Ron Steslow 🌻

Had a great chat with a Syrian immigrant to the US yesterday morning, who was my uber driver on way to the @MSNOWNews DC studio. I told him I lived in Syria previously. I mentioned "Faruq's" shawarma shop in Malki, and he went crazy. Best shawarma anywhere in the world, we agreed! He said that when he was young, years ago prior to leaving Damascus, he used to go in front of the US embassy in Abu Rumaneh and literally look up and talk to the American flag. Prayed that he could come to the US. Said he did it all the time, night after night. I was stunned. The same flag I used to look at walking home from work, silhouette in the night sky, and hoping that it meant something to the Syrian people, who back then lived in a terribly repressive regime. So this story from my uber driver, man, it got to me. America stood for something very real to him. Political and economic liberalism, in a world where in many places, that doesn't exist. The Syrian driver ended our chat (I had tears in my eyes) with a great final thought. He said that in America, you can scream and yell at Trump, with no sanction. Or praise and love him too. He loved that about our country. He didn't tell me who he supposed politically, because to him, it didn't matter. Some times you need to hear stories like this one to give you hope.

The privacy-destroying digital ID laws are not about protecting kids. (They can’t, won’t, and will backfire.) They are about protecting advertising revenue for Meta, Google, et al.

@BoudreauxsGhost You can’t have freedom without privacy.

Abolish the FCC and remember that this is why you do not want an FCC for AI (FAIC no!). Power wants control of information, and you have to keep a wall of separation between power and truth.

Starting in 2027, all new passenger vehicles will be required to have Infrared cameras, eye‑tracking, head‑position monitoring, and behavioral impairment detection. A biometric babysitter in every car. No vote. No opt‑out. Just mandatory. It’s control tech, plain and simple.

Meta spent $26.3 million lobbying for "age verification" bills in 45 states. But the bills don't regulate social media. They regulate your operating system. Someone traced $2 billion in nonprofit grants and lobbying records. Here's what they found: 1. Meta's lobbyist wrote Louisiana's age verification law. The sponsor confirmed it. It forces OS-level surveillance. Meta's platforms? Zero new requirements. 2. Meta covertly funded an astroturf "child safety" group to push these bills nationally. It has no EIN, no incorporation records. It doesn't legally exist. 3. $70M+ into state super PACs, deliberately fragmented across databases to dodge centralized tracking. 4. On every social media bill, Meta fights. On the one bill regulating operating systems, Meta just "monitors." 5. The EU solved this with zero-knowledge proofs. No biometrics. US bills mandate vendors that send your face to third-party clouds. Meta profits from harvesting data. They wrote laws forcing every device to broadcast your identity through a system-level API. They built the surveillance. They wrote the mandate. They exempted themselves. Every claim sourced from IRS filings, Senate disclosures, and state lobbying records.

I’m going to keep harping on this. Meta’s push to remove encryption and lobby for age verification laws feel like two sides of a very ominous coin.

Yeah, so basically it turns out Meta has been heavily lobbying online age verification laws. They've lobbied over $2,000,000,000 to politicians in form of grants and donations. x.com/bee_fumo/statu…

Computer scientists caution against internet age-verification mandates. An open letter warns of censorship, centralized power, and loss of privacy: reason.pub/4lsLqzu

Added context: Another source very close to the matter contacted me this morning and shared that they are very confident that removing the BRCA remains red line for the crypto industry at large. However, the source added that there have been rumblings that the language in the bill related to non-controlling blockchain developers not being treated as money transmitters, language very similar to the language on this issue in the BRCA, may be on the chopping block due to pressure from hawks in Congress on this issue of money transmission, even what would be seen as money transmission by non-controlling developers/entities. The source I spoke with today is not certain that the crypto industry cares as much about this specific language related to money transmission in the bill as they do about the BRCA (though, there's overlap btw the two, which makes things a bit confusing). They said that the industry would likely be split regarding which companies and institutions would still support the bill if this particular language were to be removed or altered. The source also added that the White House is in favor the BRCA remaining in the bill.

I think there is some confusion regarding Coinbase, the "Market Structure Bill" (CLARITY Act), and de minimis exemptions for spending bitcoin... The de minimis exemption was *never* mentioned as being part of that bill (H. R. 3633). @SenLummis proposed this in a separate bill (S. 2207). Now, that is beside the point from whether Coinbase is lobbying for or against the de minimis exemption for bitcoin in a future bill, but it's important to get our facts straight. Personally, I think the developer protections in Section 109 of the CLARITY Act (taken from the BRCA, Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, spearheaded by @TheBlueMatt and others) are MUCH more important than the debate about de minimis exemptions. I have been talking with folks from @bitcoinpolicy for months on my @RoxomTV livestreams (@KyleOlney, @zackcohen_, @zackbshapiro, @Bayman11771) and they have consistently been ringing the alarm bell that current horse trading in DC seems to be favoring REMOVING these Section 109 protections for non-custodial software developers... THIS is what we should be focused on. I would love to see @brian_armstrong / @coinbase come out and publicly support Section 109 of the CLARITY Act and clarify this is a non-negotiable item.

@faryarshirzad @MartyBent “We’ve never lobbied against bitcoin” seems a lawyerly way to make room for treating de minimis as bargaining fodder.

This is a total lie @MartyBent. We have never and will never lobby against Bitcoin. Ever.

“Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas” indeed

Nice to see that @HyunSongShin has officially recognized that stablecoins open the door to an "Uber Surge Pricing" type liquidity market. [Actual gas markets also clear in a similar way, notably the NBP balancing point system.] The below screenshot is from his latest BIS paper "Tokenomics and blockchain fragmentation". This is something I've been pointing to for years, though I've seen it as eventually leading to dynamic pricing and markets for intraday funds in general. The paper is more concerned about the fragility and fragmentation risk introduced in systems that rely on many different networks using surge pricing mechanisms to ration entry and exit across systems. And of course turkeys don't vote for xmas, so the central bank perspective is that all this "congestion" and cost uncertainty can be avoided if programmable money just shifts to cbank ledgers where the cbank balance sheet can absorb congestion shocks in a way that can regulate transaction costs. The BIS concludes: "These [programmable money] innovations do not require decentralised consensus among anonymous validators. They can be implemented on unified ledgers anchored by central banks, which benefit from the institutional trust of the traditional monetary system." bis.org/publ/work1335.…

Mass surveillance and censorship are escalating in many countries right now. There is a global attack on secure encrypted communication. Often, authorities, politicians, and tech companies work together to push for new laws. One example: when Ashton Kutcher (yes, the actor), through his tech company Thorn, tried to introduce total surveillance of all EU citizens through undemocratic and corrupt methods. First, Ashton Kutcher convinced the EU Commission that they could scan everything on an EU citizen’s phone or computer (messages, photos, emails, phone calls, all of it) for child sexual abuse material without, at the same time, looking at the content of other types of communication. And then? And then EU Commissioner Ylva Johansson presented the legislative proposal called Chat Control, which aimed to scan everything on all EU citizens' phones and computers (including conversations in end-to-end-encrypted messaging services). The message from the Commission was: we will only search for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). And then? And then experts from all over the world explained to her that the kind of scanning she was talking about (as Ylva described it: a drug-sniffing dog that can detect illegal content in a message without reading the message) simply cannot be done safely, and that Chat Control would mean the end of privacy and pose a security threat to all Europeans. Ylva responded with: “what about the children?” And then? And then it was revealed that Thorn, the organization founded by Ashton Kutcher and which had been lobbying for Chat Control from the beginning, was selling the kind of scanning technology that could be used for Chat Control – despite being registered as a charity organization in the EU’s lobbying registry. And then? And then it was revealed that Thorn, together with the EU Commission, had also started and funded “children’s rights organizations” that had supported the proposal. What appeared publicly to be charitable organizations were in fact lobby groups. And then? And then it was revealed that Europol wanted unlimited access and wanted to use the scanning for more than just child abuse crimes, saying that all data – also unfiltered and innocent material – should be stored because it “could at some point be useful to law enforcement”. And then? And then it was revealed that employees at Europol had joined Thorn, to lobby their old colleagues. And then? And then politicians in Brussels wanted to exempt themselves from the scanning. And then? And then the European Parliament, in an almost historic consensus, voted against the proposal and called Chat Control nothing but mass surveillance. As one of the members of the parliament said: “The Commission wasn’t focusing on protecting children but wanted mass surveillance.” And then? And then The Council of the EU (law proposals must go through both the Parliament and the Council), after three years of negotiation, finally reached a common position on Chat Control. The requirement for mandatory scanning (including end-to-end encrypted messaging services) was removed, which is a major victory, but several problematic elements remain in the Council's position. For instance, the Council wants to demand ID Control to use messaging services (including end-to-end encrypted). And then? And then, in 2026 the final negotiations began, between the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the Council of the EU. At the same time, the European Commission is working on a Plan B, through the initiative Going Dark/ProtectEU, where they once again try to force total surveillance (this time organized crime is the excuse) on the citizens of the EU. And then? youtube.com/watch?v=fPzvUW…

Bro Google is doing something wild. Starting September 2026 every Android developer has to give Google their government ID. Legal name. Home address. Phone number. And pay a fee. Even if they never use the Play Store. Even if they just put their app on their own website. So basically if you build any app for Android — Google wants to know exactly who you are. No exceptions. Brave, EFF, Tor Project and 40+ other organizations said no and signed an open letter against it. And think about who this really hurts. The people building privacy apps, VPNs, encrypted messaging, tools for journalists and activists. People who specifically chose to stay away from Google. Now Google wants their home address. Google is literally building a database of every person who writes Android software. Run by Google. Controlled by Google. Android was supposed to be the open system. The alternative to Apple locking everything down. Slowly it's starting to look the same. Is Android still actually open? 👇

this might be the most insane thing i saw all week.. i still don’t think people have fully processed what @bilawalsidhu actually built here while everyone else was doomscrolling the Iran strikes, he had an agent swarm pulling public signals before the caches disappeared and turned it into a minute by minute 4D replay on a 3D globe 3,400 flights clearing airspace. GPS interference spreading across the Gulf. shipping rerouting in real time. all from public data, built overnight by one person people are calling it 'Palantir at home' and tbh that feels directionally right the models and the agent architecture will commoditize. the real moat, he said, is whoever figures out which proprietary data streams the world actually needs and moves fast enough to own them. i can imagine journalists using something like this to verify events in conflict zones, or even regular observers trying to make sense of what’s happening as the world spirals. imagine the same swarm pointed at shipping disruptions, disaster response, or global trade flows in peacetime.. that's a different kind of product entirely. huge value for the world.

Age verification risks tying users’ “most sensitive and immutable data” — names, faces, birthdays, home addresses — to their online activity, EFF’s Molly Buckley told @CNBC. “Age verification strikes at the foundation of the free and open internet.” cnbc.com/2026/03/08/soc…

BREAKING: The world is now experiencing its largest oil supply shock in history, losing nearly 20 million barrels of oil supply per day. Top oil supply shocks: 1. Hormuz Closure (NOW): -20 million b/d 2. Iranian Revolution (1978): -5.5 million b/d 3. Yom Kippur War (1973): -4.5 million b/d 4. Iraq-Kuwait War (1990): -4.3 million b/d 5. Iran-Iraq War (1980): -4.0 million b/d 6. Russia-Ukraine War (2022): -2.0 million b/d The current supply shock is roughly the same size as the top 2-6 COMBINED.

Another bombshell, that needs follow-up. To be very clear: the agency attempted to spy on victims (me, “Adam” and other retired personnel, ie, regular American citizens), who were running victim support groups. Designed to promote healing and assist in mental health care. Not only is this morally disgusting, it’s also CIA spying on private US citizens, ie blatantly illegal. Of note, this was reported to congressional oversight committee staff. Yet no action was ever taken. Some of those that tried to carry this out remain in senior CIA positions today.