Federal government has contracted external consultants to develop a centralized digital identification system that would consolidate access to all government documents and services, reports Blacklock’s Reporter.
Department of Social Development announced the initiative but has not disclosed the cost or timeline for the project.
Despite its growing influence across multiple policy areas, few Canadians are aware of the IIU’s reach — or the extent to which their behaviour is being subtly shaped by design.
Canada’s Privy Council Office (PCO) has a behavioural science unit established under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that quietly shapes public policy and influences citizen compliance through psychological experiments and data modelling.
The Impact and Innovation Unit (IIU), which bases its framework on a UK government initiative and tools issued by the World Health Organization (WHO), has quietly pioneered its approach to behaviour change using psychology, economics and social sciences for years — but its role became most visible in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Older, white males without university education feel most restricted in what they can say, study finds
Free speech is under threat because Britons feel they cannot speak out for fear of offending others over race, religion and immigration, a study has found.
Nearly half of those polled (49 per cent) believe people are too easily offended, particularly if they speak out on race and immigration issues, according to research for the Commission for Countering Extremism, which advises the Government.
The more outspoken people’s views, the more likely they were to feel constrained by the risk of offending others. Older, white males without a university education are among the groups who feel the most restricted.
Aaron Brown was working as a CIA case officer in 2018 when he wrote a post for an agency blog warning about what he called “gait recognition.” He cautioned his fellow officers that computer algorithms would soon be able to identify people not just by their faces, or fingerprints, or DNA — but by the unique ways they walked.
Many of his colleagues, trained in the traditional arts of disguise and concealment, were skeptical. One called it “threat porn.” But Brown’s forecast was chillingly accurate. A study published in May reported that a model called FarSight, using gait, body and face recognition, was 83 percent accurate in verifying an individual at up to 1,000 meters, and was 65 percent accurate even when the face was obscured. “It’s hard to overstate how powerful that is,” Brown said.
One of Canada’s top pro-democracy groups has sounded the alarm by warning that the Canadian federal government is planning to revive a controversial Trudeau-era internet censorship bill that lapsed.
The Democracy Fund (TDF), in a recent press release, warned about plans by the Liberal government under Prime Minister Mark Carney to bring back a form of Bill C-63. The bill, which lapsed when the election was called earlier this year, aimed to regulate online speech, which could mean “mass censorship” of the internet.
The measures would allow judges to impose restrictions including electronic tags and a ban on internet use on anyone suspected of planning violent crimes
The Southport inquiry will examine whether courts should be allowed to impose sweeping restrictions on people suspected of planning serious violent offences, even if they have not committed any crime.
Opening proceedings on Tuesday at Liverpool town hall, Sir Adrian Fulford, the chair, said the inquiry will consider whether the state should have powers to impose curfews, electronic tags, internet bans and limits on social media use for individuals deemed to pose a risk of serious harm.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has been focused on improving traffic flow and reducing congestion on provincial roads and highways for several years. His gaze has now turned to an electronic device that can disrupt traffic and frustrate drivers: speed cameras.
Ford and his PC government have tackled this issue on several occasions.
The government’s inclusion of warrantless information demand powers in Bill C‑2 has attracted mounting concern, particularly the stunning decision to target everyone who provides services in Canada — which creates near-limitless targets for warrantless disclosure demands.
Department of Justice officials have confirmed that Bill C‑2 extends far beyond just telecom companies to services such as financial institutions, car rental companies, and hotels. The inclusion of professional services that frequently face strict confidentiality obligations deserves greater scrutiny, as the approach virtually guarantees a constitutional challenge — alongside the privacy challenge — in light of Supreme Court of Canada rulings in Spencer and Bykovets.
In Burnaby, B.C., police investigating the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl staged an undercover operation at a Kurdish New Year’s celebration in hopes of capturing the perpetrator whose identity was at that point completely unknown.
After DNA analysis from the crime scene suggested the suspect was likely Kurdish, the RCMP posed as market researchers for a fake beverage company at the ethnic cultural festival. Undercover officers served tea to festivalgoers at random in more than 140 disposable cups, which were then discarded, swabbed and analyzed. The DNA found on the cups included the brother of the suspect – a key step that allowed authorities to later arrest and convict the killer.
At 6:00 local time on Wednesday morning, police in Germany began a massive operation to crack down on people posting hate speech on social media. Remix reported that the Federal Criminal Police Office seized smartphones, computers, and tablets during raids involving over 100 different cases. The raids were conducted under a Criminal Code Paragraph 188 and were designed to take down those engaging in racism or other forms of hate speech. The outlet noted …
At around 6 a.m. this morning, hundreds of people across Germany awoke to police officers at their door. Their only ‘crime’ is to have openly made critical or offensive comments on the internet, many about specific politicians.
This is not a scene from the Third Reich or the German Democratic Republic, but from the Federal Republic in the 21st Century. Officers from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) intend to make approximately 170 house visits today, to investigate ‘hateful’ or insulting comments made online. Suspects have had their tablets, laptops, and phones confiscated, and their homes searched. This operation has been taking place annually for several years now, to enforce paragraph 188 of the German criminal code. This was amended in 2021 to make it a criminal offence to insult a political figure, punishable by a maximum sentence of three years in prison.
One of Canada’s intelligence agencies says it “improperly” shared information about Canadians that it had obtained “incidentally” with international partners.
The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) shared some details about the incident after the intelligence commissioner — the quasi-judicial position that reviews the cyber spy agency’s activities — flagged the case in his annual report tabled in Parliament earlier this week.
CSE spokesperson Janny Bender Asselin told CBC News that last year the agency had to notify the defence minister “of an incident where CSE improperly shared information.”
Can police use a drone with a zoom lens to peer into the interior of vehicles stopped at red lights? Can police enter a home’s private driveway and look in the windows of vehicles? Can the government track the cellphone location data of millions of Canadians to track their movements? And can a private foreign company scour the internet collecting photos of Canadians for use in facial recognition technology that is sold to police?
If government were reliably a force for good — always benevolent, never abusive — we would not need constitutional protections for freedoms of speech, movement, religion, assembly, or association. We wouldn’t need to worry about the abuse of state power. We could ignore Lord Acton’s famous warning that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
But, we should learn from history.
A border security bill tabled this week by the federal government would grant CSIS, the police and other law enforcement agencies the right to demand information about internet subscribers – including their locations – without a warrant from a judge.
The proposed changes, part of a sprawling piece of legislation unveiled on Tuesday, were criticized by civil liberties advocates and legal experts, who argued that the measures would run counter to previous court rulings and would almost certainly face new challenges.
