Can police use a drone with a zoom lens to peer into the interior of vehicles stopped at red lights? Can police enter a home’s private driveway and look in the windows of vehicles? Can the government track the cellphone location data of millions of Canadians to track their movements? And can a private foreign company scour the internet collecting photos of Canadians for use in facial recognition technology that is sold to police?
If government were reliably a force for good — always benevolent, never abusive — we would not need constitutional protections for freedoms of speech, movement, religion, assembly, or association. We wouldn’t need to worry about the abuse of state power. We could ignore Lord Acton’s famous warning that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
But, we should learn from history.
A border security bill tabled this week by the federal government would grant CSIS, the police and other law enforcement agencies the right to demand information about internet subscribers – including their locations – without a warrant from a judge.
The proposed changes, part of a sprawling piece of legislation unveiled on Tuesday, were criticized by civil liberties advocates and legal experts, who argued that the measures would run counter to previous court rulings and would almost certainly face new challenges.
German intelligence workers have reluctantly admitted they are running fake accounts on social media and are now unwilling to go into detail about their purpose.
287 such accounts are run by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Brandenburg alone, according to the response to a parliamentary question from the AfD. Party official Hans-Christoph Berndt said this suggests there could be “10,000 such disguised provocateurs” across the whole of Germany, joking that Erich Mielke—the Stasi boss whose tactics earned him the nickname “The Master of Fear”—“is back.”
At some Loblaws and Shoppers Drug Mart stores, you may soon see employees strolling about wearing a new accessory: body cameras. Walmart is also piloting this tech in Canada. They’re compact and sometimes colourful devices that hang from a lanyard like a name tag at a conference. Except instead of sweetly introducing you to a clerk, they introduce the tacit threat of being recorded.
This technology is typically associated with law enforcement, not retail clerks. Though the cameras aren’t always storing video or audio, they can be switched on during “escalations.” It’s a surreal update to the kind of “Karen”-esque supermarket-aisle showdowns you sometimes see on social media, but more importantly, it’s a dark sign of what’s being asked of wage workers in today’s surveillance economy.
A retired special constable is preparing to sue Kent Police after being arrested over a social media post warning about rising anti-Semitism.
Julian Foulkes, from Gillingham in Kent, was handcuffed at his home by six officers from the force he had served for a decade after replying to a pro-Palestinian activist on X.
The 71-year-old was detained for eight hours, interrogated and ultimately issued with a caution after officers visited his home on November 2 2023.
The police haven’t just been arresting citizens over memes—they’ve gone after their own former officers.
You probably didn’t hear about this case, but in November 2023, Kent Police arrested retired special constable Julian Foulkes.
His so-called crime?
Posting a warning about… pic.twitter.com/Zb8oIyJNxH
— The Stark Naked Brief. (@StarkNakedBrief) May 10, 2025
Turns out retired cop Julian Foulkes—arrested then cleared over a “thought crime” tweet—wasn’t far off in 2023. By April, pro-Palestine activists were practically storming Heathrow, looking for “Jewish” departures. See linked post. https://t.co/dpJYZOScJM pic.twitter.com/w6LJezjtF5
— Starmer Sycophant (@sirwg202110) May 10, 2025
A retired special constable was arrested and detained over a social media post warning about the threat of anti-Semitism in Britain, The Telegraph can reveal.
Julian Foulkes, from Gillingham in Kent, was handcuffed at his home by six officers from Kent Police – the force he had served for a decade – after challenging a supporter of pro-Palestinian marches on X.
Police body-worn camera footage captured officers scrutinising the 71-year-old’s collection of books by authors such as Douglas Murray, a Telegraph contributor, and issues of The Spectator, pointing to what they described as “very Brexity things”.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) plans on photographing every single person who leaves the US by car, an agency spokesperson told Wired. The agency says it will start using facial recognition technology at official border crossings to match all outbound travelers’ faces to their passports, visas, or other travel documents, though there’s no public timeline for when this will happen.
Few things stir the imagination of conspiracy theorists like the prospect of a government-backed digital-identity scheme. The obsessive advocacy of digital ID by Tony Blair of all people is just more grist to their mill. But there are perfectly rational reasons to be wary of the British state’s digital-ID scheme. For one thing, it will make us less safe.
In 2004, Daniel Gonzalez went on a three-day killing spree. Could predictive AI have identified him as a threat before it was too late?
At age 24, Daniel Gonzalez was well-known to the authorities. He was an intelligent child, with an IQ of 125. But by his late teens, he had already racked up a long history of violence – from punching a bus driver over a disputed fare to threatening his carer with a knife.
Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia aged 19, not helped by a fondness for LSD and Ketamine binges, he was soon spending time on the streets, in and out of mental hospitals, and in prison.
Innovations such as digital identities and live facial recognition should shape the future of the criminal justice system, Tony Blair has said.
Proposals for technological advancement such as the establishment of a unique digital identifier to connect a person’s data, such as health and tax records, have been included in The Times Crime and Justice Commission’s full report and recommendations, which were released on Monday.
Blair was always a creep.
A system that aims to predict who may go on to commit serious violent crimes, including murder, by analysing data held by police and probation services is being developed by the government.
The Ministry of Justice is working with researchers on a test project that uses algorithms to identify patterns in the personal data, in an effort to improve public safety, according to documents that were obtained by freedom of information requests by the pressure group Statewatch.
It is many years since I clambered into a cage in Cambridge’s King’s Parade for Amnesty International and stared glumly through the bars at a photographer who snapped me for the front page of the student paper. On that drizzly, damp day, we were trying to draw attention to the plight of prisoners in authoritarian countries where people could be thrown into jail for no reason, except to deter other critics of the regime, and denied their basic human rights.
In the past few days, I’ve found myself wondering what that idealistic young student would have thought if you’d told her that, 40 years in the future, she would be writing about a woman thrown into jail in our own country largely to act as a warning to others. A widely-respected and adored childminder described by one parent as “the kindest British person I’ve met”, a mother of two children (one living, one dead), a carer to a sick husband, by whose side she also appeared in his role as a Tory councillor.
The parents of a nine-year-old girl were arrested by police after they complained about their daughter’s primary school in a WhatsApp group.
Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine were reportedly detained in front of their young daughter by six officers before being left in a cell for eight hours.
They said they were questioned on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property.
The police are the enemy of the people.
This is not policing by consent. This is China.
It’s about time we stopped paying taxes to fund the salaries of these little gestapo pricks. https://t.co/NNQMw7ESTZ
— Laurence Fox (@LozzaFox) March 29, 2025
Facial recognition cameras that scan for wanted criminals are being installed permanently on UK high streets for the first time, The Times can reveal.
The Metropolitan Police will permanently put up live facial recognition (LFR) cameras in Croydon, south London, as part of a pilot project that may see the scheme extended across the capital.
The cameras, set to go live in June or July, will monitor the faces of people on the high street and match their image to a database of alleged criminals, including rapists, burglars and robbers.
