Who will guard the guardians?

Americans paying attention have been horrified to learn just how inept and malicious our federal law enforcement agencies have become under the Harris/Biden cabal. Institutions necessary for the preservation of our representative republic have not only failed us but have been turned against us. As Juvenal wrote: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guardians? The answer, increasingly, is certainly not the Harris/Biden Administration.

Share

Meta smart glasses can reveal personal details about strangers on the street — even home addresses

This pernicious program is every stalker’s dream.

Two Harvard students developed a program for Ray-Ban’s Meta smart glasses that can be used to identify an individual and obtain access to their personal information, including a home address.

AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, who are engineering students at the Ivy League school, posted a chilling demonstration of what their program, dubbed I-Xray, can do.

Share

Want your DNA profile from the RCMP’s DNA bank? You can’t have it, a new ruling finds

OTTAWA – A person’s DNA profile may dictate who they are but, if it’s in the RCMP’s DNA bank, they aren’t allowed to have it.

That’s according to a first-of-its-kind decision published this summer by Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard. The ruling is an example of how the government can sometimes legally withhold even extremely personal data like one’s DNA profile in certain cases.

Share

Federal Study Finds ‘Vast Surveillance’ of Social Media Users

Several social media and streaming services are engaging in “vast surveillance” of their users, including children, by collecting and sharing personal information, the Federal Trade Commission has disclosed.

The findings, released Thursday, stem from a comprehensive study of nine major companies, including Meta, YouTube, and TikTok. According to the report, the platforms — which primarily offer free services — capitalize on consumer data by using it for targeted advertising based on user demographics.

Share

RCMP Lifts Veil on Use of Emerging Technologies to Fight Crime

The RCMP says it installed tools on digital devices to covertly collect electronic evidence in 32 cases over a recent five-year period.

The criminal offences being investigated in these cases from 2017 to 2022 involved national security, illicit drugs, financial misdeeds and other serious matters.

The national police force disclosed the statistics Tuesday in a report that provides details about various operational technologies, some of them little known to the public.

Share

What’s At Stake in the Censorship War

The fight for a free Internet is raging globally.

The censorship war has hit a flashpoint. Late last month, Brazil banned Elon Musk’s social media site, X, after Musk refused a government order to suppress seven dissident accounts. Brazilian Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes responded by restricting access to the platform across the country. This story has direct implications in Brazil and also reveals the hidden stakes of the global censorship war.

One way to measure the influence of a political regime is to trace the flow of money, goods, people, information, and force. These are the raw materials of politics, and the form that these materials take helps to shape the form of the political regime.

Share

Keir Stasi? UK government wants to prosecute ‘non-crime hate speech’

In the United Kingdom’s escalating war on the freedom of expression, the U.K. Home Secretary is seeking to reinstate the prosecution of “non-crime hate speech,” overturning a 2021 court ruling which described the measure as a move towards a police state in Britain.

According to an August 28 report in the U.K. Times, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper “faces a legal battle” to reinstate measures to interrogate, monitor, and even prosecute members of the public for a range of “non-criminal” remarks.

h/t XC

Share

“There is no place for Orwell’s ‘thought police’ in 21st century Britain”: An Interview with Isabel Vaughn-Spruce

Isabel Vaughn-Spruce is a peaceful, law-abiding woman—but she has been arrested twice for praying silently near an abortion centre in Birmingham, England. In a rare bit of good news for freedom of speech, she has just received a payout of £13,000 from the West Midlands Police “in acknowledgement of her unjust treatment and the breach of her human rights” after she issued a claim alleging “two wrongful arrests and false imprisonments; assault and battery in relation to an intrusive search of her person; and for a breach of her human rights both in respect to the arrests, and to the onerous bail conditions imposed on her.”

Share

Zuckerberg Admits Facebook Wrong to Suppress Hunter Laptop Story, Scolds White House for Covid Censorship

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged Monday that Biden administration officials pressured Facebook into censoring Covid-related content and conceded that his platform was mistaken when it censored the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 election.

In an explosive letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), Zuckerberg owned up to Facebook’s decision to go along with the White House’s censorship demands and expressed regret for suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg wrote.

Share

Biometrics in the workplace may be the way of the future. But at what cost?

When Ellie Thomson arrives at work, she doesn’t punch in on a physical clock or even check in on an app. Instead, she scans her finger.

“Seeing everyone else go ahead and do it, it just figured like the right thing to do and there was no issues with it,'” Thomson told Cost of Living.

Thomson is a 21-year-old server and bartender at charbar in Calgary. She’s one of many employees who now use biometric technology such as fingerprint scanning to clock in and out, and that number is rising.

Share