“Surveillance Society”

Canada and the rest of the democratic world are facing a “tsunami” of transnational and digital repression with the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S., the arrival of artificial intelligence and a softening of attitudes on human rights, according to a respected Canadian cyber-research group.

The director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy issued the chilly warning in a presentation to be delivered Monday to a House of Commons committee studying transnational repression.

I agree technology inches us closer to a surveillance state every day but The Munk School suffers compulsive onanism.

The Liberal government has introduced a new lawful access bill that it says will help police and security services track and identify people who may be using tools like social media or artificial intelligence to commit crimes or threaten national security.

This legislation is the government’s most recent crack at broadening the access law enforcement agencies have after Bill C-2, introduced last spring, raised concerns with civil liberties groups that the powers went too far.

Millions of electric car drivers in Britain were spied on by the government through their mobile phones as part of a “bizarre nanny state” plan, it can be revealed.

Customers of O2, as well as other operators including Tesco Mobile, were monitored on the government’s behalf if their mobile internet history and app records showed they visited a site related to electric vehicles (EVs) once a month on at least two occasions.

Department for Transport officials commissioned O2 to spy on 25 million devices as part of a £600,000 study intended to produce a “comprehensive evaluation and understanding of the uptake and usage of electric vehicles”.

Durham Region, outside Toronto, is the latest Ontario municipality to create a program for recording “non-criminal hate incidents” (NCHIs) such as (to quote the website) telling offensive jokes, destroying religious texts or sending discriminatory text messages.

The new Community-Based Hate Reporting program includes a form where people are encouraged to report such “hateful” incidents — anonymously if they wish — so that they can be connected with taxpayer-funded security or counselling, so that the region can better track hate incidents, and so that police can be informed. Waterloo Region, Ottawa, Chatham-Kent, Hamilton and Muskoka already have similar reporting tools.

Amazon’s Ring says it is canceling its video doorbell partnership with police tech provider Flock Safety — following severe backlash over a Super Bowl ad that depicted a “surveillance state,” in the eyes of some critics.

The commercial touted the ability of Ring doorbells to reunite families with their lost dogs using a feature called “Search Party.” Owners can upload images of their lost pets to the app, which will launch the feature and use AI to scan neighborhood Ring cameras for matching images.

No one thought this through? No one said “wait a minute”?

If regulating social media to protect children from online harms was a simple matter, the nation’s Culture and Identity Minister, Marc Miller, wouldn’t be vowing to “act swiftly” almost five years after the Liberals tabled their first effort at an online harms bill.

That initial legislation, titled Bill C-36, came two years after then-public safety minister Ralph Goodale first raised the issue. That triggered a year of public consultations before the government rolled out legislation that died when the 2021 election was called.