Tag: surveillance

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First Amendment rights ideological culture international affairs

Art Caves to Power

Xi Jinping, China, Thailand, censorship, surveillance

The Chinese Embassy in Thailand has pressured the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre to censor an exhibit: to remove works dealing with China’s persecution of groups such as the Uyghurs and Tibetans. 

The exhibit’s curator notes an “irony”: the exhibit being censored is on the theme of censorship. Actually, it’s about more than that. Titled Constellation of Complicity: Visualising the Global Machinery of Authoritarian Solidarity, it’s an ambitious project, attempting “to reveal power in its entanglements, and to insist that art remains one of the last ungovernable territories of resistance.”

But the exhibit is held in the Kingdom of Thailand, not exactly known as a bastion of freedom and democracy. So it shocked no one when the gallery’s operators felt that they had no choice but to submit to China’s demand — in no small part because a financial sponsor and the Thailand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had both accepted the diktat.

What happened is no isolated example of bad behavior — by China or by unresisting victims. Increasingly, we live in a world where the Chinese Communist Party tells us what can be said, what can be shown, what can be done.

Several years ago, a Marriott worker in Nebraska was fired after he or a colleague “liked” a pro-Tibet tweet using the Mariott social media account. The CCP exploded. Marriott has hotels in China. Marriott groveled.

Marco Rubio, then a U.S. Senator, said at the time that every week it seemed that another major company was shamelessly apologizing to the PRC for “some sort of ‘misstep’ related to Tibet . . . and other sensitive issues.”

It’s not just “art” that must learn to resist the governance of China  . . . before it’s too late.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights international affairs Internet controversy

UK Targets Wikipedia

UK, British, Wikipedia, censorship, surveillance

It would be nice if Wikipedia were suing to challenge the United Kingdom’s entire Online Safety Act, not just the provision that most directly targets Wikipedia. 

Better something than nothing, however.

As Wikipedia describes it, the Act “creates a new duty of care for online platforms, requiring them to take action against illegal content, or legal content that could be ‘harmful’ to children where children are likely to access it. Platforms failing this duty would be liable to fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their annual turnover, whichever is higher.”

The Wikipedia Foundation objects to being classified as a category 1 service under the Act, a designation that imposes digital ID requirements on its contributors.

“Privacy is central to how we keep users safe and empowered,” says Phil Bradley-Schmieg, lead counsel for the Wikipedia Foundation. “Designed for social media, this is just one of several category 1 duties that could seriously harm Wikipedia.”

“Designed for social media” — in other words, do it to the other guys, not us.

“Volunteer communities working in more than 300 languages could be exposed to data breaches, stalking, vexatious lawsuits, or even imprisonment by authoritarian regimes,” Bradley-Schmieg adds.

True. But won’t those risks also be faced by those who surf in to say something on a social media platform and suddenly find themselves confronted with age-verification — ID — demands?

We need a tsunami of lawsuits against the UK’s global assault on privacy and freedom of speech.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom international affairs

UK as China’s Thumb Puppet

Xi Jinping, China, UK, surveillance, censorship

British police do some good things. In 2023, officers were credited with reducing the number of phone snatchings by punks on mopeds. Great.

Let’s have more of that, less of telling victims of totalitarian dictatorship to shut up for their own good.

The UK police wanted expatriate Hongkonger Carmen Lau, a pro-democracy activist and former Hong Kong politician who has been living in Britain since 2021, to stay out of trouble with China. So in March, London bobbies asked her to sign a “memorandum of understanding” obliging her to avoid public gatherings and “cease any activity likely to put you at risk.”

What activity? 

Not hang gliding.

The sickening effort to muzzle Lau came after neighbors got letters “offering a £100,000 bounty (US$131,947) for information on her movements” leading to her arrest by Hong Kong’s Chinese Communist Party authorities.

Hong Kong denies sending the letters. But in 2024, it placed bounties on the heads of six pro-democracy activists, including Lau, who had fled overseas in the wake of China’s repressive national security law of 2020, which targeted Hong Kong liberties.

Lau felt constrained to submit to the police request when they came to her door but has continued to speak out. “A truly democratic response should center on protecting the rights of those targeted, not advising them to retreat from public life,” she says.

Responding to the revelations, Thames Valley police say that they’d never “confirm or deny safeguarding tactics that we may or may not use. . . .”

Is this the free world? Not if under China’s thumb. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights

The Bobbies That Say NIII

UK, British flag, censorship, surveillance, internet, news

In Great Britain, you can get police to show up at your door just by posting an unauthorized opinion on social media.

Things are about to get worse. By talking about it online, Britons who think that the country has an immigration problem could draw the attention of a new police unit, National Internet Intelligence Investigations.

Saying “we’ve got to protest about this” will probably cause the sirens to go off.

Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, says the government is trying “to police what you post, what you share, what you think” because it “can’t police the streets. . . . Labour have stopped pretending to fix Britain and started trying to mute it.”

However, this kind of thing happened under the Tories too.

People still speak their minds in the UK. They aren’t yet used to regarding their political opinions as prenatal forms of criminal activity.

One could use social media to plan or boast about what everybody agrees is a crime. A thug might post video showing how he beat somebody up. Bank robbers might share bank-robbery plans on Facebook. Criminals tend not to do these things. But if they did, for real (that is, they’re not play-acting), who could object if the police inspect the incriminating posts and take appropriate action?

But what’s happening in the UK is not that. 

It’s an attempt to prevent social unrest by finding expressions of dissent and pretending to divine which speech-crime will lead to protest-crime.

It requires Big Brother Bobbies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Fourth Amendment rights privacy too much government

What Does the FBI Do?

FBI, surveillance, censorship, religion, church

“The FBI began surveilling a Catholic priest in 2023,” wrote James Lynch last week, “after the clergyman refused to divulge details about a recently arrested parishioner who was converting to Catholicism and seeking spiritual guidance.”

The agency’s Richmond Field Office “tracked the priest’s movements and coordinated with several other FBI offices and a foreign law enforcement agency to gather intelligence on the clergyman and his priestly organization,” Lynch summarizes.

This is all based on a new House Judiciary Committee report entitled “How the Biden-Wray FBI Manufactured a False Narrative of Catholic Americans as Violent Extremists.” *

“The FBI attempted to violate the priest-penitent privilege,” the report continues, “on the faulty reasoning that the Richmond subject under investigation seeking spiritual guidance had not been baptized or completed catechism.”

You may be asking yourself, is the FBI out of its mind?

Certainly, out of this hemisphere. Consider that FBI agents have also extended their reach way beyond U.S. borders to focus on wrongthink elsewhere.

According to investigative journalist David Ágape, “the FBI has helped Brazil censor its citizens,” working with the Soros’ Open Society Foundation to promote censorship in Brazil and a secret judicial police force targeting “people deemed to be spreading false information.”

Was the FBI nurturing censorship in foreign lands to later re-import them here?

From its beginning, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has had trouble staying within constitutional limits. I guess we should not be shocked that it doesn’t obey jurisdictional limits, either. 

Hopefully, Director Kash Patel will rein in the agency. It won’t be easy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* According to the committee, “The report reveals that contrary to testimony from former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray, the 2023 Richmond memorandum that derisively labeled traditional Catholics as ‘racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists’ was not an isolated incident. Under the new leadership of Director Kash Patel, the FBI has cooperated considerably with the Committee’s subpoena, and has produced over 1,300 pages of additional documents related to the Richmond memorandum that the Biden-Wray FBI did not disclose.”
Note: You can also mouse-over the asterisk in the main text to see the footnote.

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national politics & policies privacy

The State vs. Our Privacy

encryption, privacy, surveillance, censorship

The policies of the new Trump administration have given us only partial reprieves from the war on freedom of speech.

The war is still chugging along. It extends even to our most private communications, including those now hidden from prying eyes by encryption. Revived legislation in the U.S. Senate threatens the providers of such encryption.

Reclaim the Net’s Dan Frieth observes that under the STOP CSAM Act of 2025 (S. 1829), which targets “child sexual abuse material,” providing a “secure, privacy-focused service could be interpreted as ‘facilitating’ illegal activity, regardless of whether the provider can access or verify the content being transmitted.”

The legislation stipulates that providers may defend themselves from charges of “facilitating” illegal activity by showing that it is “technologically impossible” to remove CSAM without disabling their encryption. But firms would still often have to go to court to make this case, and “many platforms may adopt invasive scanning out of fear, not necessity, just to avoid liability, with real consequences for privacy and user trust.”

Defaulting to routine invasive scanning means an end to providing users with encryption, including users threatened by despotic regimes.

Current law already requires platforms to report known examples of material that entails the sexual abuse of children.

Any good or service that can be put to good use can also be put to evil use. Just as we shouldn’t penalize the makers of knives, forks, mail, curtains, roads, and guns for their use by criminals, the makers of encryption services should also not be so punished.

Nor should we grant to government bodies such a frightening dystopian power, accumulated to override our basic freedoms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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privacy

Big Ugly Border Bill

Canada, surveillance, privacy, metadata

The price of liberty may be more than eternal vigilance. Must we also employ all-knowing vigilance? Encyclopedic knowledge of all possible dirty tricks freedom’s enemies may employ?

One such is burying the latest assault on liberty in legislation about an unrelated matter in hopes that nobody will notice.

In Canada, a controversial effort to sabotage online privacy has wormed its way into a bill supposedly about strengthening border security: the Strong Border Act (Bill C-2).

It’s not exactly new, since, as Reclaim the Net reports, it’s something “law enforcement agencies have been pursuing since the late 1990s.”

As with populations south of the border, the people themselves hate such interference. “Despite being repeatedly rebuffed by public opposition, parliamentary committees, and Canada’s highest court,” observes Ken Macon, “the drive to erode digital privacy protections continues.”

In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that Canadians have a right to expect that their subscriber information will be kept private. In 2023, the courts affirmed that users’ IP addresses were also entitled to protection. Investigators couldn’t simply rummage through a Canadian’s subscription details and surfing history without a warrant.

But the new legislation would entitle authorities to make warrantless “information demands” on service providers.

If this legislation ostensibly about the border is enacted, service providers would, on demand, have to identify particular users and whether the provider possesses his transmission data. The actual data itself would not have to be handed over, but Macon stresses that permitting such indirect searches would “effectively sidestep the very privacy protections the courts have upheld.”

Vigilance, indeed, knowing our governments’ lust for omniscience about us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights international affairs Internet controversy social media

Against British Censorship

U.K. British, censorship

The dictates of the neo-redcoat British government, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, are out of control.

Starmer’s Labour government wants the whole world to obey its censorship demands. The latest is that its Office of Communications, called Ofcom, is threatening the American social media platforms Gab and Kiwi Farms with mega-steep fines for unwaveringly safeguarding the freedom of speech of users. 

Which of course Gab and Kiwi Farms have every right to do.

Ofcom says it’ll sock Gab with fines of up $23 million USD for refusing to censor its users per UK orders. 

“We will not pay one cent,” says Gab CEO Andrew Torba.

Gab is not only not cooperating with Ofconjob’s insanity, it has also reported the Starmer government to the U.S. Trade Representative and the U.S. Department of Justice in hopes that the U.S. government will retaliate against the United Kingdom for trying to gag social media in the United States.

Kiwi Farms, threatened with the same fine of up to 10 percent of worldwide revenue, is telling UK users who want to use the site to access it through a VPN or Tor in order to protect their online traffic and disguise which country they’re from. Otherwise, they’re out of luck.

Kiwi has also reported success in obtaining pro bono counsel for dealing with “the UK’s attempts to enforce its censorship regime in the United States.”

As the U.S. president famously said in Butler, Pennsylvania: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tearing Into the Apple

“Any kind of back door . . . access for the ‘good guys’ can also be exploited by the ‘bad guys,’” observes a Technology & Innovation Foundation report.

We can omit the skeptical scare quotes around “bad guys”; cyberhackers stealing your private information are bad guys.

Example: the China-affiliated hackers who looted U.S. telecommunications systems with the help of U.S.-mandated back doors.

But “good guys” demanding unlimited access to encrypted information are also bad guys.

Example: the United Kingdom officials behind a secret order last month, recent divulged by the Washington Post, demanding that “Apple allow access to all cloud content from users worldwide.”

Reporter Joseph Menn observes that this hitherto undisclosed order requiring “blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, has no known precedent in major democracies.”

Apple is not commenting, now, to avoid legal jeopardy. But in March, when told the order was impending, Apple said: “There is no reason why the UK should have the authority to decide for citizens of the world whether they can avail themselves of the proven security benefits that flow from end-to-end encryption.”

Apple may stop offering encrypted storage in the UK rather than obey the order. This probably wouldn’t satisfy the Starmer government. If Apple sticks to its guns, its products may even end up being banned in the UK.

The alternative is open season for private and state-backed cyberhackers.

Meanwhile, time to remove your secrets from the cloud.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights media and media people political challengers social media

The Ignorance of Censorship

Covid, censorship, surveillance, PSYOP, mind control

Why is Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, governor of Minnesota right now?

Perhaps because government censors — functioning through agents like Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook — made it harder to hear his opponent, Dr. Scott Jensen, during Walz’s 2022 re-election campaign.

A shift in a few percentage points would have tilted things in the challenger’s favor. But Jensen had made the government’s response to the pandemic — including the tyrannical policies of Walz’s state government — a central theme of his campaign.

And in those days (as in these), all-out censorship of various deviations from the government line was de rigueur. Disagreement about COVID-19, both the nature of the infection and the wisdom of the government’s response, was among the targets.

Jeffrey Tucker asks “Why Did Zuckerberg Choose Now to Confess” to the fact that Facebook had done so little, in Zuckerberg’s words, to resist repeated pressure “from the Biden administration, including the White House . . . to censor certain COVID-19 content”?

The answer to the uninteresting question “why now?” is standard CYApolitical calculus. In any case, the confession isn’t quite exhaustive; Zuckerberg doesn’t acknowledge the extent of the censorship. As Tucker notes, “every single opponent of the terrible policies was deplatformed at all levels.”

The single COVID-contrarian piece by Tucker himself that slipped through the social-media censorship net “by mistake” got an atypical tsunami of response. So what if Dr. Jensen’s message and arguments had not been perpetually smothered by government-pressured social-media companies?

Jensen may still have lost (Walz got 52 percent) but the point of elections goes further than a horse race. Where there is free speech, voters can learn something.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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