The all-knowing Liberals put up a tactical white flag when the national storm of who-the-hell-do-you-think-you-are swept over them concerning their attempt to regulate the internet.
Debate on a Conservative motion related to Bill C-10 was shut down, though the Liberals said Monday the bill will now be amended so social media posts are not regulated. What is more galling and more threatening than the bill itself however, is the set of mind behind it.
Understand one thing: If the Liberals are able to pass Bill C-10 – an update of the Broadcasting Act – Canada will have the most-regulated Internet in the free world.
“The plan is not for us to regulate all of the Internet,” Toronto Liberal MP Julie Dabrusin, told the Commons Heritage committee this week. Dabrusin is parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Heritage, Montreal Liberal MP Steven Guilbeault.
Nah, let’s just regulate the Internet.
As one of Ontario’s hospitals almost runs out of oxygen, and our defence minister announces a review of sexual misconduct in the military, the Liberals have decided that this seems like as good a time as any to fix the Internet.
Or, more specifically, the Broadcasting Act, which is currently before committee; the reforms to the act have been presented as a way to expand things like content requirements and other Canadian norms to digital streaming services like Netflix and Disney+. This is misguided for a host of reasons, but well within the usual bounds of nanny-state nonsense we already generally accept from our government.
The Guilbeault Interview: If Bill C-10 isn’t a fireable offence, this interview should be.
Heritage Minister @s_guilbeault is simply unable to respond coherently to basic questions about his own legislation.https://t.co/R0YYhiBvnS https://t.co/n9oEwbx5kr— Michael Geist (@mgeist) May 1, 2021
Several years ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau quipped that he sees Canada as the world’s “first postnational state.” It’s become an iconic catchphrase of his tenure — admired by liberals as a mantra of inclusivity; mocked by conservatives as an admission of the vacuousness of progressivism.
It’s a fine debate to have but, in the context of Trudeau, it’s also fairly pointless, given the prime minister has never shown much interest in actually governing in a postnational way. His is, in fact, a quite explicitly nationalist government that has repeatedly shown itself happy to use the power of the state to push a particular notion of correct patriotic behavior.
Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault and the Liberal government’s response to mounting concern over its decision to remove a legal safeguard designed to ensure the CRTC would not regulate user generated content has been denial. The department’s own officials told MPs that all programming on sites like Youtube would be subject to regulation, yet Guilbeault insisted to the House of Commons that user generated content would be excluded from regulation as part of Bill C-10, his Broadcasting Act reform bill.
Liberal government says controversial changes to broadcasting bill will only apply to professional content (ED. Bullshit)
The federal government is facing an uproar over controversial changes to a bill that would bring videos and other content posted to social media sites like YouTube under the purview of the country’s broadcasting regulator.
The changes to Bill C-10 — made at the behest of Liberal MPs on the heritage committee — would allow the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to regulate user-generated content uploaded to social media platforms, much as it regulates radio and TV content now.
The government says the changes apply only to professional content and are necessary to make wildly successful online streaming services and apps contribute to Canadian culture.
… Read that again: “all the programming that is on those services would be subject to the Act.” Despite the warning, Parliamentary Secretary Julie Dabrusin put forward a motion to remove the exclusion, which gained the support of the committee.
This is a remarkable and dangerous step in an already bad piece of legislation. The government believes that it should regulate all user generated content, leaving it to regulator to determine on what terms and conditions will be attached the videos of millions of Canadians on sites like Youtube, Instagram, TikTok, and hundreds of other services. The Department of Justice’s own Charter analysis of the bill specifically cites the exclusion to argue that it does not unduly encroach on freedom of expression rights. Without the exclusion, Bill C-10 adopts the position that a regulator sets the rules for free speech online. As Emily Laidlaw tweeted, human rights apply online and offline.
The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service has been quietly running a program that tracks and collects Americans’ social media posts, including those about planned protests, according to a document obtained by Yahoo News.
The details of the surveillance effort, known as iCOP, or Internet Covert Operations Program, have not previously been made public. The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.
Police visited the L.A. home of a podcaster this week a day after after he posted a tweet criticizing AOC and her comments on Israel and Palestine.
Ryan Wentz runs the online show Soapbox and tweets under the handle Queelamode.
On April 7, he posted a link to an interview where AOC stumbled and struggled to answer questions on how to resolve peace in the Middle East. Wentz called her answers ‘incredibly underwhelming’.
Vaccination passports, like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want everyone to be forced to carry, are profoundly un-American.
This data-driven authoritarianism, if it comes to pass, will wash away what remains of the rule of law and the Constitution, and annihilate the American way of life.
A report declassified last Wednesday by the Department of Homeland Security is raising serious concerns about the possibly illegal involvement by the intelligence community in U.S. domestic political affairs.
Entitled “Domestic Violent Extremism Poses Heightened Threat in 2021,” the March 1 Report from the Director of National Intelligence states that it was prepared “in consultation with the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security—and was drafted by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with contributions from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).”
The French subsidiary of Ikea will go on trial on Monday over allegations that it snooped on employees and customers by using private detectives and police officers.
Ikea France will be tried as a corporate entity alongside several of its former executives.
Prosecutors say Ikea France set up a “spying system” across its operations.
The 15 people in the dock include top executives such as former CEO Stefan Vanoverbeke, and former store managers.
When a secretive start-up scraped the internet to build a facial-recognition tool, it tested a legal and ethical limit — and blew the future of privacy in America wide open.
In May 2019, an agent at the Department of Homeland Security received a trove of unsettling images. Found by Yahoo in a Syrian user’s account, the photos seemed to document the sexual abuse of a young girl. One showed a man with his head reclined on a pillow, gazing directly at the camera. The man appeared to be white, with brown hair and a goatee, but it was hard to really make him out; the photo was grainy, the angle a bit oblique. The agent sent the man’s face to child-crime investigators around the country in the hope that someone might recognize him.
When an investigator in New York saw the request, she ran the face through an unusual new facial-recognition app she had just started using, called Clearview AI. The team behind it had scraped the public web — social media, employment sites, YouTube, Venmo — to create a database with three billion images of people, along with links to the webpages from which the photos had come. This dwarfed the databases of other such products for law enforcement, which drew only on official photography like mug shots, driver’s licenses and passport pictures; with Clearview, it was effortless to go from a face to a Facebook account.
Big Tech companies such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon collect personal user data from many different sources to create “secret identities” of people in order to understand users’ personality traits, predict purchasing behavior, and ultimately sell these profiles to advertisers and sometimes the government.
Most often, users don’t even realize that their data is being collected and exploited by tech companies. Besides advertisers, millions of people’s personal user data has also been sold to U.S. federal agencies for border control purposes as well as to the military for counterterrorism purposes.
