RCMP aims to dramatically expand reach into remote areas via drones
The RCMP is looking to expand the growing use of drones by Canadian police, issuing a tender for long-range aircraft that could reach far-flung crime scenes and other incidents well before officers arrived.
The Bank of Canada (BoC) will not be introducing a digital currency any time soon.
After researching and holding public consultations on the idea of a central bank digital currency, the BoC said it will be shifting its focus away from the concept.
Freeland is crying.
Several social media and streaming services are engaging in “vast surveillance” of their users, including children, by collecting and sharing personal information, the Federal Trade Commission has disclosed.
The findings, released Thursday, stem from a comprehensive study of nine major companies, including Meta, YouTube, and TikTok. According to the report, the platforms — which primarily offer free services — capitalize on consumer data by using it for targeted advertising based on user demographics.
The RCMP says it installed tools on digital devices to covertly collect electronic evidence in 32 cases over a recent five-year period.
The criminal offences being investigated in these cases from 2017 to 2022 involved national security, illicit drugs, financial misdeeds and other serious matters.
The national police force disclosed the statistics Tuesday in a report that provides details about various operational technologies, some of them little known to the public.
The fight for a free Internet is raging globally.
The censorship war has hit a flashpoint. Late last month, Brazil banned Elon Musk’s social media site, X, after Musk refused a government order to suppress seven dissident accounts. Brazilian Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes responded by restricting access to the platform across the country. This story has direct implications in Brazil and also reveals the hidden stakes of the global censorship war.
One way to measure the influence of a political regime is to trace the flow of money, goods, people, information, and force. These are the raw materials of politics, and the form that these materials take helps to shape the form of the political regime.
In the United Kingdom’s escalating war on the freedom of expression, the U.K. Home Secretary is seeking to reinstate the prosecution of “non-crime hate speech,” overturning a 2021 court ruling which described the measure as a move towards a police state in Britain.
According to an August 28 report in the U.K. Times, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper “faces a legal battle” to reinstate measures to interrogate, monitor, and even prosecute members of the public for a range of “non-criminal” remarks.
h/t XC
Canadian officialdom just can’t get past the idea that they and they alone have been gifted with the intelligence and judgment to determine what the public should hear or see on the Internet.
X, the social-media giant owned by Elon Musk, has officially been banned in Brazil. Last night, X failed to meet a deadline set by a Supreme Court judge to block vast swathes of content and appoint a local legal representative for the company. It has now gone offline to its 22million Brazilian users – roughly one tenth of the national population.
Isabel Vaughn-Spruce is a peaceful, law-abiding woman—but she has been arrested twice for praying silently near an abortion centre in Birmingham, England. In a rare bit of good news for freedom of speech, she has just received a payout of £13,000 from the West Midlands Police “in acknowledgement of her unjust treatment and the breach of her human rights” after she issued a claim alleging “two wrongful arrests and false imprisonments; assault and battery in relation to an intrusive search of her person; and for a breach of her human rights both in respect to the arrests, and to the onerous bail conditions imposed on her.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged Monday that Biden administration officials pressured Facebook into censoring Covid-related content and conceded that his platform was mistaken when it censored the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 election.
In an explosive letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), Zuckerberg owned up to Facebook’s decision to go along with the White House’s censorship demands and expressed regret for suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg wrote.
The founder of free speech platform Gab has shared a letter from the German government asking the social media site to give up the identity of a user who called an obese female politician fat.
h/t XC
When Ellie Thomson arrives at work, she doesn’t punch in on a physical clock or even check in on an app. Instead, she scans her finger.
“Seeing everyone else go ahead and do it, it just figured like the right thing to do and there was no issues with it,'” Thomson told Cost of Living.
Thomson is a 21-year-old server and bartender at charbar in Calgary. She’s one of many employees who now use biometric technology such as fingerprint scanning to clock in and out, and that number is rising.
OTTAWA – A law professor is urging the Supreme Court of Canada to weigh the constitutionality of “revolutionary and unprecedented legislation” that limits members of a prominent spy watchdog from using their parliamentary immunity to speak out.
In an application to the top court, Lakehead University Prof. Ryan Alford says the case raises issues of public importance about the protections afforded to MPs and senators exercising their freedom of speech and debate.
Federal lawyers say in an opposing submission there’s no need for the Supreme Court to wade into the matter.
A federal advisory body is calling on Canada’s security agencies to publish detailed descriptions of their current and intended uses of artificial intelligence systems and software applications.
In a new report, the National Security Transparency Advisory Group also urges the government to look at amending legislation being considered by Parliament to ensure oversight of how federal agencies use AI.
Your social media is being scraped by who knows who that’s a given.
‘Is it time to cut “Big Tech” down to size?’, asked the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship-current affairs programme, Q&A, earlier this week. The focus, as you probably will have guessed, was Elon Musk’s X, known for its more laissez-faire attitude to content moderation than the other tech giants. The answer, from the predictably unbalanced panel, was a clear and resounding ‘yes’.
I believe BCF remains banned in Oz to this day.
