Tag: police state

BBC Anchor Claims Arguing Against Surveillance State “Was A Fair Talking Point In The 1990s, But People Are Over That Now”

An arrogant BBC News anchor lectured a privacy advocate Tuesday who argued that a rise in violent crime, particularly against women, cannot be countered by eroding freedom and further empowering the surveillance state.

Following the announcement that police in the UK are setting up a scheme to use CCTV cameras to watch women at night to make them ‘feel safer’, Madeline Stone of the privacy advocate group Big Brother Watch argued that there are already masses of surveillance cameras everywhere and they do not make people any safer or prevent crime.

Stone emphasised that adding more cameras strips away privacy and is in no way a solution to the problem, including harassment of and violence against women.

“But the woman is asking for the camera to be on them, so this is not a breach of civil liberties,” the anchor responded, referring to the scheme which uses an opt-in app.

Stone replied that having an anonymous stranger tracking a woman’s movements via a camera isn’t going to help, but was continuously interrupted by the anchor who repeatedly stated “if it’s something that’s going to make you feel safer,” it will be welcomed.

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Pelosi Doubles Down on IRS Looking Into Bank Transactions

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has doubled down on a provision in the Democrats’ multi-trillion-dollar reconciliation bill that would allow the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to see information on all Americans’ bank transactions totaling $600 or more. Republicans and banks have raised the alarm about the provision, reporting that their constituents and clients are deeply concerned about the proposal.

Since the introduction of their reconciliation bill, Democrats have insisted that the bill will not add to the debt or the deficit, claiming that all new spending in the bill will be paid for.

Along with significantly increasing marginal tax rates to pay for the bill, Democrats proposed and wrote into the bill a section to allow the IRS to gather Americans’ private information from banks, including information on all transactions totaling more than $600.

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Government Eyes In the Sky

In August 2016, Bloomberg Businessweek revealed the existence of a pilot program being operated by the Baltimore Police Department in which small manned aircraft circled over the city all day, using cameras to continuously photograph a 32-square-mile area and giving police the ability to retroactively track any vehicle or pedestrian within that area. It was the ultimate Big Brother “eye in the sky”—and yet the Baltimore police had not notified the public or even the mayor or city council about the program. Revelation of the secret program generated a storm of controversy, and eventually it was put on hold—though in December 2019, the city’s police commissioner announced that the program would be revived.

The technology behind the Baltimore program involves pointing multiple cameras toward the ground and stitching those images together into a single, larger photograph. It also uses computers to automatically correct for the changing camera angles of the circling planes as well as factors such as topographic variances and lens distortion.

The result is a surveillance system of enormous power, able to reconstruct the movements of all visible vehicles and pedestrians across a city—where they start and finish each journey and the paths they take in between. It can allow tracking of a great proportion of people’s movements throughout a city.

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Schools gave laptops to kids during pandemic — then they spied on the students for their own good

Schools across the United States reportedly handed out laptops to pupils for distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic — and then spied on them with the very same electronic device, according to a Monday report from The Guardian.

What are the details?

According to recently released research from the Center for Democracy and Technology, 86% of teachers polled said their schools provided electronic learning devices — such as tablets, laptops, and Chromebooks — for students to use at home at nearly double the rate when compared year over year.

Many of those devices, however, were reportedly being used to monitor students — even going as far as to “[comb] through private chats, emails, and documents” — in order to protect them from harassment and suicidal ideations.

The research noted that more than 80% of teachers surveyed admitted that their schools used such surveillance software on those student devices.

One anonymous administrator told the Center for Democracy and Technology that many teachers believe that spying on kids for the greater good will have only positive impacts on the students being surveilled.

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FB “whistleblower” saga has propelled push for social media “permits”

Apparently emboldened by a recent “Facebook whistleblower’s” congressional testimony and media tour, an op-end has surfaced on project-sindicate.org exploring how information could be further and more efficiently contained and obscured from users, beyond “old-fashioned” ways like censorship and downranking.

And Steven Hill, formerly of the Center for Humane Technology (CHT) – an outfit dedicated to “radically reimagining our digital infrastructure” – has an appropriately radical idea: introduce digital operating permits and “protect people” by not allowing more than 1,000 to see a particular post.

To make the idea somewhat palatable, it was introduced under the guise of a novel way of dealing with what everybody seems to agree needs to be dealt with: tech monopolies. But the tech monopoly horse has left the barn a long time ago, and it seems that a degree of regulation will now be needed to rein it in and then allow natural ways of dealing with monopolies – fair competition and innovation to take care of the problem.

But Hill thinks the way to make them less dominant is by making major social media sites’ audiences artificially smaller. And since an average person hardly communicates with 1,000 people “in real life” (notwithstanding that people’s digital lives have very much become a part of their “real” one), Hill doesn’t think that users would be “deprived” by this limitation.

But right away, the true nature of this extraordinarily dystopian idea reveals itself to be not to truly limit the power of tech monopolies, but to make sure that the message that does get out to a lot of people (so, more than 1,000 at a time) is very controlled.

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Days After Cops Raid Home, 3D Gun Legend ‘JStark’ Found Dead of ‘Heart Attack’ at 28

The 3D gun pioneer, who invented the rapid-fire 3D-printed gun that could be entirely printed at home, “JStark” has died, according to German magazine Der Spiegel. He passed away in his home, according to the magazine, of a heart attack. He was just 28-years-old.

After his invention of the FGC-9 in 2020, JStark became a well-cherished internet hero and news of his death is sending shockwaves through his popular channels. According to Der Spiegel, JStark died on Friday, October 8 of a heart attack.

The magazine reports that it “appears” his death was natural and police ruled out foul play. Adding to the suspicious nature of a 28-year-old man, who appeared to be in good health, dying of a heart attack, however, is the fact that days before he died, on October 6, police raided his home.

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The Science Of Propaganda Is Still Being Developed And Advanced

We live in a far less free society than most of us think.

It looks like we’re free. We don’t get thrown in prison for criticizing our government officials. We can vote for whoever we want. We can log onto the internet and look up information on any subject we’re interested in. If we want to buy a product we have many brands we are free to choose from.

But we’re not free. Our political systems are set up to herd people into a two-party system that is controlled on both sides by plutocrats. The news media that people rely on to form ideas about what’s going on and how they should vote are controlled by the plutocratic class and heavily influenced by secretive government agencies. Internet algorithms are aggressively manipulated to show people information which favors the status quo. Even our entertainment is rife with Pentagon and CIA influence.

How free is that? How free is your speech if there are myriad institutional safeguards in place to prevent speech from ever effecting political change?

It doesn’t matter what you’re allowed to say if it doesn’t matter what you say. It doesn’t matter if you’re allowed to call the oligarchic puppet put in office by the last fake election a dickhead. It doesn’t matter if you’re allowed to Google any information you want only to find whatever information Google wants you to find.

What is the functional difference between a regime which directly censors the internet to prevent dissent and a regime which works with Silicon Valley plutocrats to control information via algorithms and has a system in place which prevents dissent from having any meaningful impact?

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Trudeau Bans Unvaccinated From Travel, Leaving the Country, And Earning A Living

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced this week that starting Oct. 30th any citizen wishing to board a plane, train, or cruise in or out of Canada will be required to show a ‘vaccination passport’ proving they received the COIVID-19 shot in order to move freely, USSA News reported.

While the draconian mandate has a temporary clause allowing the alternative of showing proof of a negative COVID-19 test, it is set to expire a month later.

Trudeau announced the measure, suggesting that those who took the shot have ‘deserve their freedom back.’

“This is about keeping people safe on the job and in our communities,” Trudeau declared. “If you’ve done the right thing and gotten vaccinated, you deserve the freedom to be safe from COVID-19, to have your kids safe from COVID, to get back to the things you love.”

The Canadian Prime Minister’s recent announcement is one of his strictest rules implemented thus far, essentially forcing any citizen who does not comply to become an absolute societal outcast. Many have pushed back on the stated mandates and suggest that they are an attack on human dignity.

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