“Surveillance Society”

Justice Minister Arif Virani has defended a new power in the online harms bill to impose house arrest on someone who is feared to commit a hate crime in the future – even if they have not yet done so already.

The person could be made to wear an electronic tag, if the attorney-general requests it, or ordered by a judge to remain at home, the bill says.

Mr. Virani, who is Attorney-General as well as Justice Minister, said it is important that any peace bond be “calibrated carefully,” saying it would have to meet a high threshold to apply.

We need to march on parliament and burn it down, in fact burn down all of Ottawa.

“I’m also a Muslim. The hatred that festers online is radicalizing people and that radicalization has real world impacts for my community, and for so many other communities,” added Virani.

Gee what a shock.

A media scandal is rocking the left-liberal German daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) after it emerged that bosses spied on their own staff and reporters to find a “mole” who had leaked info about the plagiarism affair of the deputy editor of the paper.

Süddeutsche Zeitung is now accused of bigotry and double standards when it comes to ‘whistleblowers.’ NGO Reporters Without Borders criticized the paper’s management and wrote that the protection of confidential sources is in danger.

The scandal has put the reputation of SZ seriously at risk.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan believes it is not “appropriate” to reveal the cost of the security personnel hired to defend London’s controversial Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) because doing so “risks encouraging those intent on carrying out … criminal activity.”

This evasive claim—which follows a 100-word ULEZ sales pitch ignoring a very direct question on the scheme’s cost—likely indicates such high security costs that they are seen as capable of  provoking “criminal activity”.

People say the government wasn't involved in censorship, but it was. And now, new documents prove that US military contractors urged & used a wide range of counter-terrorism tactics against civilians, including psyops, debanking, and changing Big Tech's Terms of Service. pic.twitter.com/mrV5dwWdHF

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) December 4, 2023

h/t Mauser

My wallet is stuffed with cards. I have a driver’s licence, firearms licence, health-care card, social insurance card, and several credit and debit cards. It’s annoying keeping up with the expiry dates on all these cards and it can be a catastrophe if they are lost. It tempts a person to embrace the concept of some kind of universal digital ID, and we have governments eager to set up such a system.

We can’t let ourselves succumb to the temptation of handing it all off to the state, however. The potential loss of privacy and personal liberty is too high a price in exchange for convenience.

The government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.

Don’t believe it.

It doesn’t matter whether you obey every law. The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale

h/t Mauser

Spyware normally associated with the intelligence world is being used by 13 federal departments and agencies, according to contracts obtained under access to information legislation and shared with Radio-Canada.

Radio-Canada has also learned those departments’ use of the spyware did not undergo a privacy impact assessment as required by federal government directive.

The tools in question can be used to recover and analyze data found on computers, tablets and mobile phones, including information that has been encrypted and password-protected.

The major network evening newscasts have failed to report a story that has been reported far and wide elsewhere: the multistate lawsuit against Meta, parent company of both Facebook and Instagram, over complaints that the company failed to protect the privacy of minors thus exposing them to harm.