“Surveillance Society”

E-commerce giant Amazon has just launched new tech that makes it far easier to sign up for its palm-scanning payment service, sparking renewed concerns among privacy experts, with some warning it’s another pebble in the growing rock pile of big tech-enabled, Orwell-style digital enslavement.

Amazon announced on March 28 that it had just launched a new app that lets first-time users of its Amazon One biometric payment service sign up for it from the comfort of their home (instead of having to do it at a physical store) by taking a photo of a hand and uploading it to Amazon’s servers.

Two videos have gone viral on X showing FBI agents visiting people’s houses to ask questions about offensive social media posts.

The first clip shows three people who claim to be FBI agents visiting a woman called Rolla Abdeljawad at her home in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

The woman asks them to identify themselves, but they refuse to do so while being filmed, before claiming they had already shown the woman their IDs.

h/t DS

We’ve had this debate before. The free speech advocates won. But a long time has passed since Canada recognized that it’s not up to the government to police legal things people write and say online, offensive or otherwise.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and so here we find ourselves again having to sound the alarm so that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s problematic Online Harms Act doesn’t become the thing to harm us.

‘Then, before you know it, you’ve committed a hate crime.’ These are the words of the ‘hate monster’, a fuzzy, orange cartoon character designed by Police Scotland. A video featuring said monster was released earlier this month, as part of an awareness-raising campaign for the new Hate Crime Act that’s coming into force in Scotland on 1 April.

Drivers in Saskatchewan who are pulled over by RCMP should be expected to take part in alcohol screening tests beginning April 1.

“Saskatchewan RCMP will be conducting roadside Mandatory Alcohol Screenings (MAS) on all lawful traffic stops in Saskatchewan RCMP jurisdiction on an on-going basis,” an RCMP news release said.

Regina police announced a similar initiative(opens in a new tab) for the month of March.

h/t Mauser

There was a bit of good news about the future of public discourse this week. The United States Supreme Court, even though stacked with right-wingers, sounded like it was ready to give the Biden administration the go-ahead to try to persuade social-media platforms not to put out content promoting nonsense about the presidential election, conspiracy theories about the pandemic and other assorted bilge and crackpottery.

The states of Missouri and Louisiana accused the government of stifling their speech by pressuring platforms to downgrade or drop their posts. But the justices, including conservatives Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, didn’t sound like they were buying it.

The TDS is beyond cure in this one.

Police Scotland’s officers will investigate actors and comedians if a complaint is made under new hate crime laws.

Training, obtained by The Herald, states that material regarded as “threatening and abusive” under the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) can be communicated “through public performance of a play.”

The Scottish Tories said this appeared to be at odds with the legislation and called for the force to explain.

This is Madness.

It’s troubling how willingly some societies will forsake civil liberties in the name of a purportedly greater or more urgent cause.

Because there are very few, if any, really, in a liberal democracy which eclipse precious rights of freedom of speech, assembly and beliefs. Even what most of us might condemn as outrageous expression or heretical — hateful — ideologies.

Governments wade into the murky end of the suppressing pool at our peril. And they’re never more baleful than when cloaking themselves in virtue — by way of shielding us from what they’ve decreed to be harmful.

March 14, 2022, was an ordinary day. I snoozed my alarm at 7.15am and then again at 7.30am. I checked on a prescription at 10.25am, scanned my bank balance at 2.40pm and bought a birthday card for my father at 4.05pm.

I didn’t record these mundane actions, but Facebook did.

In fact, between December 2021 and December 2023, Meta — the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — tracked me an average of 33 times a day from websites and apps that aren’t connected to my social media accounts. Even when I wasn’t looking at them, they were looking at me.

You have to understand: the Online Harms Act was supposed to be the “good” bill, the one part of the Trudeau government’s three-pronged effort to regulate the internet that was addressed to a real problem.

The Online News Act (Bill C-18) was a transparent shakedown operation, whose stated premise – by posting links to stories on news media websites, social-media platforms were not providing them with valuable free advertising but stealing their content – was but a front for its actual premise: the platforms have money, and the media want some.

No, Canada!

The country that brought you debanking protesters and government-assisted suicide for the poor now wants to criminalize speech to lock up people for life and to put wrongthinkers under house arrest if the state sees a chance they will commit a crime.

Doesn’t get more Orwellian than that.