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.
Soon the government might shut down your car.
President Joe Biden’s new infrastructure gives bureaucrats that power.
You probably didn’t hear about that because when media covered it, few mentioned the requirement that by 2026, every American car must “monitor” the driver, determine if he is impaired and, if so, “limit vehicle operation.”
Punishment for thoughtcrimes is the new normal in Canada.
Americans may wish to look up north to see how the latest attacks on free thought and expression are proceeding. In Canada, governments, universities, and self-regulating organizations regularly attack the core civil rights that have long allowed individuals in English-speaking democracies to flourish and innovate: the right to think and to speak.
Canada has waded into the contentious issue of regulating online content with a sweeping proposal that would force technology companies to restrict and remove harmful material, especially posts involving children, that appears on their platforms.
While the intent to better monitor online content has drawn widespread support, the bill has faced intense backlash over its attempt to regulate hate speech. Critics say the proposal crosses the line into censorship.
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.
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
The federal government is clearly worried about the onslaught of criticism of its newly introduced Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act. That criticism has come from all corners, including civil society groups like the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Canadian Constitution Foundation¸which I work for.
Academics have warned about amendments to the Criminal Code and Canadian Human Rights Act chilling speech, and about the expansive search powers for the proposed “Digital Safety Commission.” Thousands of regular citizens have written to their Members of Parliament asking them to stop and fix the bill.
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.
You really need to keep an eye on the Department of Injustice these days because you never know what they’re up to. The latest example comes to us from Forbes this week. It involves Google and a collection of YouTube videos that have attracted the attention of the feds. It’s not just the creators of the videos who are of interest, however. Forbes uncovered warrants showing that the FBI had demanded user data on everyone who watched particular videos.
‘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
Canada’s “Freedom to Read” week was all about promoting censorship.
As Big Brother says, “Ignorance is Strength.”
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.
