Our next PPI board meeting will take place on 20.01.2026, 20:00 UTC / 21:00 CET.

All official PPI proceedings, board meetings included, are open to the public. Feel free to stop by. We’ll be happy to have you.

Where:jitsi.pirati.cz/PPI-Board

Agenda: Pad: etherpad.pp-international.net/…

All of our meetings are posted to our calendar: pp-international.net/calendar/

We look forward to seeing visitors.

Thank you for your support,

The Board of PPI

pp-international.net/2026/01/b…

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

More recent assaults on the First Amendment are dominating the headlines, but Rümeysa Öztürk has now been facing deportation for 297 days for co-writing an op-ed the government didn’t like, and journalist Ya’akub Vijandre remains locked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement over social media posts about issues he reported on. Read on for more on a virtually unprecedented (and only half over) month of attacks on press freedom.

Raid of journalist’s home ignores federal law and constitutional freedoms

The FBI raid of the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, reportedly to investigate a contractor accused of mishandling classified records, marked an alarming escalation in the Trump administration’s multipronged war on press freedom. All the meanwhile, Post billionaire owner Jeff Bezos remains silent.

The Department of Justice (and the judge who approved this outrageous warrant) is either ignoring or distorting the Privacy Protection Act, which restricts law enforcement from raiding newsrooms and reporters. The administration may now be in possession of volumes of journalist communications having nothing to do with any pending investigation.

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern, along with Chip Gibbons of Defending Rights & Dissent, wrote for The Guardian that, alarming as it was, the raid was the product of a decades-long backslide at both the federal and local level. And our Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy Lauren Harper wrote for The Intercept about how the raid was enabled by the Department of Justice’s revisions to its guidelines on searching journalists’ files. Harper previously exposed that the administration’s pretext for those revisions was a lie.

Reporter and security researcher Nikita Mazurov also wrote for us about measures reporters can take to minimize the risk to sources in the event of a raid or device seizure.

• Read our statement on the raid

Don’t forget last week’s alarming intrusion on newsgathering

We told you last week about the House Oversight Committee’s bipartisan vote to subpoena journalist Seth Harp over a tweet identifying a high ranking military officer involved in the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Democrats reportedly supported the subpoena as part of a deal to also issue subpoenas related to the Jeffrey Epstein case. That was a big mistake — journalist subpoenas are a constitutional red line, not a bargaining chip. After all, if not for the source relationships that enabled reporters like the Miami Herald’s Julie Brown to expose Epstein’s crimes, he might still be on his island preying on young girls.

Worse yet, the subpoena will allow proponents of the Natanson raid and future intrusions to legitimize and “both sides” their assaults on the Constitution. You can use our action center tool to tell Congress to clean up the mess it made.

• Write to your representative here

What the Maduro ‘extradition’ means for U.S. journalists

For journalists who work online, the most dangerous assumption is that press freedom is territorial. It is not. In the digital age, journalists publish globally by default, and states increasingly assert criminal jurisdiction globally as well.

The recent assertion of U.S. authority to abduct Maduro risks normalizing extraterritorial arrests for violations of the arresting country’s domestic laws, bypassing extradition procedures and other protections. As former federal computer crime prosecutor Mark Rasch wrote in a guest post for FPF, a country with repressive press laws could use the Trump administration’s actions to justify arresting U.S. journalists at home over online publications accessible elsewhere.

• Read more here

Wikipedia’s 25th birthday proves the power of free speech

Over the last quarter century, Wikipedia has gone from the source that teachers universally clamored “you can’t trust it” to one of the most reliable sources in a world of “disinformation” and AI-generated slop.

As FPF senior software engineer and volunteer Wikipedia editor Kunal Mehta explains, Wikipedia can only exist because of the robust free speech and free press safeguards that protect it (for now) in the United States.

• Read more here

Town hall on authoritarianism and the news

Rising authoritarianism impacts the news you depend on, whether you’re making choices in the ballot box or the doctor’s office. Journalists are facing increasing dangers that impact their work and their personal lives. FPF co-sponsored a town hall, available to stream now, which takes you behind the scenes of your news in 2026.

• Watch it here

What we're reading

Stars and Stripes job applicants are asked if they back Trump policies

The Washington Post
The same people who spent years whining about alleged bias in government-funded media are now extracting loyalty pledges from prospective reporters and promising to refocus the newsroom of a publication that is statutorily guaranteed independence.

Who isn’t a domestic terrorist: 19th Prairieland defendant should concern us all

National Lawyers Guild
Any effort to criminalize use of encryption is a serious threat to press freedom — especially coming from the current administration. It’s noteworthy that this is the same prosecution in which the government seeks to criminalize possession of literature.

Mamdani names new media commissioner, undoes Adams’ 11th hour press access changes

New York Daily News
Former Mayor Eric Adams tried to restrict press access in New York just before his term ended. Good for his successor, Zohran Mamdani, for killing the proposed rules.

I’m a community journalist in New York City. Here’s why Mamdani’s ‘influencer presser’ stung

Poynter
On the other hand, Mamdani should not overlook community journalists in favor of friendly influencers. Sure, social media influences the youth, but young people also need to know how to critically consume real news so their opinions aren’t dictated by algorithms.

freedom.press/issues/raid-of-r…

On January 9th of last year, we released an article “MAGA-Flavored Imperialism” as part of the Through the Spyglass series. condemning President Trump’s stated goals of annexing Greenland and the Panama Canal.

A little over a year later, the issue has reared its ugly head once again and needs reiterating.

As previously stated: “The alleged “anti-war candidate” seems to be just fine with US Imperialism.”

We reiterate our commitment to Pan-Americanism and a true Good Neighbor Policy. We, the United States Pirate Party, recognize that the actions taken by the President will only lead to bad blood and strained relationships between ourselves and our neighbors.

We already kidnapped the President of Venezuela in the middle of the night, which, despite how you might feel about Nicolás Maduro, is an escalation the United States cannot afford to make. We have spoken as much about it here.

Now, trying his luck again, the allies we have chosen to keep in Europe are sending non-NATO troops to Greenland in order to protect it from a potential U.S. invasion.

If the President’s gambit is to prove a dying empire “still got it”, then his plan must be marked as a failure. The world is unamused by the United States positioning and actions, and the backlash we will have to face is one from which I’m unsure we will ever truly recover.

Remember to read the original article, MAGA-Flavored Imperialism.

I understand people were tired of the status quo; we were too. But if this is the change of pace being offered, it is a marathon in the wrong direction.

uspirates.org/still-relevant-o…

In the mid-1700s, Denis Diderot published his Encyclopédie in France, collecting the work of more than 140 authors to summarize the Enlightenment. It quickly landed on the Catholic Church’s banned books list for including contrarian thoughts, and, at one point, his publisher preemptively censored some content without Diderot’s knowledge.

Around the same time, King George III censored the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, requiring the removal of some anatomically correct drawings in an article about midwifery.

So when the 13 newly independent American states ratified the First Amendment a few decades later, it laid the groundwork not only for a free press but also for an encyclopedia that was not censored by an oppressive government.

Today, we celebrate the realization of that dream in the form of Wikipedia, which over the past 25 years has been collaboratively built by unpaid strangers on the internet. Wikipedia went from the source that teachers universally clamored “you can’t trust it” to one of the most reliable sources in a world of “disinformation” and AI-generated slop.

Despite not being written by professional journalists (I edit it myself as a volunteer and used to work for its nonprofit host, Wikimedia Foundation), it’s still able to set trends and drive narratives. For example, in 2011, Wikipedia editors started collating a list of people killed by law enforcement in the U.S., three years before The Washington Post would win a Pulitzer for its version of the same.

And for better or worse, Wikipedia is most likely the largest single source powering today’s AI models. All in all, it’s the largest repository of knowledge in human history.

But it’s important to understand and appreciate that Wikipedia only exists because of the robust free speech and free press protections that exist in the United States.

But it’s important to understand and appreciate that Wikipedia only exists because of the robust free speech and free press protections that exist in the United States.

Kunal Mehta

Wikipedia has never been actively censored in the U.S., nor has any U.S.-based editor ever been arrested for their edits to Wikipedia. There’s never even been a serious threat of censorship of Wikipedia by the federal government. (The FBI once demanded Wikipedia stop using its seal under a law written to stop impersonation of federal agents; Wikipedia’s legal team laughed it off.)

The same cannot be said about Wikipedia in other countries. In France, intelligence operatives held a Wikipedia administrator until he deleted an article about a military radio station, under the guise it contained classified information. Agents made this demand even though the information in question wasn’t classified at all and was mostly based on a documentary that the French air force had worked on and publicly released.

In India, a court required Wikipedia to remove an article about a news agency because it was supposedly defamatory. To top it off, the court then demanded Wikipedia remove the separate article that was written about the court case and removal order!

This kind of censorship shouldn’t happen in the U.S. The Supreme Court ruled the First Amendment protects publishing classified information in a case about the Pentagon Papers. A U.S. court cannot order an article to be taken down, as that would be an unconstitutional prior restraint.

In the U.S., the law known as Section 230 would also protect Wikipedia from defamation claims, and instead require litigants to sue the editor who actually wrote and published the allegedly defamatory content. Those editors would be protected under the First Amendment and the high court’s New York Times v. Sullivan decision, which requires defamation claims from public officials — later expanded to public figures — to meet the much higher standard of actual malice to win (nearly every biography on Wikipedia is of a public figure, by policy).

And to state the obvious, the U.S. has never blocked all of Wikipedia, unlike China (since 2015), Myanmar (since 2021), or Turkey, which did so from 2017 until an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights forced that nation to unblock it in 2020. We know of one editor, Bassel Khartabil, who was executed for their online activity, and a few others who are incarcerated in Belarus and Saudi Arabia.

Certainly, there are plenty of people in power who wish they could censor or control Wikipedia. At first, it was through editing: In 2006, a number of Congressional staffers were caught whitewashing their bosses’ biographies, and, in 2007, someone at the FBI tried to remove images from the Guantánamo Bay detention camp article.

Then, in 2013, Edward Snowden leaked that the National Security Agency was illegally spying on Wikipedia readers and editors, revealing that the U.S. had adopted the same playbook as China. Wikipedia responded by encrypting all connections using HTTPS a few years later, and (unsuccessfully) sued the NSA for First and Fourth amendment violations.

The attacks against Wikipedia are starting to ramp up once again; last year saw ethically compromised interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin and Sen. Ted Cruz complain about Wikipedia’s supposed left-wing bias, despite the First Amendment prohibiting the government from acting as speech police. We’ve also seen bits of the First Amendment firewall begin to crumble, with judges green-lighting prior restraints, or bipartisan groups of lawmakers working to repeal Section 230.

It will require a concerted effort by all of us to not just maintain existing First Amendment protections, but to expand them. That’s the only way Wikipedia will thrive for another 25 years.

freedom.press/issues/wikipedia…

🎁 15 января 2026 года крупнейшей энциклопедии в истории интернета исполняется четверть века — ровно 25 лет с момента её основания в 2001 году. Википедия выросла из идеи свободного знания до глобальной платформы с десятками миллионов статей на 300+ языках, служащей фундаментом для образования, исследований и повседневных нужд людей по всему миру, а также площадкой для обучения искусственных интеллектов человеческой культуре.

В течение всего 2026 года сообщество Wikimedia планирует отмечать этот юбилей серией событий, онлайн-акций и материалов, объединённых темой «Knowledge is Human» (Знание это человек) — ведь именно люди, их вклад и сотрудничество сделали Википедию тем, чем она стала.

Википедия существует благодаря волонтёрам, которые ежедневно пишут, проверяют и улучшают статьи. Проект сохраняет свою независимость: без рекламы и платных подписок, полагаясь на добровольные пожертвования и вклад людей, открыто делящихся знаниями.

🏴 Пиратская партия России традиционно поддерживает свободу знаний и информационные свободы, которые являются сердцем Википедии. На страницах русскоязычной версии Википедии есть статья о нашей партии, где можно ознакомиться с нашей историей, целями, принципами и многой другой полезной информацией.

Википедия — это не просто энциклопедия, это символ открытого обмена знаниями и коллективного творчества. Она показывает, как миллионы людей могут объединиться, чтобы создать нечто намного большее, чем просто набор фактов — целый мир знаний, доступный каждому. Эта идеология перекликается с нашими принципами:

• свобода информации — право каждого получать и распространять знания без цензуры;
• прозрачность и участие — общественные процессы, открытые для вклада каждого;
• борьба с монополией на знание — против закрытых систем и БД;
• децентрализация и совместное творчество — как основы прямой электронной демократии.

Для нас Википедия — это не только ресурс, но и пример того, каким может быть общество, где информация свободна, а участие каждого ценится.

В эпоху, когда знания всё чаще оказываются под давлением государственных и коммерческих интересов, алгоритмов и корпоративных блоков, Википедия остаётся редким пространством, где человеческое знание по-прежнему доступно всем и каждому. Призываем всех активно участвовать в наполнении Википедии и сохранять своё имя в культуре человечества, включая его будущих небиологических представителей.

Сообщение Википедии 25 лет! появились сначала на Пиратская партия России | PPRU.

As part of its digital sovereignty drive, the European Commission is currently inviting public input on the future of European Open Digital Ecosystems through an open consultation. The idea is to gather perspectives from different parties – developers, civil society, policy makers, public administrators, and industry insiders and ascertain how it could establish and shape the foundations of Europe’s digital future.

The European Pirates will take this opportunity to submit a response to the commission’s call. The discussion below is a starting point for that wider reflection. It outlines key ambitions of the EU’s open digital strategy and highlights several structural bottlenecks that deserve careful attention as Europe defines its next steps.

Amid rapid transformations and politically charged ramifications in the global digital landscape, the European Union has decided to restructure and strengthen its open-source digital ecosystem strategy. Over the past few years, digital infrastructure has quietly become a geopolitical asset. Cloud systems, AI models, data pipelines, and even open-source software now shape economic power, security posture, and democratic resilience. The European Commission initially adopted the strategy in 2020-2023. The call to action is amplified at the Summit on European Digital Sovereignty in Berlin in November 2025.

The underlying idea is simple: Achieve and maintain Europe’s digital sovereignty.

Key Goals Of The Initiative:

• Digital sovereignty & independence: Help Europe reduce reliance on non-EU tech companies by making it easier to use, modify, and host digital tools within European infrastructure, giving users and institutions greater control and real choices.
• Innovation & competitiveness: Offer shared, reusable tech foundations so startups, small businesses, and researchers can build faster, experiment more, and focus on new ideas instead of starting from scratch.
• Security & trust: Open code can be examined by anyone, which makes it easier to spot problems, improve safety, and build public confidence, especially for systems used in sensitive or essential sectors.
• Economic growth: Support a stronger digital economy by encouraging collaboration, lowering entry barriers, and creating space for new European tech companies to emerge and scale.
• Standards & interoperability: Push for open technologies that work well together across Europe and connect seamlessly, rather than becoming isolated silos.
• Strategic autonomy: Strengthen Europe’s digital capabilities, particularly in areas such as AI, to ensure geopolitical independence on an ever-evolving technological platform.

History as a mirror shows that sovereignty can only be attained when something, be it a nation or a system, is built brick by brick. It cannot be purchased off the shelf as a commodity. In the face of current volatile geopolitical situations and ever-evolving technological innovations, the EU’s initiative to build a digital ecosystem is indeed a need of the hour and a duty to its citizens.

But it is essential to recognise that, though the initiative’s ambition is straightforward, it is underpinned by complex challenges. Europe is trying to build an open digital ecosystem while simultaneously operating one of the world’s most assertive regulatory environments. It wants openness without dependency, innovation without loss of control, and sovereignty without isolation. Whether these goals can coexist is no longer a theoretical question. It is now a structural one.

The initiative marks a shift away from reliance on non-European digital infrastructure toward home-grown, openly accessible technologies. But building software is easier than sustaining ecosystems. Open Source does not thrive on policy declarations alone. It survives on developer communities, long-term funding, legal clarity, and trust. In a climate shaped by AI disruption, transatlantic regulatory tensions, and growing corporate consolidation, Europe’s strategy is as much an experiment in governance as it is in technology.

The proposed framework of the EU’s Open Source Initiative works through four interconnected layers:

1. Digital Governance
2. Digital Infrastructures Software and Data
3. Digital Products and Markets
4. People

In this context, it is critical to analyse the bottlenecks that can impede the development of an open digital ecosystem in Europe. Various views have been put forth by policymakers, developers, industry leaders, and digital rights advocates. Below are a few bottlenecks that must be carefully examined and navigated:

Bottlenecks

1. Regulatory Complexity, Legal Uncertainty, and Burden On Developers

The EU’s AI Act introduces a risk-based way to govern AI. Some uses of AI are completely banned, others need strict oversight, and general-purpose AI must follow rules for transparency and safety.

The main challenge is how these rules affect Open Source projects. Vague definitions, complex requirements, and excessive bureaucracy have worried both developers and civil society groups. Smaller teams may feel discouraged—not because they oppose safeguards, but because complying with the rules may be too much for them.

Recent delays in the European Commission’s AI compliance deadlines in late 2025 demonstrate this problem. If the rules are too strict or confusing, independent developers might stop participating. If the rules are too weak, people may lose trust. Without clearer guidance and more practical expectations for open projects, these rules could slow down Europe’s digital progress by discouraging people from getting involved.

2. Funding Gaps and Ecosystem Support Challenges

Beyond being a cornerstone of Europe’s digital sovereignty, Open Source is a highly viable economic proposition for the EU (contributing approximately €65-95 billion annually and $8.8 trillion globally). But Open Source remains underfunded relative to traditional infrastructure.

This highlights significant gaps in strategy and funding within Europe’s Open-Source ecosystem. Many organisations lack clear plans or long-term investments in Open Source, making it harder to sustain projects and remain competitive.

In this context, it is crucial to pay attention to the EU’s position on digital products and markets. For instance, the global generative AI landscape is dominated by China and the US, with 60% and 12% share, respectively, while Europe ranks third with just 7%. Interestingly, Europe produces 21% of research papers worldwide, but its share of patent filings remains at 2%. The gap is due to the lack of access to venture capital.

Europe is heavily dependent on non-EU countries for critical raw materials and semiconductors. Such heavy reliance on external producers makes the supply chain vulnerable to supply chain disruptions and geopolitical pressures. Without a robust industrial base and competitive markets, the idea of digital sovereignty will remain a far-fetched dream.

3. Harmonising Policy and Technical Implementation

It is essential to recognise that the open-source initiative is not only about passing laws. It is about building systems people are expected to use.

The bottleneck arises when laws, funding mechanisms, and public technology projects become misaligned. If policies advance faster than practical tools, developers are left uncertain. If systems are built without legal and social clarity, adoption slows.

Open Source grows through steady collaboration. It depends more on continuity than on declarations. When coordination weakens, Europe risks producing strong frameworks that struggle to take root beyond official documents.

4. Addressing Cybersecurity Regulation Without Excluding Open Source

Secure networks and compatible systems to software, hardware, data networks, and cloud infrastructure are the mainstay of digital sovereignty that Europe strives to achieve.

• The Digital Decade Policy 2030 is focused on improving connectivity across the continent.
• The EU’sCyber Resilience Act (CRA) aims to improve the security of digital systems.
• A proposed €300 billion investment is in the pipeline as part of the Eurostack initiative, which aims to integrate cloud services, the AI Continent Action Plan, new AI Factories, and shared data spaces into a unified European digital infrastructure.

Despite these efforts, structural weaknesses persist, and cybersecurity remains a significant concern. Fragmentation is another challenge. If EU countries do not work together, they might continue to develop separate, incompatible data-sharing systems. This would make it harder to create a unified European data space.

Digital infrastructure and data systems are key to Europe’s digital future. They support governance, markets, and the protection of individual rights. But sovereignty is not just about having technology. It also means Europe must be able to create, store, manage, and use data in ways that reflect its values.

At this moment, as Europe seeks to shape its digital future, it cannot outsource its strategic technology layers. Digital sovereignty cannot be achieved by focusing solely on the application. Priority investment is needed in foundational systems such as:

• Secure networking and VPN tooling
• collaborative productivity platforms
• web and application security infrastructure
• data-centre orchestration and virtualisation layers

5. Skill Gap and Lack of Trust

According to the Commission’s second annual report on the State of the Digital Decade, only 55.6% of Europeans had basic digital literacy. Public trust in EU policies concerning the protection of online rights stands at 45%. This gap of skill and public trust is a matter that needs to be examined critically.

Many people still feel unsure about technology and unconvinced that their rights are truly protected online. When digital policies feel distant, complex, or designed only for experts, people can feel excluded. That loss of trust can quietly weaken Europe’s digital ambitions.

This human side shows that digital sovereignty is more than laws and systems. It is about ensuring people feel confident, included, and able to join the digital world. Without this, even the best strategies risk being about people instead of truly serving them.

​Ecosystem and Infrastructure Realities

Beyond geopolitics and regulation lies a quieter layer where Open Source actually lives.

Most projects are maintained by individuals or small teams. This creates vulnerabilities that no sovereignty strategy can ignore.

Critical tools often depend on only a few people. When they burn out or move on, systems falter. Enterprises hesitate to rely on software without clear responsibility structures. When problems arise, there is often no obvious place to turn.

This does not undermine openness. It undermines resilience.

Contribution pathways face similar strain. Companies often want to return improvements to the broader community. Yet limited maintenance capacity, slow review timelines, and project governance constraints frequently push the organisation towards considering an internal/private version. Once that happens, the incentive to contribute back erodes, fragmenting ecosystems and increasing maintenance burdens across the board.

The obstacle here is not motivation. It is the absence of institutional scaffolding.

​From ideology to infrastructure: what Europe would need to build

If Europe is serious about Open Source as public digital infrastructure, it must consider new structural instruments, such as:

• EU-based sponsorship platforms that reduce friction between developers and funders
• public-sector sponsorship obligations tied to software procurement
• early-stage funding mechanisms for individual maintainers
• Public-funding conditions that require open-source contributions

These are not symbolic gestures. They are the economic foundations of a sustainable open-source ecosystem.

Closing Perspective: The Value of Digital Rights Voices

As Europe navigates regulation, competition, and technological acceleration, digital rights organisations continue to stress an essential point: innovation and rights protection are not opposites.

They argue that digital policy should not only prevent harm, but also actively empower people. That means meaningful transparency, accountability, and the protection of the integrity of Open Source itself.

This perspective reframes Europe’s initiative. It is not only about market position or technological independence. It is about shaping a digital environment where infrastructure supports dignity, autonomy, and democratic choice.

Europe now faces a rare opportunity. It can build an open-source strategy that does more than produce software. It can create a digital public space where innovation is structurally supported, and rights are structurally protected.

​

​

​

​

​

​

europeanpirates.eu/europes-ope…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

This morning, the FBI raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, reportedly in connection with an investigation of a system administrator accused of accessing and taking home classified intelligence reports.

The following can be attributed to Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF).

“This is an alarming escalation in the Trump administration’s multipronged war on press freedom. The Department of Justice (and the judge who approved this outrageous warrant) is either ignoring or distorting the Privacy Protection Act, which bars law enforcement from raiding newsrooms and reporters to search for evidence of alleged crimes by others, with very few inapplicable exceptions.

“The government has said that Natanson is not under investigation, nor should she be for simply reporting information provided to her by sources. Even the Trump DOJ’s guidelines on searching reporters’ source materials (which were weakened from prior guidelines based on the administration’s proven lies about “fake news”) make clear that it’s a last resort for rare emergencies only. The administration may now be in possession of volumes of journalist communications having nothing to do with any pending investigation and, if investigators are able to access them, we have zero faith that they will respect journalist-source confidentiality.”

Please contact us if you would like further comment.

freedom.press/issues/fbi-ignor…

During the January 11th Pirate National Committee meeting, the board decided to make official what everyone already knew to be true:

The United States Pirate Party proudly and loudly endorses Drew Bingaman for Pennsylvania State House of Representatives, District 108.

Running for the Democratic Party nomination, Drew is a fighter and a champion to the causes of the United States Pirate Party.

Drew took on the reigns of captain in August of 2023 and steered the ship back on course in a time of choppy waters. Under his leadership, the Pirate Party held its first in-person conference, endorsed a Presidential candidate for the first time since 2008, and saw the additions of Texas and Florida to the Pirate National Committee.

As his successor, and this is Jolly Mitch speaking, I can promise you that Drew Bingaman’s leadership shaped my opinion of what makes a good leader. Drew’s steady hand, honesty and commitment to betterment are qualities I can only hope to emulate as Captain, and that those qualities are sure to shine as candidate for PA 108.

You can find Drew’s campaign page on Facebook.

If his time in the Pirate Party has been any indication, residents of PA’s 108th District have the opportunity to take on a leader that’s truly anti-corruption, pro-common-sense-and-common-folk, and unafraid to speak the truth.

You can see the meeting in which we endorsed Drew here.

Check out the latest statement from Drew, regarding elected officials in Minnesota.

Drew Bingaman, Victory is Arrrs

uspirates.org/pirate-candidate…

We elect our Pirate Council in February. Positions include Captain, First Officer, Quartermaster, PR/Media Director, Activism Director, Swarmwise Director, Web/Info Director, three Arbitrators and two representatives to the US Pirate Party.

If you are interested in throwing your hat in for any of these positions, nominations are open on-line until end of day Friday, January 30th. Before you do, become a member, join our activists email list, and read our Articles of Agreement and Code of Conduct.

Ballots will be sent out by February 13th and are due back by February 27th. We will use the same voting mechanism we used in our previous election. Voters will be emailed a randomly generated id that only the voter will know. Once the election is done, we will delete the ids. In this way, we can ensure that only supporters can vote, while also maintaining the secrecy of votes.

We look forward to multiple candidates for all positions.

masspirates.org/blog/2026/01/1…

Pirate Parties International condemns the nationwide internet shutdown that has been in effect in Iran since January 8, 2026. This measure is a flagrant violation of international human rights and serves to conceal crimes against humanity.

Since December 28, 2025, hundreds of thousands of Iranians have been protesting against economic crisis and political oppression. The Iranian regime responds with mass violence and total digital blockade:

• Scores of protesters and civilians, including children, killed
• Civilians are arbitrarily arrested
• Media reporting and human rights documentation made impossible
• Security forces intensify oppression under cover of digital darkness

The internet shutdown violates fundamental human rights:

• Right to freedom of expression (Article 19 ICCPR)
• Right to access to information
• Right to document human rights violations
• Enables crimes against humanity

The UN Human Rights Council has explicitly determined: blanket network shutdowns are never lawful and always constitute violations of human rights.

Iran has operated one of the world’s most repressive internet censorship systems for years:

• 2019: Six-day internet shutdown during fuel protests
• 2022: Massive throttling during Mahsa Amini protests
• Permanent blocking of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, WhatsApp
• Systematic criminalization of VPNs and encryption

The current total shutdown continues this pattern.

DEMANDS OF PIRATE PARTIES INTERNATIONAL

1. Immediate restoration of internet access by the Iranian regime
2. End violence against protesters and release of all arbitrarily detained persons
3. International sanctions:
   
   • Add IRGC to terrorist organization lists
   • Comprehensive sanctions against regime officials
   • Invoke UN Security Council

   
   

4. Technological support for Iranian civil society:
   
   • Decentralized and secure communication tools
   • Open-source censorship circumvention tools
   • Starlink and similar technologies

   
   

5. Long-term digital sovereignty:
   
   • Build alternative infrastructure
   • Develop open-source ecosystems
   • Implement decentralized network technologies

   
   

STATEMENT

Schoresch Davoodi, Board Member of Pirate Parties International and European Affairs Officer of the Pirate Party Germany:

“Iran has been using its technical arsenal for digital oppression for decades – White SIM cards for regime loyalists, criminalization of VPNs, billions invested in surveillance. The current total internet shutdown is not new, but rather the escalation of a decades-old strategy. When the people speak too loudly, the regime shuts down the internet.

Iran needs not less democracy and less freedom – it needs MORE. The Iranian freedom movement deserves our full solidarity and the tools of digital freedom: decentralized networks, open-source tools, and encryption without backdoors.”

ABOUT PIRATE PARTIES INTERNATIONAL

Pirate Parties International fights for data protection, digital freedom, transparency, and citizen rights in the digital age. It is a member-based international umbrella organization with official status at the United Nations (ECOSOC consultative status).

pp-international.net/2026/01/i…

Every Thursday of the week, Bastian’s Night is broadcast from 21:30 CET.

Bastian’s Night is a live talk show in German with lots of music, a weekly round-up of news from around the world, and a glimpse into the host’s crazy week in the pirate movement.

If you want to read more about @BastianBB: –> This way

piratesonair.net/bastians-nigh…