“Surveillance Society”

In the 20 years between the Oscar-winning film and its new stage adaptation, The Lives of Others has become uncomfortably resonant.

Back in 2006, we still enjoyed the moral certainties of Cold War bipolarity. Market capitalism’s hiccup was still a few years away. Free societies had conclusively won the argument, and it didn’t occur to many of us that the winners had learned so little from their victory. But, in the shadow of the Covid psychosis and its residual frictions, what originally felt like a cosy retrospective on ‘the end of history’ now feels more like PTSD.

In Germany, the police will start a manhunt for a person who calls a politician “fat.” Friedrich Merz, the German Chancellor, has filed somewhere between “hundreds” and thousands of complaints, with attached criminal penalties possible, over people insulting him online.

The benefits of technology are in the eyes — and, in this case, the ears — of the beholder, as police departments in Calgary, Edmonton, and other Canadian cities may soon have technology with the power to block cellphone communications.

Currently, only the RCMP is authorized to use the call-jamming technology, using it, for example, to monitor and jam illegal calls out of and into prisons to detect drug dealing and drug use in the facilities.

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.

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.

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.

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.