Heather Burns

Misrepresentations around human rights and immigration fuelling calls A new report from the University of Oxford's Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, Faculty of Law, warns that misleading media coverage is shaping public debate on immigration and human rights. The

@cyberleagle.bsky.social weekend reading www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-09...

1995 me would like to sit down with 1995 Tori Amos and explain to her that 2025 me will not be able to see 2025 her because tickets sold out in 9 minutes at £160 each. We will both have opinions about this. Very opinions.

American Unexceptionalism: Global Lessons on Fighting Religious Nationalism Listen to American Unexceptionalism: Global Lessons on Fighting Religious Nationalism on RedCircle

So you can imagine my excitement to hear that he and Rev. Susan Hayward are launching American Unexceptionalism, a new series exploring how people of faith around the world resist religious nationalism and authoritarianism. It premieres October 23 and will be must listen as well!

The “so, what’s happened in the five and a half years since we last sat down?” coffee is going to be a good one

Discord hack shows dangers of online age checks as internet policing hopes put to the test As the drive for age verification grows, so does the pressure on online companies to keep users' data safe and, as the Discord hack shows, that cannot be guaranteed.

Clicked on the story, but then cheered out loud a little when I saw the byline. Welcome back, Rowland. news.sky.com/story/discor...

The Dog that Caught the Car: Britain's 'World-Leading' Internet Billed as a “world-leading” child-protection law, the UK’s Online Safety Act has instead normalized surveillance and ID checks. “Tech policy wonk" Heather Burns writes that the model is spreading acro...

(ahem)
internet.exchangepoint.tech/the-dog-that...

The impact assessments did indeed lay out the implications of OSA age verification - as the compliance costs of contracting with a third party provider, broken down by business size. Not including AV, which in impact assessment terms is "do nothing", was not a costed option, because The Children.

because I'm a sweary Glaswegian with zero tolerance for bullshit, which means I'd last three days in the civil service

I'll be in my "I told you so" yurt. It's an imaginary yurt. But it's a yurt.

behold the power of the age verification vendors lobby

We're so relieved to see Germany reaffirm its opposition to the dangerous Chat Control proposal--the one that would mandate mass scanning of communications. Germany's long been a solid champion of privacy, and the news that it was considering backing mass surveillance was alarming. 1/

Policy peeps - I want to write something about the UK’s ECHR/HRA Article 8 review in the private communications context, but I don’t really want to put it on my personal blog. Who’s up for it?

“the White House official said ‘We’re working hard to look at the law and say, How do we achieve the president’s vision?’”

Bray is a historian at Rutgers who received death threats after landing on Turning Points USA's Professor Watchlist. As a result, he announced he was moving to Europe. And then this happened.

This kind of harassment and abuse of scholars is Charlie Kirk's legacy and it's only getting worse.

But here’s the thing: Abortion, Every Day has learned that Cash once wrote an entire pamphlet calling oral contraceptives “chemical abortion.” In it, he claimed that “all forms of the birth control pill” kill a “human being”. Unless by some miracle there’s another Richard Cash in South Carolina who worked with Pastors for Life, the Republican legislator wrote that birth control pills “induce changes in the uterine lining so that if conception does occur, implantation is prevented, thus inducing an abortion.”

This banger was my favorite, though: “Over time, a woman using birth control pills runs the definite and intentional risk of killing one or more of her children as a result. Therefore, it is morally unacceptable to be on the pill while engaging in sexual intercourse.”

This daily newsletter has asked its recipients to shout a little louder about the fact that the Trump administration is redefining contraception as abortion, with a view to censoring it online, so here’s said newsletter on the author of one of the state test bills which is laying the groundwork.

@benwhitelaw.bsky.social

Here's the tech powering ICE's deportation crackdown  | TechCrunch From phone spyware and facial recognition to phone unlocking technology and databases and more, this tech powers Trump's deportation machine.

Here's an updated list of all the technology ICE has in its arsenal to mass deport people.

We've added new sections on cell-site simulators and cellphone location data.

techcrunch.com/2025/10/08/h...

A/80/341: Threats to freedom of expression online in turbulent times In the present report, the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression focuses on a paradigm shift in the governance of social media platforms ...

Strong report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Protection of Freedom of Expression on "the paradigm shift" in the governance of social media platforms that has "alarming consequences for freedom of expression online". www.ohchr.org/en/documents...

Apropos of nothing, I saw "A House of Dynamite" in the cinema before it goes on Netflix, and without spoiling anything, this is ... a bad idea.

Fig.7 US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem speaks at the so-called "Terrorism Confinement Center" in Tecoluca, El Salvador on March 26, 2025. In her speech, she threatens migrants without valid papers with detention: "If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face." 16 More recently in 2024, the images have become creepier and more cruel, as was the case in-speaking of remigration-the sexy racism mash-up video and AfD party song, "Remigration Hit" (Fig. 6). The music video is deliberately audacious in creating an AI-generated visual echo of the infamous May 2024 dance party on the island of Sylt at which elite young Germans were captured on film singing, , "Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus.' "s "Aryan" pilots and gyrating flight attendants cram scores of abjected and depressed black and brown men onto hundreds of airplanes and send them away into the blue sky. This is a different kind of arousal or rush, a flagrant display of a felt sense of virile superiority to brown and black men. I think we can read here a shift over the five years between 2019 and 2024: from sexualized danger-mongering (though that hasn't gone away either—in fact the other parties, from the Christian Democrats to the Greens, are now jumping on that band-wagon)* to a mode of full-on braggadocio, where Schadenfreude reigns and-as Adam Serwer put it about Trumpism-"the cruelty is the point." There is, apparently, delicious pleasure in being able to cause hurt. The secret memo of fascism to its followers is not repression. On the contrary, it's a message of permission, of license and impunity. Or as political theorist Robyn Marasco notes, it's all about participation in power.® Indeed, similar forms of sexy racism are embodied by Trump's Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem (Fig. 7).' 17

What Can We Do With the Right’s Delight in Pain? Right-wing authoritarianism lures people away from the promise of democracy, peace, and equality toward destructive violence by offering one key appeal: pleasure in harming other people.

This review prompted me to go buy this monograph today at ye olde feminist bookstore: postmodern fascism is not just sadistic, it is erotic.
jacobin.com/2025/09/herz...

Trump’s State Department Wants to Use Tech Policy to Remake Europe In Its Image | TechPolicy.Press Tech policy is a key part of the Trump administration's dramatic project to replace the US's traditional European alliances, Dean Jackson writes.

A secret meeting with X. A senior State Dept. advisor just out of college. The VP's speech in Munich. Pressure on European regulators.

What do they share? They're all part of an agenda to turn the transatlantic alliance into a far right international:

www.techpolicy.press/trumps-state...

I wrote about an under-appreciated aspect of AAUP v. Rubio. It is the first case of the Trump Era to explicitly identify and reject the primary and most pernicious form of speech suppression employed by this Administration: Chill.

balkin.blogspot.com/2025/10/aaup...

Police Said They Surveilled Woman Who Had an Abortion for Her 'Safety.' Court Records Show They Considered Charging Her With a Crime Court records show that the narrative Flock and a Texas Sheriff's Office has told the public isn't the whole story, and that police were conducting a 'death investigation' into the abortion.

NEW: In May, a Texas police department said they used the powerful Flock surveillance network against a woman who had an abortion "for her safety"

Newly obtained court records show it was a 'death investigation,' and they considered charging her with a crime

www.404media.co/police-said-...

einen Swing! 💃

also: you need to view Ofcom’s OSA moves against live-streaming in this particular context. The insurrection will not be live streamed. Because the children.

Yes I am *great fun* at parties in 2025

On the day it happens, and it will, the executive power provisions within the Communications Act of 1934 and the National Emergencies Act of 1976 will allow him to kill switch the US internet. He will. Plan for that now, because it includes your US-based cloud storage and hosted SAAS applications.

CC: the academic readers of my dissertation who got to the part where I discussed Thiel and probably wondered what I was smoking

ROSS