“Surveillance Society”

With Parliament ending June 23, Bill C-10 is on the clock.

The bill was tabled on Nov. 3, purportedly to modernize Canada’s 1991 Broadcasting Act and meet challenges and opportunities presented by the global, online era. Many (including myself) assessed C-10 as lacking astute analysis and bold vision. Then things got worse. A clause that exempted user-generated content from regulation was removed, igniting debate by top experts about C-10′s impact on Canadians’ rights to free speech and an open internet. Last week, the bill was further politicized and made even more controversial when the Liberals and Bloc Québécois limited committee debate, and then, with the NDP, introduced amendments without making them public, in an attempt to rush the bill to the House of Commons, pass it and send it to the Senate.

OTTAWA — Canada’s national police force broke privacy law by using controversial facial recognition software that put innocent Canadians in a “24/7 police lineup,” the federal privacy commissioner says.

The RCMP conducted “hundreds” of searches of Clearview AI’s database of billions of photos scraped from the public internet, including social media sites, without consent. The company lets law enforcement and private business then match photos against that database.

The FBI has asked USA Today for the IP addresses and phone numbers of everyone who read one of its articles during a 35-minute period in February as part of an ongoing child porn probe, in what the publisher is calling a violation of the First Amendment.

On February 2, FBI agents Daniel Alfin and Laura Schwartzenberger were killed and three others were wounded when 55-year-old David Huber started shooting as they approached his apartment in Fort Lauderdale shortly after 6am.

The federal Liberals sparked an uproar over a bid Friday morning to shut down committee study on its controversial Bill C-10, as experts continue to express concern about the impact the legislation could have on free speech online.

The Liberals moved a time allocation motion for the bill on Friday morning, a procedural move that crunches the time allotted to discussing a bill and is normally used to limit hours of debate in the House of Commons — not at committees.

The NYPD controls an extensive network of cameras that it can use to track New Yorkers across the city, raising concerns about invasive and discriminatory policing tactics, according to an investigation by Amnesty International.

The NGO enlisted thousands of volunteers to hunt for cameras at intersections in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, in an effort to document the size and scope of the New York Police Department’s surveillance capabilities. In total, 15,280 cameras were located. When synced with facial recognition technology (FRT), the cameras are capable of tracking New Yorkers across all three boroughs, Amnesty said.

Lawmakers in Massachusetts passed one of the United States’s first statewide restrictions on facial recognition for police officers, which may set the standards for the industry nationwide.

For years, computer engineers and scientists have used cameras and artificial intelligence to try and identify individuals in pictures. These often develop into compiling databases of images as well as criminal profiles. That’s created a substantial market for Clearview AI and iOmniscient to offer their services to law enforcement.

Life as depicted in George Orwell’s 1984 “could come to pass in 2024” if lawmakers don’t protect the public against artificial intelligence, Microsoft’s president has warned.

Speaking to BBC’s Panorama, Brad Smith said it will be “difficult to catch up” with the rapidly advancing technology.

The programme explores China’s increasing use of AI to monitor its citizens.

Critics fear the state’s dominance in the area could threaten democracy.

AI emotion-detection software tested on Uyghurs

A camera system that uses AI and facial recognition intended to reveal states of emotion has been tested on Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the BBC has been told.

A software engineer claimed to have installed such systems in police stations in the province.

A human rights advocate who was shown the evidence described it as shocking.