CHAT CONTROL 2.0 BLOCKED AGAIN, THANKS TO YOU! What happened yesterday: the European Parliament blocked the deal pushed by the EU Council. The EU Council wanted: (1) "voluntary" scanning of all private chats under "search plans" approved automatically unless an authority vetoes; (2) administrative authorities, not courts, ordering providers to scan private messages, not limited to suspects, using AI with massive false positive rates; (3) making the failed Chat Control 1.0 mass scanning regime permanent, while admitting it is not effective, as we discussed in my previous posts. Your voice to parliamentarians made a huge difference again: the Parliament refused scanning of private communications, stating it must remain limited to persons linked to child sexual abuse, not everyone by default or under a blanket licence, as Council proposed. The Parliament also closed the back door where "risk mitigation" rules could force providers into scanning under threat of fines. What did pass: a preliminary agreement on scanning publicly accessible content for known child abuse material. This was proposed by the Parliament as the effective, targeted alternative. But we have doubts about it, keeping in mind how it works in financial laws 🙄 We still wait for the text to see what this means and will inform you in the coming weeks. And if you think decentralized protocols are exempt, remember that #ChatControl targets service providers. Any #relay or client operating in the #EU could face obligations under this framework. This defense proves again: our voice matters when it is vocal, with your support! And we will need it again in November, so please follow the updates. Now, it is important to call or write to your MEP and your government to say thank you to those who stand on the side of privacy. They need to see you are watching their move. Please repost.

Important update on Revolut, and why this concerns anyone here whose data sits with a KYC'd service, exchange or fiat on-ramp: (1) According to the group now extorting #Revolut, and the Duel team in contact with them, the attackers took over Italian government and law enforcement mailboxes with an infostealer, sent Revolut Bank UAB in Lithuania a forged European Investigation Order in the name of the Italian authorities, and kept sending requests for five months. (2) Revolut answered every one, as #FATF Recommendations and EU AML laws require. Refusal carries fines up to €5 million or 10% of turnover. Nothing in the rules obliges the bank to check whether the state behind the request is who it claims to be. Now scale this abuse a thousand times, in the hands of authoritarian states and their proxies, who do not seek attention like these hackers and quietly collect data on citizens and entities of the #EU and other Western countries. (3) The attackers claim to hold 147 GB from the #Italian side, including internal documents and officer chat logs, and say most of the Revolut data concerns customers in #Switzerland, #France and #Hungary, with other countries affected. Passports and #KYC selfies of named individuals are being published daily until Revolut pays. Every bank, exchange, payment provider and #CASP in every jurisdiction that follows FATF rules is exposed the same way, because the rules oblige them to answer state requests and nobody is required to check whether the state behind the request is legitimate. Self-hosted wallets close one door. The moment your data touches a regulated intermediary the same channel opens. Human rights groups, victims and experts, with support of Open Dialogue Foundation, described this risk to the European Parliament three years ago with support of @jack @npub1kp7j...487l and few other bitcoiners. We proposed specific remedies, supported by the majority of the European Parliament. The European Commission and the Council removed every safeguard the Parliament adopted from the AML Regulation. That decision is why this is happening now. Three institutions have since named this transnational financial repression: (1) European Parliament resolution of 18 June 2026, under MEP Hannah Neumann leadership; (2) Council of Europe Resolution 2669 of 25 June 2026, rapporteur MP Efstathiou, with MP Wiechel pushing for an investigation and remedies; (3) OSCE PA in The Hague, July 2026, led by MP Mauro Del Barbe, with the most detailed focus on exactly these attacks. We are collecting witness statements to push for implementation. If you are a legal or security expert and want to support our work, DM me. You want fewer surveillance channels open on you? The political fight decides which safeguards go back into the law. Support the MPs and MEPs who pushed for remedies. Demand accountability from Commission and Council for the ones they rejected. Before the next leak names someone who does not have the means to move house.

Who knows why @Damus shows me this? Few weeks already. Restarting doesn’t help.

This week #Revolut confirmed it handed over customers' passports, verification selfies, home addresses, IBANs and full transaction histories, including #Bitcoin, to a fake government request. The email came from a real government agency's domain, and Revolut complied because the rules told it to. #FATF rules, transposed into #US, #EU and #UK law, oblige every regulated institution to keep this data and hand it over promptly to any state request, with fines in the millions for delay and none for handing over too much. Nobody is required to check whether the state behind the request is legitimate. Any exchange, on-ramp or card issuer you use sits under the same rules. Authoritarian states and their proxies have used these requests for years against critics, donors and businesses. We call it transnational financial repression. This time it reached bitcoiners at scale. Since 2022 the Open Dialogue Foundation has campaigned before EU regulators for the privacy of payments and asked the Bitcoin industry to join. We were grateful for the support of @jack , @npub1kp7j...487l and a few other bitcoiners. Most others laughed, saying we are losing time or it was not their business. In 2023 we won a majority in the European Parliament for our safeguards. The closed-door trilogue then removed most of them from the AML Regulation. We did not have enough loud voices from the industry to defend payment privacy, and now not only activists, but also bitcoiners, business people, donors - we all face the hunting of our data at scale. There is still a chance. In July 2026 OSCE Parliamentary Assembly parliamentarians adopted remedies against the weaponisation of AML/CFT laws and recognised transnational financial repression as a threat to the security of the OSCE area, which covers the US, Canada, Europe and Central Asia. This would have been impossible without the support of Atlas Network, @Cypher Tank and the Reynolds Foundation (@npub1hkt8...ltpw ), who understood the problem at first sight. Will you keep observing and complaining, or join and make this space safe to use, invest and build in? There is nowhere else to run, if you understand how FATF rules work. If you don’t - happy to explain. Privacy has to be protected and normalised as a human right. Now, before it is too late.

Your Identity for Sale. Protect it NOW! For the last decade, governments across the world have followed Financial Action Task Force (FATF)'s mantra: we need full transparency and to identify everyone for security, for "better protection". This statement has not only proven to be a great failure, but it has now become the main weapon against western society and its governments themselves. On Aug. 31, Brian Krebs reported that a new service on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit was offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 153 million people in North America. The FBI's New Orleans field office has launched an official investigation. How did more than 153 million identity documents from people in the United States and Canada end up in the hands of cybercriminals selling them on the dark web? Based on Krebs's interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by idscan.net, a widely-used identity verification company based in Louisiana that processes over 21 million verifications monthly at more than 20,000 locations, serving clients including Hertz, Target, FedEx, and Caesars Entertainment. The data had been continuously exfiltrated for over a year before it was discovered. For me this is also personal. As someone who has been subjected to the weaponisation of cybersecurity and financial laws by an authoritarian regime for my human rights work seeking to obtain my travel, financial, and communication data across the EU and the U.S., I know exactly what this kind of breach enables. Travel records, financial histories, and communication metadata are the most sought-after information for physical, economic, or digital attacks by authoritarian regimes and their proxies - we call it transnational financial repression. And I'm endlessly grateful for Mauro Del Barba, Markus Wiechel, Hannah Neumann for leading and pushing for clear remedies against these attacks at the level of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and European Parliament. This is real protection of our citizens and entities against cyberattack, not pushing for new aggregation of personal data! When 153 million identity documents sit in a single database for over a year, undetected, every person in that database becomes a potential target, not just for common fraud, but for transnational repression. Privacy has to be recognised as a fundamental human right, including in the digital space, where the same data that sits unprotected can be weaponised by bad actors and AI-powered tools alike. This is one more example of the message I'm not going to tire of repeating: the weaponisation of FATF's financial, national security and cybersecurity laws no longer serves as protection. Time to stop it and implement the most recent resolutions on transnational financial repression NOW.

Not your intelligence, not your rights. No matter how much of your own intelligence goes into a document, if #Claude touched it, it comes out marked as AI generated since August 2. Consequences for small NGOs using AI to cut costs on design and translation: a witness statement translated into English, a testimony de-identified to protect the source, a report an exiled activist ran through Claude to fix their grammar, all carry the same mark as “fabricated content”. Once detection tools are public, “this NGO report is AI-generated” becomes the cheapest discrediting line available to the governments we document. The honest caveats in Anthropic’s small print will not travel with the accusation. European Commission declared #Europe a place for innovation. This is not the way to do it…. Would I stop using AI to defend human rights? No. Dictators and bad actors already use every tool available to repress people. We should be able to use every tool available to protect them.

With the Digital ID framework, the Digital Euro, and Chat Control all moving toward implementation, the question 'what happens when the state turns off your money?' is no longer theoretical for any EU resident or entity. Are you ready to fight back for your rights? Let's meet at @BTCHEL 25.-26. SEPTEMBER in September!

Age verification for the internet is the end of human rights and freedom of speech for generations to come: not only in the EU, UK - also in the US. We are watching the freedom values of Western civilization collapse — adopting the same digital cage that others are already trapped in. Human rights are taken away every single day — all because too many of us are still not ready to defend them, mistakenly believing these rights are simply given. Generations fought for these freedoms, high standards of values, and paid with their lives so that we could enjoy and live in a free Western society. Ask yourself: what have you done, and what are you doing every day, to protect this heritage?

Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights

South Carolina Governor Signs Social Media Age Verification Law

A bill sold as child protection builds the legal framework for surveilling every user in the state.

European Parliament has just rejected the Chat Control proposal again! 🫶🚀 Your voice always matters! Stay ready and keep standing up for your rights!🫶 As a follow-up, ask your MEP to investigate: 📌 Why are EPP MEPs following the agenda and timelines set by Google, Meta, TikTok, and other big platforms, instead of defending the fundamental rights of EU citizens? 📌 On what legal and political basis was this vote reopened, and who requested it — was it driven by the public interest or corporate lobbying? Ask EPP’s MEPs to show their proposal publicly! 📌 If this vote can be reopened once, does that mean it can be reopened again whenever the outcome pleases powerful actors — but not when citizens and civil society are dissatisfied with the result?

My ‘may I meet you’ comes along with ‘what do you know about #Bitcoin’ and… ‘are you ready to defend #privacy?’ 😂 🧡

See you in #Amsterdam! Orange Stage (only 😍) Are you coming?

🚀GERMANY STANDS ON THE SIDE OF PRIVACY! Three important statements on the EU’s Chat Control regulation from the Federal Ministry of Justice of Germany: - The proposed Chat Control Regulation involves “indeed very serious intrusions into privacy,” with the core issue being the extent of such intrusion. - The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has already established narrow legal limits in its previous rulings on data retention. - It is essential that any future regulation be legally sound and proportionate, reflecting Germany’s concern for upholding privacy rights even when combating serious online crimes such as child sexual abuse. ⏱️ Use these arguments in your message to your government before 14 October 2025! ⏱️ Ask your MP/MEP to support your voice! ⏱️ Encourage your friends in Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Spain to join the Stop Chat Control campaign!

Which one is better? ☺️🥰 Photo credit for Matti Keski-Kohtamäki (x/ig: @mkphotons) 🧡🚀

#Nostr are you in the room? 🧡

Thank you @Frank Corva Old Account for your continuous support of our privacy advocacy efforts 🧡 View quoted note →

Digital Rights Under Siege: Join BTCHEL Talks! Join me to discuss why #Bitcoin P2P privacy payment tools, privacy of communication, and travel data protection matter more than ever at BTCHEL conference in #Helsinki (August 14-16)! Bring anyone who's tired of feeling like their every move is being tracked and wants to do something about it! Do it before it is too late - we're living through an unprecedented assault on digital privacy: 1. The EU's Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) is advancing a "zero tolerance for anonymity in crypto" policy, while... 2. Denmark's EU Presidency is fast-tracking #ChatControl regulation for adoption on October 14, 2025. This isn't just regulatory overreach—it's the architecture of mass surveillance disguised as child protection and combating financial crimes/terrorism. The consequences are already visible and show how financial surveillance creates real physical and national security dangers: - kidnapping incidents in #France targeting crypto-assets holders, - weaponisation of AML/CFT and cybersecurity laws for transnational financial repression in the #EU by authoritarian regimes and their proxies. When your payment history, communication patterns, and travel data are exposed, you become a target. For those who don't know - proposed ChatControl means: - Automatic scanning of ALL private messages, emails, and chats - Mandatory age verification ending anonymous communication - Cloud storage monitoring, including your private photos - App store censorship and digital exclusion of minors Join me at BTCHEL (August 14-16) to examine new evidence of how Russia's allies are weaponizing cybersecurity and #AML regulations against the EU, #US, and #Western democratic institutions. In a world where digital and physical converge, privacy of payments, communication, and travel isn't just convenience—it's survival. It protects your life, property, and cultural identity from those who would exploit your data. See you! 🧡

MY MESSAGE TO THE U.S. CONGRESS: Transnational Financial Repression Costs Lives—Here's the Evidence Last month I testified before the US Congress about something that sounds like a conspiracy theory but isn't: authoritarian regimes are weaponizing American and European banks, travel and communication information to silence their critics. Do you know this is happening? Here's how it works: Dictatorships and their proxies are systematically abusing Financial Action Task Force (#FATF) anti-money laundering, cybersecurity systems that Western democracies created for security cooperation. They turn our own tools against us. The scariest part? It's completely legal. I, my Open Dialogue Foundation team, and our families lived this nightmare. Despite winning in court repeatedly and proving all accusations false, we still lost our bank accounts, crypto accounts, crowdfunding platforms. Our crime? Documenting human rights violations and sanctions evasion. But it didn't stop there. A Belgian judge revealed that dozens of Kazakh security officers filed subpoenas seeking the maximum amount of private data on Lyudmyla Kozlovska—including her banking, travel, and communication records. Why? To isolate and destroy us our capacity to live, work and defend human rights. We fought back; most activists can’t or don't know how. When authoritarian regimes and their proxies can manipulate American and European financial, travel, and communication systems to silence dissent, they're attacking the foundation of Westen values and democracy itself. How did we survive and continue holding rights violators accountable? #Bitcoin peer-to-peer payments and encrypted communications became our lifeline. We've learned firsthand that compromising privacy doesn't just threaten operations—it costs lives. Here's the complete testimonial with policy recommendations: https://humanrightscommission.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/humanrightscommission.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/posted-fin_tlhrc_lyudmyla_kozlovska_written_testimony_open_dialogue_foundation.pdf Video from 30:00

Good morning ☀️ #Provo has an incredible heart for families. The way this community rallies around parents and children is the most touching thing I’ve ever experienced. Have you been there ? Would love to connect with local #bitcoin #Utah community to join efforts in defense of privacy of financial, travel and communication data from the weaponization.

🚨 YOUR VOICE NEEDED: CONGRESS SEEKS TESTIMONIES The US Congress is investigating how authoritarian regimes weaponize financial regulations against American donors supporting democracy. WE NEED YOUR INPUT. 📢 WHY YOUR TESTIMONY MATTERS Chairman #McGovern asked me directly: "Your testimony calls for the Treasury Department to issue a financial crimes enforcement network advisory highlighting foreign governments' misuse of anti-money laundering/anti-terrorism financing tools to target U.S. entities and residents in transnational repression. Has the Treasury Department made any steps in this regard? If not, what do you think is a productive pressure point?" This question shows Congress recognizes that the case of American philanthropist Barlyk #Mendygaziyev demonstrates a terrifying trend: 🔻His brother Bekizhan imprisoned in #Kazakhstan as RETALIATION for Barlyk's pro-democracy advocacy 🔻US banks terminated their financial services based on Kazakhstan's false claims and accusations 🔻Kazakhstan exploited AML/CFT laws to silence American donors 🎯 THE BIGGER PICTURE When authoritarian regimes can: 🔻Turn US financial institutions against democracy donors 🔻Weaponize "anti-extremism", AML, cybersecurity laws and international cooperation mechanisms against civil society and donors transnationally and domestically 🔻Take family members hostage to silence advocacy Every donor, activist, and NGO becomes vulnerable transnationally 💪 WHY DEFENDING DONORS IS CRITICAL 🔻Democracy movements NEED financial support 🔻Majority of the prodemocracy donors are U.S. philanthropists. They are at risk of being criminalized for supporting human rights if no remedies established 🔻Kazakhstan's playbook is being copied by other autocrats 🔻US financial system is being turned against democracy itself 📝 WHAT CONGRESS NEEDS FROM YOU Submit testimonies/recommendations on: 🔻How financial debanking affects pro-democracy work in your country 🔻Your experiences with weaponized AML compliance 🔻Policy recommendations to protect legitimate donors 🔻Cases of authoritarian abuse of US financial systems or U.S. financial intelligence (I will explain more in the next post) 🔗 WE HELP YOU TO SUBMIT Information to the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission: 🔻Send your story to me 🔻Reference: [mention your country] Transnational Financial Repression 🔻Deadline: end of July 2025 When autocrats can silence American donors, democracy loses its lifeline. Your voice can help Congress close these dangerous loopholes. #DefendDonors #TransnationalRepression #TransnationalFinancialRepression #Congress #Democracy #HumanRights #Philanthropy #CivilSociety #TomLantos #USCongress #AML #CFT

US CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS ON TRANSNATIONAL FINANCIAL REPRESSION On June 24, 2025, the US House of Representatives held hearings on transnational repression. I had the honor of presenting to the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission one of the most sophisticated methods of persecution—the abuse by undemocratic regimes of financial and cybersecurity regulations, as well as mutual legal assistance agreements, targeting not only government critics but also #American philanthropists, non-governmental organizations, and investors. My testimony and recommendations addressed two key aspects: (1) explaining how transnational financial repression is carried out and its impact on the United States, and (2) how these mechanisms are used to obstruct financial support for pro-democratic movements and humanitarian activities. Regimes, particularly #Kazakhstan and #Russia, along with their proxies such as Kyrgyzstan's #Bakai Bank, have learned to exploit trust-based mechanisms of international cooperation. This enables dictators to arbitrarily freeze or confiscate assets in the #UnitedStates, deny Americans access to financial services, misuse financial intelligence and personal data, and spread targeted disinformation to undermine organizations' economic reputations and circumvent international sanctions. By abusing these international agreements, dictators and their proxies can also initiate Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP suits), depleting their critics residing in Western countries both legally and financially. One example is the case of American investor and philanthropist Barlyk Mendygaziyev, his family members, and political hostage Bekizhan Mendygaziyev. I will share more details in the next post.