police officers will no longer alert ICE agents when they encounter an unauthorized migrant during routine traffic stops or in connection with other low level infractions.

Instead, officers will only alert ICE in cases where a person has been arrested and is being brought to, or has already arrived at, a county jail.

It is to LOL. While I wish more city reps had pushed back against Abbott and his desire to placate Trump during this internal invasion of the United States by masked ICE kidnapping squads, I’m more than happy to revel in the belated blow-off of everything Trumpian following his party’s spectacular mid-term implosion.

And why should any law enforcement agency lend ICE a hand? If federal immigration officers want to do evil things on main — ranging from murders to assaults to deliberately running people over — they should do it on their own. There’s no reason any US law enforcement agency should agree to be an accomplice, before, during, or after the fact. Let these motherfuckers do their evil shit on their own. Just handle your own stuff and I guarantee the locals will like and respect you more than if you’ve decided to aid and abet actual evil.

And this move makes even more sense now that Harris County prosecutors are moving forward with criminal charges against ICE agent Mario Morales — the officer who deliberately ran over a fleeing man and then hid behind false statements by ICE and DHS until footage captured by a local business’s CCTV camera exposed ICE’s lies.

Technically, Governor Abbott still controls Texas until next January. But everyone in Texas can help him find the exit before he’s officially no longer a drain on their tax dollars. And that neutralizes Abbott’s threat to pull more than $100 million in public safety funding from Houston unless it agreed to be part of the ICE problem.

That threat no longer exists. And now that it doesn’t, other cities in Texas should be following in Mayor Whitmire’s footsteps. There’s nothing stopping them now. Abbott’s temporary grasp of the state’s purse strings has effectively ended. Now is the time to do what’s best for the people they serve.