6 Aug 2026, 15:26 UTC54 views1 reactionsread 6 August 2026 Pakistan's Crackdown on Speech Draws International Alarm
Censorship blocking · 04.08.2026
Pakistan continues assembling a full toolkit for stifling free speech, and this time the international human rights community's response came swiftly. ARTICLE 19, together with Amnesty International, HRCP, Digital Rights Foundation, and a dozen other organizations, sent a letter to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and two minister…
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6 Aug 2026, 13:16 UTC75 views1 reactionsread 6 August 2026 Data Sovereignty Isn't the Same as Resilience
Surveillance control · 05.08.2026
Southeast Asia is racing to build data centers, and along with them — data sovereignty laws. The logic is simple: sensitive information should physically stay within the country. It sounds like concern for security and citizen protection, and in theory, it is.
But the industry is already hinting that the conversation needs to move beyon…
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6 Aug 2026, 09:31 UTC74 viewsread 6 August 2026 Zambia's 2026 vote: a test for keeping the internet on
Shutdowns · 05.08.2026
Zambia is preparing for elections on August 13, 2026, and more than 370 organizations from 106 countries have decided to remind President Hakainde Hichilema of a simple thing: it's better not to shut down the internet during voting. Yes, this has to be spelled out in a separate letter — because, unfortunately, the practice is not uncommon.…
6 Aug 2026, 08:31 UTC83 viewsread 6 August 2026 China Tightens Exit Rules Citing Tech Security Risks
Surveillance control · 05.08.2026
China has tightened its exit rules, citing risks to technological security. The wording is as vague as it gets, but the gist is simple: citizens' departures can now be restricted under the pretext of protecting certain technological secrets.
What exactly counts as a security threat remains an open question — and that's no acciden…
6 Aug 2026, 07:58 UTC88 views0 reactionsread 6 August 2026 Roskomnadzor Launches Massive VPN Crackdown
Censorship blocking · 06.08.2026
Roskomnadzor appears to have carried out one of the largest crackdowns on VPN services in the history of Russian internet blocking.
On August 4, one popular VPN service reported a new attack on circumvention tools that had already been underway for several days. The service didn't disclose details, but the problem turned out to be widespre…
5 Aug 2026, 11:16 UTC113 viewsread 6 August 2026 Data Consolidation: When Convenience Becomes Surveillance
Surveillance control · 04.08.2026
The Center for Democracy and Technology has released a report with a wonderfully simple title — "What Is a Database?" It sounds like a first-year computer science question, but it's not: this is an examination of how the U.S. federal government is stitching together data long scattered across states and municipalities into un…
4 Aug 2026, 15:26 UTC114 viewsread 6 August 2026 AI Access Gap: Infrastructure, Skills, and a Cautionary Tale
04.08.2026
AI for everyone — that's what the marketing says. In practice, it's business as usual: the pie gets divided wherever there's already infrastructure, skills, and institutions in place, while everyone else gets crumbs and an instruction to "adapt."
Here are the dry numbers. The US holds more than 5,000 data centers — 10 times more than any other …
4 Aug 2026, 13:26 UTC109 viewsread 6 August 2026 DDoS attacks as a data-driven censorship tool
Censorship blocking · 04.08.2026
Turns out DDoSing independent media isn't just script-kiddie mischief — it's a fully formed censorship instrument. With actual scientific methodology, no less.
Here are the facts. This year, at least seven exiled Belarusian media outlets were hit by DDoS attacks, and staff link them directly to coverage of political topics. In Serbia, a …
4 Aug 2026, 10:51 UTC105 views1 reactionsread 6 August 2026 EU extends chat control scanning regime to 2028
Surveillance control · 04.08.2026
The EU has extended the temporary "chat control" regime until April 2028. The vote went off without drama: 25 countries in favor, one against, one abstained — via written procedure, with no extra noise, in the spirit of "we're just extending what's already working anyway."
The essence of the regime: platforms get the right to voluntar…
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4 Aug 2026, 09:21 UTC111 viewsread 6 August 2026 Italy quietly blocks abortion info sites online
Censorship blocking · 04.08.2026
In Italy, legal abortion exists only to the extent that doctors are willing to perform it — and that, it turns out, is a problem: 67% of the country's gynecologists refuse the procedure on "moral grounds," and some hospitals report a 100% refusal rate. On top of that, there's a mandatory week-long waiting period, which easily pushes a p…
4 Aug 2026, 07:57 UTC120 views1 reactionsread 6 August 2026 Yarovaya Law at Ten: Failure That Reshaped FSB Power
Surveillance control · 03.08.2026
The "Yarovaya Law" turns ten. In all this time, it never learned to store all of Russians' internet traffic — but it did manage to reshape the balance of power within the FSB.
In 2022, the number of fake bomb threat reports grew almost tenfold, exceeding 20,000. Courts were evacuated several times a day, and the FSB's Second Serv…
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3 Aug 2026, 10:46 UTC131 views2 reactionsread 6 August 2026 Cockroaches Outmaneuver Censors in India
Censorship blocking · 03.08.2026
Cockroaches vs. the state — and the cockroaches are winning.
Indian regulators went for the old playbook to shut down the Cockroach Janta Party: Section 69A of the IT Act, blocking the domain cockroachjantaparty.org, notices against the @CockroachParty account on X. Classic move — chop off the head, and the movement dies.
It didn't. The part…
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Showing the 12 most recent of 20 posts we hold for @brandmauer_report. View and reaction counts are the latest single reading for each post, not a live figure, and a recent post is still accumulating both. A view count marked ≈ was rounded by Telegram before we ever saw it — t.me prints views in full below 1,000 and to three significant figures above, so ≈1,200,000 means somewhere between 1,150,000 and 1,249,999. Unmarked counts are exact. Text is reproduced from the public post preview and truncated for length.