“Surveillance Society”

On the morning of Jan. 10, Nicole Cleland was in her car trailing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent through Richfield, Minn., her hometown.

Suddenly, the agent turned into a series of one-way streets and stopped, getting out of his white Dodge Ram, said Ms. Cleland, who volunteers with a local watchdog group that observes the activity of immigration officers. The agent then walked over to Ms. Cleland’s car and surprised her by addressing her as Nicole.

“He said he had facial recognition and that his body camera was on,” said Ms. Cleland, 56, who had not met the agent before.

A trial of Live Facial Recognition technology (LFR) in south London has helped cut robbery and shoplifting and led to more than 100 arrests, according to the Metropolitan Police.

The pilot scheme in Croydon, which launched last October, has seen fixed cameras mounted on street furniture instead of mobile vans, which map a person’s unique facial features and matches them against faces on watch lists.

The Met said a third of the arrests involved offences against women and girls, including strangulation and sexual assault.

Ministers are rallying international support for a crackdown on Elon Musk’s social media site X amid outrage over its use to create fake photos of naked women and children.
Downing Street has held talks with like-minded governments about a coordinated response to the controversy, which threatens to erupt into a diplomatic row with the White House.
Australia and Canada are both said to share Sir Keir Starmer’s concerns over the use of Grok, X’s artificial intelligence tool, to generate explicit “deepfake” images.

If it’s stupid Carney is in.

🚨 NEW: The Government is working with Canada and Australia to launch a coordinated ban on X over Grok

Ministers believe it will send a “powerful message” to Elon Musk if countries do it together

[@Telegraph]

— Politics UK (@PolitlcsUK) January 10, 2026

Update: Canada may have come to its senses

h/t Mauser

The Digital Services Act (DSA), adopted by the European Union in 2022 and fully applicable since February 2024 to “very large online platforms” (VLOPs) such as X, Facebook, TikTok, and Google, is not officially presented as an instrument of “organized censorship.” Formally, it is purported to be a regulatory framework intended to govern digital services in order to protect users from illegal content, systemic risks, and opaque platform practices.

However, a growing number of critics — particularly in the United States, including Elon Musk and several Republican members of Congress — describe the DSA as a mechanism of mass censorship. In their view, it imposes heavy bureaucratic oversight on freedom of expression and enables selective repression of dissenting opinions.

The role assigned to ‘trusted flaggers’ under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) has been a target for criticism from Republican lawmakers in Washington, who have argued that the legislation risks making Europeans and, more specifically, European governments the arbiters of what even Americans can and cannot say online. The DSA requires online platforms, like Facebook or X or TikTok, to maintain “notice and action” mechanisms that allow “individuals and entities” in the EU to flag content for suppression, and it empowers EU member state governments to appoint organizations whose notices the platforms are required to give priority treatment. These are the ‘trusted flaggers.’

On December 4th, 2025, the United Kingdom’s Labour government announced plans to extend facial recognition technology to every village, town, and city across the country. Alongside this, they want to enable the police to compare images from CCTV, doorbells, and dashcams with government records. The police may also be given access to the images of the 45 million people currently on Britain’s passport database.

In Europe, the controversy surrounding what is popularly known as the “Chat Control” project — proposed EU regulation officially aimed at combating child sexual abuse material — has, for months, been crystallizing massive opposition on both technical and civic fronts.

Totalitarianism is growing at a terrifying speed in what was once considered the free world. “Digital identification” (digital ID) is now being pushed by world leaders, the World Economic Forum, and the tech billionaire set.

Although this rollout has the potential to affect negatively everyone on the planet, the media, instead of reporting it, seems happy distracting the public with a Gaza obsession; unserious culture wars over wokeness, transgenderism, “climate change” and so on.

Britain has long been one of the most surveilled democracies in the world. But under Starmer’s government, things are about to take a more sinister turn. It seems we are all going to be watched by facial recognition cameras as well.

According to a Home Office consultation launched on Thursday, the government is developing a new legal framework to expand the use of facial recognition technology. Rarely seen outside of China, live facial recognition cameras – which constantly scan live CCTV footage – could be installed in every town centre up and down the country. It used to be that only hardened criminals would end up on a police line-up. Soon, every member of the general public will feature on its digital equivalent.