“Surveillance Society”

Shortly before Christmas, the U.S. State Department slapped visa sanctions on five individuals whom it described as being agents of a “global censorship-industrial complex” bent on restricting the freedom of speech of Americans. The headliner of the sanctions list was, of course, Thierry Breton, the former EU internal market commissioner, who spearheaded efforts to enforce the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) during the last years of his tenure in the Commission. But the directors of three organizations allegedly involved in censorship activities were also sanctioned: HateAid, the Global Disinformation Index, and the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Imagine this: You have a group of friends over for dinner. You are sitting around the table having a nice conversation about current events. You mention that you don’t like it when immigrants take advantage of social welfare instead of getting a job; you explain that your taxes would be lower if immigrants weren’t so lazy.

Now imagine this: Your teenage daughter has found herself a boyfriend, and you sit her down to have a conversation about the potential consequences of being intimate with him. Your daughter dismisses your concerns by saying that she can always get an abortion, whereupon you reply that abortions are immoral.

Would you be surprised if, in either of these cases, the police came to your house and arrested you for illegal speech?

Shabana Mahmood’s announcement that facial recognition is to be rolled out across the nation is no vague statement of aspiration. Part of wider policing reforms and backed by the promise of fifty more camera-topped vans, the Home Secretary’s announcement signals the government’s determination to make mass surveillance part of daily life. Combined with the current consultation on facial recognition, it also confirms that Britain is becoming a surveillance state without any real thought or debate.

On the morning of Jan. 10, Nicole Cleland was in her car trailing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent through Richfield, Minn., her hometown.

Suddenly, the agent turned into a series of one-way streets and stopped, getting out of his white Dodge Ram, said Ms. Cleland, who volunteers with a local watchdog group that observes the activity of immigration officers. The agent then walked over to Ms. Cleland’s car and surprised her by addressing her as Nicole.

“He said he had facial recognition and that his body camera was on,” said Ms. Cleland, 56, who had not met the agent before.

A trial of Live Facial Recognition technology (LFR) in south London has helped cut robbery and shoplifting and led to more than 100 arrests, according to the Metropolitan Police.

The pilot scheme in Croydon, which launched last October, has seen fixed cameras mounted on street furniture instead of mobile vans, which map a person’s unique facial features and matches them against faces on watch lists.

The Met said a third of the arrests involved offences against women and girls, including strangulation and sexual assault.

Ministers are rallying international support for a crackdown on Elon Musk’s social media site X amid outrage over its use to create fake photos of naked women and children.
Downing Street has held talks with like-minded governments about a coordinated response to the controversy, which threatens to erupt into a diplomatic row with the White House.
Australia and Canada are both said to share Sir Keir Starmer’s concerns over the use of Grok, X’s artificial intelligence tool, to generate explicit “deepfake” images.

If it’s stupid Carney is in.

🚨 NEW: The Government is working with Canada and Australia to launch a coordinated ban on X over Grok

Ministers believe it will send a “powerful message” to Elon Musk if countries do it together

[@Telegraph]

— Politics UK (@PolitlcsUK) January 10, 2026

Update: Canada may have come to its senses

h/t Mauser

The Digital Services Act (DSA), adopted by the European Union in 2022 and fully applicable since February 2024 to “very large online platforms” (VLOPs) such as X, Facebook, TikTok, and Google, is not officially presented as an instrument of “organized censorship.” Formally, it is purported to be a regulatory framework intended to govern digital services in order to protect users from illegal content, systemic risks, and opaque platform practices.

However, a growing number of critics — particularly in the United States, including Elon Musk and several Republican members of Congress — describe the DSA as a mechanism of mass censorship. In their view, it imposes heavy bureaucratic oversight on freedom of expression and enables selective repression of dissenting opinions.

The role assigned to ‘trusted flaggers’ under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) has been a target for criticism from Republican lawmakers in Washington, who have argued that the legislation risks making Europeans and, more specifically, European governments the arbiters of what even Americans can and cannot say online. The DSA requires online platforms, like Facebook or X or TikTok, to maintain “notice and action” mechanisms that allow “individuals and entities” in the EU to flag content for suppression, and it empowers EU member state governments to appoint organizations whose notices the platforms are required to give priority treatment. These are the ‘trusted flaggers.’

On December 4th, 2025, the United Kingdom’s Labour government announced plans to extend facial recognition technology to every village, town, and city across the country. Alongside this, they want to enable the police to compare images from CCTV, doorbells, and dashcams with government records. The police may also be given access to the images of the 45 million people currently on Britain’s passport database.