“Surveillance Society”

Last weekend, Governor General Mary Simon held a symposium at Rideau Hall about the problem of social media abuse, bringing together targets of online nastiness to talk about their experiences and “facilitate the creation of networks of resilience.” Since there’s a government online harms bill before Parliament, this was very obviously risky territory for the non-partisan vicereine.

A lot of bad GG picks.

The dangers of poorly drafted laws relating to online speech and expression were starkly revealed late this March when it emerged that a heavily pregnant businesswoman had been arrested in Nigeria, banged up in a water-flooded prison cell and threatened with a sentence of seven years behind bars and a £2.8m fine in damages – all for the heinous crime of criticising a tin of a local tomato purée product online.

The first year of live facial recognition technology has been the biggest ­breakthrough for crime detection since DNA, the Metropolitan Police chief leading its introduction has said.

In an exclusive interview with The Times, the Met’s director of ­intelligence, Lindsey Chiswick, said that the tool had been a “game-changer”, triggering an arrest every two hours of alleged criminals including rapists, burglars and robbers since it was introduced last April.

E-commerce giant Amazon has just launched new tech that makes it far easier to sign up for its palm-scanning payment service, sparking renewed concerns among privacy experts, with some warning it’s another pebble in the growing rock pile of big tech-enabled, Orwell-style digital enslavement.

Amazon announced on March 28 that it had just launched a new app that lets first-time users of its Amazon One biometric payment service sign up for it from the comfort of their home (instead of having to do it at a physical store) by taking a photo of a hand and uploading it to Amazon’s servers.

Two videos have gone viral on X showing FBI agents visiting people’s houses to ask questions about offensive social media posts.

The first clip shows three people who claim to be FBI agents visiting a woman called Rolla Abdeljawad at her home in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

The woman asks them to identify themselves, but they refuse to do so while being filmed, before claiming they had already shown the woman their IDs.

h/t DS

We’ve had this debate before. The free speech advocates won. But a long time has passed since Canada recognized that it’s not up to the government to police legal things people write and say online, offensive or otherwise.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and so here we find ourselves again having to sound the alarm so that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s problematic Online Harms Act doesn’t become the thing to harm us.

‘Then, before you know it, you’ve committed a hate crime.’ These are the words of the ‘hate monster’, a fuzzy, orange cartoon character designed by Police Scotland. A video featuring said monster was released earlier this month, as part of an awareness-raising campaign for the new Hate Crime Act that’s coming into force in Scotland on 1 April.