“Surveillance Society”

It didn’t take long, once Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press, for those threatened by its power to react.

Sure, a few eyebrows were raised when, in 1455, Mr. Gutenberg first used his invention to print the Bible, making it more available for people to read and interpret for themselves. But a generation later, after rogue priest Martin Luther stepped out of line with the Roman Catholic church’s orthodoxies and triggered the Reformation, the suppression of ideas that challenged the status quo really got rolling.

Increasing numbers of worried Americans have been wondering over the last few years whether progressive Democrats have succeeded in creating a police state in America. From the Russia Hoax to the revelations of the Twitter Files release, to the coordinated attempts to quash scandalous and true Biden family stories, to the blatant display of dual justice, they’ve seen that the cabal of one political party, with its power bases in the government and the sycophant media, has succeeded in limiting or destroying political opponents while eliminating individual rights. Just how bad is it? Has that cabal suspended our American Constitution and Bill of Rights and created an authoritarian alternative? Are we there yet?

Do you have a conservative face or a liberal face? Take a look in the mirror and answer yourself as soon as possible because it is quite possible that your ideology — at least what some robot thinks about it — will become public or end up in someone else’s hands sooner rather than later.

Last weekend, Governor General Mary Simon held a symposium at Rideau Hall about the problem of social media abuse, bringing together targets of online nastiness to talk about their experiences and “facilitate the creation of networks of resilience.” Since there’s a government online harms bill before Parliament, this was very obviously risky territory for the non-partisan vicereine.

A lot of bad GG picks.

The dangers of poorly drafted laws relating to online speech and expression were starkly revealed late this March when it emerged that a heavily pregnant businesswoman had been arrested in Nigeria, banged up in a water-flooded prison cell and threatened with a sentence of seven years behind bars and a £2.8m fine in damages – all for the heinous crime of criticising a tin of a local tomato purée product online.

The first year of live facial recognition technology has been the biggest ­breakthrough for crime detection since DNA, the Metropolitan Police chief leading its introduction has said.

In an exclusive interview with The Times, the Met’s director of ­intelligence, Lindsey Chiswick, said that the tool had been a “game-changer”, triggering an arrest every two hours of alleged criminals including rapists, burglars and robbers since it was introduced last April.

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.