You can get away with nearly anything in lawless Britain. You can shoplift, deal drugs or launder money, safe in the knowledge that the police will let it slide. Some crimes – like breaking into the country – they will even assist you with. But there is one thing you absolutely cannot do. You cannot say the ‘wrong’ thing on social media.
Clearview AI develops facial recognition software that lets law enforcement and other government agencies upload a photograph and match it to identified images in the Clearview database. That database includes 70 billion images, many of which Clearview scraped from social media, and more than 2,000 law-enforcement agencies turn to Clearview when trying to locate people, whether criminals or victims. That is the reality of life in the modern world.
FORT PIERCE, Fla. — Like many Florida municipalities, officials in St. Lucie County recently decided to get rid of all their automated license-plate readers made by Flock, the company whose cameras have drawn scrutiny over police misuse and data privacy concerns.
County officials thought they had 52 of the cameras — which law enforcement agencies use to record passing vehicles’ license plates as well as the time and location of each sighting — scattered across the county’s main roads on Florida’s east coast. But as they prepared to remove them, they discovered 14 more that they hadn’t known about and that the county hadn’t permitted.
From tracking criminals to sniffing out drugs, dogs have long helped police crack cases. Now experts are hoping a database of canine DNA could offer vital leads.
While hair, saliva and other canine material may be found at crime scenes, or on individuals connected to incidents, scientists say they are often not fully investigated.
Yet such traces could provide valuable clues, from the identity of a canine perpetrator to evidence a dog’s owner was present at a crime scene.
Prime Minister Mark Carney says his government will move ahead this fall with legislation imposing new rules on social media platforms, including restrictions aimed at children and requirements dealing with content deemed harmful.
Blacklock’s Reporter says Carney confirmed the government’s plans for Bill C-34 as Liberal MPs gathered ahead of Parliament’s return following a 13-week summer recess.
A Tennessee woman who was falsely charged with bank theft in North Dakota and jailed for six months has sued for $10m in damages, alleging in a federal lawsuit that Fargo police improperly relied on an artificial intelligence (AI) facial recognition system to wrongly accuse her.
Angela Lipps, 50, was arrested at gunpoint by US marshals at her home in Tennessee while babysitting her neighbor’s four children in July 2025. The mother of three and grandmother of five was booked into a county jail and remained there for almost four months without bail while awaiting extradition to North Dakota, where she was held for about two more months.
FBI Director Kash Patel acknowledged that the FBI participated in a program with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to spy on lawful gun purchasers under the Biden administration.
Sen. Ted Cruz brought the issue up during a Tuesday Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
A number of legal scholars and civil liberties advocates in Canada have begun asking whether this country is sliding toward a more authoritarian style of government.
In 1933, the Gestapo arrested Hannah Arendt for illegally researching Nazi propaganda, and she fled Germany that same year. That was also the year Germany’s government used a fire at the Reichstag to justify an emergency decree suspending civil liberties. It was supposed to be temporary. It stayed in force for the next twelve years.
Many of us in Britain still flatter ourselves that we live in a free country. Although the UK isn’t quite a police state (not yet anyway), neither is it a country in which the individual can any longer speak without glancing over his or her shoulder. The old compact of a liberal society was simple – the state punished genuine criminality, while opinion was left to the rough justice of argument, satire and public disagreement.
A major free speech row erupted last night after it was revealed that more than 60,000 people have been arrested over the past five years for ‘communications offences’ – some as trivial as viewing disparaging TikTok videos.
The astonishing figure has been described as ‘Orwellian’, and having a ‘chilling effect’ in stifling opinions online.
The statistics – to be published in a hard-hitting report this week – also highlight the chaotic implementation of rules on ‘malicious’ messaging, with some police forces making 14 times more arrests under the powers than others.
I don’t want to live in the United Kingdom (UK).
I’m certain most Canadians would say the same thing if you asked them. So why is the Canadian government, and particularly Heritage Minister Marc Miller, taking cues on so-called “social cohesion” from the UK’s Labour Party? Isn’t the UK a royal mess?
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms is warning the City of Hamilton and its police service that efforts to prevent a controversial political conference from being held in the city may violate Charter-protected freedom of expression.
Lawyers funded by the Justice Centre sent a warning letter to the city and Hamilton Police Service after Mayor Andrea Horwath and police publicly opposed the Dominion Society of Canada’s DomCon conference, scheduled for Saturday.
During the summer of 2021, Hamilton Police officers looked on as a group of Indigenous sovereigntists tore down the city’s Sir John A. Macdonald statue and sawed right down the middle of its face. Instead of arresting the numerous parties to the crime right then and there, they waited, eventually laying a charge on a 56-year-old who was absolved months later through a stay of proceedings.
When Justin Cowgur, a city council member in Centerton, Arkansas, was asked two years ago to vote on a contract to install Flock license-plate readers, he found it easy to say yes. The Republican wine seller believed the artificial intelligence-powered cameras — which record passing cars’ plates into a database that officers can search to investigate crime — could help ease the strain on their understaffed police force and keep his bedroom community safe.
But lately, he’s come to regret the deal, saying he no longer trusts the company with the huge amount of data its roadside cameras collect. Earlier this month, after a parade of residents voiced concerns about their privacy and the system’s risk of abuse, he and other members voted unanimously to cancel the contract.
Privacy experts are raising concerns after a Winnipeg bar flagged a woman as a nationwide public safety concern through its ID scanning system, which led to her being denied entry to a Calgary Stampede venue in July.
Alexandra, a Montreal-based lawyer, went to the Riverside bar in St. Vital on June 6, where a person working security scanned her driver’s licence at the door using a Patronscan ID scanner.
She said she was not told why they were scanning it and had no idea an incident later that evening would lead to a flag that potentially banned her from bars across Canada.
This is creepy.
