“Surveillance Society”

OTTAWA — The use of facial recognition technology as a security tool on Parliament Hill would pose substantial legal, privacy and human rights risks — and might even be unlawful, says a study prepared for the parliamentary security unit.

It warns the technology could be used to surveil, track, identify or misidentify a person, and might lead to decisions that result in them being stopped, questioned, detained or arbitrarily prevented from entering the parliamentary precinct.

That won’t stop Justin he wants a social credit system.

Is lowering the crime rate worth giving up your privacy?

Three American cities now require or likely will soon require businesses to give police access to their private surveillance footage. Leaders of all three cities see it necessary and cite rising crime. But privacy advocates decry the proposals as another example of the USA becoming the United Surveillance States of America.

Houston became the first city to enact such rules. It’s part of Mayor Sylvester Turner’s federally funded One Safe Houston initiative. Turner announced it in February following a series of officer-involved shootings coupled with several dozen murders.

Canadians aren’t keen on giving federal agencies more powers to share information in the name of national security if it comes at the expense of privacy rights, documents obtained by Global News suggest.

The Privy Council Office (PCO), the central department of government, recently polled Canadians about the balance between privacy rights and the ability of government agencies to share intelligence with partners to address national security threats.

The director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab says spyware is “like a wiretap on steroids,” and it requires more oversight and a much higher threshold for use than traditional wiretaps.

Ron Diebert will speak to the House of Commons ethics committee as part of its probe into the RCMP‘s use of spyware in 32 investigations in the last five years.