“Surveillance Society”

You’re returning home after a long trip. You’re exhausted, jetlagged, and perhaps irritated because of the lineup at border control. If it’s an overseas flight, you probably slept in your seat – and it shows.

If the federal government gets its way, your fatigue could give border agents a “reasonable general concern” – a made-up standard allowing them to pull you aside without cause and search your emails, browsing and search history, banking, legal or health records and anything else stored or accessible on your phone, tablet or laptop.

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Angry bank customers who traveled to a city in central China to retrieve their savings from troubled rural banks have been stopped by a health app on their cellphone.

Chinese residents are required to have the health app, which displays a code indicating their health status, including possible exposure to COVID-19. A green code is required to use public transportation and to enter locations such as offices, restaurants and malls. But some depositors at the banks in central Henan province said their codes were turned red to stop them.

The incident has started a national debate on how a tool designed for public health was appropriated by political forces to tamp down controversy.

The future is scary.

The federal government is cutting short debate by MPs on its online streaming bill, a move Tory MPs have condemned as “draconian” and “disturbing.”

They say curbing scrutiny of the bill line by line in committee is an attempt by the government to rush it through the House of Commons and will lead to the creation of a “flawed and incoherent” law.

Why can’t we get rid of ‘non-crime hate incidents’?

Britain’s thoughtpolice are a law unto themselves. Nothing captures this more clearly than the continued existence of the ‘non-crime hate incident’ (NCHI) – a policing tool that refuses to die. At the weekend, the Daily Mail reported that the Home Office is drawing up new plans to increase the use of NCHIs, as part of its new hate-crime strategy. There are fears this could effectively criminalise comedians like Ricky Gervais for joking about trans issues.

NCHIs are a sinister form of thoughtpolicing. They can be recorded by the police whenever someone is accused of showing ‘hostility towards religion, race or transgender identity’. There does not need to be any evidence of hate – just as with hate crimes more broadly, the only requirement is that the victim or anyone else perceives the motive of the non-crime incident to have been hateful. In other words, literally anything can be logged as a hate incident.

Brave New World? You decide.

J. Michael Evans, president of the Alibaba Group– a Chinese multinational technology company—bragged at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: “We’re developing through technology an ability for consumers to measure their own carbon footprint. What does that mean? That’s where are they traveling, how are they traveling, what are they eating, what are they consuming on the platform?”