“Surveillance Society”

The Liberal government has introduced a new lawful access bill that it says will help police and security services track and identify people who may be using tools like social media or artificial intelligence to commit crimes or threaten national security.

This legislation is the government’s most recent crack at broadening the access law enforcement agencies have after Bill C-2, introduced last spring, raised concerns with civil liberties groups that the powers went too far.

Millions of electric car drivers in Britain were spied on by the government through their mobile phones as part of a “bizarre nanny state” plan, it can be revealed.

Customers of O2, as well as other operators including Tesco Mobile, were monitored on the government’s behalf if their mobile internet history and app records showed they visited a site related to electric vehicles (EVs) once a month on at least two occasions.

Department for Transport officials commissioned O2 to spy on 25 million devices as part of a £600,000 study intended to produce a “comprehensive evaluation and understanding of the uptake and usage of electric vehicles”.

Durham Region, outside Toronto, is the latest Ontario municipality to create a program for recording “non-criminal hate incidents” (NCHIs) such as (to quote the website) telling offensive jokes, destroying religious texts or sending discriminatory text messages.

The new Community-Based Hate Reporting program includes a form where people are encouraged to report such “hateful” incidents — anonymously if they wish — so that they can be connected with taxpayer-funded security or counselling, so that the region can better track hate incidents, and so that police can be informed. Waterloo Region, Ottawa, Chatham-Kent, Hamilton and Muskoka already have similar reporting tools.

Amazon’s Ring says it is canceling its video doorbell partnership with police tech provider Flock Safety — following severe backlash over a Super Bowl ad that depicted a “surveillance state,” in the eyes of some critics.

The commercial touted the ability of Ring doorbells to reunite families with their lost dogs using a feature called “Search Party.” Owners can upload images of their lost pets to the app, which will launch the feature and use AI to scan neighborhood Ring cameras for matching images.

No one thought this through? No one said “wait a minute”?

If regulating social media to protect children from online harms was a simple matter, the nation’s Culture and Identity Minister, Marc Miller, wouldn’t be vowing to “act swiftly” almost five years after the Liberals tabled their first effort at an online harms bill.

That initial legislation, titled Bill C-36, came two years after then-public safety minister Ralph Goodale first raised the issue. That triggered a year of public consultations before the government rolled out legislation that died when the 2021 election was called.

Shortly before Christmas, the U.S. State Department slapped visa sanctions on five individuals whom it described as being agents of a “global censorship-industrial complex” bent on restricting the freedom of speech of Americans. The headliner of the sanctions list was, of course, Thierry Breton, the former EU internal market commissioner, who spearheaded efforts to enforce the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) during the last years of his tenure in the Commission. But the directors of three organizations allegedly involved in censorship activities were also sanctioned: HateAid, the Global Disinformation Index, and the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Imagine this: You have a group of friends over for dinner. You are sitting around the table having a nice conversation about current events. You mention that you don’t like it when immigrants take advantage of social welfare instead of getting a job; you explain that your taxes would be lower if immigrants weren’t so lazy.

Now imagine this: Your teenage daughter has found herself a boyfriend, and you sit her down to have a conversation about the potential consequences of being intimate with him. Your daughter dismisses your concerns by saying that she can always get an abortion, whereupon you reply that abortions are immoral.

Would you be surprised if, in either of these cases, the police came to your house and arrested you for illegal speech?

Shabana Mahmood’s announcement that facial recognition is to be rolled out across the nation is no vague statement of aspiration. Part of wider policing reforms and backed by the promise of fifty more camera-topped vans, the Home Secretary’s announcement signals the government’s determination to make mass surveillance part of daily life. Combined with the current consultation on facial recognition, it also confirms that Britain is becoming a surveillance state without any real thought or debate.