The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change.

People will see in the media all of these disclosures.

They'll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally

to create greater control over American society and global society.

But they won't be willing to take the risks, necessarily, to stand up and fight.

And the months ahead, the years ahead, it's only going to get worse.

The one too, a couple of years ahead, the third year and last year.

Of course, the first year I have been thinking about this.

The president of the United States, an many years ahead of the country,

What is happening everybody

Simon

Back

Another episode

A little intro there

From our boy

Eduardo Snowden

That was

Almost 13 years ago

Can you believe that?

And here we are

Here we are

13 years later

And his greatest fears

Essentially have come true

Unfortunately

So this is going to be

Kind of a packed episode

Got a lot of things to cover

Gonna go a little bit in depth

And some background

And some clarity

Um

different things that I think have been circulating around definitely the internet the last few days

that I've seen mostly from different YouTube personalities and people on the socials but

there yeah there's a lot going on so this episode is 53 recorded today March 12th

2026 9 30 Mountain Standard Time in the U.S. I was laughing so I can't remember I was going to try to

remember what the UTC time was and I just totally slipped my head so this episode is locked out how

governments and Google are closing the open internet and it's a pretty pretty bold statement

there and hopefully I'm wrong but it definitely seems that we are going in that direction so

yeah that's uh that's going to be like the main headline uh I'm going to try to get to some of

some important topics some of them not so important some of them are just informational

If I don't get to all of them, of course, as always, the show notes link will be in

the notes below. You can click on that, get to all of the different resources, my notes,

links, all of that fun stuff. So one of the biggest things is Motorola announcing a partnership

with Graphene OS. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that. But the main crux of what I'm

going to be talking about is pretty much what the title said. And that is, there's two massive

shifts happening right now, one driven by governments and one driven by Google. Of course,

there's more than that at play, but that's what I'm focusing on in this episode.

And they're both aimed at the same thing, ending the era of being anonymous or ungated access to

digital tools and platforms. So we're going to talk a little bit about some of the different

legislation that's going on in the US and internationally, and that whole thought,

everything that's kind of revolving around.

that where your os is becoming an identity checkpoint before you even open an app so we're

kind of getting to the the root level here and second uh google announced you know starting

this year in september that every app installed on a certified android device must come from a

developer who is registered with google that involves you know submitting government issue

id paying a fee and agreeing to the google's terms even for apps that are being installed

outside of the google play store which are often referred to as is side loading which i just call

installing applications so by 2027 that'll cover 95 of android devices on planet earth so uh separately

you know each story in itself is kind of alarming together they reveal a larger coordinated if not

deliberate deliberately coordinated uh effort closing off the open internet as we know it today

So governments demanding to know who you are, platforms demanding to know who built the tools that you use, and the apps that are most threatened are exactly the ones that privacy conscious users depend on, whether it's F-Droid or anonymous open source tools and utilities built by people who never wanted a relationship with a corporate gatekeeper in the first place.

So in this episode, we're going to break down kind of both sides to the story and kind of just in plain English as best as I can and connect the dots between those stories and walk through what you can do right now to protect yourself from Google phones to VPNs and end-to-end encrypted communications.

So a couple other stories of notes. ISIS using the same Microsoft tech Israel uses to surveil and go after Palestinians. Security researchers warn about age verification laws and building a global surveillance system.

have a link to that as well as tiktok has come out and said they won't add into end encryption

for user safety which is mind-blowing ad guard launching both uh for vr both their first ad

blockers and uh a trustee what they're calling trusty vpn through ad guard which you know if

you're a meta quest vr user those might be of interest to you and then um of course there's

some mandates coming out of mexico uh mandating biometric sim registration for all phone numbers

so uh it might get to that article actually as well so if any of that is of interest to you stick

around if not uh totally understand catch you in the next one uh for those that uh are sticking

around i just want to give a quick shout out to those who support the podcast both through time

effort and talent and those are you know very much appreciated those efforts as a collective

collective do help significantly keep the show going and hosting and all these different things

and moderating. So I'm just going to give a quick thank you because we don't do sponsors. We don't

do advertisers. You are the producers. You all. Me, I'm just a dude behind the mic gathering the

information, setting up some stuff and just doing the best I can. But really, this community has

grown beyond really my expectations. Over 436 people sitting in the Matrix channel right now.

And that's just really amazing. Every time I'm dropping into the Matrix channel,

there's more and more conversations happening and good, good resources being shared back and forth.

We do have a couple of smaller group chats, both in SimpleX and another one in Signal.

And then we also have an off-topic channel. All of those resources can be found over at

closednetwork.io. And so I want to give a shout out to our Patreons, Michael Bates,

Privacy Badass. I can't talk. Privacy Badass tier.

Along with David, as well as TK, Vo also, and Mr. Milkshake, privacy supporter, as well as Mr. Milk Mustache.

Sorry, I misspoke there.

I did not mean to detract from your name.

And as well as Hutch, thank you all for that ongoing support.

It's greatly appreciated.

And also from our lightning boosters, Bond, Wartime, Circus Media, SNX, Firefly Go, a couple of anonymous, some big, huge supporters.

Bond is number one.

Lightning supporters over 108,000 Satoshis.

For those that don't know what sats and Satoshis are, those are people donating through Podcast 2.0 applications and sending Bitcoin, basically, just through the app.

Over the lightning network, Wartime, over 22,800 sats, Circus Media, 48,663, Firefly Go, just in the last episode alone.

alone 6,500 sats coming in a total of 17,567 satoshis just totally thank you thank you all

for that uh love and support and and i really appreciate it i'm gonna just talk uh real quick

about the patreon stuff i'm gonna keep the patreon up and i have some goals and ideas for that as i've

been kind of working behind the scenes on infrastructure i moved the website over from

wordpress to a ghost cms which is a open source content management system and it has the ability

to kind of do the same thing that patreon does so those that want to support financially that maybe

don't like patreon you can go directly to closed network.io you can set up an account with an alias

email account or whatever doesn't matter whatever works for you you can you can do a free or paid

subscription whatever works out for you economically is totally cool one of the benefits to signing up

for the free account over there

is I've been wanting to do this for a while, but kind of putting out a newsletter or at least

content via email. It will only be information sent from me, and it will only come through that

channel. I initially had the list building on the website going through MailChimp, but I didn't

really want to use MailChimp for the email marketing aspect, or not marketing, but the

newsletter because I just didn't really like all of the cookies and everything that they embed in

there, and you can't really opt out of it. Ghost is significantly better. It's more private-focused.

I'm the only one that sees the lists, and it's a little bit easier for me to have a central point

where I can create a post and email it out. I can embed a quick podcast in there or some audio or

some stories, some of my writings, those kinds of things, and some how-tos and tutorials as well.

that's going to be a little bit easier for me to do all through that one ghost cms platform and so

if you want to be signed up for that all you got to do is pop over and click subscribe yeah put in

a name could be fake name fake email whatever email alias you want to use the more the better

i love seeing email aliases in there it warms my heart so uh that's kind of where we're at the

website still um i have a lot of um content to add but the the primary links are there for if you go

to the website there is a link called community links and that is going to be basically the

breakdown for getting into the main matrix channel the off-topic channel and getting over to our forum

and show notes so still have the forum up uh it's not super active kind of just use it as a knowledge

based repository and i've got plans for that down the road but right now the main website closed

network.io is kind of the hub for everything and so you'll be able to get to the links uh from the

from the website and as well as on

under the podcast tab, um, I'm just embedded the yellow ball podcast feed in there as well as

links to the RSS directly. Or if you want to listen to it on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, whatever,

or you can just grab the RSS feed and add it to your favorite podcast player. Of course,

the podcast is in all major platforms. So if you just, you know, whatever podcast app you use

antenna pod or, you know, uh, podcast guru, whatever, whatever you should be able to just

search for closed network podcasting and it'll, it'll come up anyways. It's just those that want

to manually add stuff. Or if you don't like using an app, because a lot of people do listen through

the browser, you're welcome to just pop on over and, you know, click on whatever episode you want

and just hit play. And, uh, yeah, so that's kind of, kind of getting some streamlined. I talked about

this, uh, over the last few, a couple episodes about changing things up. And so, yeah, that's,

that's what I've decided to do for now. I don't know if I'll do this forever, uh, using

I don't know if I can't.

GoCMS, but it is open source, self-hosted. You can kind of keep things under one roof. And I'm

not also relying on a third party to send emails out. So those will all come directly from the

site. I want to give a quick thank you to our moderators on Intelligent 7, Mattis Max, always

in the forums and the Matrix channels and welcoming people. And even with their busy lives,

it's all volunteer. So I just want to say, I appreciate that. Thank you guys. And yeah,

if all of the channel links and everything are also in the show notes, so the Matrix channels

and all that fun stuff, you can follow me on Mastodon, Noster, X. I still am on X. Probably

will be there for a while. I don't know when I'll exit from there, but you know, if you want to

follow me, that's where I'm at. But you can also just subscribe through the website and I'll be

sending out more communique via that vehicle. So, uh, so

yeah, that's it. Without further ado, we're going to go and pop right into this debacle. I put a

lot of work into putting this together. So hopefully it conveys well, and you can kind of

simply understand and follow. If you watch YouTube, like some ordinary gamer or, you know, like

Mudahar, so just other privacy focused YouTube channels that have been talking about this in the

last week and even actually over the last year, especially with the Google stuff, but even more

so with the age verification, because we are really kind of in the home stretch of like, you really

can't hide from this. Even all, like a lot of mainstream Linux distributions are putting out

blog posts and things about how they're going to comply with some of these state laws and

international laws for the attestation of what age you are lumped into a group, and then that'll

create a signal. So I'm going to

to kind of talk a little bit about that. And I also want to talk about, you know, really,

what does this mean? Because there are two parallel scenarios happening simultaneously

this year. There's scenario A, which is you buy a new phone, and before you reach the home screen,

it asks for your date of birth. And every app you install from that point forward gets a signal

about your age. So this is law in California, Louisiana, Illinois, Texas, Utah, and dozens of

other countries are following. And then there's scenario B, an anonymous developer has spent,

you know, one, two, three years building a privacy tool that helps people in authoritarian countries

communicate safely. And it's starting in September of this year. So, you know, six, seven months away,

that app is going to be blocked from being installed on 95% of Android phones unless that

developer hands their government.

ID to Google. And so there's a connecting thread here, both stories, right? They're about the same

thing. Who controls access to digital tools and what price do you pay to use them? So the stakes

for everyday users are, you don't have to be an activist or a journalist for this to affect you.

These changes reshape the phone and your pocket, the apps you can install and what companies

behind your device, what they know about you. So let's, let's just talk about the OS level

age verification, right? So the traditional age verification is a website asks you to type in

a birthday. This is common if you've been to like a tobacco sales website or an alcohol beverage

website or something like that, you just type in your address, right? Easy to ignore, easy to fake,

you know, widely considered just theater for the most part, right? It's just like, Hey, we ask our

visitors how old they are. But the new approach, this new approach, legislation is moving the age

check.

into the operating system itself so before you open a browser or download an app

and there are four bracket systems to this so laws like california ab1043 classify users into

four age groups there's under 13 then 13 to under 16 16 to under 18 and 18 or older and the api

handshake every time you download or launch the app the os sends a real-time signal with your age

bracket to the developer silent automatic always on so this is happening in the background because

it's built into the operating system this isn't like an app this isn't just a setting this is

something that just has to be on by default and to be compliant so the simple analogy is think of

your phone's location services you turn them on it's set up an app can silently request your location

forever right

A lot of times, if you go into your privacy settings and you look at location, you can

see what applications have access to your location based on whether or not you're using

the app, whether they never have access to it, whether it's always on, right?

Well, this is going to be an always on feature, right?

Sending this signal of your age already, you cannot kind of shield that, that piece of

data about yourself.

So in the US, right, state by state, California has AB 1043, which is the Digital Age Assurance

Act.

And that was signed October 2025 and effective January 1st, 2027.

And that applies to any entity that develops, licenses, or controls an OS.

And it's sweeping.

And it's not just Windows and Mac OS, Android and iOS, but Linux distributions, Valves, Steam

OS, and even niche open source projects.

So it does not require a photo.

ID and users self-report their age. So critics are calling this the honor system dressed up as

child safety policy. And for me, this, I'm looking at this as like the, it's a layer layering in

the groundwork, right? So it's kind of like, Hey, we get everyone on board with building this in

at the OS level, they build out the APIs. And then later on, it'll be a lot easier for them

to actually pass new laws to enforce photo ID because the mechanism, the system will already

be in place, right? So like I said, it doesn't require a photo ID right now. This is a user

self-reporting their age, but the penalties are stiff for not implementing this. So for each affected

child that, that is access to an OS that didn't have any kind of attestation where they attest

their age to the device's $2,500 fine.

for unintentional violations, and $7,500 per fine for intentional ones.

So Louisiana has a similar bill, HB House Bill 570.

That goes into effect July 1st, 2026, a few months out.

Illinois, Senate Bill 3977.

That's effective January 1st, 2027.

Texas, SB 2420.

That's a mobile-focused, similar framework bill.

Utah has SB 142, already partially enforced, and full activation is December of this year,

2026.

Colorado is SB 26-051, proposed, modeled on the California law, and its potential effective

date is January 1st, 2028.

So Louisiana, Texas, and Utah already have App Store Accountability Acts requiring mobile

app stores to verify and transmit users' age.

And California's law goes further by...

the desktop apps as well. So it's a lot to keep up with because some of these are just mobile only

or mobile app store. Some of them are now going to be OS level. And on the international platform

here or in its stage, if you will, Australia has the global trailblazer. And that's December 2025.

It's a major social platform, you know, basically, you know, requires legally requires to ban

users under 16 or face heavy fines. And in March 2026, there's an extent an extension to

pornographic and explicit pornographic material and explicit gaming and search engines have until

June of 2026 to implement age assurance for logged in users. In the United Kingdom, of course,

we've talked many, many times about the Online Safety Act. That's, you know, from 2023, those

provisions are in force as of July.

of last year so all platforms social media forums search engines dating apps they must they have to

age verify you know of course to protect minors and early enforcement uh you know reddit was fined

for for uh relying on the self-declaration and then france germany spain spain brazil netherlands

portugal poland norway malaysia all have various stages of social media age restrictions or age

verification mandates through 2026 and then in the eu there's the digital services act and the eu

digital identity wallet integrating age assurance standards expected to mature later this year so

over the next one to two years we're going to start seeing significant changes you might already see

a lot of these things happening if you're an ios user i know i mentioned i think on the last episode

52 that ios 26.4 which was still currently in beta but it probably will be pushed out over the next

next month or so already has that age verification

baked baked into it as well as some other features like rcs into an encryption for uh

you know communicating with android users using rcs and those kinds of things but that's where

these different um technology stacks are rolling out so you know why does this matter for privacy

beyond the child safety right it's because you know looking at this of course we always hear

it's for the children it's for the children and but everyone has to provide their age

at the os setup not just kids so if you don't have kids in the house you don't it's like everyone is

impacted by this so the infrastructure is built into your device from first boot regardless of

who you are and the self-declaration problem is we're seeing is california's law doesn't require

adv verification and if it's this easy to lie what's the actual goal here right the infrastructure is

just being built for a more durable policy policy and you know it's it's it's easier to just

justify it when many

you

and nations are or countries are kind of doing the same thing it just sounds it just seems like

it's a lot easier they they have momentum to to push this out and we we know about the data

breach risks right in october 2025 discord through a third-party vendor there was a breach

exposing approximately 70 000 government ids collected specifically because of age requirements

and now age data is is a new honeypot so the open source collision right uh where the laws

definition of os provider and i'm using air quotes with my fingers as i say os provider

is so broad it sweeps in linux distros steam os and even niche open source like calculators

db 48x which responded by geo blocking california and colorado users entirely rather than comply

because it's

it's like if you're a small volunteer team you may not have the resources to you know build out

os level or app level uh age verification so what some people or some groups are doing is they're

just saying okay well if you're in california colorado you just can't use our app and we'll

just basically geo block you you know from ip so if you're coming to their site from uh your you

know an ip address in those states they just just won't let you access it so you know will that work

in the short term sure but uh probably not very well and at some point people are gonna have to

start making hard decisions and i have my own questions around that too because there's a lot

of situations where it's like well what about server os's or what about hypervisors right they're not

technically an operating system they're just a kernel manager uh is it an os i don't know is that defined

is proxmox an os is true naz an os

os is docker nos you know if you set up a docker instance for an application specifically

technically i guess it's an operating system but is it though because you know uh yeah you know

and if a child were to access an app uh from that docker container running this could be something

like a media player a media server is you know does that fall within that because they didn't

age verify to watch something on jellyfin i you know i i don't i don't know i i'm asking a lot of

questions is cubes os going to adhere to this it's technically a hypervisor for for a workstation

right for a for computer desktop every time you launch an ephemeral vm application it's pulling

from a vm template does that template vm need to be os verified right i mean you see like how

ridiculous this is and how do you

enforce that. And I don't think the governments are really too worried about how they're enforcing

it yet, as much as they are as laying the groundwork, the foundation for the acceptance

of this being a new normal, so that years coming down the road, it becomes a little easier for

them to get to the ultimate endgame, which is photo ID, like your identity will be verified

to the operating system, not just you attesting that you're within a certain age signal,

but that you have actually doxed yourself just to use a stupid phone or a laptop. So I want to kind

of step back and look at the two different, you know, we'll look at the, you know, the Android

ecosystem specifically, right? So Android's open promise and why it matters. So iOS, right? iOS is

what runs on Apple iPhones. From the very beginning, it's been one store, one gatekeeper, Apple decides

what exists.

on the phone, what apps come stock from, you know, Apple developers, and then what kind of store

you can, you know, is available and what apps are available in that store. Android, on the other

hand, is built on AOSP, which is the Android open source project. And you could always install apps

from anywhere, your own files, you could compile your own APK and just install it. There are third

party stores like F-Droid and Aurora. And you could even just download applications from like APK

Pure and, you know, other repositories that keep basically an archive of different versions of

different applications that you might want to regress to and things of that nature. That's often

referred to as side loading. I like to think of it as just installing an application. Side loading is

a term that's used when you're typically installing an app out from not using the preferred,

well, you know, app store. In this case would be the Google.

play store so you know installing those apps is how privacy how the privacy ecosystem has survived

i remember uh a while back this is probably a few years going back but my pseudo

is um an app that you can create different anonymous identities in it can be ephemeral

it can be persistent you can attach a phone number to it an email address is kind of having

these pseudo anonymous you know pseudo anonymous profiles uh to be able to use for different

situations i myself to this day still use my pseudo there was a time uh where they just made

the apk available from their website to download and install that would be considered side loading

and you know there's there's tons of instances where we're all a lot of us listening to this and

that talk in the in the in the group that all sideload right most of my applications i'd say

a large percentage of them are

are either coming from Accrescent,

which is the built-in store from Graphene OS,

or from GitHub or other repositories

using the Obtainium app,

because you can just add a source link

of where the app lives,

and Obtainium will install it

and tell you when there's a new update available.

This is how I install Signal

as well as several, several other applications,

but I am installing in those all through Obtainium.

So if I look at my Obtainium list right now,

you know, NT Photos, Orbot, ProtonMail,

AntennaPod, BravePipe, Breezy, Weather, Clock,

you know, I mean, tons and tons,

Image, ICSX app, Mastodon, Material Files,

Mali, MulvadVPN, I have Micro-G installed

even through there,

because I do use it in a specific user profile,

Primal, Revance.

you know runster seal i mean to the wave lake i mean tons and tons of apps i install

from uh the source directly using obtainium i'm not installing them from like the play store so

anonymous developers specifically chose android because it let them ship tools without handing

their identity to a platform controller well back in august of 2025 google announced you know

starting september of 2026 every app installed on a certified android device must come from a

developer who is registered with google regardless of where the app come from right so this is just

not about google play store it covers side loading apps installing apps so fdroid apps apps from any

third-party store apps distributed directly from developers websites anything on certified devices

so certified android devices

make up probably 95% of all Android phones worldwide. I think the number I've heard

tossed around as far as like the number of Graphene OS users is somewhere in the ballpark

of around 400,000. Now that sounds like a lot, but in a planet with billions of mobile devices,

that's just nothing. That's a drop in the bucket. So, you know, some people will say, well, this

doesn't impact de-Googled phone users, but it actually really does because the user base is

going to shrink to literally almost nothing overnight come September. So, you know, will

developers continue developing for the very few out there that are using de-Googled phones,

especially when these people might be relying on donations and things to fund the project and

run their infrastructure? We don't know. Likely a lot of people will stop developing because they

don't want to dox themselves for writing an app that circumvents ad blocking or things of that

nature. So what are the developer certification requirements? It's a 24%

one-time registration fee paid to google so we have an extortion fee built in the creation of

a google put google payment profile of course so that we can pay them government issued id

an agreement to google's terms and conditions which okay if you're a revanced developer if

you're a new pipe developer like you're already breaking their terms of conditions so you're not

going to submit that proof of ownership of the app signing keys and registration of all apps

in a new android developer console so if you're an app developer and you want people to be able to

install your apps even if your app isn't in the app store the google play store all of these changes

will roll out to the android os so you're kind of boned so what the timeline looks like right is

august 2025 last year this policy was announced november of 2025 there was an early access preview

where google added you know students and hobbyists to carve out

you

like limited device distribution to get buy-in march 2026 this month verification opens to

all developers globally so there's they're starting the process now in september of 2026

enforcement begins and brazil indonesia singapore and thailand and then into 2027 and beyond will

be a global rollout of all certified android devices worldwide so this is a this is kind of

a staged rollout but who gets hurt from this like i said f droid open source app stores the entire

model source code auditing instead of identity checks is going to be replaced by google's

identity-based gatekeeping its catalog of privacy tools utilities open source apps all face dramatic

reduction so f droid or a board member and i'm gonna i cannot say this dude's last name his name

is mark prudemoy prudemoy prudemoy prudemoy prudemoy prudemoy

p-r-u-d apostrophe h-o-m-m-e-a-u-x um so uh board member for f droid i'm just gonna call

mark estimates 90 to 95 percent of android developers are opposing this policy sure

totally could completely see that anonymous privacy app developers developing build you know

developers building tools for journalists activists i mean think of all your security drop

and orbot and and everything to do with tor and anonymous communications encrypted you know

tools and all these different things um those users you know especially repressive countries

face like a stark choice like reveal their identity to google and any government that compels access

to that database or lose reach to virtually every android device and the database concern here is

google has not answered what the data it collects during verification how long it's retained

or which governments can access it

So this policy creates a comprehensive global database of all Android developers, including their government IDs.

So the antitrust angle here is the policy follows Google's 2024 antitrust loss to Epic Games, which required allowing third-party app stores.

So critics argue verification is a workaround.

Third-party stores technically still exist, but every developer must register with Google first.

So like I said, it doesn't matter if you want your app in the app store.

If you're just even developing it to be installed through a different channel, like Obtainium, or through a Crescent, or F-Droid, you have to do this.

So this extends Google's gatekeeping authority beyond its own marketplace into distribution channels where it has no legitimate operational role.

And, you know, there's an open letter to Google signed by EFF and Free Software Foundation and Tor Project and Proton and F-Droid and 30-plus others.

as of last month, February 24th, 2026. So that's kind of who's fighting back, right,

to keep the Android open movement. There's keepandroidopen.org. That's led by the F-Droid

board member, Mark. The open letter addressed directly to Sundar and Larry Page and Sergey

Brin, Google's VPs for, you know, app and ecosystem trust. The signatories include the EFF,

Free Software Foundation, F-Droid, you know, all of them, Proton, AG, NextCloud, Fastmail,

Vivaldi, Article 19 and dozens more. So there's a lot of, like, people trying to reach out and push

back. I know even, I think, last, earlier this week or last week, the CEO or one of the founders

for System76 met with a Colorado senator to really explain, like, the challenges and the dangers of

doing this, who's a Colorado senator who was, you know, behind the bill in Colorado.

for the OS age verification and you know Google's partial concessions are well you know a student or

hobbyist account type has limited distribution and there's a vague advanced flow I don't know

for power users and probably if you've if you've been following the story you've probably heard

advanced flow but no one really understands what that is and fdroid notes that Google has refused

to provide any concrete details on what advanced flow actually entails and it's probably just some

something that you know they kind of came up with to say oh no we've got some we've got something to

address your concerns it's called you know they probably just pulled it off a whiteboard in a

conference room somewhere we'll call it advanced flow uh that will help you know ease the burden

uh you know for for this and yeah so connecting the dots right the pattern here is governments

are requiring OS providers to collect and broadcast identity signals they're a

at the infrastructure level so before you even open an app or download an app install an app

and then google is requiring developers to be identifiable to a central authority before their

software can reach the device so gating who gets to build for their platform even though it's

supposed to be an open platform both policies use the language of protecting children protecting

users from malware to justify this infrastructure change and create this gatekeeping power both

policies hit the privacy community the hardest because the tools are most threatened by identity

requirements and those are tools designed to resist identity you know so it's kind of like a catch-22

and you know if you have to start giving pieces of your identity to just use the device like you're

and then now the apps are limited because the apps that you want are from developers who don't want

to participate in doxing themselves it's like uh you know so the compounding effect

uh, that I see is, you know, once both policies are in full force, you know, your OS is broadcasting

your age bracket with every app launch and every app on your device comes from a Google verified

developer who surrendered their identity to install their software on your phone. So at the

OS layer, the governments know your age, it can trace your app usage. And at the app layer,

Google knows every developer can disable any app and holds a global registry of who built what.

So what's the end result? A device that is far less anonymous than most users can assume. And it

both ends of the software stack from the end user using the device and the developer making the

software that for which device it goes on. So what are the escape hatches? Well, I mean, we know about

a lot of the de-Googled Android, you know, OS is yet graph, you know, as the biggest one, some might

say Calix OS or lineage OS. I don't think, I don't even know if Calix OS has come back to developing any

new ROMs. I think they were taking a six.

months sabbatical and i honestly haven't followed uh the status of what they're doing but you know

those are those are exempt from the google's developer verification policy because they're not

you know these certified right they're not certified so they're just aosp based builds

they're not certified android devices so they fall outside google's enforcement reach on the

age verification though these these builds also sidestep the os level age signal since they don't

use the standard google account setup process where age data would be collected so in my opinion

this is not really just a fringe option it's increasingly you know the answer to both problems

at once um i think that people are resilient and you know developers like there will be a lot more

users that were you know and and kind of dovetailing over because i have you know obviously this story

which is huge about motorola being the oem that's

partnering with graphene os to basically uh you know from from motorella side they want to expand

their enterprise portfolio and offer like a more secure private device and so they're working with

the graphene os team to actually make a foam that meets the security requirements of the graphene os

team so there's a possibility here that um the demand i mean and really

motorola is the only official oem that graphene os works with but graphene os is not exclusive to

them so other oems could make phones and tablets or whatever uh that meet the security requirements

and collaborate with graphene os to grow because i think there might be this sub market that will

grow like if we're saying 400 000 users well i could see that growing to 4 million i could see a 10x

growth in a year and a half or two because you know when you think about who's using graphene

os well hardcore privacy advocates i i use graphene os a lot of people and made in our groups let's

you know use it but it's it's kind of small it's it is not kind of small it's small it's a small

user base if we can get that user base to grow then that incentivizes open source you know app

developers to continue developing even though they won't be able to get the reach to the larger

android market so i am trying to be optimistic and hopeful that that is maybe the path that we see

because if we don't then it's it's just going to be hard right we may still have the hardware we

may still have graphene os but you may have very limited you know options for applications because

developers walk away from continuing to build out their software and we're just left with a bunch of

old-stale

patched applications so what can we do like right now um and that's basically going through your

devices and checking your privacy and security see what data is being collected and which apps

have access to what knowing which of your apps came from where was it installed via f droid was

it installed from attainium was it from uh google play store is it at risk under google's new policy

uh then the next step i would actually this is kind of something that a roadmap for myself right like

okay simon like you're telling all this what what can i do back up what you have so before google's

enforcement hits save local copies of your apps that you depend on tools like apk extractor can

pull those installer files from apps already on your device export data from privacy sensitive apps

while you still have full access because they may they may shut them off right if you're this is like if

you're

a regular Android user, right? If you're on Graphene OS, that wouldn't be as big of a threat.

If an app you rely on is distributed through F-Droid only, like reach out to the developer

and ask what their plans are under the Google's new policies. Some will register, others won't

or can't, and try to find out what you can. If you have like a few apps that you just 100% rely on,

email, contact the developers. Tell them, hey, first of all, I really appreciate you doing this.

I live by this application. I need this application. What are your plans for Google's

new policy and how would this impact this app? Because the more information and the knowledge

you have before these things happen, the more you can plan some of your alternate roadmaps.

Graphene OS, in my opinion, the gold standard, right? Runs on Pixel devices, has sandbox Google

Play option for apps that require it. It's completely exempt from both Google's developer

verification policy.

and the standard os level age collection setup and you know lineage os yeah i mean i know some

people use that and they'll say that in the chat it's you know broadest it's got the broadest device

you know compatibility and it has a strong open source community is it as secure and private as

you know graphene os definitely not um i honestly probably wouldn't advocate to use lineage os if

you have a threat model that you know makes you worry at night about the security of your device

meaning if you lost it or something like that um but you know it's just it's something so i'm

mentioning it um and then also use the right tools right so you know you make sure you know you're

using a vpn to mask your traffic um i personally really like mulvad i've been using mulvad for a

long time i like to keep my vpn separate from other app companies that i also use so i do use proton

mail i use tutomail so for my my vpn i like to use mulvad so that way i have these kind of

compartmentalized applications and

uh

It's harder to correlate users.

I know there's some controversy about ProtonMail recently

because they gave payment information to law enforcement to arrest somebody.

That's a topic for another time.

So I do know about that story, and I think it's kind of like,

hey, expect that if any commercial company is compelled by law enforcement

that they're going to have to give them whatever they can.

They can't give them access to the email content,

but they can give them access to other meta information and payment details

were tied to that user using a credit card in their name.

So think about those kinds of things, right?

Keeping the separation of who knows what you're doing.

Also, Tor or Orbot is a great tool.

It adds an anonymization on top of VPN-level privacy.

It's available on Afterroid because you can actually have Orbot running,

which is a connection to Tor,

and you can select which app specifically you want to route through Tor

because not all apps...

will work well, right?

Like your banking app probably wouldn't, you know,

route that through Orbot, but a social media app,

sure, why not?

You know, other applications, podcast apps,

anything that you want to break up, you know,

any traceability of what data is being sent where,

it's a great tool for that.

Signal, obviously, it's a tried and true

into an encrypted, you know, messaging tool.

It's available in Google Play.

It's probably at less risk

from developer verification and on AfterEd

because they'll probably verify

because it's so big.

And then your end-to-end encrypted email providers,

you know, like I said, ProtonMail, 2Denota,

they also both signed the open letter

opposing Google's policy.

So I kind of look at them as, you know,

like on our side in this case,

whatever that means.

And for the people fighting this,

you know, you can sign the open letter

at keepandroidopen.org.

You can support F-Droid.

It runs entirely off donations.

And volunteer labor.

fjoy.org you can support electronic frontier foundation so they have a great leading legal

and legislative team that fights you know multiple issues and start talking about it start talking

about it to people in your life they may not have any idea that this is going on and these changes

are happening so you know share this episode maybe with them or share content in a meaningful way

that's just kind of more informative but not you know like threatening and you know the more people

that you know also start emailing and calling their their state legislators their whoever wherever

you are wherever you live however that's set up with your government organization contact the people

that represent you or should be representing you so uh what not to panic about yet so the california

age verification law is self-reported on our system right now enforcement verification mechanisms are

really unclear at the time so the risk um is just what infrastructure becomes you know

you

and what it is and what it isn't, you know, today. And Google's enforcement doesn't go global until

2027. Like I said, 2026 is rolling out a handful of countries this year, and then will be global

next year, 2027. But it's not unlimited. So the legal challenges, you know, are coming on both

fronts, both from the First Amendment side, if you're in the US, and as well as antitrust

proceedings and EU regulatory friction and could slow that implementation down. So we'll see how

that goes. So basically, the takeaways are just governments are building these age verification

infrastructures at the OS level, California's law, Louisiana, Illinois, Texas, Utah, and much more

are to follow. And your device will be the identity checkpoint, right? Google is closing the Android

open ecosystem by 2027. This is all in motion. So these are the kind of things to think about.

And, you know, there are two different actors, you know, there's the government, there's Google,

there are building two different gateways.

This is...

basically to access your digital life.

You know, one wants to know your age.

One wants to know who built your software.

Neither is asking for your permission.

It's just going to be mandated.

And all these tools and apps that we use

are effectively, you know, caught in the crossfire.

And a lot of those tools are designed to protect you

from that kind of scrutiny.

So I look at this as just a total attack across the board.

And, you know, the open internet was never guaranteed.

It was built by people, I believe,

who, you know, believe it should exist

and it should be defended by people who still believe that.

So, and that's, you know, what this whole podcast is about

is trying to identify, you know, what's happening.

What are the forces out there that are trying to creep in

and encroach on your sovereignty,

your ability to communicate, share ideas, be creative,

make dank memes, whatever.

And now it's like, well...

they want to know initially now more about you uh from from the get-go and they want to know

what apps are being installed and who are the developers behind those apps so that is the

crux of you know this whole thing that's been going on really since last year and is getting

a lot more traction into this year and i expect you know over the next few months uh you know i

keep tabs on this i'm trying to keep tabs on which states which countries uh are going to be

affected you know by this whether it's os verification or age restrictions and that kind

of thing but it's just a weird time to i never in a million years would have thought that ever

installing uh a linux distribution where it would ask for your age at the point of install and how

they even roll that out to adhere to all that is like a whole nother ball of wax i don't know what

that's going to look like i think

you

you know and again in the beginning it's on our system so you can just put in anything really but

the problem is is that that infrastructure now becomes in place because there's these api calls

that are being done at the os level to send that signal of the age to the app uh as you install

applications but like how does this work you know especially when you think about linux you can

compile applications from source i mean i i've done that many times uh where there's not a binary

for it i mean the enforcement side of it i don't understand i don't understand and that's why i

think i don't think they really care i don't think it's really so much about that right now

is it is more about setting uh the precedent for it just to exist at all and then over time see how

far they can get away with eroding that so uh kind of come back real quick to this graphene os

partnership so

So, Motorola says it's introducing a new era of smartphone security through a long-term partnership with the GrapheneOS Foundation, the leading nonprofit and advanced mobile security and creators of the hardened operating system based on Android open source project.

Together, Motorola and GrapheneOS Foundation will work to strengthen smartphone security and collaborate on future devices engineered with GrapheneOS compatibility.

It says, quote, we are thrilled to be partnering with Motorola to bring GrapheneOS's industry-leading privacy and security-focused mobile operating system to the next generation smartphone, said spokesperson at GrapheneOS.

I'm not sure who it was.

So, quote, this collaboration marks a significant milestone in expanding the reach of GrapheneOS, and we applaud Motorola for taking this meaningful step towards advancing mobile security.

Which kind of makes me think that Motorola actually approached GrapheneOS because it looks like Motorola, you know, wants to basically offer...

some enterprise, like I said earlier, some enterprise products and services for businesses

and different things. But, you know, as far as on the consumer side, benefits us because

they are an OEM. So Graphene OS will get easier and quicker access to AOSP releases. We kind of

lived through the little hiccup with the initial Android 16 QPR1 release that they were struggling

to get. Also, too, Google has not been releasing the Pixel firmware or device drivers and things

of that nature. That makes it, you know, a lot easier for the Graphene OS team to add enhancements

and features to the device components like the camera and microphone and these different things.

You know, with their operating systems. So working with an OEM that's basically working hand in hand

will knock a lot.

lot of those barriers down. And I think that the end result will be very cool. I think that, again,

I think I also could open up the possibility to expanding our reach and growing that user base

even further. One thing I wanted to touch on was that Mexico mandates biometric SIM registration

for all phones. And this is something to keep an eye on because if this takes off, I could see

something like this happening. I know that there's already in a lot of countries that require you to

KYC yourself, show identity and all that kind of stuff to activate a mobile number or activate a

SIM card. But this is mandating a biometric SIM registration. So anonymous prepaid SIM cards

are dying in Mexico. So this is going to be in effect this year, July 1st, 2026. Every active

cell phone number in the country must be biometrically linked to a named government

credentialed individual.

or face suspension. That is around 127 million numbers, each one tethered to an identity the

Mexican government can look up by name. So the mobile registration law took effect January 9th

of this year, covering prepaid and postpaid plans, physical SIMs and eSIMs. Existing subscribers

have until June 30th to complete registration. New lines activated after January 9th of this year,

so a couple months ago, get 30 days. If you miss the window, the line goes dark, phones cut off. So

enforcement mechanism runs through the CURP Biometrica, Mexico's biometric upgrade to its

existing population registry code. So the new credential embeds a photograph, electronic

signature and QR code that directly is tied biometrically to a verified record.

uh, held in the national record.

registry. So it's, I don't know, that's pretty scary. So residents are registering a mobile

line must provide their CURP number alongside a valid government ID, which makes biometric

enrollment not optional, but structurally required. You cannot register a phone number

without first handing your biometric data to the state. So it's like your thumbprint,

that kind of thing. What Mexico is building here is a national phone network where every number

has a face attached to it. Other than convenience for those who have low usage in some criminals,

prepaid SIMs have historically been the tool of people, tool of people who need connectivity

without disclosure, domestic abuse survivors, journalists, activists, anyone whose safety

depends on the gap between a phone number and illegal identity is closing. They've announced

any, there's no exemption. So the government has

not announced, or I should say they have not announced any exemption for these populations,

and the administrative guidelines released so far contain no carve-out for people who face

genuine risk from identity-linked registration. So this article will be in the show notes if you

want to go read the whole thing, and I'm just looking at this going, man, you know, we talk

about how sometimes certain states or countries will pass laws, and you're like, oh, wow, sucks

for them. But, I mean, this really is a global challenge. Like, no matter where you are,

they're likely probably talking about, have already implemented, or planning to implement

similar laws that basically force people to, you know, dox themselves. And then the second part is

these databases are being created, which will be just massive honeypots for

hackers. Especially, I mean, the FBI can't even knock.

get hacked right uh there's just another recent fbi hack and internal hacks regarding the epstein

files i mean it's just there's no such thing as a secure computer there's no such thing as a secure

database it's not a matter of if just when and so now governments are forcing citizens to adhere to

this and give more and more information biometric information government issued ids names addresses

phone numbers that kind of thing and if you're in the hacking business i mean it's just a gold mine

uh because it's again it's just gonna i think it's just gonna create a lot of um chaos uh for

identity theft and blackmail and spying and people who have access to this data you know exes or

abusive relationships or stalkers or whatever uh yeah it's all

in the name to like well we have to protect the kids but there are so many other better ways to

do that than forcing everyone into these honeypots um you know what's interesting though is that there

are services like silent link and stuff that exist uh i wonder how long they'll exist but you know

they could be ways to circumvent some of these to have a phone pay for it with cryptocurrency like

monero activated as an e sim my guess though is that if you're in a hostile state like like mexico

they'll see you know these mz numbers the international mobile subscriber ids that don't

have any identity link to it they might think it's maybe just a tourist or something but if it's just

if it's always on or on you know connecting a lot to the network they probably will have surveillance

tools to report on that and they might find reason to investigate that by triangulating from you know

like

connected cell towers and things of that nature. So, uh, you know, I, I don't really know. I don't

really know where we're going with all this. I just sit in here and I'm always researching and

collecting this into my notes and everything. And I'm reading these articles. I'm like, Oh my gosh,

like what, what's happening? How did we get so far so quickly, uh, with this? Uh, one other

article I want to touch on, cause it kind of, kind of falls within this is ISIS using the same

Microsoft tech. And this is a real news network, uh, article, uh, says ISIS using the same

Microsoft tech Israel uses to surveil and kill Palestinians. So, you know, in just six months

immigration and customs enforcement, also known as ice, it's more than tripled the amount of data

stored on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. And the guardian reported at the same time that it's

arsenal of surveillance technology ballooned. So this week tech workers with the no Azure for apartheid

NOAA campaign staged a protest and informational picket

at Microsoft's global headquarters in Redmond, Washington, demanding that Microsoft

cancel all contracts that provide technological support for Israel's

ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and ISIS campaign of terror

in the U.S. We speak with

Ibtil, a former software engineer at Microsoft, and

organizer with the NOAA campaign.

So, it's kind of a brief article, but

I just found it, you know, interesting to highlight that

with the expansion of

data collection, data brokers, data warehouses,

artificial intelligence models being ran on that

doing correlation and analysis to basically

increase, exponentially increase

you know, all of any any targets that they're looking

for.

it's just so much easier to do now than ever before no warrants generally required because

a lot of this data falls within terms of service that can be purchased or accessed under some sort

of rubber stamp warrant of some kind and it just just seems that you know again going back to that

clip I played at the very beginning of the podcast Edward Snowden 2013 was you know his biggest fear

was that Americans are you know talking about America or people in general won't fight back

won't resist and I feel like we're kind of being pushed into a corner there's like one little

corner that we're standing in that basically gives us the ability to communicate like I said share

ideas and without all of this surveillance and known identities it really is a move to

remove any kind of freedom of speech freedom of expression

uh, you know, ways to assemble and activate, uh, for a cause that they can preemptively

stop it before it ever happens.

And, you know, it, it just, it does concern me.

It concerns me that, you know, just only, you know, in the last couple of years, I've

been like, oh yeah, I really, I really do have a plan to migrate from Mac OS to Linux

on my work machines and how would that look and all this.

And I'd like to be in a, you know, free and open environment.

Now those free and open environments are being targeted.

The very things we hold sacred are now being targeted with financial criminal penalty.

So I can't blame a lot of the large Linux distributions to adhere to this because could you imagine,

I mean, it could be charged for potentially every Linux ISO that's downloaded.

They could.

assume that that's a charge you know I don't I don't know I just it's so outlandish to me

I can't even really wrap my head around what this will look like in another two years from now

like what I will be talking about into the microphone if I'm even talking into a microphone

I don't know I I really don't have any idea I don't want to like sound like you know just kind

of like the like with this defeatist but uh also too you know we have to be really thoughtful about

how and what systems you know we want to build on for the future because they're all under attack

right now with with all of this so yeah I don't really know come into the chat and let's let's

talk about it while we still have a chat server because you know that server probably runs an OS

that's not age verified um speaking of the OS and the chat I'm looking at still alternatives to

matrix matrix has been okay

okay but um i think that in the long run i'd probably like to move towards some sort of

decentralized communication protocol i've always talked about and matrix is a protocol we're just

not self-hosting we're currently utilizing matrix.org to host our chat rooms and i think

that moving to something like xmpp in the long run would be really good the more we can be

decentralized in our communications uh and when i say we i'm talking about we as a collective not

just the podcast community but we in general having communications that are basically ran by

operators that you know you trust um is going to be kind of like the only only real way to move

forward and um i did talk to a friend of mine who is the guru on reticulum and i'm planning to have

him on the on the pod hopefully this month uh definitely

you

Within the next two to four weeks, I'd like to try to get him on and do an entire episode on just Reticulum, which is a completely separate network stack, totally decentralized, and can be ran on many different signals like Bluetooth, LoRa, Wi-Fi, over TCP IP.

And you can host things like servers and websites and different things like that.

It's pretty wild, and you can run it on really old hardware, too, which is cool.

It's very easy to flash old devices with OpenWRT and get Reticulum set up and connect it to a node to get into the node network.

And it's very resilient, and I think that that might be something that I rely on heavily over the coming years to be able to have communication that is not under direct service.

of any kind and it kind of is out in the fringes you know so uh yeah so have that working on as

well some other things coming up for some other episodes and also would like to host um kind of

a privacy bar we've done one in the past and it was kind of fun and it was just basically having

everyone on who that wants to be on to have a open group chat and i thought about just maybe turning

that into an episode if anyone would like to to hear it because i'm sure there's just a lot of

questions and like hey what do you use for this and what are you guys running and how i do this those

those conversations are where all the meat is i have learned so much from so many different people

by just talking about things like hey you know what do you use to download uh a song or a video

or something on your mobile device oh i set up a me tube server oh i have a you know cobalt uh you

know cobalt server well what is that a white cobalt server and by doing learning those things i've set

them

up myself and now i use those servers myself hosted on my own proxmox server to like do those

very things and you know sometimes it's even just what keyboard are you using or what you know uh

text-to-speech engine are you using and and things so you kind of get plugged in and you know learn

what people are doing and it really broadens your your thoughts on on like how to you know set up

workflows and things of that nature and if that's your cup of tea cool and if it's not that's cool

too um i encourage you to definitely pop over to the new website closednetwork.io and maybe just

join as a free member so that um as i put out more content that is outside of just the podcast feed

that you'll be glued into that of course if it's not your cup of tea and you don't want want uh the

extra email i get it i really do that's why i really try to make this all very uh laid back and

chill uh again you know there's no there's no advertising there's no promotion uh i'll never

see

send you an email with a, an affiliate link, uh, or anything such like that. So it really is, uh,

meant to be really for the community and, and that's it. So, uh, if someone, um, has any other

ideas, um, with how I can kind of improve upon that too, feel free to let me know, shoot me an

email, simon at closed network.io. Uh, if you just have some basic input or feedback and, um, yeah,

yeah. So that's, um, that's really all I had for this episode. I really wanted to kind of

delve into this whole debacle between these two forces between, you know, governments and Google

and kind of give my interpretation of it and how I see what this, what this, what's happening right

now. And, um, like I said, I'll keep, I'll keep tabs on it. We'll keep, we'll keep trucking along.

Um, yeah. And that's, that's all I've got for this one, everyone. I hope you're doing well,

uh, and look forward to, uh,

Bye.

uh, seeing how, you know, these new things that I'm working on, how, how the, how they work out,

how they're received. Uh, if you hate it all too, I want to know that as well. Um, but, um, you know,

again, feel free to chime in and otherwise I'll just assume that you love everything that I do.

So yeah. So with that, I will catch you all in the next episode, which should be in the next

week or two. All right. Catch you later.

Going. And if I ever fail, just know I'll go again. I never quit. Cause I know that every

loss may lead to another win. I'm going up. I bet when I land, they're going to tell me it's luck

again. See that I'm winning. It's harder to watch. I'm setting the stage. You should give me my prize.

You ain't got a soul. You lacking the spirit. You talk out your neck. I'm going to show you I'm with it.

I've been really happy. You just shouldn't watch me win again and win again and win again. I know

it's probably getting on me and when I'm sending them. So if I ever win again, it's nobody to minimum.

I didn't have to sell my soul.