🔴🎤 [LIVE FROM LONDON] Trust Conference #TC2026# | Exposing the machinery of digital repression. “Disinformation is organized. Corruption is organized. Surveillance is organized. So, we, journalists, should be organized as well.” @laurentrichard0, founder of Forbidden Stories, is taking the stage at the London Trust Conference 2026 @trustconf hosted by the @TRF. From Russian surveillance technology deployed in Iran to Pegasus spyware in Morocco and the global disinformation industry exposed by our #StoryKillers# investigation, Laurent is revealing how Forbidden Stories and its partners have uncovered the hidden machinery of digital repression. 🔎 Facial recognition, spyware, disinformation campaigns: these powerful tools are designed to operate in the shadows. But investigative journalism can bring them to light. Through these investigations, Laurent is highlighting a powerful message: cross-border collaboration is essential to exposing those who seek to silence journalists and manipulate information. ✊ Because when journalists work together, their stories become much harder to silence. Killing the journalist won't kill the story. #LondonTrustConference# #TC2026# #PressFreedom# #InvestigativeJournalism# #DigitalSurveillance#

LATEST: 🇺🇸 The Bitcoin Policy Institute has joined the US State Department's new "Freedom Tech Excellence Program" to work on "online freedom of expression" and "countering digital surveillance."

Ep. 270: The fight for privacy and free speech in the surveillance age The early internet opened unprecedented avenues for speech, creativity, and connection without traditional gatekeepers. But it also raised civil liberties questions: Do our offline freedoms exist online? And if so, how far do they extend? Today, those questions are more urgent than ever. Advances in AI have given governments powerful new tools to track, monitor, and analyze our behavior, raising fundamental concerns about the future of free expression in the digital age. Today, @TheFIREorg's @NicoPerrino is joined by Cindy Cohn, the executive director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She has spent thirty years as a civil liberties attorney specializing in digital rights, which she documents in her newly published memoir Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 05:17 Why write this book now? 09:11 Does privacy make free speech possible? 14:52 Code as speech: Bernstein v. United States 33:34 The Patriot Act and government spying 51:09 National security letters and Section 702 57:57 Who is Tony Coppolino? 01:06:06 Why EFF left X 01:11:05 What’s next for Cindy 01:13:56 Outro

The Qin dynasty built the most sophisticated centralized killing machine the ancient world had ever seen, and it collapsed in 15 years. Central planning does this. Qin Shi Huangdi unified China in 221 BCE by abolishing the feudal system of competing states and replacing it with 36 commanderies under direct imperial bureaucratic control. He standardized weights, measures, coinage, and axle widths across a territory of roughly 60 million people. Strip out price signals and replace them with edicts, and you don't get coordination. You get organized chaos that looks like order right up until it doesn't. The Qin state ran on corvée labor. Hundreds of thousands of conscripted workers died building the Great Wall, the Lingqu Canal, the Epang Palace, and even an entire army of terra cotta warriors. These weren't voluntary labor markets clearing at mutually beneficial wages. The state simply claimed your body, your time, and your life. The actual productive class of farmers and craftsmen got taxed at rates that archaeological records suggest exceeded 50 percent of output in some regions, with zero say in how those resources were allocated. When Qin Shi Huangdi died in 210 BCE, the bureaucracy immediately imploded. Two rebel armies had overthrown the dynasty by 206 BCE. The state had no feedback mechanism because it had destroyed every institution that could generate honest feedback: private property, voluntary exchange, local autonomy, competing power centers. The Second Emperor Qin Er Shi simply accelerated spending on palaces and armies, deepening the fiscal crisis, because nothing in the system punished him for doing so. You are watching this pattern repeat right now in 2026 across every country that believes sufficiently detailed planning can substitute for the distributed knowledge of millions of free individuals making their own choices. The Qin had bronze weapons and the Silk Roads. Modern states have digital surveillance and central bank balance sheets. The logic is identical, and so is the destination.