“Surveillance Society”

The technology of war has come home

The New York Times recently ran an article on the dangers of surveillance tech in China. One wishes they would do the same for the US.

According to the Times, Chinese authorities implement facial recognition tech everywhere they can, the police seek to connect electronic activity (making a call) to a physical location, biometric information such as fingerprints and DNA is collected on a mass scale, and the government wants to tie together all of this data to build comprehensive profiles on troublesome citizens. The latter is the Holy Grail of surveillance, a single source to know all there is known about a person.

Local law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using an obscure cellphone tracking tool, at times without search warrants, that gives them the power to follow people’s movements months back in time, according to public records and internal emails obtained by The Associated Press

Police have used “Fog Reveal” to search hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices, and harnessed the data to create location analyses known among law enforcement as “patterns of life,” according to thousands of pages of records about the company.

OTTAWA — The use of facial recognition technology as a security tool on Parliament Hill would pose substantial legal, privacy and human rights risks — and might even be unlawful, says a study prepared for the parliamentary security unit.

It warns the technology could be used to surveil, track, identify or misidentify a person, and might lead to decisions that result in them being stopped, questioned, detained or arbitrarily prevented from entering the parliamentary precinct.

That won’t stop Justin he wants a social credit system.

Is lowering the crime rate worth giving up your privacy?

Three American cities now require or likely will soon require businesses to give police access to their private surveillance footage. Leaders of all three cities see it necessary and cite rising crime. But privacy advocates decry the proposals as another example of the USA becoming the United Surveillance States of America.

Houston became the first city to enact such rules. It’s part of Mayor Sylvester Turner’s federally funded One Safe Houston initiative. Turner announced it in February following a series of officer-involved shootings coupled with several dozen murders.

Canadians aren’t keen on giving federal agencies more powers to share information in the name of national security if it comes at the expense of privacy rights, documents obtained by Global News suggest.

The Privy Council Office (PCO), the central department of government, recently polled Canadians about the balance between privacy rights and the ability of government agencies to share intelligence with partners to address national security threats.