Tag: surveillance

Categories
general freedom nannyism regulation

Killer Cars for Your Safety

“It is in my memory banks,” Eric Peters wrote last month, referencing an android on an old Star Trek episode, “the long-ago time when GM was a car company.”

Yes, in the “long-ago” they “made an almost infinite variety of vehicles to suit almost any need and budget, all of them designed and engineered to free their owners. Some were utilitarian. Others were beautiful. Some were arrogant. None were parenting. They were made by adults who respected other adults. What became of that GM?”

The answer? Government.

Specifically, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, as directed by Section 24220 of 2021’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. 

“By 2027, every new car sold in the United States could be required to actively monitor the person behind the wheel,” explained Shawn Henry, the Chief Security Officer at CrowdStrike until last year. “That means watching your eyes, tracking your behavior, and constantly evaluating whether you’re alert enough to drive. For a lot of drivers, that starts to feel less like safety and more like surveillance.”

The idea is for your car to remove you from control.

The excuse for this nanny-state totalitarianism — a human-made robot take-over! — is that it will save lives. If you are too tired, too excited, too sleepy, or just walking erratically, the idea is for your smart car to prevent you from taking the wheel. 

But it would only save lives under normal conditions. In an emergency, your actions — watched over with loving grace by your ultra-smart car — could look like you’re on drugs or worse, and the car, not understanding the emergency, blocks your escape.

That is, if the NHTSA ever finalizes the regulation.

In a world where the CIA can execute you by making your car drive off the road (yes, it’s a thing), adding more overriding tech?

The wrong direction.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Grok Imagine

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Fourth Amendment rights litigation

The C-word in Surveillance

4th Amendment, search, surveillance, Constitution, cars

Is unconstitutionality like obscenity? — we can’t define it, but know it when we see it.

Take San Jose, California, and its automatic license plate reader system. I might not win an argument explaining how San Jose’s public surveillance relates to the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. But. . . .

That amendment insists that people have a right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” and that governments may not search and seize property without a warrant “upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

How does one’s public goings-about in cars that are drivable only with a state-mandated license plate amount to something that must not be searched or surveilled? Our driving on roads is all out in the open, after all, not private. 

Maybe we should stress the Fourth’s narrow guideline: warrants must describe the place to be searched, and the persons.

Broad-based tracking flouts that narrow stricture.

But really, I’m biased: mass surveillance is Orwellian. Do we want our government keeping track of us that much?

Especially as in San Jose, where not only can over a thousand police department employees scour the data sans any legal warrant, but the department also shares this resource with over 300 agencies across the state.

Creepy. That’s the word for it.

And that’s the word used by Institute for Justice lawyers who filed a lawsuit against San Jose’s practice.

Jacob Sullum’s article in Reason explains the legal arguments carefully as well as the many ways the information can be weaponized to, for example, retaliate against protesters. 

Information is power, after all. And in the wrong hands . . . creepy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Grok Imagine

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights international affairs

Fecklessly Fining 4chan

UK, censorship, 4CHAN, surveillance

You host a website. Users can say whatever they want on this site. Next thing you know, a UK regulatory agency is sending you, an American organization based in the United States, a letter announcing a trillion-dollar fine for failure to comply with UK censorship demands. How much do you panic?

If you’re 4chan, not much.

4chan hasn’t been fined a trillion dollars yet. But some day the ever-increasing meaningless fine may reach that level.

The redcoat-staffed regulatory agency is called Ofcom. It has fined 4chan £520,000 — in dollars that’s about $693,000 — “Under a Law That Doesn’t Apply in the US.” The bulk of the fine is for failing to implement age verification — that is, failure to force users who are by and large anonymous to identify themselves.

The back-and-forth between Ofcom and 4chan started in April 2025. Ofcom isn’t getting the message. 4chan’s lawyer says the company “has broken no laws in the United States, my client will not pay any penalty. Increasing the size of a censorship fine does not cure its legal invalidity in the United States. . . . As has been explained to your agency, ad nauseam, the United Kingdom lost the American Revolutionary War. We are not in the mood to discuss the matter further. . . .”

The only problem for 4chan I see on the horizon is the struggle in the U.S. to impose a similar regulatory regime here. Fortunately, our own courts still somewhat recognize the relevance of our First Amendment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Illustration created with Nano Banana

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Accountability international affairs national politics & policies

Weaponized Data via Silencer

data collection, China, surveillance, authoritarianism

“Authoritarian regimes have developed strong cyber espionage capabilities that enable their influence and coercion operations,” explains a National Intelligence Council “assessment,” dated April 7, 2020.

This report goes on to say that the “collection and aggregation of vast quantities of personal data” by commercial enterprises, and the willingness to share this data with third parties, “increases both the likelihood and the impact of data breaches.”

The report, which is highly redacted though declassified in late 2022, fingers Iranian hackers as well as foreign governments for having obtained private data on U.S. citizens. In 2013, Russia’s Federal Security Service “sponsored a theft of 3 billion accounts” off an American web service, and in 2017 Chinese agents “stole 147 million from a US credit-reporting agency.” And more.

Reading on, a sense of déjà vu develops. The report calls this technological capacity “digital authoritarian capabilities” — yet our own government has the same. 

It accuses China of marshaling “mass surveillance and AI-driven algorithmic tracking of its citizens’ behavior at home to inform the use of soft or coercive incentives and disincentives to control them,” but that, I’m afraid, is what our government does, too.

Now we learn that all this and more was known by American intelligence agencies during the first Trump administration.

But was kept from him. 

That is, “intelligence analysts downplayed China’s actions because they had disdain for the ‘vulgarian’ Trump,” explains Just the News, and at least one agent kept evidence of possible Chinese interference in the 2020 election from the president because that might have led to “policies against China” that the agent didn’t like.

That, right there, we call a datum.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights Internet controversy privacy

Think of the VPNs

UK, surveillance, VPN, censorship

It’s for the kids. Let’s remember that. If bureaucrats and politicians get massive amounts of new power to lord over us, this is just a happy side effect.

Reclaim the Net reports that during recent debate in the U.K.’s House of Commons about a Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, lawmakers rejected proposed amendments that would have required age verification to use virtual private networks (VPNs) and certain other services. 

That’s good. People use VPNs to avoid being tracked and identified by such tyrannical governments as those of China or the United Kingdom.

And any ID requirement would increase the chances that governments discover the identity of users no matter what rules VPN providers are supposed to follow to prevent this.

But Brits cannot relax just yet. Amendments that lawmakers did approve would compel Internet service providers to “restrict children’s access to specific online platforms, impose time-of-day limits on when services can be used, and mandate age verification across nearly any platform that enables users to post or share content.”

Time-of-day limits? Aren’t parents the ones who tell their kids when it’s bedtime?

If we do descend into a dark totalitarian night with no freedom, no privacy, a telescreen in every room, we’ll have to look on the bright side: It was for the kids. The kids needed to be protected from algorithms, choice, freedom, the deficiencies of merely parental oversight, and books with pages addictively connected to adjacent pages. 

Those kids. Always causing trouble.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment

The Dorito Bandito Threat

AI, crime, police, surveillance

A student at Kenwood High School in Baltimore County didn’t know what he was inviting when he munched on Doritos after football practice.

“They made me get on my knees, put my hands behind my back, and cuffed me,” Taki Allen said of the police in about “eight cop cars” who surged to his location.

“They searched me, and they figured out I had nothing,” Allen recalled. “Then, they went over to where I was standing and found a bag of chips on the floor. I was just holding a Doritos bag — it was two hands and one finger out, and they said it looked like a gun. . . .

“The first thing I was wondering was, was I about to die? Because they had a gun pointed at me.”

The school’s security system is “AI-powered.” 

It “saw” a gun, not Doritos plus finger. 

An alert went out before the security system’s finding had been confirmed. The alert was soon cancelled, but the school principal didn’t know this when she called the police, who in turn acted with leap-first/look-afterward brio.

We can’t blame AI. We cannot blame insensate artificial intelligence, so-called, any more than we can blame knives and guns for the way these inanimate objects “act.” The humans in this case bungled bigtime. They should reform.

Steps to take include never acting on the basis of unverified AI claims and never using drunken, hallucinogenic AI as one of your call-the-cops triggers to begin with.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights privacy

Permit to Harass, Interrupted

Minnesota, surveillance, abortion, privacy

Minnesota’s permit to harass has been interrupted — not halted, because a federal court has granted only a preliminary injunction.

Nancy Brasel, the district judge, has for now blocked Minnesota’s law requiring grassroots advocacy groups to publicly disclose the names and addresses of their vendors because she expects that this requirement will indeed be ultimately thrown out.

Violating, as it does, freedom of speech.

One of the targets of the law is Minnesota Right to Life. One of its vendors dropped MRL with a thud in the middle of a campaign. As MRL’s executive director, Ben Dorr, notes, the challenged law mostly hands “a ready-made ‘enemies list’ to our political opponents.” He counts seven vendors who refused to work with his organization after being harassed by abortion rights proponents.

This harassment is the apparent reason for the disclosure regulation’s existence. When the names and locations of vendors who facilitate spread of political messages is forcibly disclosed, this allows opponents of the message to stoop to any low, such as harassing companies that provide services to organizations trying to get the word out.

What the harassers hope to accomplish, and sometimes do, is frighten vendors into dropping clients who engage in advocacy.

The thugs who would impede speech any way they can sometimes speak of “transparency” as if it were an end in itself. Whether transparency is desirable depends on the context. Citizens have every right to know how much government spends, and on what, and why — transparency is necessary there, because governments belong to citizens. But no crook or bully has an inalienable right to all the information about innocent people that he needs in order to go after them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights international affairs privacy

Private Chat, Back Now in Europe?

European Union, EU, Germany, surveillance, censorship, civil liberties

We seem to have Germany — not a typo: Germany — to thank for the fact that one of the most intrusive EU gambits attacking freedom of speech is about to fail.

The proposal would let governments monitor all private chat messages, via mandatory back doors, without bothering with such trivialities as warrants, probable cause, evidence.

The European Union centralizes many assaults on liberty that member countries are supposed to supinely accept once enacted. But it can’t ignore individual members as proposals are still en route to becoming law. And the German government, often not exactly a beacon when it comes to free speech, has now made its opposition to this particular mode of surveillance and censorship loud and clear.

As Germany blocked the plan, first announced in 2022, German Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig said that “unprovoked chat control must be taboo in a constitutional state. . . . Germany will not agree to such proposals at EU level.”

Parliamentary leader Jens Spahn of the Christian Democratic Union also uttered some common sense, explaining that warrantless monitoring of chats “would be like opening all letters as a precautionary measure to see if there is anything illegal in them. That is not acceptable, and we will not allow it.”

Although the proposal is not yet quite dead, the German opposition makes it extremely unlikely that EU bosses can go further with it.

Great spirit, German officials. Cheers to now applying this principle consistently — as is required of principles.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights social media

Apology Request Denied

U.K. UK, free speech, censorship, surveillance

The UK police picked the wrong elderly cancer patient to badger for exercising her right to freedom of speech.

Whatever Deborah Anderson said on social media, it wasn’t harsh enough to justify clapping on the irons and hauling her away. Just a knock on the door and a polite request to Do the Right Thing. But polite in the way a mailed fist in a marshmallow glove is polite.

Anderson: “I’m a member of the Free Speech Union and I’m an American citizen. . . . I’ll have Elon Musk on you so quick your feet won’t touch. . . . You’re here because somebody got upset? Is it against the law? Am I being arrested?”

Officer: “You’re not being arrested.”

Anderson: “Then what are you doing here?”

“My plan was, if you were admitting that it was you who wrote the comment, you could just make an apology to the person.”

“I’m not apologizing to anybody. I can tell you that.”

“The alternative would be that I have to call you in for an interview. . . .”

Somebody complained to the police, and somehow that’s enough all by itself, regardless of the nature of the complaint, for the police of the United Kingdom to leap into nonsensical action.

Anderson then asked whether there are “no houses that have been burgled recently? No rapes, no murders?” Good question, but ineffectual. Not his task at the moment, the officer said.

At least we can be proud of one of these two interlocutors.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Fireflly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights international affairs social media

Germany Versus X

The question is freedom of speech. Many German officials are opposed. Twitter-X, or X, is in favor.

As Reclaim the Net summarizes the case, “German prosecutors are testing whether the reach of their censorship laws can outstrip the guardrails of international treaties.”

These prosecutors have been going after three X managers for alleged “obstruction of justice.” This obstruction consisted of refusing to immediately give prosecutors data on users who utter government-disapproved speech.

The X managers have been adhering to the provisions of a bilateral treaty, the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, under which the German requests are to be reviewed in U.S. legal channels before X can be forced to comply. Which increases the chances that X will not be forced to comply.

The prosecutors regard the managers’ refusals as a form of criminal interference. The legal and constitutional issues are now being battled over in German courts.

This is the German government which has been in the news for raiding the homes of people who post sentiments online of which the government disapproves.

That X is not meekly obeying orders to violate the trust of account holders and turn over their private information has upset German advocates of censorship. One MP, Anna Lührmann of the Green Party, says that X’s resistance to censorship is a “scandal” that “goes against fair competition and puts our democracy at risk.”

I don’t think, though, that democracies fail to be robust as they become more like dictatorships. Germany has it all inverted.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts