#rogue tech

"The problem is that there’s no way to reliably verify someone’s age without verifying who they are. A platform cannot magically discern that a user is 16 without collecting identifying information, whether through government documents such as a passport, payment information like a credit card, or other identity-disclosing data. Whether that data is stored by the platform itself or outsourced to a vendor, the result is always the same: A user’s offline identity is forever linked with their online behavior.

"Democrats and Republicans in Congress have struck a deal on a bill they say will help keep children and teens safe online. The KIDS Act could pass on the House floor as soon as next week; if enacted, it would fundamentally change the way everyone — not just kids — accesses the internet.

At stake is your ability to use many social media platforms without revealing your identity. 

That’s because the KIDS Act at least strongly incentivizes — and, for some services, outright requires — age verification. Many platforms will turn to age verification to avoid potential liability under the law. Companies like X, video-sharing services like Vimeo, and others with a history of users’ populating social feeds with edgy content may be required to verify users’ ages because they host a certain amount of content deemed “sexual material harmful to minors,” a term that the KIDS Act defines broadly. 

That’s a big problem for people who need to be able to use the internet anonymously, since, as Taylor Lorenz has previously written about in The Intercept, “there’s no way to reliably verify someone’s age without verifying who they are.” 

Threats to online anonymity harm everyone, but one group is often overlooked: journalists and the sources who talk to them. Age verification requirements will help the Trump administration carry out its vendetta against the press by creating new avenues to identify journalists’ confidential sources. [...]

In 1926, radio station WJAZ in Chicago changed its frequency to one previously reserved for Canadian stations (by an informal agreement between the United States and Canada) without getting permission to make the change, and was charged by the federal government with "wave piracy". The resulting legal battle found that the Radio Act of 1912 did not allow the US government to require stations to operate on specific frequencies, and the result was the passage of the Radio Act of 1927 to strengthen the government's regulatory authority.

On February 5, 1926, while litigation with the U.S. government was ongoing, the station broadcast the operetta "The Pirate". For publicity, the engineering staff was photographed wearing pirate outfits in the transmitter room.

Original caption: "THE CREW OF A 'PIRATE STATION' IN ACTION: Undaunted by the disciplinary action of Uncle Sam in bringing suit against WJAZ on the ground that it has been pirating wave-lengths other than those assigned to it, the outlaw Chicago station recently—and appropriately—broadcast the operetta 'The Pirate'".

"Global interconnectedness [allows] individual actors in key positions of power to influence decisions across the entire network. Nowhere is this danger more evident than in the now-globalized banking sector. The serious consequences of interconnected global banking and finance have recently threatened the left-wing German solidarity organization Rote Hilfe (Red Aid). ...

Rote Hilfe is a German solidarity organization that provides material and political support for individuals and groups on the Left affected by state repression. ... Although it is regularly attacked by Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU), it is not a banned organization. ...

Until recently, Rote Hilfe held bank accounts with Sparkasse Göttinger and the cooperative bank GLS. ... But in December 2025, within the span of a few days, the two banks sent notifications of the imminent termination of Rote Hilfe’s accounts — without providing any further explanation. The accounts were to be shut down by the end of the year. Without access to organizational bank accounts, Rote Hilfe would suddenly find itself completely unable to collect dues or distribute funds to activists and organizations in need. Since the organization supports activists financially, through paying fines and funding ongoing legal help, the consequences could have been disastrous.

This practice is known as“ debanking”: a form of repression aimed at excluding certain organizations and activities from sociopolitical life without needing to resort to an outright ban. Debanking exploits civil law — the right of banks to refuse services to clients — to limit political activity. Without a bank account, an organization’s potential actions are severely restricted and even simple transactions become nearly impossible. The phasing out of cash payments only makes this threat graver.

One of the most insidious aspects of debanking is that the victims have almost no ability to formally protest the action. Maintaining an account is a private legal transaction between a customer and bank, to which there is no entitlement under civil law. In other words, you usually cannot bring a lawsuit against a bank for dropping you as a customer. Banks can open and close accounts as they please. Nor do they have to give any reason for closing an account. Debanking is in effect like a ban with no recourse to the rule of law or even right to demand an appeal to the decision.

Rote Hilfe was just one of a growing number of organizations facing repression through debanking in Germany and across the world. Only a few months before, GLS announced the termination of the accounts of the German Communist Party (DKP) [this is bonkers] and the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC) [this is evil, ABC just helps with legal fees and supports people in prison] in Dresden, also effective for the end of 2025. Berlin’s Postbank terminated several accounts held by the VVN-BdA (Association of Persecutees of Nazi Persecution – Federation of Anti-Fascists) taking effect on March 31, 2026. ...

It wasn’t clear to Rote Hilfe members why they were being targeted and why these account closures are happening now. ... A few weeks earlier, the Trump administration placed the so-called “Antifa-Ost,” along with Italian and Greek groups, on the SDGT (Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organization) list. Financial transactions with these groups are prohibited for US citizens and subject to criminal prosecution. At the same time, the US Treasury Department’s OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) list was updated, prohibiting US companies from conducting business with these groups and requiring that their assets be frozen whenever possible.

But what does this American decision have to do with German banks and Rote Hilfe? The problem starts with the fact that no organization by the name of “Antifa-Ost” exists. It is a media construct. It is just a name used to lump together various regional anti-fascist groups and individuals in order to subject them to legal prosecution. Rote Hilfe offers legal assistance to activists accused of membership in this organization, through its “We Are All Antifa” campaign, which was launched in response to the proceedings against antifa activists accused of attacking neo-Nazis in Budapest in 2023 and other recent actions within Germany.

Since Rote Hilfe provides political and financial support in pending legal proceedings, it can be considered associated with “Antifa-Ost.” ... Suspicion that the threatened debanking of Rote Hilfe was linked to these proceedings was confirmed over the course of the subsequent court case launched by Rote Hilfe to appeal their account closures. In its written statements, Sparkasse cited Rote Hilfe’s involvement in the “Antifa-Ost” trials. It argued that the classification of “Antifa-Ost” as a foreign terrorist organization had created a new legal situation, which posed new due-diligence obligations and negatively impacted its risk assessment. It also claimed that this would lead to reputational damage.

1) don't put all your eggs in one basket

archives need to be paper and digital, public and private sector, centralised and decentralised, fully legal / by the book and rogue, in vaults and cabinets and servers and torrents

create as many redundancies as you can: make copies, and copies of the copies, and copies of the copies of the copies, ad nauseam; anyone anywhere who can make copies, should

spread the physical hubs (paper stacks or servers) geographically, in as many places as possible; you never know what kind of natural disaster or man-made horror will take out a whole building, city, region, or continent tomorrow

2) entropy is a bitch, think longterm

pick methods that are more likely to last

schedule regular copying: you gotta transfer the stuff to a new medium before the old one falls apart, so have some idea when it's expected to fall apart

3) keep converting to new formats

no format becomes obsolete instantly, there's always a transition period; use transition periods to furiously convert everything

4) indexing and searching is as important as the content itself

self-explanatory

5) eyes on the prize: the end goal is public access

if a random nobody, with no status and no money, can't access it easily, freely, and anonymously, the job is only half-done; you've built the back-end and neglected the front-end; get someone to complete it ASAP, because now it's just sitting pretty and isn't doing anything; or isn't doing enough, in any case

bonus: use. fucking. torrents.

It is truly bonkers that the bittorrent protocol is not being used for archiving. It's an ideal method for digital archiving and it should be standard procedure. If a university has stuff on a hard disk, it can put it on its server, and if it can put it on a server, it can torrent it and seed it 24/7. If the same archive is useful for another university on the other side of the planet, that one can download it and then stay in the swarm, also seeding it. If a library or city council anywhere on earth finds the archive of interest, it can do the same. The more the merrier, every download is a potential redundancy and every seeder is an actual redundancy.