French police will have to photograph British babies’ faces at the border unless the EU accepts the use of new passport technology.
EU officials last night confirmed that there would be “no exceptions” to the need for facial imagery under the bloc’s entry and exit system (EES), suggesting even infants will have to provide data.
At present, non-EU travellers’ passports are stamped and they are subjected to a series of questions when they cross the border into the bloc.
Massachusetts creates a system of decentralized surveillance in public schools
A phenomenon is sweeping many Massachusetts public schools: the “bias incident report.” The inner-ring Boston suburb of Newton (home of Jake Auchincloss, the congressman for the Fourth District) hosts an online portal where a person can report any cases of “hate speech, bias, or discrimination.” Another wealthy suburban district, Acton-Boxborough, lays out a protocol for the reporting and investigation of “all incidents of bias, including prejudice, bigotry, microaggressions and cultural appropriation.” Belmont, Lexington, and Wellesley are among other elite suburbs with these kinds of protocols, though their emergence is not confined to wealthy districts: Boston Public Schools has its own “equity” reporting form.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was ordered by the Commons Speaker to remove part of a video he put out on Twitter on Thursday accusing the Liberals of trying to close down debate on the online streaming bill.
After the Liberals tabled a “closure” motion to curb debate of the bill in the Commons, Mr. Poilievre hurriedly filmed a video, saying there was an “emergency here on Parliament Hill” as the Liberals were “shutting down debate” on Bill C-11.
The Liberals are shutting down debate on Bill C11! This is a bill that gives the govn’t authority to control what we can see, hear and post online. Talk about censorship!
And now the govn’t is shutting down debate.
Censorship upon censorship! #killbillc11 pic.twitter.com/RyP99BxpGl
— Rachael Thomas (@RachaelThomasMP) March 30, 2023
While technically unconnected to each other, recent reports about the Secret Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement playing fast and loose with rules regarding cellphone tracking and the FBI purchasing phone location data from commercial sources constitute an important wake-up call. They remind us that those handy mobile devices many people tote around are the most cost-effective surveillance system ever invented. We pay the bills for our own tracking beacons, delighted that in addition to tagging our whereabouts, they also let us check into social media and make the occasional voice call.
The RCMP in the Lower Mainland have continued to use a tool that allows investigators to track suspects based on the location of their cellphones, despite failing to finalize a policy on how to address significant privacy issues raised about the technology.
Documents obtained through an access-to-information request that took more than 18 months show that between July, 2015, and March, 2021, the RCMP used the Stingray-type technology 112 times, with 57 per cent of those deployments being for drug investigations. The documents included copies of the RCMP’s 2017 interim policy on the use of the technology and a 2020 draft policy.
… This crazy incident could have had a much more serious ending for Colbert: what would have happened if he’d cracked open a few beers after he’d come home?
“Had this young man in Barrie been consuming alcohol (after driving), he would have failed the screening device, he would have been arrested and brought in to provide a sample,” Neuberger said. “So it’s real. This is a perfect example of how things can go wrong under this legislation.”
In the latest Twitter Files report published on Friday, journalist and author Matt Taibbi revealed that Twitter partnered with the Virality Project, which warned the social media platform that “true stories that could fuel hesitancy,” complained that “anti-vaccine” accounts were retweeting the CDC, and ironically ran searches for the term “surveillance state” while looking for more information to censor.
“The NSA’s surveillance network “has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic”… the NSA, working with the FBI, engaged in the bulk collection of phone records of U.S. citizens’ phone records. Other programs may allow for data collection from Google, Facebook, YouTube and other platforms. These are the alleged capabilities that have been leaked to the media and government watchdog groups. One can only imagine what the federal government’s more secretive and advanced programs might be capable of collecting.”
In early February, I spent $171.59 to see the Rangers play the Canucks at Madison Square Garden. I had no plans to watch the hockey game. I just wanted to find out whether my guest, Tia Garcia, a personal injury lawyer, could get into the building.
We got in the security line and walked through the metal detector. Then, as Ms. Garcia turned to pick up her bag from the conveyor belt, a security guard asked her to step aside and show her driver’s license. “Am I in trouble?” she asked.
The guard told her that she would need to wait for management to come speak to her.
I am unfamiliar with the law in Canada and wonder if biometric info can still be collected willy nilly in the private sector as it was in the past.
If you enjoy watching YouTube videos or prefer on-demand streaming services, like Netflix or Disney, over cable or radio, Bill C-11 will have a big impact on you.
Through this piece of legislation, the government is about to give itself the authority to control what you watch. Instead of giving you more of what you want, YouTube will be instructed to give you more of what the government wants you to watch.
Google was scheduled to appear before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage yesterday to discuss Bill C-18 and its test of the removal of links to Canadian news services for a small percentage of its users, but the meeting was postponed due to technical difficulties. That ensured that the big Bill C-18 news of the day did not come from the hearing, but rather from an exceptional Ricochet Media article featuring comments from Senator Paula Simons that should heighten concern about the government’s intent with Bill C-18. Senator Simons, a longtime journalist and Trudeau appointee to the Senate, raises many concerns with the bill (and a great line that “honest to god, I feel that this is written by people who have never used the Internet”), but I think this is the key passage, which opens the door to targets beyond Google and Facebook …
This where the government is at with Bill C-18. A Canadian can post a quote from a news article on their Facebook page, but if they include a link to the source article, there would be a requirement for the platform to negotiate mandatory payment for linking. pic.twitter.com/8dt618rHaQ
— Michael Geist (@mgeist) November 29, 2022
Not entirely sure this would impact blogs like my own, but it seems likely.
Oh, I’ve been suspended from Twitter for calling Junior a China Whore.
I apologize to whores for the hurtful association with Trudeau and the CCP.
Chatbots pave the way for a surveillance state
Can anyone compete with China’s Artificial Intelligence super-system? Sleepy government bureaucracies the world over are finally waking up to the hard reality that they have virtually no chance. China is galloping ahead. Only last month, it unveiled its latest rival to San Francisco’s ChatGPT: the Moss bot, and this month it plans to release another. The UK lags far behind.
When I was a sparring partner for professional boxers many, many years ago, I was taught to be wary of the jab. It is a tactic used to distract an opponent while setting him up for a devastating power punch that takes him down for the count.
Biden is throwing jabs.
The power punch is a little noticed Executive Order with the innocuous number 14067 and its title, “Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets.”
An author should be pleased to see his thesis bolstered by events. Yet since writing The Coming of Neo-Feudalism in 2020, I have not found any joy in the continued growth of the West’s class divides, as wealth becomes increasingly concentrated in ever fewer hands. The good news is that the working and middle classes are not yet out for the count, and are showing welcome signs of pushback against both state and corporate power.
All these projects to digitize the world are also programs to digitize you, to turn you into a virtual rather than real human being.
The most egregious act that brought the world’s attention to the Canadian truckers’ Freedom Convoy was when Justin Trudeau ordered banks to freeze the accounts not only of peaceful protesters but also of their financial supporters and even some people related only by association, such as ex-spouses. This move inspired so much outrage that, in a somewhat unprecedented fashion, this feckless prime minister was later excoriated to his face by some members of the European Parliament. In a blistering speech that went viral, MEP Mislav Kolakušić of Croatia declaimed, “You block the bank accounts of single parents so that they can’t even pay their children’s education and medicine, that they can’t pay utilities, mortgages for their homes,” and so forth.
Croatian Member of European Parliament and former judge Mislav Kolakusic calls out Justin Trudeau during his visit to the European Parliament in Brussels yesterday:
“To you these may be liberal methods. For many citizens of the world, it is dictatorship of the worst kind.” pic.twitter.com/3HRXUrnErC
— James Melville (@JamesMelville) March 24, 2022
