Starmer Calls for Spyware on All Phones

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer strode onto a stage at London Tech Week and handed Apple, Google and friends a three-month ultimatum with all the menace of a substitute teacher confiscating phones at the door. Build us controls that stop children from taking, sharing, or viewing nude images, switch them on by default across every phone and tablet already humming away in the nation’s pockets, and look sharp it.

“This government will not stand by while children are put at risk online,” he announced, before adding the line every tech executive in the room heard as a polite threat.

“Today I am calling on the tech companies to introduce device-level controls to prevent children from taking, sharing or viewing nude images. And if they don’t act, we will.”

Stirring stuff. Nobody wants children harmed, and saying so out loud is the cheapest applause line in British politics.

The trouble is the two innocent-looking words tucked into the speech like a wasp in a picnic basket, the words “device-level.”

Here is what “device-level” means once you peel off the cuddly branding. To catch one naughty photo on your phone, something has to inspect every photo on your phone. All of them.

It is software that leans over your shoulder the instant you raise your camera, squints at whatever you are making, and decides whether you may keep it or it gets reported to authorities.

Engineers named this trick years ago, client-side scanning , and even Apple, a company that would happily sell you the air inside its packaging, built a version of it in 2021 and then sprinted away from the idea the moment people worked out what it did to private messaging.

The worst part is what it does to encryption. End-to-end encryption is meant to mean nobody in the middle can read your stuff, not the app, not your internet provider, not a bored government with a warrant fetish.

Client-side scanning waltzes around all of that by reading your photo on your own device first, before the encryption clicks shut. The lock on the front door stays bolted. There is just a man with a clipboard standing in your hallway, jotting notes before you turn the key. The math survives. The privacy, meanwhile, is dead.

Step back and admire how casually people are treating this. A government politely asking every phone maker to install a tiny invigilator inside the camera lens, marking your snapshots as they form, would have been thrown out of a Black Mirror writers’ room a decade ago for being too on the nose.

Picture a painter glancing up mid-brushstroke to find a man from the Office at the easel, tutting and scraping off the bits he disapproves of. That is the energy on offer, rolled out across roughly every handset in Britain and wired, in theory, to phone what it spots.

Ah, but adults will be fine , we are assured. Officials promise the controls will not bother devices “owned and used by adults who verify their age.”

The opt-out for surveillance is, gloriously, more surveillance. To switch off a child-lock on a phone you bought with your own money and legally own, you must first march up to the state and prove who you are.

Self-described panopticon enthusiast, Secretary Shabana Mahmood, is having precisely none of this doom-mongering. “I make no apologies for doing the right thing to protect children from paedophiles. This is stopping the coercion and sextortion of children, not surveilling or policing people’s phones,” she insists, with breezy confidence.

The tech already exists, she reckons, and the companies merely need to flip a switch as through the death of civil liberties were a bedside lamp.

Her headline reassurance arrives wrapped in magnificent certainty. “There is no reporting, no data collection, no monitoring, and no images leaving the device. All adults will be able to switch off the protections if they are over 18.”

Nothing leaves the device. None of it. Pinky promise , says the secretary from the government who asked Apple to secretly install backdoors to iCloud .

The EU spent two years building almost exactly this contraption, christened it “Chat Control,” and then watched it die a richly deserved death.

The European Parliament finally pulled the plug this March, rejecting blanket scanning of private messages by a single vote . For now.

Even Germany, a country with a long and unhappy memory of governments steaming open the mail, refused outright on constitutional grounds , and its justice minister compared mandatory message scanning to “opening all letters as a precautionary measure.”

Signal announced it would simply pack up and leave the continent rather than gut its own encryption.

As we previously reported, working from Germany’s own federal police figures, found that 48 percent of the chats flagged by automated scanning turned out to be completely innocent . Family holiday photos. Medical pictures sent to a doctor. All hoovered up and forwarded to police as suspected child abuse because a robot got the jitters.

Here is the part that should make your eye twitch. A parent who wants a child-lock on their kid’s phone can switch one on today. For free. They just have to turn it on. It requires parenting, not state control.

If you are tempted to extend the government some benefit of the doubt, cast your mind back over the past year.

This same Office served Apple with a secret order, a Technical Capability Notice, demanding a backdoor into end-to-end encrypted iCloud backups , first for every human on the planet and later, after Washington threw a tantrum, for British users alone. Secret being the operative word, since the law gagged Apple from so much as admitting the order existed.

Apple’s answer was to rip its strongest encryption out of the UK entirely rather than build the thing, sniffing that it has “never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services,” and the fight is still grinding through the courts. That is the track record of this government, one that asks one company, in the dark, to dismantle encryption for an entire nation is not a government you hand a camera-side scanner and trust to use it gently.

So spare a thought for what this little inspector gets up to once it tires of policing teenage selfies. A system that can read every image on every phone, sold to you today as a babysitter for the under-18s, is exactly the system a future minister could repoint at protest photos, leaked documents, unflattering memes, or whatever sets off the moral panic of the week.

Nobody has explained how you age-verify tens of millions of adults without assembling the enormous identity database ministers swear blind they are not building. Nobody has explained how “nothing leaves the device” survives in the same room as a snooping model that someone in an office has to keep trained, updated and told what to flag.

Reclaim The Net exists to defend free speech and push back against the expansion of surveillance

Every day, we dig through court filings, leaked documents, and policy proposals so you don’t have to. We name the companies, the bills, and the backroom deals that threaten your right to speak freely and exist privately online.

The threats to free expression and digital privacy aren’t slowing down and neither are we.

If free speech and digital privacy matter to you, help us keep doing the work that protects them.

Becoming a supporter is the best way to sustain our work over the long term but, if you prefer, a one-time donation is also a meaningful way to help.

A one-time donation of $5 , or whatever amount you can afford, directly supports the work that informs decision-makers and strengthens the fight for free speech and freedom from surveillance.

or make a one-time donation

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Published on June 9, 2026

On June 1, a co-worker of mine, whom I’ve come to know as a wise, experienced, and discerning man of God, wrote the first part of a series evaluating Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI . In it, Bruce Sabalaskey states that “ AI is not like a better calculator or a faster filing cabinet. AI systems are increasingly tied to communication, commerce, education, warfare, employment, media, government services, surveillance, and social life .” Further on in Part I, he reiterates how AI can “ attack work and family stability . ” While I will leave it in Bruce’s very capable hands to explain just how we should respond to AI as followers of Jesus Christ, I want to take you on a side quest into the dangers of Age Verification Laws (AVLs) — nay, their evils.

Like Bruce, I’ve been a software engineer for multiple decades. Not quite as long as him, but I did survive Y2K and the dot-com bubble burst. I witnessed the launch of DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.1. In fact, it was with the launch of Windows XP and its “online activation” that I experienced my first twinge of insight into where I saw all of this going. Yes, I was young and inexperienced when I got th at first bad taste in my mouth with “online activation,” but it didn’t sit well with me in ways I didn’t fully understand until 2019. Microsoft had planted the seeds of distrust in me that have guided my view of technology for nearly 30 years.

For nearly 30 years, there has been a steady decline in your rights to property ownership, independence, and privacy, with the ultimate goal to make you a digital slave of the state. From the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to increasingly hostile EULA (End User License Agreements) that tell you that you don’t own what you purchased and that the seller can revoke your “privilege” of use if you tick them off , or for any reason at all really , without financial redress of any kind. As an only slightly exaggerated example, let us say you bought a banana. With the current EULA trends, y ou could be told that you can only eat it with a for k and knife . I f you b ake it into a b anana cream pie, they will seize your house like you agreed to in the EULA, because pie violates the agreed-upon banana usage in your monthly banana subscription. I’m being a bit facetious, but Disney did try to claim that a man could not sue over the negligent death of his wife at a Disney park because the EULA of his Disney+ Subscription he allegedly agreed to said he could never sue them for any reason.

Currently, there is a U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) regulation that requires all vehicles manufactured in 2027 and after to include a state-controlled remote kill switch on your personally purchased motor vehicle. There is a whole other piece that could be written that. There are states that have thermostats in your that will lock you out of control if they don’t like the temperature you set, or if you have used what they consider to be too much electricity. As bad as that is, t he ultimate destruction of your right to privacy, independence, and sovereignty over your own person and family is yet to come and is going to be trojaned into every aspect of your life via AVLs . You will be forced to accept the system or be cast out of it. Unable to buy or sell without them. This is not hyperbole or alarmism. This is fact. You need only look at China’s social credit system.

What are AVLs ? AVLs were sold to the public as protection of children from social media or “predators,” but, in reality, they provide no protection to children, and in fact make it easier for predators to get hold of you r or your children’s date of birth, biometrics, and location. Most unbelievable of all, AVLs are , in Canada at least, being pushed and supported by the porn industry because they do not wish to police themselves or accept the costs or the liability. They instead want to push the liability onto parents and the government.

Many jurisdictions worldwide are in the process of introducing AVLs, with a similar solution to what was proposed to the Canadian senate by “Ethical Capital Partner s ,” the major porn conglomerate cited above . That is, “device level authentication.” Many jurisdictions have already passed legislation, while others are being debated in legislatures . Some examples include Brazil, the UK, the EU, Canada, California, Colorado, Illinois, and now U.S. federal bill H.R.8250 , which calls it “operating system providers,” not “device level authentication.”

Just what is an operating system (OS)? An OS is a piece of programmed software that makes any digital device go. And I mean any . Washing machines, refrigerators, TVs, even some toasters have OSes, and, of course, every computer on the planet has an OS. This sudden push to “save the children” from evil computers is not a coincidence or is it out of the blue. I’m old enough to remember when governments were yelling at each other to put a computer in every , school, and office. Now they are yelling at each other how to control all those computers. This isn’t to save your kids, but to dictate your life, track your every movement, and decide what you or your family is allowed to participate in in society. This is the social credit system on steroids with malevolence at its core.

Computers already have the means to lock you out of your devices with TPM modules . In use since 2003, TPM modules are capable of completely locking you out of your device permanently, effectively making it no better than a paper weight. Originally only needed in high security environments or to keep track of corporate hardware, Microsoft made them a mandatory component of any computer running Windows 11. Right around the time they were moving to subscription based “ services .” Services where you own nothing.

If you combine TPMs with NHTSA-regulated k ill switches and OS-level AVLs, you create the perfect storm for total and absolute control by the state , via AI, of every aspect of your lives from thermostats to toasters and grant them authority to determine what is appropriate to believe say or do in your or expose your children to . AVLs are not necessary. Protecting your children is as simple as educating yourself on the tools that already exist to block and filter harmful content, and sitting down and talking with your children. There are many other possibilities that could or should have been implemented to protect your children from pornography or predators at the state level , but legislators are not interested in th ose solutions because they give power to the people not the state, whereas AVLs great all the power to the state .

Less than 10 years ago, “experts” were considering showing pornography in schools as part of a “pornography literacy class.” Schools across the West incorporated sex clubs and called them “Gay-Straight Alliances” or similar euphemisms. Do not buy the lie that they care your children. They don’t. The single purpose of AVLs is to digitally control and enslave you.

Jeremy Williamson is LifeSiteNews’ director of IT & Engineering.

Published on June 9, 2026

Major privacy-focused tech companies are threatening to leave Canada if Bill C-22 (the “Lawful Access Act”) becomes law in Canada. The legislation has drawn sharp criticism from opposition parties, cybersecurity experts, and technology firms due to its loose requirements on data retention and overall security concerns.

Online platform Signal, which prides itself on end-to-end encryption, told The Globe and Mail that they would “rather pull out of the country than be compelled to compromise on the privacy promises we have made to our users.” Udbhav Tiwari, Signal’s vice president of strategy and global affairs, emphasized that end-to-end encryption is incompatible with the types of exceptional access the bill could demand.

DuckDuckGo, known for its privacy-oriented engine, confirmed through CEO Gabriel Weinberg that it would also withdraw its VPN service from Canada if the bill passes in its current form.

NordVPN, one of the largest VPN providers in the entire world, also responded to the legislation in an X post, stating that they “will consider all viable options,” including “limiting, or if necessary removing” their presence from Canadian jurisdiction.

Hey @NordVPN – will you comply with Bill C-22 in 🇨🇦?

— Johnny Seabass (@BananaKingCo) May 15, 2026

Part 2, the “Supporting Authorized Access to Information Act,” goes further by imposing obligations on a broad range of “electronic service providers” (including messaging apps, VPNs, engines, and cloud services). These include requirements to develop and maintain technical capabilities that authorize government access to information, as well as potential regulations that would mandate the retention of specified metadata categories — such as communication patterns, locations, and timestamps — for up to one year.

READ: Google warns Canadian internet bill would lead to ‘surveillance infrastructure’

The government has justified its actions by stating that the bill includes safeguards to respect Charter rights, does not mandate backdoors into encrypted services, and is needed to modernize tools for addressing serious crime and national security threats in line with other G7 countries. However, critics — including major tech companies, privacy experts, and civil liberties organizations — warn that the bill’s vague language surrounding “technical capabilities,” combined with its broad metadata retention requirements, risks undermining end-to-end encryption, while imposing heavy compliance costs and new security vulnerabilities on both service providers and ordinary Canadian users.

The bill has also managed to unite Canadian political parties against it, from one end of the spectrum to the other. The Conservative Party and its leader, Pierre Poilievre, have come out strongly against the legislation. Poilievre declared that the bill is a Liberal attempt to “try to turn the entire tech sector into a gigantic surveillance arm of the state.”

On Bill C-22, Poilievre states: "Here we have another bill where they [Liberals] try to turn the entire tech sector into a gigantic surveillance arm of the state." pic.twitter.com/pHOwMx5aeM

— Juno News (@junonewscom) May 27, 2026

Poilievre describes the legislation as the Liberals “going after the good guys,” comparing it to their attempt to increase gun control on law-abiding citizens, along with an increase of government censorship that targets non-criminal, free speech-exercising citizens.

On the other side of the political spectrum, the Green Party, specifically leader Elizabeth May, has also expressed disdain for the bill and vowed not to support it.

Asked if she supports Bill C-22, Elizabeth May replied: "Not a chance."

She calls the bill "appalling," warning it could force tech companies to insert spyware for police, and said it needs major amendments.

The Public Safety Minister then says, "we need to get you a briefing." pic.twitter.com/YnTftKzCVi

— Juno News (@junonewscom) May 27, 2026

May called the spyware bill “appalling,” stating that “we are basically setting it up for tech companies to insert spyware to report on us to the police.” The Green Party leader went on to say that the bill would need “lots of amendments, at a minimum.” The aforementioned public safety minister, as well as Secretary of State Ruby Sahota, followed up May’s statement by laughing and stating that “we need to get you a briefing.”

Bill C-22 passed second reading on April 20 and has been under study by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security (SECU). Committee hearings featuring testimony from tech companies (such as Apple), privacy experts, and other stakeholders wrapped up in late May, with discussions around possible amendments, particularly on encryption and metadata issues.

As of early June, the bill remains at the committee stage, with no report yet tabled for consideration at report stage or third reading. The government has indicated potential openness to some amendments while aiming to advance the legislation before the summer break.

Iran Launches First Missile Attack On Israel In 61 Days

Pierre Poilievre: As Canadians suffer under the Carney recession, a new economic time bomb ticks away.

New study calls for fairer representation in Parliament

How a Climate Scientist Was Attacked by the White House, Congress & His Own University

Following The Science: The New Climate Change Deniers Are The Alarmists

Families in Canada must work nearly half the year to pay taxes

Trump calls on Iran, Israel to ‘stop shooting,’ return to talks