By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | September 28 2026
EU’s Council is again pushing for the new chat control regulation to allow the bloc’s police to order internet companies to scan people’s private communications for illegal content in “parts of a service” for a period of time, rather than having to obtain a warrant to target a specific suspect.
This is one of the three key points from a note (PDF) prepared for the sixth and potentially final trilogue on the legislation, also known as Chat Control 2.0, that is to take place on Tuesday, 29 September. The document, dated September 18, was leaked from the Council and is marked as a “presidency note.”
The Council, the European Parliament (EP) and the European Commission (EC) will be negotiating behind closed doors, with the latter represented by Commissioner for Internal Affairs Magnus Brunner.
The other two key points are that the Council believes limiting searches to specific suspects would “not generate any added value compared to the possibilities already existing under criminal law,” and that it wants the scope of the new rules to remain broad, covering not only known illegal photo and video content, but also new material, and “the solicitation of children.”
The note is based on previous discussions and reveals that the EP is willing to accept an approach that requires search plans, but with the caveat that they must be “targeted” and subject to review by judicial or independent administrative authorities.
The Council, however, wants searches to be authorized in “parts of a service or, where possible, to individual users,” and that the search plan would have to include the technologies used and other relevant safeguards, again subject to review.
The note reveals that the Council also wants to make sure that any mechanism to review and possibly suspend searches “should operate in a manner that does not deter providers from carrying out own-initiative searches.”
As a last resort, the Council will ask member states if they would be willing to drop “own-initiative searches or detection orders on non-public content” from the scope of the regulation – but only if no other compromise can be found “providing at least for the same level of effectiveness as the current voluntary practice.”
Former German member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party Patrick Breyer has no doubt that what is being proposed is “mass surveillance by another name,” and that the goal of the Council, Commission and some member states is to “permanently normalize mass surveillance across Europe.”
Breyer said that the proposal to scan “parts of a service” would in reality mean that “every user in the EU” would be subject to this.
And, he noted, this is not a new system that would replace the old one, but would rather exist in parallel with it. The old system, meanwhile, “is a proven disaster,” the former MEP said, revealing that in Germany, over half of investigations target minors for “consensual sexting” while 75 percent of flagged chats are “not actionable.”
The Council’s own legal service has in the past said that scanning an entire service or parts of it is “highly probable” to be found “general and indiscriminate” surveillance, and therefore unlawful.
MEMO | September 28, 2026
Greek journalist and former European Parliament member Stelios Kouloglou filed a criminal complaint Monday against officials at Israeli spyware maker NSO Group, alleging that his phone was infected with Pegasus while he served on a parliamentary inquiry into surveillance software, Anadolu reports.
The complaint was submitted to the Athens prosecutor’s office, Greek public broadcaster ERT reported. Kouloglou said a forensic examination by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab found that his phone had been infected around Oct. 21, 2022, and again on March 6 and 7, 2023.
At the time, he was a substitute member of the European Parliament committee investigating the use of Pegasus, Predator and similar spyware. The complaint said the infections coincided with significant phases of the committee’s work.
Kouloglou alleges the spyware could have given those responsible access to communications, contacts, documents, location information and data related to his political work. The complaint seeks an investigation into alleged breaches of communications privacy, unauthorized access to data and violations of personal data law.
Speaking after filing the complaint, Kouloglou said surveillance was an issue affecting all citizens and expressed hope that Greek prosecutors would investigate the case.
His lawyer, Zacharias Kesses, said no action had previously been taken despite the allegations being known.
The future of the planet depends on uprooting Jewish supremacy
By Nahida Exiled Palestinian | September 28, 2026
There is no running away from the fact that there are extremely troubling ideas throughout the Torah, Talmud, Mishneh Torah and Tanya.
Ideas like “choseness”, “promised land”, “return to Zion”, “building the temple”, “tikkun olam”… etc come from no other than Torah itself, soaked in supremacy, dominance aspiration, deception and mass-killing.
We can no longer hide our heads in the sand, pretending not to know, pretending not to see.
Jewish anti-Zionists should move on now, and use all their activism outside the Palestine solidarity movement, direct their work towards their people where serious discussions happen, plans are drawn, funds are raised, weapons are shipped and is genocide plotted and enacted. They should work with their own Jewish communities to try to get them out of the mess of supremacy and genocide they got themselves into.
Instead of wasting their time denying any links between Judaism and Zionism, instead of throwing their energy on controlling the Palestinian discourse, and instead of relentlessly monitoring us, Semite Palestinians lest we slip and “conflate Zionism with Judaism”or say something “antisemitic”, that may offend a Jew, Anti-Zionist Jews should change course and adopt a different role to play.
They should shift their activism within, try to effect change within their own Jewish communities who by vast majority are still supporting the Genocide with all their wealth, their leverage, all their influence and all their might.
They should leave us Palestinians to lead our Liberation Movement, and to narrate our authentic, untamed, unfiltered, unkosherised story without censoring, blacklisting, slandering or intimidation.
The future of the planet depends on the uprooting of Jewish supremacy, deception, hatred and violence from their ideology, and joining the human race as equals not as “chosen”.
Failing to confront the elephant in the room would end up in a World Nakba, like nothing we have ever seen before.
This is a WARNING, a mere WARNING of a brewing global disaster, I see in the horizon, and I am praying that together we would be able to prevent before it’s too late.
MEMO | September 27, 2026
British police on Sunday arrested two demonstrators during a pro-Palestine protest outside the ruling Labour Party’s annual conference in Liverpool, Anadolu reports.
Protesters gathered outside the conference venue, with several holding homemade signs expressing support for Palestine Action, a group banned by the UK government.
Police officers moved to arrest an elderly man who was sitting beneath a tree, before making a second arrest involving a protester holding a sign supporting the banned group.
A spokesperson for Defend Our Juries, which organized the protest, said it had hoped the new prime minister, Andy Burnham, “would do the sensible thing and bin the ban on Palestine Action given the weight of public pressure to do so and the escalating amount of resources required in enforcing it.”
Nearly 74,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 175,000 others wounded in Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza since 2023. The offensive has also destroyed around 90% of the enclave’s infrastructure.
Despite a ceasefire that took effect last October, the Israeli army has continued daily attacks in Gaza, killing over 1,400 Palestinians and injuring around 5,000 others, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip.
RT | September 24, 2026
Germany’s opposition lawmakers have accused Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government of seeking to create a “secret police” by dramatically expanding the powers of the country’s intelligence agencies.
The accusations came during the first parliamentary debate on the reform on Thursday, with lawmakers from the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Left and the Greens raising concerns over surveillance and fundamental rights. The government argues that the changes are needed to counter growing security threats.
Under a reform approved by the cabinet last month, the BND foreign intelligence agency and the BfV domestic security service would gain broader operational powers, allowing them to move beyond primarily gathering and analyzing information.
Among the proposed changes, the BND could sabotage foreign companies, penetrate foreign IT systems and disable weapons deemed a threat to Germany. The BfV, meanwhile, could secretly enter homes and access computers and mobile phones under certain circumstances.
German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the reform would usher in a “new era” by turning the country’s intelligence services into “genuine intelligence agencies” capable of actively countering threats. He said Germany must bring its services to the level of its European partners.
AfD MP Gottfried Curio branded the proposed overhaul of the BfV “Stasi 2.0,” referring to East Germany’s notorious secret police, and called the reform a “coup against the rule of law.” The AfD, however, supports granting the BND greater operational powers.
The BfV has itself been locked in a legal battle with the AfD. In 2025, the agency designated Germany’s most popular party a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organization, but a Cologne court in February barred it from applying that classification while the case proceeds.
The ruling came months before the AfD scored major gains in regional elections. It won 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt earlier this month and 38.3% in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Sunday.
Green MP Konstantin von Notz said granting the BfV such extensive powers would be a “grave mistake” and questioned whether parts of the reform would survive scrutiny by the Constitutional Court. He nevertheless backed giving the BND greater powers.
Left Party MP Clara Buenger went further, warning that the BfV could become a “new German secret police.”
“Fundamental rights are being trampled on here,” she said, arguing that the agency would gain powers traditionally reserved for police.
The debate comes as Merz’s government braces for growing AfD influence at the regional level. The Telegraph and Die Welt reported in July that Berlin was developing a “secret plan” to counter potential “obstructionism” by regional authorities, allowing the federal government to bypass them in a crisis.
The German government wants the intelligence reform to take effect at the beginning of 2027. It still requires approval from both the Bundestag and Bundesrat.
The Cradle | September 25, 2026
Israeli settler gangs are using drones to terrorize Palestinians across the occupied West Bank, harassing families and guiding armed raids that have killed Palestinians, The New Arab (TNA) reported on 25 September.
“When herders left their homes in the morning, the drones would pursue and shadow them; if they approached certain areas, settlers would gather to attack and drive them away. Eventually, the drones began monitoring residents inside their homes around the clock, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop them,” Rabie Abu Naim, a displaced resident of Al-Khalayel, east of Ramallah, told TNA.
Settlers later rigged the drones with speakers blaring abuse and orders to leave, and drones were also used to drop tear gas on targeted communities, as violent assaults wounded many until terrified families fled, the report said.
Abu Naim also pointed to the killing of a boy and a young man in Al-Mughayyir days ago, saying drones “played a major role” in a raid that began with a drone tracking a flock of sheep, after which settlers moved in to steal the animals while shielded by the Israeli army, which “killed the two victims in cold blood during the incident.”
In Mikhmas, shepherd Mohammed Abu Siyam told TNA that settlers sent a drone after his 19-year-old son, Nasrallah, and other young men searching for livestock stolen from the village in February.
With the drone watching their every move, armed illegal settlers lay in wait for the young men, then opened fire, killing Nasrallah and wounding others.
Another Palestinian living in Hajjah, near Qalqilya, told TNA that settler drones fly so close to village homes that families fear the machines will crash through their windows, leaving residents under constant watch and feeling that “privacy is non-existent, and everyone feels constantly threatened.”
Illegal Israeli settlement councils have recently begun arming settlers with drones to film, scout, and watch the areas around outposts, building on earlier Israeli funding that equipped outposts with drones as part of a so-called security package.
Palestinians, meanwhile, are barred from owning drones even for their work, and the Israeli army has arrested numerous Palestinian photojournalists over the past three years for having them, citing a military order that has banned Palestinians from possessing the devices since 2017.
Israeli occupation forces have also raided toy shops across West Bank cities dozens of times, confiscating every drone on the shelves, including those made for children, and threatening shop owners with arrest if they sell them.
In May, OCHA documented settlers using drones to chase residents of Arab al-Mleihat, a community since emptied.
Salah al-Khawaja of the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission told TNA that the constant surveillance of Palestinian homes can become “an additional factor driving families to leave the areas where they live.”
RT | September 24, 2026
The EU has published a wide range of reports detailing what social media companies like TikTok and Meta are doing to comply with its Digital Services Act (DSA). The reports detail the extreme censorship needed to stay on Brussels’ good side.
Under the European Commission’s “voluntary Code of Conduct on Disinformation,” the largest online platforms operating in the EU are required to submit biannual reports explaining their efforts to combat so-called “disinformation.” Although adherence to the code is described as “voluntary,” those who do not comply are subject to fines under the DSA, which came into force in 2023.
The commission published reports by Meta, TikTok, Google, Twitch, and more than two dozen other platforms on Wednesday. Each report spans hundreds of pages, and details the speech restrictions and censorship policies put in place at the behest of the EU.
These include restrictions on political speech surrounding elections, which the EU has mandated in every major European vote since 2024, under the pretext of fighting “Russian interference.” According to documents released by the US House Judiciary Committee earlier this year, these measures have almost always been used “to disadvantage conservative or populist political parties.”
In its report, TikTok admitted that it removed more than half a million posts concerning elections in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, Hungary, Malta, Portugal, and Slovenia this year. RT has covered the EU’s efforts to interfere in the Bulgarian and Hungarian elections in depth, and found that TikTok came under particularly intense pressure from Brussels, after its failure to implement sufficiently draconian restrictions during Romania’s presidential election in 2024.
Each report is hundreds of pages long, and every major social media company admitted that they now defer to EU-approved “fact-checkers” to police content on their platforms. Meta explained that it now automatically down-ranks content flagged by fact-checkers, while YouTube stated that it has trained AI models to pre-emptively remove content it thinks would fall foul of these groups.
Multiple reports specify that the platforms themselves must pay the fact-checkers’ salary. These fact-checkers flagged more than 14 million posts on Facebook in the first six months of this year alone.
Every social media platform devoted a chapter in its report to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, with Facebook noting that all posts on the conflict are subject to monitoring for “disinformation and misinformation” by pro-EU fact-checkers.
Russian media outlets are banned from Facebook, while Ukrainian outlets are free to operate, and Kiev is permitted to fundraise on the platform.
Despite mentioning “disinformation” more than a dozen times, the DSA does not define the term.
For the last several days, Israeli forces have blocked the main entrances and exits to the central West Bank governorate of Ramallah and Al-Bireh, further restricting Palestinian movement.
The punitive measure was taken after a Palestinian man carried out a shooting attack near the illegal settlement of Halamish, located to the northwest of Ramallah in the Occupied West Bank, on Sunday, September 20.
The attack resulted in the killing of an Israeli settler. The assailant was also injured and later identified as Qadri Samara (37). Samara was shot at by Israeli soldiers stationed at an army post near the site of the attack.
Although Samara managed to withdraw from the scene, later in the day Israeli forces carried out a raid at the HClinic Hospital in Ramallah and arrested him.
Following his arrest, the Israeli army also stormed Samara’s town of Biddu, northwest of Jerusalem, on Sunday evening, raiding his home and surrounding worshippers inside a mosque.
In a security meeting held on Monday, September 21, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called for the controversial death penalty law, mandated in March, to be used against Qadri Samara.
The law has faced widespread condemnation from international human rights groups for multiple reasons, mainly because it applies exclusively to Palestinians, while exempting Israelis convicted of the same offenses from the same penalty.
Both Israeli soldiers and illegal settlers have enjoyed total impunity despite murdering thousands of Palestinians over the past two decades in the occupied West Bank, a territory regarded under Palestinian jurisdiction in accordance with international law.
Forced disappearances have plagued Mexico for decades. In 2019, something remarkable happened: Twenty-one disappeared people were found, alive. They had been toiling in narco-slavery camps, an under-covered aspect of Mexico’s illicit drug trade. But there wasn’t a happy ending. (This story was originally published in Spanish by Quinto Elemento Lab):
Freedom had not been kind to the captives. Few had been able to regain even the wretched standard of living that had pushed them into the arms of the cartels in the first place. Many were scarred by paranoia, trapped in addiction or suffering mental illnesses. Some had been abandoned by their partners or families. More than one, we learned, died after being rescued, some by their own hand. We came to feel that these men had been triply betrayed: first by the narcos who had lured them into the mountains, then by the government that failed to look for them, and finally by a society that refused to welcome them back into its fold.
We are telling their stories not because we hope to secure justice, but simply to establish the truth. This was a modest ambition shared by one of our interlocutors, Andrés. He told us that many of the survivors’ accounts had been doubted. He’d even read criticisms on social media: That’s what they deserve for being shiftless and lazy. “Those people should try thinking before they speak, because they don’t know when they might suddenly find themselves in a similar situation,” Andrés said. “They might be lucky enough to be rescued, or unlucky enough to die out there. I decided to give this interview because this situation’s not going to change. In Mexico, there’s sexual slavery, human trafficking, forced labour. This didn’t start yesterday; it’s been going on for many years.”
Login