Psychologist, author and social commentator Jordan Peterson, the guy the left loves to hate, said on Sky News Australia that it won’t be long before the fears over COVID-19 are exploited to bring about a mass social credit system involving digital passports and government controls on the people.
He’s quite right.
The masses, amid COVID-19 fears, have shown as frogs in boiling pots of water.
Part Six of the Twitter Files was released by journalist Matt Taibbi on Twitter Dec. 16, revealing just how closely the platform worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to censor Americans prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform. “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,” Taibbi tweeted.
A Chinese security camera company has been advertising ethnicity recognition features to British and other European customers, even while it faces a ban on UK operations over allegations of involvement in ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang.
In a brochure published on its website, Hikvision (Canadian site) advertised a range of features that it said it could provide in collaboration with the UK startup FaiceTech.
These included using facial recognition for retail security, border control, and anti-money laundering checks for retail banking.
When East Germany collapsed, millions of the Stasi’s victims choose to remain in ignorance about their oppressors. Is it sometimes better to forget the past than to investigate it?
In East Germany, during the communist period, people would sometimes join a queue on the basis that if others were waiting, there must be something worth having at the end of it. Siegfried Wittenburg, whose images accompany this article, photographed this waiting-for-I-know-not-what in his home town of Rostock. It was safer to take photos than to criticise the regime in words, but only just.
A COVID contact tracing app brazenly violates Americans’ right to privacy.
In the age of cell phones and the internet, consumers often face a simple choice: convenience or privacy? Do we let Big Tech have access to our private communications and free email accounts because it’s so easy? Once you’ve said yes — and who among us has not? — it’s not a stretch to think that Big Data already has almost all your information, so why get picky at the next juncture?
OTTAWA — The RCMP worried that after arriving in Ottawa, participants in the “Freedom Convoy” would try to pinpoint Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s location, documents suggest — just as demonstrators had tried to do during last year’s election campaign.
The concerns are outlined in assessments by the national police force’s intelligence personnel that were tabled as part of evidence presented at a public inquiry probing the Trudeau government’s use of the Emergencies Act in response to last winter’s protests.
The weeks-long demonstrations, which blockaded downtown Ottawa and several border crossings, were driven by opposition to COVID-19 restrictions such as mask and vaccine requirements. Many participants voiced their opposition to the federal government in general and Trudeau himself.
Leaders of the Group of 20 (G20) have issued a joint declaration promoting a global standard on proof of vaccination for international travel and calling for the establishment of “global digital health networks” that build on existing digital COVID-19 vaccine passport schemes.
The joint statement followed the conclusion of the G20 summit held in Bali, Indonesia, where leaders discussed global challenges and coordinating policies in response, including to future pandemics.
WASHINGTON — During a closed-door session with lawmakers last December, Christopher A. Wray, the director of the F.B.I., was asked whether the bureau had ever purchased and used Pegasus, the hacking tool that penetrates mobile phones and extracts their contents.
Mr. Wray acknowledged that the F.B.I. had bought a license for Pegasus, but only for research and development. “To be able to figure out how bad guys could use it, for example,” he told Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, according to a transcript of the hearing that was recently declassified.
But dozens of internal F.B.I. documents and court records tell a different story.
THE great aim of the technocratic left-wing elites in the West is to bring an end to the independence of nation states and effectively rule the world through supranational bodies with the assistance of large-scale lobbying groups and authoritarian Big Tech corporations. In The Communist Manifesto of 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were open about wanting to abolish countries and nationalities and, whether today’s globalist politicians know it or not, they are still working from that playbook – and have managed to drag much of the so-called centre ground with them. Crucial to this idea is the modern bien pensant obsession with open borders and maintaining high levels of unsustainable immigration.
A half-pound drone bought at Best Buy and $20 of hardware put together by a team of University of Waterloo researchers has proven to have Superman-like powers.
Nicknamed Wi-Peep, the device can “see” through walls, surreptitiously identifying the locations of smart watches, phones, laptops and the like, with speed and accuracy.
I think thy already have “x-ray” tech that looks through walls but it is after you not your iPad.
Efforts to track foreign mis- and disinformation under former President Donald Trump have since been “perverted” under President Joe Biden to increasingly monitor what Americans say on social media, former Trump administration officials told the Daily Caller.
TikTok is spelling out to its European users of the platform that their data can be accessed by employees outside the continent, including in China, amid political and regulatory concerns about Chinese access to user information on the site.
The Chinese-owned social video app is updating its privacy policy to confirm that staff in countries, including China, are allowed to access user data to ensure their experience of the platform is “consistent, enjoyable and safe”.
The other countries where European user data could be accessed by TikTok staff include Brazil, Canada and Israel as well as the US and Singapore, where European user data is stored currently.
THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.
The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board”: a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.
h/t Mauser
OTTAWA—A judge leading the federal inquiry into the Liberal government’s use of a special emergency law to end the ‘Freedom Convoy’ protests has agreed to hear evidence from Canada’s spy agency at a secret hearing.
In a ruling made public late Wednesday, Justice Paul Rouleau said the federal government asked for a secret hearing — behind closed doors and without other parties present — in order for his commission counsel to examine employees of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service on evidence related to the convoy protest that the agency claims is classified.
It all centres around evidence not yet tabled at the inquiry. And it is unclear what is the subject of the CSIS intelligence that the spy agency wants to protect.
What do they have to hide?
Unnamed foreign “adversaries” may have leveraged the Canadian “freedom movement” protests to advance their own interests, a newly-disclosed intelligence report suggest.
According to previously secret assessments by the Ontario Provincial Police’s (OPP) intelligence branch, the “available information” on Feb. 19 suggested that foreign actors may have pushed support for the movement, which fueled the convoy blockades in Ottawa and across the country, “to protect or enhance their own strategic economic and political interests.”
Again? First they did then they didn’t, now they did! Anything for Justin!
