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TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast
#697: The Legal Fight Against UK Online Censorship with Preston Byrne
01:27:19
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- [00:07]
A
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitco.
- [00:32]
B
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
- [00:34]
A
Probably should be. Probably should be. Preston Byrne.
- [00:37]
B
It's been too long. Welcome back.
- [00:39]
A
Hey, great to be here. Great to see you.
- [00:42]
B
It's great to see you too. I mean, we've got a lot to talk about. What the hell is going on in Europe, in the uk, with speech.
- [00:51]
A
Yeah. They need to be put back in their box and they need to get back in their box, back in their kennel. Um, and we're. Yeah, we're. We're. We can. We can talk about that at length.
- [01:03]
B
Yeah, Yeah, I guess. I think maybe the best jumping off point is 4chan and Ofcom. You're very intimately sort of connected with that. You're representing 4chan. For those in the audience who may be unaware of what's happening, why don't we just start there and then we'll get into the broader topic of speech.
- [01:29]
A
Sure. So I think, as with all bitcoin stories, our story begins on the Isle of Yap. I've been active in cryptocurrency since 2013, mostly as a lawyer for crypto companies. I also had an early enterprise blockchain startup. We forked Ethbok 2 and built really complicated financial services automation things on it, and that didn't succeed. So I went back into private practice. And one of the first things I did when I went back into private practice, because it had been a sort of longtime interest of mine, was represent US companies that were focused on free speech. And at the time, back in 2017, 18 US companies that had free speech moderation policies were being targeted by the American government. Right. And they were being targeted by American service providers. And it wasn't such a big problem. Foreign governments weren't quite the problem they are now. But what has happened is that because the United States has this thing, the First Amendment, which protects speech here, and that includes the right to host whatever you want, essentially, as long as it's legal, the right to publish software in the terms that you want, the right not to be told by the government what kind of software you run or how you choose to run it, or who you choose to allow to access it. There were forces both in the American government during the Biden administration and the Obama administration, and there are forces outside of the American government in the NGO space. And there are, of course, foreign countries who want to take that away from the United States. And so one of their strategies was to try to achieve via the back door what they couldn't achieve via the front, because the US government can't boss around American citizens and tell us what we can and can't say. The First Amendment, of course, is geographically bounded. It is limited to the United States. So there were a series of legal regimes that have been stood up across the world. One of them in Europe is called the Digital Services Act. One of them in the United Kingdom is called the Online Safety Act. Another one in Australia is also called the Online Safety act and is substantially very similar to the UK regime. And all of those regimes came online at the beginning of 2025, and the UK was the first out the gate to try to enforce them. So they started sending letters in late February to American companies. The first one was a mental health discussion board called Sassu. Second one was a company called Gab, which is a social network. The third one was a discussion board called Kiwi Farms. And the fourth 1 was a. Was 4chan, which I think requires no introduction for most people, but it's a. It's an image board, and it's the source of a lot of Internet culture. Completely anarchic. Everybody is anonymous on the website. There are no usernames. And, you know, that's. It's. It's a totally. It's. It's not lawless. Right? They certainly obey American law, but compared to something like Facebook or X or Reddit or YouTube or any other mainstream social media platform, there's significantly less content moderation that occurs there. And so the UK targeted these companies and said, okay, well, listen, you guys are the worst of the worst from our perspective. You host speech and conduct that we would prefer not exist. And so when their censorship law came online, they started targeting these four companies. Tiny, tiny, tiny companies. I mean, at one point, you know, it's not that way anymore. But at one point, 4chan was described accurately as just a bunch of Mac Minis running in a closet. And so essentially, that was the infrastructure that ran the site. And to prove the principle that they could take on what the UK and its political class regarded as the worst actors on the Internet, and it could make them obey the UK's rules and so these companies were targeted one by one. I was put in touch because I've been active in the free speech Internet space for nearly 10 years with these companies one by one. And, you know, the clients made the decision, each one of them, one at a time, right? They said, listen, we believe that the principle here is the idea that American civil rights on the Internet require defending is so important that we cannot give an inch to the United Kingdom on this front. And, you know, certainly I'm sympathetic, right, to foreign governments. You know, foreign countries have their own rules. They have their own ways of doing things. The world is not the United States. But the thing that distinguishes these four targets from, you know, a company like an X or a Facebook or a Google, is that they have absolutely no operational footprint outside of the United States. And so when the UK was trying to censor these targets, as it continues to do to this day, the UK was essentially saying our rules, which are expressed to be applicable outside of the jurisdiction. They, you know, there's a language in the statute which says this is extraterritorially applicable outside of the uk. Our rules get to govern what Americans do, American servers, and you have to answer to us. And the principle of that, if we concede it, right, the First Amendment ceases to exist effectively as something which exists online. And so these four clients decided to fight back. Four chan and Kiwi Farms in particular, decided to bring a lawsuit against Ofcom in the District of Columbia, which we brought in August. And also what we've been doing in parallel to that is we've been advancing both communication with the executive branch. We've been ensuring that the executive branch knows what's going on, that they receive copies of these censorship notices. Obviously, we have no visibility into what the executive branch chooses to do and how it chooses to do it. But we have been serving as a source of information for them. We've been also ensuring that these censorship notices get presented to Congress. We now know as a matter of public record that Congress is considering introducing a foreign censorship shield statute. We don't know what's in it. And we ourselves, you know, the legal team for 4chan and kiwi farms, developed in coordination with a fellow named Colin Crossman, who's the Deputy Secretary of State for the state of Wyoming, a draft bill called the Granite Act. GR is like the rock, which stands for guaranteeing rights against novel international tyranny and extortion. And what Granite does is it provides a censorship shield law which would effectively blunt any further attempts to enter the United States by one of these foreign countries. We know the federal government has seen a copy of that law. We don't know whether they're going to choose to follow the form of that law themselves in any legislative reform that they're going to proceed with in the new year. But essentially it's been a multi front. This year has been. It started out as just one guy repairing foreign censorship demands and the whole process has snowballed to the point where now we're seeing executive action on this. We have confirmation from members of Congress, including Senator Eric Schmidt, that their own legislative solutions will be forthcoming. We have our shield bill proceeding in Wyoming. We have strategic litigation being waged by ourselves and also by other entities like NetChoice. They're not part of the effort, but they have been fighting UK Online Safety act style laws in accordance with their mandate. And recently, just this week, in fact, it's Today's what today's the 19th of December. So on the 15th they got an age verification mandate which is very similar to the OSA struck down by a federal judge in Louisiana. Then on the 17th, so two days ago they had another rule which was a content mandate in the state of Arkansas, very similar to the UK Online Safety act that was preliminarily enjoined. So they got an injunction, a temporary injunction in that case, which means it's very likely that they're going to get a permanent injunction and that law will be struck down. So what we've seen is the foreign governments have been pushing, pushing, pushing this content, this way of looking at the Internet and saying, you know what, the Internet should not be a free place. It should be a place which is regulated and tightly controlled by us and not in accordance with the First Amendment, but by our rules. And what's happened is there's been a response across the board. Legislation, litigation and executive action, and also education. Right. Letting the American bar know and letting the American populace know what's going on overseas, how they're trying to enter the United States, the manner in which they're doing it. And we're starting to really reach some inflection points where that process now effectively is moving under its own power. Whereas a year ago really there were only a handful of people pushing. So if I drop dead of a heart attack tomorrow, whatever's going to happen is still going to happen. Which is great because it means that my efforts representing these four clients will not have been in vain. But it's because now the whole American system is waking up and a legal response is beginning to form. So that's the view from 30,000ft is that the foreign censors coordinated a series of. And this has been planned for years, many, many years. The first call I had with the UK on the topic of the Online Safety act was in 2023 in relation to a US company, free speech oriented social media company. And a senior civil servant at the Home Office said, listen, how are you planning to implement the Online Safety Act? And I responded to him that, you know, we're not planning to implement the Online Safety act, and if you want to censor my client word for word, essentially I said, you're going to have to land ground troops on the east coast and seize their servers by force. And I don't, to be blunt, I don't think the UK is prepared to do that at the present time. But essentially, yeah, that's, that's, it's been a long, long, long fight. And finally we're starting to see traction at the federal level in state legislatures. And I'm very optimistic that over the course of the next year we're going to see meaningful legislative developments which will essentially redraw the rules of the Internet in America's favor.
- [10:57]
B
Well, first off, thank you for your service. It's incredibly important work because it seems existential. So is the UK and I mean Europe, with their Online Safety Act. Are they essentially assuming that the US Government should cooperate with them? And I think, yeah, I think they're.
- [11:16]
A
Assuming that the US Government doesn't have the capacity to respond to them. I don't think they're assuming that there will be cooperation. If the Biden administration had continued or if we were under a Harris administration, I think you would see, if not active cooperation, then you'd certainly see willful blindness to their activities and you wouldn't see any legislative or executive momentum to stop it, as was indeed the case under the Biden administration. They were serving notices, they were giving reciprocal treatment to notices that the Germans were serving on American citizens under the German censorship law, something called the Network Enforcement act or the NetsDG. And so they largely ignored this. And we told them, listen, this violates the First Amendment. What are you doing? And they ignored our correspondence. We told the Trump administration about this and the notices, we didn't hear anything back, but the notices from the German government against this particular target immediately stopped being served. So, you know, that's the difference in the change at the top. The US Government, certainly it can't tell these countries what to do, but it has the option to decide whether it's going to resist And I think under a Biden administration, it would not have resisted at all. I think it would have just kind of let them roll over Americans rights because it serves their political interests and their political objectives to do so. There are forces in the US Government on both parties who are very much not in favor of free speech on the Internet, as the First Amendment understands term. So, yeah, that's. Yeah, I think that's the answer to that question. I'm not sure if it satisfactorily answers that, but.
- [12:48]
B
No, it does. And this goes far beyond just free speech, too, because I know in a lot of these acts from UK And European Union, the European Parliament more broadly, they want to basically kill encryption too, and end encryption, introduce these backdoors, sue any app that is allowing their users to use an end encryption to communicate with each other. And so, I mean, this is not only an attack on free speech, but also a surveillance mechanism on top of it. And it's pretty egregious.
- [13:22]
A
Yeah. And I mean, I think we've had those. We've had the encryption wars here in the United States for 30, 40 years as well. Right. There have been attempts to break encryption at various times by various administrations, and there are always people, I guarantee you there are people within the current Trump administration who aren't fans of encryption. But ultimately, we have a system. That system has constitutional guardrails. And the job of the First Amendment lawyer is to enforce those guardrails whenever possible, as robustly as possible, as quickly as possible, to prevent encroachment on Americans individual rights. And so from our point of view, it's something which is just so important that you, you have to get it, you have to get involved immediately. You have to stop it immediately. And I don't think the UK Was expecting. I don't think they're used to that in their own country. I think what they're used to is lengthy judicial review procedures. Those judicial review procedures take forever to resolve. It results in minor modifications to the scheme. They're not used to the idea of Americans riding into battle and getting a tro, a temporary restraining order, to tell a random federal judge, telling the entire federal government in all 50 states, guess what? You can't do this on a nationwide basis anymore. That's not something that they're accustomed to because the judicial system doesn't have the power to do it. So I think it was. What we've seen is a clash of systems, a clash of cultures, legal cultures, and foreign governments that really didn't understand that. Just because, for example, with the gdpr, the Data protection, the European Data Protection Rule. Just because all of America rolled over when they decided to roll that out on a global basis didn't also mean that we would roll over when they decided to go after the First Amendment on a global basis. I think they're qualitatively different rul. And so they, you know, they should. They should have expected a qualitatively different response, but their experience dealing with the Americans and Internet, you know, European Internet regulation before, taught them that that wasn't something that we were going to do. And I think that that was a mistake.
- [15:22]
B
Yeah. So bringing this back to 4chan and kiwi, you guys sued in DC federal court on August 28th, alleging Ofcom's orders do not bind them in the United States, that the orders were not properly served. Interesting to learn more about how they were served, that any attempt by US Court to enforce them would violate the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments. So let's talk about how they were not properly served and then from there, what's happened since August 28th? What has the back and forth been like, if there has been any.
- [15:53]
A
Sure. So we filed. Ofcom announced that they were going to fine 4chan 20,000 pounds sterling on August 13th or 14th. Two days later, Kiwi and 4chan, through a press release that my law firm issued, announced their intention to file suit in D.C. we then did file suit in D.C. on the 28th. And, you know, when you've got an entity on the other side which is potentially right. So they're arguing that there is sovereign instrumentality in the United Kingdom, which presents some interesting problems from a litigation standpoint, because they may benefit from sovereign immunity. Now, that's a live issue in the case. I'm not going to go into that in too much depth because we've yet to file our opposition, and they're going to file their reply. But the. The issue there, right, from our perspective, is that they sent these notices by email to the United States. They just said, hey, here's an email. You must do this. And we want confirmation, as is the established legal position here in the United States time and time and time again, that if you want to get an American to do something, you cannot just send them a letter from overseas. You have to serve them with legal process. That legal process has to comport with American due process requirements, and generally speaking, also has to comport with the requirements under an applicable international treaty, whether it be the Hague Service Convention or the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty procedure between the two countries, or Letters Rogatory between two courts. And so none of that was used. It was just sent by email. So we are highly confident that these orders, if Ofcom came over here and tried to say, hey, 4chan and kiwi farms, are now obliged to follow our instructions, a US Court would say, with Ofcom as the plaintiff and rather than with us as the plaintiffs, that they would say, listen, no, this order was not validly served. So there are two questions we've asked the court to resolve. The first one is, were the orders validly served? And if the orders were validly served, Right. Then we have to answer the second question. We don't think they were. So at that point, we're going to be asking the court, listen, the order wasn't validly served. So from our perspective, the second question about whether it's constitutional to enforce here is moot. Right. Effectively, because the case should end, because we should just say, listen, the order wasn't validly served, there's no ripeness on the second question, and the case ends. And that's really all we're asking for. We're not asking for damages, we're not asking for injunctions, various other things. We're just asking for confirmation. As a practical matter, we're asking for confirmation these orders weren't validly served, which would then confirm the position that my clients aren't obliged to follow them. Now, in response to that obviously very legal, correct, legally correct position, Ofcom responded by alleging that they are completely immune from suit. Right. So there's no, there's, there's, there's no way that we can sue them because they, they're saying that there is sovereign instrumentality in the United Kingdom. And the way that works is we have a law called the Foreign Sovereign Immunities act, and the Foreign Sovereign Immunities act says that subject to certain limited exceptions, if an entity is a sovereign entity or in conducting sovereign things engaged in sovereign activity, it is immune from suit in American courts. And that means that even though we're not asking for financial damages or anything else, if it's a threshold issue, it's a jurisdictional issue. So if OFCOM is a sovereign instrumentality, and if OFCOM is engaged in sovereign conduct that is not subject to one of the exclusions under the fsia, then what happens is the case is dismissed. Right. It goes away forever. And so, you know, that's. They're entitled to do that. But, you know, part of the reason we brought the suit was to demonstrate to legislators in Washington that law reform was needed in order to head this off because this is the expected response if an American goes to court and seeks an order from a US court not seeking very much. Right. Just confirmation. Listen, we just want the court to confirm that this order wasn't validly served. Can you please tell us that, that a sovereign on the other end of that lawsuit is going to turn around and seek to have the case dismissed and is going to use every legal lever available to avoid a US Court from reaching that determination. And so we've also done in parallel to this is we proposed a law, the Granite act that I referred to earlier, which would take sovereign immunity away from these foreign sovereigns if they attempt to get into the United States and push around American citizens. And it would also create a civil cause of action that allows an American citizen to, to sue that entity and obtain financial damages against them. So the case is the case. We have the issues, they've made their arguments, we're in the process of making ours. They're going to make some more arguments still after that. But one of the purposes of bringing the lawsuit was to demonstrate to Washington, which I'm very confident we have done and I'm very confident the message has been heard that American law currently disadvantages the American defender and massively advantages the foreign attacker. Because if the foreign attacker comes in, you have this enormous threshold issue to get over of sovereign immunity and that that limitation is self imposed. It's not imposed by foreign law, it's imposed by American domestic law. And so that's one of the reasons we brought the suit is to ensure that there's a record, a comprehensive documentary record showing that this is the case and to, and to tell Washington, listen, this is the problem and this is exactly where you need to get involved and apply a fix. Because ultimately if it's federal legislation and you can pass all the state legislation you want, as we are indeed trying to do with the Wyoming granted Act. But the fix has to be at the federal level. And, and we, you know, I'm very, very, very confident that a fix along, I haven't seen the federal bill. I do know that one is being worked on because it's public information that one is being worked on. But I'm very confident that the federal government is, is going to be going to be commencing the legislative response to this problem in due course.
- [21:38]
B
Something along the lines of the Granite Act.
- [21:40]
A
So ideally it's going to be along the lines of the Granite Act. The federal government has definitely seen the Granite act, including its most recent iterations which are currently non public. But yeah, we'll see what they do. I'm optimistic that we're going to see some action in the new year, but really, I don't have a ton of visibility into that process because I'm a solo practitioner working nights and weekends from my house. And so drafting federal legislation is a little bit above my pay grade.
- [22:09]
B
Yeah. But if it is aligned with what you presented in the Granite, your proposal for the Granite act, you describe it as mutually assured destruction. A system of mutually destruction.
- [22:23]
A
Yeah. So if they fall. So what the Granite act does is it has really two pieces, a shield and a sword. So the shield states that a. An entity operating in the United States, a foreign order which is served on that entity, which would, if served by an American government entity, violate their constitutional rights, is not enforceable here. Right. Which is already the position. But if you set it out in a statute and make it very clear, instead of responding to a foreign censor with a 20 page memo, what you do is you. Which we have done. Right. What you do is you respond to the foreign censor by saying, here's the statute. Go away. Right. So please stop sending us stupid letters. The letters are stupid now. Right. To be clear. But it's a little more complicated to exhibit its stupidity than it would be if we had a statute which set out the position very clearly. The second thing it does on the shield side is it prevents any US Government agency from cooperating or serving or giving effect to those notices. And it basically says that a US State actor can't cooperate with, like the Biden administration did. It says you can't give effect to an order, and if you do give effect to that order. Zora, will you stop it? My dog is whimpering at the bottom of the stairs in the background. So it says that if you do cooperate with that notice, then what will happen is there's a civil cause of action against the government agency that did it. So that'll prevent any cooperation from the DOJ or the Department of State or something like that. It also creates a sword. Right. I call it a turbo laser, a thermonuclear civil cause of action in podcasts and things like that. And what that does is it allows the American to countersue or sue because it's not, you know, it's a separate proceeding. So it allows an American to sue a European censor for three times the amount of the threatened fine in an American court. And it takes sovereign immunity away from that European censor with respect to, you know, with respect to that claim. So essentially, if you send a letter to an American citizen under this regime, the American citizen, on receiving the letter, will know that letter is not going to be whatever that threat that letter contains, it's not going to be enforceable in the United States. And moreover, because they received the letter, they now have a civil cause of action where they can bring it against the sovereign entity, the agency, and anyone working for the agency jointly and severally, and they can seek to make them liable for damages in an American court. And those damages would be then recoverable in principle against sovereign assets custody to American banks. So all told, this is not designed to create a lucrative practice suing foreign governments in American courts. It is designed to deter foreign notices from ever being sent in the first place because they know that, firstly, they're never going to get those orders enforced here, and secondly, that if they attempt to enforce them at all or even threaten them, right, the political con, they will have to pay a very steep political price for that, which is not the case now. Right now they can send as many letters as they want. It costs them nothing. The response is in fact, very expensive from the American side of the equation because you have to get highly specialized lawyers willing to work for free for small targets running federal litigation in our federal courts without compensation. So that's not a sustainable or scalable way to defend the American constitutional perimeter. If, however, you turn around and you say, okay, well, this is now catnip for plaintiff's counsel and it's really worthwhile and you can do the work on contingency and there's a big pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. You're going to have lawyers, you know, queuing up around the block to defend American civil rights, and it's going to communicate to these foreign governments that even if, right, for whatever reason they decide it's worth their while to send these notices into the US they're not going to get anything, right? They're not going to be able to enforce them here. So it's, it's designed to redraw the boundary. Tell foreign governments, you know, within this red line, right, that's America's turf, don't cross it. If you have a question or a query and you're really interested in knowing whether the communication you're sending to an American citizen violates their First Amendment rights, that's not the American citizens problem anymore. It's your problem, which is exactly how it should be. So if the federal government copies that approach in any meaningful way, I think that the foreign censorship problem will end largely And I think it will end more or less overnight and then we will have a new operating system, legal operating system for the Internet. And it'll be really interesting to see what happens over the course of the next 30 years with a lot like that in the books. So that's the objective is basically to prevent this from happening anymore because it's the threat, it's the intimidation, it's not necessarily the enforcement because Ofcom can't enforce their orders here. We know that Ofcom knows it, the UK knows it, the US government knows it, everybody knows it. But what happens is you go to a tech company, you talk to their highly risk averse legal team that likes occasionally going to London for a conference or something like that, and you say, hey, we're going to throw you in jail if you don't follow our rules. And guess what? They follow the rules and their constitutional rights are limited as a result.
- [27:13]
B
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- [30:35]
A
Free speech in the uk, I mean, it exists the way they define it, but it doesn't exist the way that Americans define it. There's an old joke about an American and a Russian having a drink together at a bar and the American says to the Russians back during the Cold War, America is such a free country, I can walk right up to the gates of the White House and I can curse out and criticize the President of the United States right in front of the White House, and they can't do Anything to me, the Russian says, well, we have free speech, too. And the American says, really? He goes, yeah, I can walk right down to Red Square, right up to the front gates of the Kremlin, and I can criticize President Reagan all I want. And, and so that, that, that's the difference is that there's a, there's a realm of political. The United Kingdom has certain qualitative judgments by which the content of assessment, the content of speech can be regarded as sufficiently offensive or insulting or abusive. And what, what those terms mean is generally defined by the current accepted political and cultural consensus in the government. The United States doesn't have that because our rules focus on making sure that speech rules are content neutral, right? So you ask what is the character of the speech, right, Rather than what is the content of the speech before you proceed to the analysis of whether you can regulate it. So in the United States, I can walk up to the White House and I can say, you know, I think, you know, I think President Trump is a dummy, for example. Something I'm allowed to say, but what I can't do is threaten him, right? I can't. And I'm not going to say what that threat might look like because it's the Internet, but I can't threaten the president, right? I can't threaten the cop standing outside the door. But regardless of who is in the White House, it should be possible to assess whether a threat has been made or not, right? So that's, that's something which is objectively verifiable whether a threat has taken place. Now, the criticism piece, right, is something where, again, regardless of who is in the White House, you can change the criticism all you want, but the identity of the target and the content of the speech doesn't change its nature, which is that it's critique or it's. It's criticism. In the United Kingdom, however, they have rules, particularly on the Internet. Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 is a good example where grossly offensive speech is something which the state is permitted to intervene on, that is inherently a subjective judgment whether something is grossly offensive or not. And if you then go and you ask a British judge, right, well, where's the line between offensive and grossly offensive? They kind of shrug and they say, well, you know, it sounds grossly offensive to me because, you know, anyone who heard that statement would, would doubtlessly be offended by it when they heard it. And so that's been used that stand in other cases, right? In the real world, you have abusive, threatening or insulting words of behavior. Right. And abusive, threatening and insulting. Those are also terms which are inherently subjective. Right. Abusive or insulting, particularly. And you've seen cases where someone burned a Quran outside of the Turkish Embassy in London. Right. There was a very specific political act derived from, you know, Turkey has a long history of a complicated relationship between secularism on which the state was founded and more religiously motivated politics which is currently running the state. And so it was an inherently political act going to the embassy and burning a Quran, saying, listen, I disagree with the involvement of religion in Turkish national politics. So that guy, Hamid Koskin was his name. He was arrested and he was tried and convicted, I believe or no, he was tried and acquitted of. Of a public order offense. But now the Crown is appealing, Right? They said, well, actually, no, we think that was sufficiently abusive and insulting because anyone would have been. And we think the judge wrongly decided this case. And in the United States, that would fall squarely within protective speech. Was anyone being threatened? No. Right. Was he threatening to cause physical harm to anybody? No. Was it his Quran that he was burning? Yes. So regardless of the subjective perception of offense or abuse or insult being felt by anyone who is watching it, in the United States, we'd say, well, that was still a protected act of expression. Right. Because it's not within the categories of speech which we seek to control under our constitutional system, which look at the content of the speech, which is the necessary inquiry. If you're asking, well, is someone offended by the speech inherently, what you're doing there is you're looking into the content of the conduct, the substance of the idea that's being communicated, and you're punishing the person for the substance rather than the nature of the speech itself. And so they don't really have our doctrine there. And the UK Online Safety act requires American companies to remove speech which is illegal there, which effectively ports their domestic speech regime as an Internet regulatory regime which obliges Americans to remove speech which is illegal in the UK but perfectly legal in the United States. And that is one of the. Incidentally, we haven't even. In the 4chan case, we haven't even reached that point in the analysis because they haven't rolled out and started seeking to enforce those content moderation rules. What they sought to do was to compel 4chan to produce a risk assessment, an audit, an internal audit, essentially, where they were going to write a document where they confessed their sins, said how they complied with the rules, and said how they were going to. Not said how they weren't complying with the rules and how they intended to come into compliance. And we looked at that and we said, sorry, that's compelled speech under the First Amendment. We don't have to explain our content moderation decisions to you. And threatening us by saying that, you know, if you don't produce this report confessing your sins, well, that violates the Fifth Amendment. And moreover, right, you're asking for an internal document that we may or may not have, you know, may or may not have produced, and you're doing it without a judicial warrant. That violates the Fourth Amendment. Right. So it's first, fourth, Fifth Amendment. We have cases on all of these things that tell us that here in the US the conduct of refusing a foreign censor's order to testify against yourself, admit your sins, and explain your content moderation practices violates our Constitution at multiple points. And we just decided, okay, well, we can either sit here and wait and ignore the notices, or we can punch them on the nose and we can say, okay, we're going to explain to the entire American bar, the case has been viewed tens of thousands of times the documents on that case. So we can explain to the entire American bar, we can explain to Washington, D.C. we can explain to you, and we can explain to anyone else who might be interested, all in one, in one clean sweep, exactly what you're asking, exactly why we object and exactly what kind of law reform is needed in order to prevent this from happening again through the simple act of filing a lawsuit which is published in the District of Columbia, which a lot of lawyers are going to read. And that's another part of the reason why we did it. Right? So we have, you know, the hurdles that we have to get over on the sovereign immunity point. I'm not going to beat around the bush. They are substantial. We do have arguments. We will be making them. But it is the sovereign immunity defense that they raised is, is a formidable one. Our point that we've been making to Washington is that when you have a coordinated global effort from 31 different sovereigns, 30 different countries, the member states of the EU, the United Kingdom, Australia, and there are some smaller entities that have similar rules that might want to try the same thing, New Zealand and Singapore in particular, and that are purporting to have extraterritorial effect in the United States, when you. That is the problem that you face. It is not sufficient to be sitting here and saying, okay, we're going to tie Americans hands behind their back with our own rules and sovereign immunity defenses. And that's something which is going to be sustainable in the long run. We need some major, major law reform changes in order to arrest this conduct and prevent it from becoming commonplace for companies large and small. And so the lawsuit was really designed to illustrate the nature of that problem. We think we've done that very successfully. We know for a fact that the lawsuit has been noticed at the very highest levels of American government. I'm not going to say where or among whom, but we think we made our point and we think we've made it very well. And of course we're going to assert our claims and defenses, make our arguments and all the rest of it. But the name of the game here has always been, for years now, it has always been we need to change the structure of American law in order to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. And I think you know where we are now. I sit at this very strange point where not a lot of lawyers or not a lot of people have been involved, but there is a process and it is very advanced. So it sounds a little crazy when you, when you say I'm really optimistic that something's going to happen, but I am extremely optimistic that something's going to happen on this front. And I think it's probably going to happen in Q1 of 2026, maybe Q2 at the latest. So, yeah, that's where we are if that is in terms of the summary.
- [39:09]
B
Yeah. Well, you mentioned companies both large and small and earlier you mentioned the fact that 4chan was described as their servers being a bunch of Mac Minis connected to each other in a closet. Obviously Elon and X have been in the news in recent months because the European Parliament, I, I don't know if they sue them, they're simply fining them.
- [39:32]
A
Yeah, the Commission, the European Commission, which is the executive branch agency of the European Union, just issued a fine for violating their various rules and that completely violates the First Amendment. It's not enforceable here.
- [39:44]
B
So there's no. Since X has business operations around the world, maybe servers and other places. It doesn't. It's still. The First Amendment still protects them.
- [39:52]
A
It protects them in the United States and it certainly doesn't protect them in the eu. Right. But the issue with the global companies that they have is they. So my clients, I have a very easy job. Right. They're entirely U.S. based. All of their assets are U.S. citus, all of their servers are in the United States. And so from our point of view, when you have that foreign intrusion, it's a very simple Analysis, Right. The analysis is, no, thanks, we're not doing this. You have no power here. With a company like X or Google or Facebook, they have very meaningful footprints outside of the United States. So it is somewhat more complicated for them to push back against these demands because there are assets against which a foreign state can enforce a judgment or a ruling or a fine or whatever else. We think that this should be resolved as a diplomatic matter between the United States and these countries and that they should respect the way that we do things, because those are usually branch offices and subsidiaries that don't actually serve and operate the app itself. I know in X's case, they actually, the contractual counterparty is an Irish entity which has, and I think they probably also have servers in Ireland. And there are tax reasons why they do that. Ireland is a tax shelter for a lot of these companies for various reasons that don't bear going into here. So their picture is somewhat more complicated. But with the Granite act as we've drafted it, it would actually protect American companies with those foreign operations and subsidiaries because it would say, listen, what you're still seeking to do when you're targeting the sub is you're actually really seeking to target the parent and you're telling the parent entity, listen, if you don't do this, your entire global business is going to suffer consequences. And at the moment, they can do that for free, and it doesn't affect them at all. And there's no real pushback or response from the United States. There's no real resistance that we can offer except full withdrawal from the European Union and then daring them to come over here to enforce the fine, which of course, if they were to do that, they wouldn't. They wouldn't be able to. So it's a complicated picture for a company like X and certainly more complicated than it would be for a client like 4chan or kiwi farms or gab. And so we are, you know, to a certain extent, we're in a privileged position because we're able to be the tip of the spear because we have these structure. You know, the operations of my clients are structured in such a way that it offers a very significant and meaningful defense to these foreign censorship attempts that a company like Google or Facebook is vulnerable to. So, you know, it's. And it's a, it's a whole of ecosystem. We're not doing this. You know, I am doing this just for my clients. Right. But it just so happens that the solution that would save my clients from this sort of thing would also save any other American company at the same time. So the entire tech industry will benefit if a law is enacted which protects these tiny American companies as we proposed it. Because ultimately a law that protects a tiny American company should also protect a big one in exactly the same way that it protects the small one.
- [42:49]
B
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- [45:11]
A
I do, but I think if what Granite is designed to do is it's designed to make the Europeans own the consequences of their censorship. So at the moment, the Europeans have sought to outsource censorship through. They've introduced several layers of intermediation between themselves and the censorship by saying, well, we expect a tech company to comply with these duties. And if you don't comply, these duties require you, right, ipso facto, to commit acts of censorship in the European Union, in the UK and on your servers in the United States. If you don't comply with those duties, we won't necessarily order you to remove a particular piece of content, but we will fine you to disincentivize you from disobeying us again or not carrying out those duties sufficiently. Well. And so rather than specifically targeting individual pieces of content for removal, what they do is they create mechanisms whereby third parties, trusted flaggers, independent entities called super complainers in the UK, they have a super complaints regime for NGOs over there to complain about particular content. And they already have sent some of these complaints. And even though the regime isn't live saying, look at all this bad content on X, look at all these posts that need to be removed. And what they do is they say, well, we found this bad post, this NGO found this bad post. You didn't remove this bad post. So you're getting fined, right, for not removing it because we've assessed that you violated your duties. And so they never actually want to get their hands dirty doing the censorship themselves. Something like Granite changes that. It says, okay, well listen, this is an American company. If you try to censor the American company or Violate their rights, you will. We'll see you in court. But it is still within your sovereign power, if you wish. In a European country, United Kingdom, France, Germany, you control the pipes leading into and out of your country. And something the United States has no say over is whether you DNS block particular pieces of content or domain. So if you want to, if you really think censorship is that important, what you need to do is you need to do it yourself. You need to hire armies of state employed moderators. You need to troll the Internet for content you disagree with, you need to block it. And when a user seeks to navigate to it, it won't get served. That is the type of censorship that we have no say over because it is purely domestic and it doesn't extend outside of your borders. Now, the reason the Europeans don't do that is because that's politically insane, because it puts the censorship directly in the hands of the government and the attribution is directly in the hands of the government. So if a user navigates to a website or to a link or to a particular post that's been banned, or a particular tweet, every tweet has its own URL. And they try to get that and they try to access it and it says, won't resolve this content 404s or whatever it is, then they say, okay, well, the government has stepped in here and there's a direct chain of causation between a government employee and a government rule and the content that the user isn't allowed to see. So what they've done is instead they've set up this very passive aggressive regime where they say, we are going to launder that censorship through a third party and we're going to conscript the American to carry it out for us. And what we'll do is we'll just lord over it and we'll issue fines if we think that the censorship isn't sufficient and doesn't meet our standards or isn't otherwise to our satisfaction. And that's fine, they're certainly welcome to do that. But our position is that if that's the approach they're going to take, the American government needs to punch them on the nose, say, no, you can't do that. If you really want to censor, you are going to have to bear the full political cost of that censorship yourself. And we're not going to allow our companies to be forcibly conscripted into those efforts so that you can avoid the full political consequences of your actions. And I think that if they were forced to do that. And we're starting to see that in the UK actually, because now they're starting to talk about client side scanning instead of server side scanning. There there was a discussion in Parliament yesterday about this and the Prime Minister started to talk about this because they know that server side scanning isn't going to work. And also they attempted to do the server side enforcement against my four clients, every American target, known American target to date. And when they did that, they got stopped at the Shoreline by a solo practitioner with an ex account working nights and weekends for free. So part of the reason we did that. So I've gotten a lot of criticism for being very vocal in how we in writing funny emails and sending Pepe memes to them and all the rest of it. But the humiliation is the point, right? We are sending them Pepe memes and we are sending them funny emails and we are not treating this seriously because they're not treating it seriously because they're not using international procedures to serve these notices. They're not bringing lawsuits in the United States as plaintiffs, as we would expect, to enforce their fines. They're just pretending that they can go do whatever they want in the UK and that whatever they do in the UK is going to have domestic effect in the US which for any lawyer who has ever done anything cross border, ever. Yeah, any lawyer who's done that will know, right? That's not how this, that's not how this game is played. So if they want to get serious and start bringing their own lawsuits in American courts, which of course they're likely destined to lose, then I will respond seriously, right? But if they're going to send emails over international boundaries and say, we've sent you this email and it is legally binding and effective on your client in the us, I'm going to send them a Pepe meme, right? Which we have done. It was a Pepe hold a little baby Pepe holding sparklers in front of a street, glorious fluttering American flag. Because the legal effect of their email is roughly the same as the legal effect of mine, which is not none. And so if they want to get serious, which they're not going to on that front, then they're going to have to change their tactics. But I think they've recognized now that the. And they'll never admit it, but they've recognized that the solution of bullying Americans into compliance is not a solution which is durable and it is one which exposes them to political costs, both here in the United States and in the uk if they turn around and do client side scanning. Right. That's something where from a legal perspective it's very different because they can simply say to Apple and Google, and I don't think there's a whole lot of constitutional objection that we can raise. If you want to sell your device here in the uk, you have to have this particular type of client side scanning available for our use and we will prohibit the sale of phones here. I disagree with that. Right. I don't think that's the right approach at all. But it is something which is pretty unquestionably in their sovereign power to do that doesn't intrude on American sovereignty and doesn't require Americans to surrender their First Amendment rights. It simply says that any device which is sold in the UK is going to have to participate in our totalitarian panopticon that we have legislated for ourselves. And ideally by doing that, what we do is we raise the political temperature in the UK for law reform. Because people will navigate to something on their phone, it'll get intercepted, there will be mistakes, there will be errors, and they'll say, this is crazy. Why in the United States am I allowed to have a phone that doesn't do this? But in the UK I've got this nerf device that's run by the state and that, you know, calls home to the police anytime I decide to go look at a porn website. I think that that's, that's where we're, you know. But if the UK wants to do that, that is their decision. But we need them to be owning the political costs of it rather than imposing that cost on American citizens.
- [52:07]
B
Yeah.
- [52:10]
A
Yeah, I want to go down.
- [52:11]
B
Now is the NGO thing, because we were, I mean, in the United States, tftc, this channel, we were subject to this type of mechanism. The center for Countering Digital Hate.
- [52:21]
A
They came after you.
- [52:23]
B
They put us on a list of climate deniers because we've had climate scientists who disagree with the mainstream idea behind cataclysmic climate change. And so they put us on the list and they sent it to YouTube and they had algorithms that were scraping our transcripts and they highly recommended to YouTube that they demonetized the channel and take down our climate related content. But I mean, the point being is like this, this NGO sort of layered mechanism existed here in the United States too, not too long ago.
- [53:00]
A
I mean, you're allowed to advocate for censorship in the United States. That's something that you're permitted to do. But I think the problem with a group like CCBH is that they work hand in glove with the foreign regulators to censor American citizens. Right? So they consult with groups with Ofcom and with the European Commission and groups like that. And they will doubtless be one of the entities that Ofcom listens to under the super complaints regime where they're seeking to censor content in the United States. And so they're, you know, you can advocate for censorship here, right? There was actually a lawsuit over this. X sued CCDH and X lost the lawsuit because they said, listen, this is a strategic lawsuit against public participation. There's protected activity. And they're trying to use a breach of contract claim without commenting on the merits myself. That was the ruling. So CCDH can advocate for censorship all they want. What happens is, for a while they had a cooperative US Tech industry. When Elon bought X, when he bought Twitter and turned it into X, a big piece of that industry ceased to be cooperative. And particularly the piece of the industry which kind of operates as an incubator for policy ideas that then spread out across the rest of the ecosystem. And so then Facebook, of course, after Elon bought X and then President Trump was reelected, Facebook then said, we're going to be listening to these people less. So one thing that these foreign regimes do is they create another avenue for these entities and organizations to apply coercive influence on American platforms to censor protected speech and conduct in the United States. And they can advocate for that all they want, right? If they're here, an American citizen here in the United States, and you work for CCDH and you think censorship is good, and you think the content that X or Facebook or someone else hosts is bad, you have a First Amendment right to run around and advocate for that speech to be removed. However, what they're also doing is they're calling down coercive state power from abroad on these same American companies. And that's something that we have the power to prohibit. The coercive power in particular, not necessarily the advocacy. So, yeah, these organizations have been doing this for a long time. I've been doing this for 10 years. There's never been any meaningful legislative intervention to prevent them from using foreign sovereign power. Or basically, the way to think about it is they do the targeting, right? So they're the guy with the laser targeter and they're painting the target and they tell the foreign states, hey, come after this particular company, right? We want that company taken out. They went after gab.com right? And they said, well, it's content which is harmful for children, right? On Gab well Gab Gab is, is an 18 plus website. Doesn't focus on children's content, doesn't permit adult content and its content moderation policy is aligned with the first Amendment. The likelihood right then it doesn't have any apps and app stores or anything like that. It's not widely used. That company was targeted for, by, for political reasons because they host wrong thing the UK state and that the NGOs who advise the British state don't like and that you know, that is the function that they serve. They point to the target, the regulator listens to the ngo, they launder it and they say listen, this is research, this is independent study. It's something like that. This disinformation studies people at Stanford basically just chronically online sociology PhDs who, who troll the Internet all day and, and confuse that for original research which advances the human species and then they turn around, they write sophisticated, well cited reports, point cherry picking content which they don't like out of tens of millions or hundreds of millions of posts. And then they use that to paint a picture of these sites as these lawless, you know, lawless anarchic wastelands that need to be brought under control. When I the lawyer, one of the few lawyers willing to represent them. I know for a fact some of these websites you get a law enforcement request, let's say from the FBI, you get a subpoena or an emergency request, right? Prime example. These companies are so small they can turn around those requests in 15 minutes which is the height of corporate responsibility, right? If the police approach and they say we've got an emergency and we need you to do something, you go to Meta, you go to Google, you go to X, it'll take days. You go to one of these tiny websites, there's not a huge amount of, it's tiny team, they know where everything is. Executive decisions can be made very quickly. You can get coefficient CEO attention on something very quickly and it doesn't take up a ton of bandwidth and they respond to these requests in under 30 minutes. There's one case for one of these companies we got a, we sent a tip to FBI ntoc, the National Threat Operations center, because a post was, it was reported by a user as potentially presenting a threat. The tip went to FBI NTOC at 10 o' clock on a Saturday night, 10:22 on the Saturday night, we get a phone call back from the National Threat Operations center in West Virginia saying hey, could you please send us the relevant data? We're on the job, right? So you have this These companies are actually really responsible and they're actually very efficient at responding when it matters, which is when you actually have a crime being committed. Where they are not responsible is when they're hosting wrong thing that the British state thinks is corrosive to British society, but which in the United States is constitutionally protected. And so that is why they've been targeted. Not because they're non cooperative with police and not because they're not responsive. Because in fact these smaller websites generally are highly responsive when you have a, when the rubber meets the road and when it actually matters. But of course the regulators don't think this because what they've done is they've seen reports that were commissioned to make these websites look like they're run by the spawn of Satan and they're evil incarnate. And their sole purpose is the destruction of all that is good in the world. Because what they did is they cherry picked content that's been read, maybe posts that have been read maybe three times by obscure accounts spouting, you know, silly ideas. Right, okay, well my client's got 100 million users. Are there a hundred, you know, population of 100 million people. How many of them are going to say stupid things and how many of them are going to say that on, you know, per day? It's going to be a lot. And we don't turn around and, you know, hook everyone up to a neural link and start censoring their thoughts as a result. So it, that's the NGO sector is, is corrosive, but it's particularly corrosive because it has been married to foreign state power and because they are steering these foreign regulators in making targeting decisions against American citizens. We know that for a fact. And so we have, you know, they can do that. Right? If you're Americans and you're an American organization, you can call for all the censorship you want because the First Amendment protects your right to do so. But I think what we can do right in terms of intervening is we can prevent foreign regulators from being an effective tool to achieve via foreign coercive force what they are unable to achieve by US domestic coercive forces.
- [59:35]
B
I wear my CCDH being on that list with as a badge of honor. You should, I'm a new climate denier according to them. But again, thing of solutions, it would be ideal if we didn't have to do any of this and if these countries would just enact better free speech laws. And moving back to the uk, you have sort of, you presented a free speech law for the UK that I have it fixed this problem, what's going on there?
- [60:07]
A
So I'm, I'm pretty active in the UK free speech movement. I could have been a British citizen, my father was a British citizen. I elected not to do that because I, I kind of saw the way the wind was blowing when at the relevant time. And I said, you know, I think having a British passport is really not in my interest. So maybe at some point I'll go back, you know, naturalize and become a citizen again, or become a citizen for the first time. But in the meantime, I enjoy the diplomatic and legal cover that the United States affords me. But I wrote something called the UK Free Speech act in 2020, which essentially creates a First Amendment style principle. It's not the same, it's not co extensive, the language isn't the same. It's not designed to be extensive because that's a different country with different rules and different practices. But essentially it says that the First Amendment should apply to spoken or written expression, right? So you should be able to say anything and you should be able to write anything in accordance. So other kinds of expressive conduct, you know, we can leave that to one side. It's up to their courts to figure out whether they want to extend that principle that way or not. And repeals large swathes of British speech codes in one go, right? It just says, listen, here are the laws that need to disappear. And it's big chunks, right? So it's, it's part three of the Public Order act in its entirety. It's large sections of The Terrorism Acts 2000 and 2006 in their entirety. It's largely. The entire Communications act would disappear or, you know, I, I want to disappear the entire Communications act and start from scratch. But you know, at least section127 of the Communications act would have to go. Bits of the Contempt of Court act for reporting on judicial proceedings would go. Bits of the Protection from Harassment act would go and be replaced by other more robust provisions that, you know, more robust provisions that, that would, that would protect, you know, free speech but also. Right. Prevent harassment. And so those are really thought experiments, right, for, for teaching, for demonstrating, much like the Granted act was, right? Illustrating, listen, here's a thought experiment. Here's what the world could look like, right? So we're going to just create the idea and then introduce the possibility that this thing could exist. And now what we're seeing is the thing is on the verge of existing, right? So with the UK Free Speech act, it's similar, right? It's it's saying, listen, here's the UK Free Speech act, here's what could exist. Now take that away and go consider how you would adapt it and what you think you can get over the line in a politically acceptable fashion. So, you know, I'm not going to say who's working on it or what stage those things are at, but I do know that that proposal has been ingested by more than one and fewer than three political organizations in the United Kingdom. And there are people within those organizations who are looking at it very seriously, not for immediate enactment because the labor government is never going to do it because they, they don't believe in free speech. But after a general election, that is something which might be on the table as part of a great repeal bill and you know, potentially doing a large scale reform of the UK's institutions and its laws to make the place freer, more competitive and just generally a nicer place to live. So, you know, that proposal is out there, it's being, it's been chewed on by relevant people. I'm very active in the UK free speech movement on the legal Advisory Council of the UK Free Speech Union, which is the nation's premier free speech advocacy organization. And essentially when these issues come up, my free speech practice is not a practice. It has not been a money making practice for a very long time. And so I provide pro bono assistance to lawyers who are representing companies that have been targeted under these rules. Because I do so much of it that basically just reading a lawyer in and saying, okay, here's the, it almost wouldn't be fair to charge for it at some point. I'll charge for it, but not until we're done winning the fight. So you know what we're, that process is moving. It's in, it's still very prototypical. We haven't got any draft legislation, nothing's been introduced. There are some MPs who have considered introducing something like the Free Speech act as a private members bill, but those efforts would largely be symbolic until such time as you have a change of government. I'm optimistic that if the reform government gets elected that something like the Free Speech act would be enacted fairly quickly. And, and currently they're projected to win the election by 400 seats. So you know, if one were held tomorrow. Right, but of course one is not legally required to be held until 20, 28 or 29. So yeah, that's, that's where things are there. That's, there's a long way to go. But I think the, the censorship has finally reached the point where the party in waiting, right, that's waiting for the election to occur by one means or another, is very much on board with loosening up speech controls and these kinds of fights when you're trying to. I've been doing this, as I said, I've been a free speech activist for 15 years and I've been pushing on the foreign free speech issue as a practitioner for 10. These fights play out over decades, right? And so the objective that I have is not. You can't. How to put it, how to put this. When you're trying to steer a state in a particular direction, you cannot do it yourself to start and you cannot do it at once. So what we've seen with the federal response to what's going on with the foreign censorship, this has been a very, very, very, very, very long process involving a lot of different people in a lot of different places. Both writers and journalists like Mike Benz and Mike Shellenberger, lawyers like myself and Ron Coleman, politicians and political activists throughout the federal system have been aware of this. And it's been a question of just kind of creating groundwork, laying traps for the foreign censors to fall into. Waiting for. It's a waiting game, right? So the Online Safety act, we knew that was coming in 2019 when it was called the Online Harms Bill, and then of course they enacted it in 2023 when it was finally called the Online Safety Act. That was not the right time to launch a counteroffensive. Right. We had to wait for them to try to enforce it and then when they tried to enforce it, that is when we could launch the counteroffensive and go strike. So there's a lot of timing involved and the timescales that are involved are multiyear, invariably and frankly they're multi decade. So the UK's free speech fight is nowhere near over. The European speech fight is nowhere near over. But a lot of it is just a question of doing very unglamorous preparatory work in in the shadows and watching and observing and gathering evidence and figuring out strategy and figuring out what weak points are and waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting until eventually the moment arrives. And then what you do is you move. So I expect that. That I expect will probably, if there is going to be a UK Free Speech Act, I would put the timetable on a five to ten year timetable, probably close. If electoral trends continue, it's going to be closer to 5. If reform for some reason falls apart and doesn't get elected, I'd put it at closer to 10 to 15. But you just have to stay in the fight and keep pushing and eventually you get your moment.
- [66:59]
B
Is the political will there from the populace in the UK particularly, are people fed up with this or is there a lot of cognitive dissonance just go along.
- [67:08]
A
I think that there's a lot of muddling along. I think that most people don't care enough because it doesn't affect them. The issue is, does it affect enough people? Does it affect a substantial enough minority of the population enough for that minority to exercise the political will to overcome the political apathy of the majority? And I think the answer to that question right now is yes. So you don't need to get free speech over the line in the UK. You do not need to have 90% of the country turning into ardent First Amendment activists. You need about 50 to 60% to not care and then you need about 30% to have it be a foundational part of their, of their political, you know, their political identity. And you then need to have them get a parliamentary majority. Because for most people the First Amendment doesn't really, for most Americans, the First Amendment is not something which they recognize as being operative on a daily basis. Right. It's kind of, it's, it's really, really deep down in the system. It's part of the kernel, right? So you'll notice it if it's gone. But you're not sitting there thinking to yourself, gee, I really use the First Amendment a lot today and I think in the UK it's kind of similar, but the reverse. There's a lot of censorship and people have self censored in order to stay within the guardrails. So they're not really aware of how much better things could be for the country and for themselves if you remove the guardrails. And you're never going to be able to convince them that that's the case. But I think the censorship has gotten bad enough that you probably have 25 to 30% of the British population that now thinks that free speech is a critical national issue. And they're willing to, you know, they're willing to make that voice heard at the ballot box and they're willing to make the voice heard in a very specific way. So it depends on what, you know, what happens politically over the next two years. But I think if we looking at current trends, it seems probable that reform will be elected. And I'm reliably informed that reform is very pro free speech.
- [68:59]
B
Good. Now, because Matt Odell and I were joking about it. Yesterday on Rabbit Hole Recap, we were highlighting Peter McCormick's nonviolent sort of opt out campaign that he's been on. And if you go read, he's trying, he's basically throwing his hands up and saying, hey, this isn't working. Like we need to protest peacefully and non violently to make a change here in the uk. And we were joking about how it was so obvious that he was self censoring himself on the website.
- [69:29]
A
I think Peter is going to be. I'm going to put this, I'm going to put this on the record. I think Peter is going to be Prime Minister one day.
- [69:35]
B
You think so?
- [69:38]
A
I actually, I actually think that one day he's going to be Prime Minister. That's, that's my, my most controversial English political opinion is. I think one day he's going to, he's just so, he's just so. He's such a good guy, right? And he's such a good communicator and that I've known him for years and years when he was doing, you know, his own bitcoin specific podcast before he became the big, you know, the UK's version of Joe Rogan. And he's just such a good guy that like he's the kind of person where you said you want to, Where I'd like to be is in 15 years, right. Looking back and Peter's the Prime Minister because he's just such a good guy and he cares so much about the country that for whatever reason circumstances and Peter collide and he winds up becoming PM. I think that's my long shot for PM in 15 years. I think that he's actually going to do it. That's my hunch.
- [70:31]
B
I would love to see that. It's been incredible watching his progression. Obviously he's moved back to Bedford and really walking away from what bitcoin did, launching the Peter McCormick show and really leaning into the political topics of the day over in the UK to try.
- [70:46]
A
And make a difference.
- [70:47]
B
It's been, it's admirable at the very least. Right. It's been fun to watch.
- [70:53]
A
Well, I think he's learning, he's learning a lot about politics by keeping it hyper local on Bedford. Right. And so what he's doing, it's an interesting kind of exercise in teaching himself. Right. Exactly what, so he's, what he's doing is he's mapping the battle space. So he's running into all of the craziness about how UK local government works and figuring out how everything's broken and how all their attitudes are attitudes of learned helplessness. So Keir Starmer is the prime example. Parliament in theory, legal theory, has absolute power to do whatever it wants. It could proclaim by an act of Parliament that the moon is made of cheese and that everyone has to refer to the moon being made of cheese. And everyone in the UK would have to say once a day when they woke up in the morning, I believe that the moon is made of cheese. That is how much power it has. There's no constitutional guardrail on it. And the Prime Minister goes before a committee yesterday, he's like, well, there's nothing we can do about immigration issues because every time we do it there's a judicial review and the regulations and there is a report that has to be done and there's this and there's that and there's this and there's that and you just go, you have absolute power, write a law enacted, you delegate the power to a state agency and you can fix any problem you want to. But what they've done is there's so, there's so much institutional inertia, they're so used to doing things in a way where nothing gets done, right, and they have various constituencies within the state that are highly incentivized to keep it that way, right, where nothing gets done at speed. And everything requires an enormous amount of bureaucracy and accordingly, everything requires an enormous amount of bureaucrats that you can never really short circuit it and adopt a sort of startup style mentality where you just go, no, what's the real problem here? How do we take a shortcut and how do we make sure that this happens at speed? But they have unlimited power, right, in principle, so there's nothing stopping Parliament from doing it except their own internal preconceptions and preconceived notions and self imposed barriers. And I think Peter's probably running into that, a lot of that dealing with local councils where it's like, hey, here's a problem downtown, there's a lot of crime, what do you want to do about it? And they're like, well, sorry, we can't do anything. So Peter goes and hires a private police force to go and patrol the downtown in the problem goes away because he can see the problem clearly for what it is, understand what the solution is, deploy that solution at speed and then the problem disappears. But the local governments just don't work that way, right? So he's learning the map, he's learning how the enemy is shaped. And I think that at some point he's Going to learn enough where he says, okay, I know enough now to figure out what needs to be done. And I think when he does that, he will have his, his own. My hunch, right? He hasn't said anything like that to me or anything like that, but my hunch is that Peter's eventually going to get sick of it enough that he just decides something needs to be done and he's going to jump into the arena and when he does so he will be a very formidable, he'll be a very formidable participant, that arena.
- [73:45]
B
So, yeah, he's got, try to pull up the site now. He's got, he's got a campaign right now to, to again, it's funny reading, reading the website was, was a hoot because you could tell he was self censoring to make sure he wasn't making the government mad.
- [74:05]
A
Yeah, everybody over there does. They all do. And that's, you know, if I were working over there now, I'm an English solicitor, right? I'm a lawyer over there. If I were over there now, I would not. I'm not flying over there now for context. I'm not flying over there because I'm afraid I'll be arrested the second, or not arrested, but at least searched the second I land because my clients are conceivably criminal targets for the UK's online safety regime, right? And my computer, conceivably it doesn't, but conceivably it has relevant information. And so they could use counterterrorism laws, for example, to stop me when I enter the border, search my devices, detain me for 12 hours and then put me on a plane and fly me back straight back to, to New York. So from my point of view, the UK is not a safe place to be if you are active in free speech at all. Right. And if they're willing to do that to Graham Linehan when he flies over there because he posted one offensive tweet once, you know, the, the chief architect of the American legal resistance, right, who's taking them on head on in every forum available. I just don't trust that the UK wouldn't take advantage of that. So it's, it's not a pleasant place to be to be a speaker and it's certainly not a pleasant place to be a free speech activist. And yeah, everyone I know over there is very guarded with what they say because they know that if they cross the line, they're not. And that's the whole point, right, about why the First Amendment exists. The realm of public discourse has been severely constrained in the uk, which prevents people from actually participating it and pushing back on state excess. Because effectively, if you criticize something loudly enough, if you criticize a government policy loudly enough, you'll be arrested for it. And that's why we're doing what we're doing here, because we know that we can't allow that to spread into the states.
- [75:47]
B
Yeah, it's. That's what I wear. Because I would like to actually go over to Peter's conference next year, but he wrote this. I no Longer Consent the Moral Case for a Peaceful Revolution. He's got a whole website.
- [76:01]
A
Yeah.
- [76:01]
B
I think he's trying to make a movement out of it, so it's interesting. It's funny that. Not funny.
- [76:08]
A
It's just crazy.
- [76:12]
B
It's crazy how Peter ended up in this position, too. Just going from.
- [76:16]
A
I mean, he's a smart guy who cares. And eventually. Eventually what happens is, if you care about. If you care about the world, you get involved. Right. And you get involved sometimes. Peter doesn't need to do this. Right. He could keep running the podcast business, not have opinions, and probably make a lot more money than the trajectory that he seems to be hinting he might go down. But that's. That's what happens if you care. You eventually start making decisions that affect your ability to make money, but you're not optimizing for money at that point. You're optimizing for outcomes. And I strongly suspect that Peter will wind up optimizing for outcomes rather than money. Just knowing, given the aggregate sum of every interaction I've had with him over 10 years, it seems logical and almost inevitable that he will do that. But we'll see.
- [77:09]
B
Well, as some people say, real, recognized real. It seems like you're real in this sense, too, where you've dedicated a lot of your life to pro bono work and the defense of free speech, particularly here in America and hopefully outside of our border. So, again, uploading smoke up your ass. Thank you for all the work you've been doing on that front. It's extremely important. These are existential.
- [77:30]
A
Anytime. You know, they're. I'm not. I'm nothing special, though. You know, they're. I know at least three other lawyers, if they'd caught this case, who they would have done. But there are, like, three people who. I know who would have done this. But. But any one of them would have done exactly the same thing. It's just a question.
- [77:49]
B
There's less than a handful of us.
- [77:50]
A
There's less than a handful of us. Yeah. It's Ron Coleman, Amy Pikoff, maybe Mark Randazza and trying to think. And I think that's it. I think that's. Those are, I think those are the three others who would have, who would. And Mark Randazza. Ron Coleman is involved, right, because he's co counsel on the 4chan case. Amy Pikoff is currently working with Pacific Legal and she's doing Fourth Amendment work at the border, which is a big problem here in the us. And Mark Randazza is one of the most storied First Amendment litigators in the United States. So those three people I know would have done exactly the same thing. And one of them in fact is involved in this fight. So I'm not alone. There aren't many of us, but there are a lot of people in the federal government now, who cares? And they can't be named for obvious reasons, but they're pushing the ball forward too. And I'd say probably another 10 lawyers in the government in various places are looking at this very seriously and moving the ball forward. So every issue has its specialists. And my issue, I languished in comparative obscurity just focusing on this one problem nobody cared about for a long time until suddenly everybody did. And so it was just a weird set of circumstances where the uk, if Bulgaria had done this right, Bulgaria had decided that they were going to have an Internet censorship law and they were going to enter the us. I would not have been the right lawyer for that. You would have needed a Bulgarian American dual qualified lawyer. But it just happened to be coincidence, timing and coincidence. Pure coincidence that it happened with the UK that did it first. But yeah, it's been a crazy ride. It's not over yet. I'm not doing any victory laps yet, but I think once we're done reinforcing the American perimeter, I think a lot of the UK's assumptions around controlling domestic speech are predicated on the additional assumption that they would be able to control American speech and the environment here through their extraterritorial rules. And I think the same is true in the uk, in the eu, excuse me, and Australia. And if we can negate that assumption by nullifying the effect of these extraterritorial laws here in the United States, that will do two things. The first one is, one, it will communicate to those places that they are not able to pull us down to the lowest common denominator and hobble us competitively, so this is not a viable economic strategy for their countries. And the second thing is, it will tell them you are not able to control the political environment here through extraterritorial coercion. And as a consequence of that, we will, you know, you will have to learn to live with America and American free speech online. And you will have to make the decision whether you want to really own the censorship, like Stasi style, Soviet style, controlling what information enters the information economy. Sorry, my dog is now making more noise. He's digging on the carpet under the chair, so presumably to go take a nap. That's my life now. I sit here, I fight foreign governments and I have a small poodle who makes noises inside. But yeah, so they'll have to make the decision whether they want to take those politically damaging actions in their countries or whether they want to chart a different course and try something else. I think it'll take a little time, but I suspect over the next five to 10 years, the alternative course of action. I think we've reached the high water mark of this nonsense and that the pushback, once we're done, once you've completed it here in the US that's going to communicate to a lot of people in Europe that their current course was not sustainable, it does not have a future, and accordingly, they need to alter course as well. Yeah.
- [81:34]
B
With that note, any calls to action to the audience? What can anybody who's listening to this, who's inspired, what can they do to get involved?
- [81:41]
A
If you're a lawyer, there's a lot that you can do. Chiefly you can pick up a, you know, pick up a pro bono case now here and there and get involved, reach out to me, you know, if there's anything you want to do, let's, let's be friends and, you know, I can try to send some work your way because if we don't succeed at, you know, holding the line with federal action, but I think we will, but if we don't, there are certainly going to be more clients and I'm certainly not able to take them all myself. If you're not an attorney, you can retweet, engage with content and call your representatives, that sort of thing. I know that your audience may not actually know this because Taylor Lorenz, who's a journalist over on the political left who is very much not aligned with the ideals of most Bitcoiners, is actually one of the most outspoken pro free speech activists for Internet speech in the United States. And I frequently find that when she expresses an opinion on any one of the many child safety or online safety or age verification laws here in the United States, even I learned something and I find myself adopting her positions. And we are not predisposed to agree with each other by any stretch of the imagination. So definitely follow Taylor. Follow people she engages with. Follow groups like Fire and NetChoice. Retweet their content. If we get federal legislation in the new year, please call your representative and say that you support that legislation and that you'd like to see it enacted, and there will be a time and a place for that. You know, the bills. No bills have been published as yet. But, yeah, I think the. I think. I think there's. There's going to be an interesting story for Internet censorship over the next 612 months, and you can get involved. Everything, everything helps. Literally every retweet, every, like, every reply, every phone call you make to a representative. If enough of us do it, we make a difference. And it requires everybody, you know, it requires everyone, and everyone. Everyone who is involved does. You know, this effort that we had, you know, nine months ago, I struggled to get a journalist to cover it. I remember I wrote. I wrote to. We provided some documents to Politico, and basically the only media coverage this had was a. Was one link of Politico uploading a PDF. And it wasn't a story, right? And it's become a story because so many people have followed it, so many people have engaged with it. And so I'm the shitposter in chief, right? But everybody who's helped to disseminate that content, there is a direct line of causation to every Twitter user, every Facebook user, every Internet user who shared this content, engaged with it, commented on it, even disagreed with it, by making this a conversation that is now. That's now being had in Washington. And yeah, I thank everybody for it, because without each and every single person who has retweeted anything, read a post, shared it by email, anything like that over the course of the last year, every single one of those things. And you can chart it. You can actually plot it on a map or on a chart. You can see the graph going up, up, up, up, up. And so with engagement and things like that. And it's because of you, right? It's because of the people who listen to these podcasts, follow us on Twitter, repost these things, that this has become a national issue. And I would not, you know, it's. It's. It's one of the. I wish I could, you know, snap my fingers, make a magic list. And I'm sure there's a way for AI to do that. But in rank, right? Every contributor to the discourse. But literally every single person who has contributed to the discussion or participated in the discussion and, and agreed with us in particular and said, do you guys are up, you guys are doing good stuff. All of that has been seen, it's all been ingested. And now what we're seeing is we're starting to see movement at the federal level to respond to this. So, yeah, thank you to, to the entire Internet for helping us do this.
- [85:28]
B
You're a formidable ship hoster. Don't sell yourself short. This was an incredible conversation. Very important. And cosign all that, get involved. If you're listening to this, every little bit helps. It's a very important, again, existential fight as we continue to transition into the digital age. We're having the big battles right now speech being one of the biggest. So, Preston, thank you for your time. Thank you for what you're doing. It's incredible work, important work, and I'm excited to see this progress into 2026.
- [86:02]
A
Yeah, I'll keep you posted. But what I would say to everyone, the parting message is it may not seem like it, but we are winning and we are going to win. So watch this space. All right?
- [86:15]
B
We're going to win. Freaks. Peace and love. Thank you for listening to this episode of tftc. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can, leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to Fountain FM to find that. $5 a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps. The show gives you incredible value, so please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time and until next time, okay?