If one company or small group of people manages to develop godlike digital superintelligence, they could take over the world. At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.
— Elon Musk (2018)
The Deep State is about to go turbocharged.
While the news media fixates on the extent to which Project 2025 may be the Trump Administration’s playbook for locking down the nation, there is a more subversive power play taking place under cover of Trump’s unique brand of circus politics.
Take a closer look at what’s unfolding, and you will find that all appearances to the contrary, Trump isn’t planning to do away with the Deep State. Rather, he was hired by the Deep State to usher in the golden age of AI.
Get ready for Surveillance State 2.0.
To achieve this turbocharged surveillance state, the government is turning to its most powerful weapon yet: artificial intelligence. AI, with its ability to learn, adapt, and operate at speeds unimaginable to humans, is poised to become the engine of this new world order.
Over the course of 70 years, the technology has developed so rapidly that it has gone from early computers exhibiting a primitive form of artificial intelligence to machine learning (AI systems that learn from historic data) to deep learning (machine learning that mimics the human brain) to generative AI, which can create original content, i.e., it appears able to think for itself.
What we are approaching is the point of no return.
In tech speak, this point of no return is more aptly termed “singularity,” the point at which AI eclipses its human handlers and becomes all-powerful. Elon Musk has predicted that singularity could happen by 2026. AI scientist Ray Kurzweil imagines it happening it closer to 2045.
While the scientific community has a lot to say about the world-altering impact of artificial intelligence on every aspect of our lives, little has been said about its growing role in government and its oppressive effect on our freedoms, especially “the core democratic principles of privacy, autonomy, equality, the political process, and the rule of law.”
According to a report from Accenture, it is estimated that across both the public and private sectors, generative AI has the potential to automate a significant portion of jobs across various sectors.
Here’s a thought: what if Trump’s pledge to cut the federal work force isn’t really about eliminating government bureaucracy but outsourcing it to the AI tech sector?
Certainly, Trump has made no secret of his plans to make AI a priority. Indeed, Trump signed the first-ever Executive Order on AI in 2019. More recently, Trump issued an executive order giving the technology sector a green light to develop and deploy AI without any guardrails in place to limit the risks it might pose to U.S. national security, the economy, public health or safety.
President Biden was no better, mind you. His executive order, which Trump repealed, merely instructed the tech sector to share the results of AI safety tests with the U.S. government.
Yet following much the same pattern that we saw with the rollout of drones, while the government has been quick to avail itself of AI technology, it has done little to nothing to ensure that rights of the American people are protected.
Indeed, we are altogether lacking any guardrails for transparency, accountability and adherence to the rule of law when it comes to the government’s use of AI.
As Karl Manheim and Lyric Kaplan point out in a chilling article in the Yale Journal of Law & Technology about the risks to privacy and democracy posed by AI, “[a]rtificial intelligence is the most disruptive technology of the modern era… Its impact is likely to dwarf even the development of the internet as it enters every corner of our lives… Advances in AI herald not just a new age in computing, but also present new dangers to social values and constitutional rights. The threat to privacy from social media algorithms and the Internet of Things is well known. What is less appreciated is the even greater threat that AI poses to democracy itself.”
Cue the rise of “digital authoritarianism” or “algocracy—rule by algorithm.”
In an algocracy, “Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, CEOs of Facebook and Google, have more control over Americans’ lives and futures than do the representatives we elect.”
Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”
How do we protect our privacy against the growing menace of overreach and abuse by a technological sector working with the government?
The ability to do so may already be out of our hands.
In 2024, at least 37 federal government agencies ranging from the Departments of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs to Health and Human Services reported more than 1700 uses of AI in carrying out their work, double from the year before. That does not even begin to touch on agencies that did not report their usage, or usage at the state and local levels.
Of those 1700 cases at the federal level, 227 were labeled rights- or safety-impacting.
A particularly disturbing example of how AI is being used by government agencies in rights- and safety-impacting scenarios comes from an investigative report by The Washington Post on how law enforcement agencies across the nation are using “artificial intelligence tools in a way they were never intended to be used: as a shortcut to finding and arresting suspects without other evidence.”
This is what is referred to within tech circles as “automation bias,” a tendency to blindly trust decisions made by powerful software, ignorant to its risks and limitations. In one particular case, police used AI-powered facial recognition technology to arrest and jail a 29-year-old man for brutally assaulting a security guard. It would take Christopher Gatlin two years to clear his name.
Gatlin is one of at least eight known cases nationwide in which police reliance on AI facial recognition software has resulted in resulted in wrongful arrests arising from an utter disregard for basic police work (such as checking alibis, collecting evidence, corroborating DNA and fingerprint evidence, ignoring suspects’ physical characteristics) and the need to meet constitutional standards of due process and probable cause. According to The Washington Post, “Asian and Black people were up to 100 times as likely to be misidentified by some software as White men.”
The numbers of cases in which AI is contributed to false arrests and questionable police work is likely much higher, given the extent to which police agencies across the country are adopting the technology and will only rise in the wake of the Trump Administration’s intent to shut down law enforcement oversight and policing reforms.
“How do I beat a machine?” asked one man who was wrongly arrested by police for assaulting a bus driver based on an incorrect AI match.
It is becoming all but impossible to beat the AI machine.
When used by agents of the police state, it leaves “we the people” even more vulnerable.
So where do we go from here?
For the Trump Administration, it appears to be full steam ahead, starting with Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure venture aimed at building massive data centers. Initial reports suggest that the AI data centers could be tied to digital health records and used to develop a cancer vaccine. Of course, massive health data centers for use by AI will mean that one’s health records are fair game for any and all sorts of identification, tracking and flagging.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The surveillance state, combined with AI, is creating a world in which there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. We’re all presumed guilty until proven innocent now.
Thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s sprawling spy network of fusion centers, we are all just sitting ducks, waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.
Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.
Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.
It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.
It’s a setup ripe for abuse.
Writing for the Yale Journal, Manheim and Kaplan conclude that “[h]umans may not be at risk as a species, but we are surely at risk in terms of our democratic institutions and values.”
Privacy—Manheim and Kaplan succinctly describe it as “the right to make personal decisions for oneself, the right to keep one’s personal information confidential, and the right to be left alone are all ingredients of the fundamental right of privacy”— is especially at risk.
Indeed, with every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.
We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before.
AI surveillance is already re-orienting our world into one in which freedom is almost unrecognizable by doing what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude.
As Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO remarked, “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about… Your digital identity will live forever… because there’s no delete button.”
The ramifications of any government wielding such unregulated, unaccountable power are chilling, as AI surveillance provides the ultimate means of repression and control for tyrants and benevolent dictators alike.
Indeed, China’s social credit system, where citizens are assigned scores based on their behavior and compliance, offers a glimpse into this dystopian future.
This is not a battle against technology itself, but against its misuse. It’s a fight to retain our humanity, our dignity, and our freedom in the face of unprecedented technological power. It’s a struggle to ensure that AI serves us, not the other way around.
Faced with this looming threat, the time to act is now, before the lines between citizen and subject, between freedom and control, become irrevocably blurred.
The future of freedom depends on it.
So demand transparency. Demand accountability.
Demand an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from the encroaching surveillance state.
We need safeguards in place to ensure the right to data ownership and control (the right to know what data is being collected about them, how it’s being used, who has access to it, and the right to be “forgotten”); the right to algorithmic transparency (to understand how algorithms that affect them make decisions, particularly in areas like loan applications, job hiring, and criminal justice) and due process accountability; the right to privacy and data security, including restrictions on government and corporate use of AI-powered surveillance technologies, particularly facial recognition and predictive policing; the right to digital self-determination (freedom from automated discrimination based on algorithmic profiling) and the ability to manage and control one’s online identity and reputation; and effective mechanisms to seek redress for harms caused by AI systems.
AI deployed without any safeguards in place to protect against overreach and abuse, especially within government agencies, has the potential to become what Elon Musk described as an “immortal dictator,” one that lives forever and from which there is no escape.
Whatever you choose to call it—the police state, the Deep State, the surveillance state—this “immortal dictator” will be the future face of the government unless we rein it in now.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, next year could be too late.
The post The Rise of the Immortal Dictator first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The U.S. federal agency in charge of detaining and deporting immigrants is poised to expand to unprecedented levels the sprawling surveillance apparatus left by the Biden administration. Within days of President Donald Trump’s victory in November, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) posted several notices on the federal procurement website seeking contractors to provide technological…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Read RFA coverage of this story in Tibetan.
A Tibetan writer and former elementary school teacher, imprisoned for having contact with Tibetans living abroad and making a prayer offering to the Dalai Lama, has been placed under strict surveillance following his release from jail in November 2024.
Palgon, 32, and who goes by only one name, was arrested at his home in Pema county in the Golog Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Qinghai province in August 2022, and served more than two years in jail.
Since his release, he has been prohibited from contacting others, the sources told Radio Free Asia on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
“Details about where he was detained over the past two years as well as his current health condition remain unknown, due to tight restrictions imposed by authorities,” the first source told RFA.
The Chinese government frequently arrests Tibetans for praying for the Dalai Lama and for possessing photos of him, limiting religious freedom in Tibet and controlling all aspects of Tibetan Buddhism.
The government also restricts Tibetans inside Tibet from communicating with those living abroad, saying it undermines national unity.
Tibetans, in turn, have decried surveillance by Beijing, saying Chinese authorities are violating their human rights and trying to eradicate their religious, linguistic and cultural identity.
Sources also said Palgon — a graduate of the prominent vocational Tibetan private school Gangjong Sherig Norling, which was shut down by the Chinese government in July 2024 — wrote many literary pieces on various social media platforms and audio chat groups before his arrest.
However, his writings and posts have since been deleted and remain inaccessible online, and his social media accounts have been blocked, they said.
Human Rights Watch noted in its “World Report 2025″ that authorities arbitrarily arrested Tibetans in Tibet in 2024 for posting unapproved content online or having online contact with Tibetans outside the region.
RFA reported in early September 2024 that Chinese authorities arrested four Tibetans from Ngaba county in Sichuan province accusing one monk from Kirti Monastery of making dedication prayer offerings outside Tibet and two laypersons for maintaining contact with Tibetans outside the region.
Translated by RFA Tibetan. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Tibetan.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
John Williams kept a backpack filled with everything he’d need to go on the run: three pairs of socks; a few hundred dollars cash; makeshift disguises and lock-picking gear; medical supplies, vitamins and high-calorie energy gels; and thumb drives that each held more than 100 gigabytes of encrypted documents, which he would quickly distribute if he were about to be arrested or killed.
On April 1, 2023, Williams retrieved the bag from his closet and rushed to his car. He had no time to clean the dishes that had accumulated in his apartment.
The post The Militia And The Mole appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
After years of conflicting decisions by federal district courts across the country on whether Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents can search your cell phone and laptop at ports of entry, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that, “the routine inspection and search of a traveler’s electronics, or for that matter, any other type of property, at the border may be conducted without a warrant, probable cause, or even individualized suspicion of wrongdoing.”
In reaching the decision, the court agreed with several other circuit courts, but put itself at odds with others and many (lower) federal district courts around the country.
The post Cellphone Seizures And The Courts appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, in a letter to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on December 19, 2024, asked him to ensure that journalists and media outlets can work freely in Ukraine and that no one responsible for intimidating journalists goes unpunished, following a year marked by several incidents of pressure, intimidation, and surveillance, as well as lack of accountability.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
President of Ukraine
Office of the President of Ukraine
Presidential Administration Building
Bankova Street, 11
Kyiv, Ukraine
Sent via email
Dear President Zelenskyy,
I am writing from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an independent non-governmental organization advocating for press freedom worldwide, to request your assistance in ensuring that journalists and media outlets in Ukraine can work freely and without fear of reprisal, and that no one responsible for intimidating journalists goes unpunished.
CPJ acknowledges the immense challenges facing your government in the midst of war and values Ukraine’s commitment to democratic standards and the rule of law. We recognize the need in exceptional circumstances for some limitations on journalistic access to information or areas for security reasons, and note that in the third year after Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s media landscape remains vibrant and dynamic.
However, we are increasingly concerned by signals pointing to an unwarranted attempt by the Ukrainian government to control the media and stifle investigative journalism. Over the last year, our research and detailed exchanges with local journalists show a pattern of unwarranted restrictions and other interventions that curtail the operations of a free press and ultimately do a disservice to the democracy that you are aiming to defend.
In October, independent news outlet Ukrainska Pravda (UP) stated that it was experiencing “ongoing and systematic pressure” from your office. UP’s program director, Andrii Bystrov, told CPJ that government officials regularly receive directives from your office not to talk to the outlet on certain matters. On October 10, Ukrainska Pravda specified that Dmytro Lytvyn, the recently appointed communications adviser for your office, banned security forces and officials from communicating with the outlet’s journalists. Lytvyn denied the allegations on October 15. Ukrainska Pravda also alleged that your office is pressuring private companies to pull advertising from the outlet, and Bystrov told us that some advertisers had withdrawn following calls from your office.
In addition to the Ukrainska Pravda incident, CPJ has recorded several other concerning incidents. These include:
In addition, CPJ is concerned about a bill currently being debated in the Verkhovna Rada that could increase criminal penalties for publishing information from public databases during martial law, thereby threatening the work of investigative journalists.
In its June 2022 opinion on Ukraine’s European Union membership application, the European Commission stated that “media freedom has also improved significantly in recent years, especially thanks to online media.” Directly pressuring independent media or indirectly letting those who intimidate them operate with impunity would represent a significant step backwards in the realization of Ukraine’s European aspirations.
As someone committed to defending Ukraine’s international standing, who has recognized that “any pressure on journalists is unacceptable,” we request that you take immediate steps to end Ukrainian government officials’ surveillance, harassment, or intimidation of journalists, and ensure that anyone who has acted to weaken freedom of the press in Ukraine is held to account.
We thank you for your consideration.
Jodie Ginsberg, CEO, Committee to Protect Journalists
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Authorities in Hong Kong are stepping up surveillance of the city’s 7 million residents with plans to deploy automated police drones, artificial intelligence and thousands of new cameras in public places, including taxis, according to recent government announcements.
The police are currently installing an additional 2,000 surveillance cameras in public places including the controversial smart lampposts targeted by protesters in 2019, Senior Superintendent of Police for Operations Leung Ming-leung told a meeting of the Independent Police Complaints Council on Dec. 17.
By 2027, an additional 7,000 cameras will be installed to monitor “crime black-spots,” with a pilot scheme already rolled out in Mong Kok, which saw mass pro-democracy protests and gatherings in 2014 and 2019, as well as the “Fishball Revolution” of 2016.
The move comes amid an ongoing crackdown on public protest, peaceful activism and freedom of speech in Hong Kong in the wake of the 2019 protest movement.
Thousands have been arrested on public order charges and hundreds under two national security laws, which ban criticism of the authorities or references to the protests.
“At places where there is a higher footfall, we would install the CCTV with a view to preserving public order and public safety,” Leung said.
Police will also install “public address systems” to boost communication with the public, he added.
Facial recognition
As early as 2019, protesters were damaging and toppling controversial “smart lampposts” that had been newly installed in the city, saying their specification included facial recognition functions, although officials said at the time they hadn’t been activated.
Police Commissioner Raymond Siu said in February that use of facial recognition technology to track people caught by the cameras was likely in future.
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Leung told the Council that footage captured by CCTV has helped solve 97 cases so far this year, including assaults and murders, but it is currently not intended for use in traffic violations like running a red light.
He said the authorities used surveillance cameras to estimate the size of crowds in the Lan Kwai Fong bar district at Halloween, “to help with manpower deployment.”
Automated drone patrols
Secretary for Security Chris Tang told lawmakers police are currently looking at bringing in automated drone patrols along default routes across Hong Kong, with images analyzed by AI for policing purposes.
“This can lead to greater operational effectiveness and higher work quality,” Tang said, adding that the program would comply with current safety and privacy laws.
Hong Kong’s police force is already equipped with a range of different drones and monitoring instruments, and are already increasingly being used by police, customs and immigration for investigation purposes, Tang told the Legislative Council on Dec. 11.
Police also use drones to conduct high-rise patrols at crime black spots, he said.
“For instance, mounted thermography and infrared detection systems are used to detect the presence of suspicious persons lingering or hiding at remotely located places or at difficult terrains,” Tang told lawmakers.
Meanwhile, the Transport Advisory Committee has said it plans to amend the law to mandate in-vehicle and dashboard cameras and GPS systems in all taxis.
“The camera system proposal … will better safeguard the interests of taxi drivers and passengers in cases of disputes and enhance driving safety for taxis,” Committee Chairman Stephen Cheung said in a statement on Dec. 17.
“These two measures will be conducive to enhancing the overall quality and image of taxi services,” he said.
‘It’s overkill’
Not everyone thought the additional cameras would make them safer, however.
“I don’t think it will,” a passerby who gave only the surname Lai for fear of reprisals told Radio Free Asia on Thursday. “On the contrary, if the streets are being monitored, there will be no privacy.”
“I really think it’s overkill.”
A taxi driver who gave only the surname Wong for fear of reprisals said: “I don’t really agree with it, because of the privacy issues.”
“Who gets to see it? It could be misused, or used as a political tool by the government,” he said. “I’m very worried about that.”
A passerby who gave only the surname Chan told RFA in an earlier interview that he had doubts about the true purpose of the surveillance cameras because there isn’t much street crime in Hong Kong.
“There really aren’t that many thieves,” he said. “But it’ll mean that if we have something we want to speak out about in future, or to oppose, we won’t be able to.”
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Roseanne Gerin.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Wei Sze, Luk Nam Choi and Edward Li for RFA Cantonese.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Authorities in Hong Kong are stepping up surveillance of the city’s 7 million residents with plans to deploy automated police drones, artificial intelligence and thousands of new cameras in public places, including taxis, according to recent government announcements.
The police are currently installing an additional 2,000 surveillance cameras in public places including the controversial smart lampposts targeted by protesters in 2019, Senior Superintendent of Police for Operations Leung Ming-leung told a meeting of the Independent Police Complaints Council on Dec. 17.
By 2027, an additional 7,000 cameras will be installed to monitor “crime black-spots,” with a pilot scheme already rolled out in Mong Kok, which saw mass pro-democracy protests and gatherings in 2014 and 2019, as well as the “Fishball Revolution” of 2016.
The move comes amid an ongoing crackdown on public protest, peaceful activism and freedom of speech in Hong Kong in the wake of the 2019 protest movement.
Thousands have been arrested on public order charges and hundreds under two national security laws, which ban criticism of the authorities or references to the protests.
“At places where there is a higher footfall, we would install the CCTV with a view to preserving public order and public safety,” Leung said.
Police will also install “public address systems” to boost communication with the public, he added.
Facial recognition
As early as 2019, protesters were damaging and toppling controversial “smart lampposts” that had been newly installed in the city, saying their specification included facial recognition functions, although officials said at the time they hadn’t been activated.
Police Commissioner Raymond Siu said in February that use of facial recognition technology to track people caught by the cameras was likely in future.
RELATED STORIES
Hong Kong officials learn neighborhood surveillance from China
Hong Kong police ask for billions to fund digital network linked to bodycams
Hong Kong adds hundreds of surveillance cameras in public places
Leung told the Council that footage captured by CCTV has helped solve 97 cases so far this year, including assaults and murders, but it is currently not intended for use in traffic violations like running a red light.
He said the authorities used surveillance cameras to estimate the size of crowds in the Lan Kwai Fong bar district at Halloween, “to help with manpower deployment.”
Automated drone patrols
Secretary for Security Chris Tang told lawmakers police are currently looking at bringing in automated drone patrols along default routes across Hong Kong, with images analyzed by AI for policing purposes.
“This can lead to greater operational effectiveness and higher work quality,” Tang said, adding that the program would comply with current safety and privacy laws.
Hong Kong’s police force is already equipped with a range of different drones and monitoring instruments, and are already increasingly being used by police, customs and immigration for investigation purposes, Tang told the Legislative Council on Dec. 11.
Police also use drones to conduct high-rise patrols at crime black spots, he said.
“For instance, mounted thermography and infrared detection systems are used to detect the presence of suspicious persons lingering or hiding at remotely located places or at difficult terrains,” Tang told lawmakers.
Meanwhile, the Transport Advisory Committee has said it plans to amend the law to mandate in-vehicle and dashboard cameras and GPS systems in all taxis.
“The camera system proposal … will better safeguard the interests of taxi drivers and passengers in cases of disputes and enhance driving safety for taxis,” Committee Chairman Stephen Cheung said in a statement on Dec. 17.
“These two measures will be conducive to enhancing the overall quality and image of taxi services,” he said.
‘It’s overkill’
Not everyone thought the additional cameras would make them safer, however.
“I don’t think it will,” a passerby who gave only the surname Lai for fear of reprisals told Radio Free Asia on Thursday. “On the contrary, if the streets are being monitored, there will be no privacy.”
“I really think it’s overkill.”
A taxi driver who gave only the surname Wong for fear of reprisals said: “I don’t really agree with it, because of the privacy issues.”
“Who gets to see it? It could be misused, or used as a political tool by the government,” he said. “I’m very worried about that.”
A passerby who gave only the surname Chan told RFA in an earlier interview that he had doubts about the true purpose of the surveillance cameras because there isn’t much street crime in Hong Kong.
“There really aren’t that many thieves,” he said. “But it’ll mean that if we have something we want to speak out about in future, or to oppose, we won’t be able to.”
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Roseanne Gerin.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Wei Sze, Luk Nam Choi and Edward Li for RFA Cantonese.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Advanced mobile forensics products being used to illegally extract data from mobile devices, Amnesty finds
Police and intelligence services in Serbia are using advanced mobile forensics products and previously unknown spyware to illegally surveil journalists, environmental campaigners and civil rights activists, according to a report.
The report shows how mobile forensic products from the Israeli firm Cellebrite are used to unlock and extract data from individuals’ mobile devices, which are being infected with a new Android spyware system, NoviSpy.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
By Colin Peacock, RNZ Mediawatch presenter
This week, Minister of Racing Winston Peters announced the end of greyhound racing in the interests of animal welfare.
Soon after, a law to criminalise killing of redundant racing dogs was passed under urgency in Parliament.
The next day, the minister introduced the Racing Industry Amendment Bill to preserve the TAB’s lucrative monopoly on sports betting which provides 90 percent of the racing industry’s revenue.
“Offshore operators are consolidating a significant market share of New Zealand betting — and the revenue which New Zealand’s racing industry relies on is certainly not guaranteed,” Peters told Parliament in support of the Bill.
But offshore tech companies have also been pulling the revenue rug out from under local news media companies for years, and there has been no such speedy response to that.
Digital platforms offer cheap and easy access to unlimited overseas content — and tech companies’ dominance of the digital advertising systems and the resulting revenue is intensifying.
Profits from online ads shown to New Zealanders go offshore — and very little tax is paid on the money made here by the likes of Google and Facebook.
On Tuesday, Media Minister Paul Goldsmith did introduce legislation to repeal advertising restrictions for broadcasters on Sundays and public holidays.
“As the government we must ensure regulatory settings are enabling the best chance of success,” he said in a statement.
The media have been crying out for this low-hanging fruit for years — but the estimated $6 million boost is a drop in the bucket for broadcasters, and little help for other media.
The big bucks are in tech platforms paying for the local news they carry.
Squeezing the tech titans
In Australia, the government did it three years ago with a bargaining code that is funnelling significant sums to news media there. It also signalled the willingness of successive governments to confront the market dominance of ‘big tech’.
When Goldsmith took over here in May he said the media industry’s problems were both urgent and acute – likewise the need to “level the playing field”.
The government then picked up the former government’s Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, modelled on Australia’s move.
But it languishes low down on Parliament’s order paper, following threats from Google to cut news out of its platforms in New Zealand – or even cut and run from New Zealand altogether.
Six years after his Labour predecessor Kris Faafoi first pledged to follow in Australia’s footsteps in support of local media, Goldsmith said this week he now wants to wait and see how Australia’s latest tough measures pan out.
(The News Bargaining Incentive announced on Thursday could allow the Australian government to tax big digital platforms if they do not pay local news publishers there)
Meanwhile, news media cuts and closures here roll on.
The lid keeps sinking in 2024
“I’ve worked in the industry for 30 years and never seen a year like it,” RNZ’s Guyon Espiner wrote in The Listener this week, admitting to “a sense of survivor’s guilt”.
Just this month, 14 NZME local papers will close and more TVNZ news employees will be told they will lose jobs in what Espiner described as “destroy the village to save the village” strategy.
Whakaata Māori announced 27 job losses earlier this month and the end of Te Ao Māori News every weekday on TV. Its te reo channel will go online-only.
Digital start-ups with lower overheads than established news publishers and broadcasters are now struggling too.
“The Spinoff had just celebrated its 10th birthday when a fiscal hole opened up. Staff numbers are being culled, projects put on ice and a mayday was sent out calling for donations to keep the site afloat,” Espiner also wrote in his bleak survey for The Listener.
Spinoff founder Duncan Grieve has charted the economic erosion of the media all year at The Spinoff and on its weekly podcast The Fold.
In a recent edition, he said he could not carry on “pretending things would be fine” and did not want The Spinoff to go down without giving people the chance to save it.
“We get some (revenue) direct from our audience through members, some commercial revenue and we get funding for various New Zealand on Air projects typically,” Greive told RNZ Mediawatch this week.
“The members’ bucket is pretty solid. The commercial bucket was going quite well, and then we just ran into a brick wall. There has been a real system-wide shock to commercial revenues.
“But the thing that we didn’t predict which caused us to have to publish that open letter was New Zealand on Air. We’ve been able to rely on getting one or two projects up, but we’ve missed out two rounds in a row. Maybe our projects . . . weren’t good enough, but it certainly had this immediate, near-existential challenge for us.”
Critics complained The Spinoff has had millions of dollars in public money in its first decade.
“While the state is under no obligation to fund our work, it’s hard to watch as other platforms continue to be heavily backed while your own funding stops dead,” Greive said in the open letter.
The open letter said Creative NZ funding had been halved this year, and the Public Interest Journalism Fund support for two of The Spinoff’s team of 31 was due to run out next year.
“I absolutely take on the chin the idea that we shouldn’t be reliant on that funding. Once you experience something year after year, you do build your business around that . . . for the coming year. When a hard-to-predict event like that comes along, you are in a situation where you have to scramble,” Grieve told Mediawatch.
“We shot a flare up that our audience has responded to. We’re not out of the woods yet, but we’re really pleased with the strength of support and an influx of members.”
Newshub shutdown
A recent addition to The Spinoff’s board — Glen Kyne — has already felt the force of the media’s economic headwinds in 2024.
He was the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery NZ and oversaw the biggest and most comprehensive news closure of the year — the culling of the entire Newshub operation.
“It was heart-wrenching because we had looked at and tried everything leading into that announcement. I go back to July 2022, when we started to see money coming out of the market and the cost of living crisis starting to appear,” Kyne told Mediawatch this week.
“We started taking steps immediately and were incredibly prudent with cost management. We would get to a point where we felt reasonably confident that we had a path, but the floor beneath our feet — in terms of the commercial market — kept falling. You’re seeing this with TVNZ right now.”
Warner Brothers Discovery is a multinational player in broadcast media. Did they respond to requests for help?
“They were empathetic. But Warner Brothers Discovery had lost 60-70 percent of its share price because of the issues around global media companies as well. They were very determined that we got the company to a position of profitability as quickly as we possibly could. But ultimately the economics were such that we had to make the decision.”
Smaller but sustainable in 2025? Or managed decline?
Kyne did a deal with Stuff to supply a 6pm news bulletin to TV channel Three after the demise of Newshub in July.
He is one of a handful of people who know the sums, but Stuff is certainly producing ThreeNews now with a fraction of the former budget for Newshub.
Can media outlets settle on a shape that will be sustainable, but smaller — and carry on in 2025 and beyond? Or does Kyne fear media are merely managing decline if revenue continues to slump?
“It’s slightly terrifying because the downward pressures are going to continue into next year. Three created a sustainable model for the 6pm bulletin to continue.
“Stuff is an enormous newsgathering organisation, so they were able to make it work and good luck to them. I can see that bulletin continuing to improve as the team get more experience.”
No news is really bad news
If news can’t be sustained at scale in commercial media companies even on reduced budgets, what then?
Some are already pondering a “post-journalism” future in which social media takes over as the memes of sharing news and information.
How would that pan out?
“We might be about to find out,” Greive told Mediawatch.
“Journalism doesn’t have a monopoly on information, and there are all kinds of different institutions that now have channels. A lot of what is created . . . has a factual basis. Whether it’s a TikTok-er or a YouTuber, they are themselves consumers of news.
“A lot of people are replacing a habit of reading the newspaper and listening to ZB or RNZ with a new habit — consuming social media. Some of it has a news-like quality but it doesn’t have vetting of the information and membership of the Media Council . . . as a way of restraining behaviour.
“We’ve got a big question facing us as a society. Either news becomes this esoteric, elite habit that is either pay-walled or alternatively there’s public media. If we [lose] freely-accessible, mass-audience channels, then we’ll find out what democracy, the business sector, the cultural sector looks like without that.
“In communities where there isn’t a single journalist, a story can break or someone can put something out . . . and if there’s no restraint on that and no check on it, things are going to happen.
“In other countries, most notably Australia, they’ve recognised this looming problem, and there’s a quite muscular and joined-up regulator and legislator to wrestle with the challenges that represents. And we’re just not seeing that here.”
They are in Australia.
In addition to the News Bargaining Code and the just-signalled News Bargaining Incentive, the Albanese government is banning social media for under-16s. Meta has responded to pressure to combat financial scam advertising on Facebook.
Here, the media policy paralysis makes the government’s ferries plan look decisive. What should it do in 2025?
To-do in 2025
“There are fairly obvious things that could be done that are being done in other jurisdictions, even if it’s as simple as having a system of fines and giving the Commerce Commission the power to sort of scrutinise large technology platforms,” Greive told Mediawatch.
“You’ve got this general sense of malaise over the country and a government that’s looking for a narrative. It’s shocking when you see Australia, where it’s arguably the biggest political story — but here we’re just doing nothing.”
Not quite. There was the holiday ad reform legislation this week.
“Allowing broadcasting Christmas Day and Easter is a drop in the ocean that’s not going to materially change the outcome for any company here,” Kyne told Mediawatch.
“The Fair Digital News Bargaining bill was conceived three years ago and the world has changed immeasurably.
“You’ve seen Australia also put some really thoughtful white papers together on media regulation that really does bring a level of equality between the global platforms and the local media and to have them regulated under common legislation — a bit like an Ofcom operates in the UK, where both publishers and platforms, together are overseen and managed accordingly.
“That’s the type of thing we’re desperate for in New Zealand. If we don’t get reform over the next couple of years you are going to see more community newspapers or radio stations or other things no longer able to operate.”
Grieve was one of the media execs who pushed for Commerce Commission approval for media to bargain collectively with Google and Meta for news payments.
Backing the Bill – or starting again?
Local media executives, including Grieve, recently met behind closed doors to re-assess their strategy.
“Some major industry participants are still quite gung-ho with the legislation and think that Google is bluffing when it says that it will turn news off and break its agreements. And then you’ve got another group that think that they’re not bluffing, and that events have since overtaken [the legislation],” he said.
“The technology platforms have products that are always in motion. What they’re essentially saying — particularly to smaller countries like New Zealand — is: ‘You don’t really get to make laws. We decide what can and can’t be done’.
“And that’s quite a confronting thing for legislators. It takes quite a backbone and quite a lot of confidence to sort of stand up to that kind of pressure.”
The government just appointed a minister of rail to take charge of the current Cook Strait ferry crisis. Do we need a minister of social media or tech to take charge of policy on this part of the country’s infrastructure?
“We’ve had successive governments that want to be open to technology, and high growth businesses starting here.
“But so much of the internet is controlled by a small handful of platforms that can have an anti-competitive relationship with innovation in any kind of business that seeks to build on land that they consider theirs,” Greive said.
“A lot of what’s happened in Australia has come because the ACCC, their version of the Commerce Commission, has got a a unit which scrutinises digital platforms in much the same way that we do with telecommunications, the energy market and so on.
“Here there is just no one really paying attention. And as a result, we’re getting radically different products than they do in Australia.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Hong Kong is sending district councilors and other local officials to mainland China to learn how the ruling Chinese Communist Party uses local networks of volunteers to monitor the population and target potential unrest before it happens.
China’s “red armband” brigade of state-sanctioned busybodies have been dubbed the biggest intelligence network on the planet by social media users, and have supplied information that has also led police to crack major organized crime, according to state media.
Neighborhood committees in China have long been tasked with monitoring the activities of ordinary people in urban areas, while its grid management system turbo-charges the capacity of officials even in rural areas to monitor what local people are doing, saying and thinking.
These local forms of surveillance and social control are known in Chinese political jargon as the “Fengqiao Experience.”
Now, it looks as if Hong Kong will be adopting similar measures, according to the city’s Secretary for Home and Youth Affairs, Alice Mak, who confirmed that 18 local officials had already been to the eastern province of Zhejiang to study the system.
“Through classroom study and on-the-spot understanding of the practical methods of the Fengqiao Experience … district councilors understand that regional governance requires strengthening communication with citizens, understanding their emergencies, difficulties and worries, as well as the early detection and resolution of citizens’ problems,” Mak told the Legislative Council on Wednesday.
She said the Fengqiao Experience will be implemented in Hong Kong by newly introduced “care teams,” and that further training is in the pipeline.
In July 2021, China empowered local officials at township, village and neighborhood level to enforce the law, as well as operating a vastly extended “grid management” system of social control in rural and urban areas alike.
According to directives sent out in 2018, the grid system carves up neighborhoods into a grid pattern with 15-20 households per square, with each grid given a dedicated monitor who reports back on residents’ affairs to local committees.
Hong Kong’s care teams are also expected to help the authorities inform the public, as well as reporting the views of the public to the government, according to a 2022 document announcing their deployment.
Detecting grievances
Current affairs commentator Johnny Lau said the ongoing crackdown on public dissent under two national security laws isn’t enough for the authorities, who want to nip any signs of potential unrest in the bud.
“The authorities are taking the big-picture view that there will be a lot of public grievances given the current economic problems,” Lau told RFA Cantonese in a recent interview. “It’s clear that more grassroots work will have to be done to prevent any outbreak of such grievances.”
He said the District Councils, which now contain only members judged “patriotic” following recent changes in the electoral system, will be the mainstay of the new approach, with the care teams staying in touch with local residents in neighborhoods.
But he said there are also plenty of technological options for keeping an eye on what people are up to.
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Former pro-democracy District Councilor Cheung Man-lung said the care teams won’t necessarily be effective if people don’t trust them, however.
“Community work is always based on public trust in those in positions of responsibility,” Cheung said. “If people don’t trust them, then there’ll be a lot of problems [with this approach].”
Cheung said he hasn’t seen much of his local care team, despite the bursting of a water main in his neighborhood recently.
Chief Executive John Lee, who was “elected” unopposed following changes to the electoral rules in 2022, first announced the establishment of care teams in his October policy address of that year, saying they would “take part in community-building” across Hong Kong’s 18 districts.
The government would carve up districts into sub-districts, and seek to engage local organizations and groups, including young people and ethnic minorities to take part in community building, he said.
The first care teams, chosen for their patriotism and willingness to follow the government’s lead, were deployed in Tsuen Wan and Southern districts in 2023.
The government changed the rules governing District Council election after the 2019 poll resulted in a landslide victory for pro-democracy candidates that was widely seen as a ringing public endorsement for the pro-democracy movement despite months of disruption and clashes.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Wei Sze and Dawn Yu for RFA Cantonese.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
We look at the world of high-tech surveillance with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow and filmmaker Matthew O’Neill. Their new HBO documentary Surveilled is now available for streaming. Farrow says he became interested in the topic after he was tracked by the Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube during his reporting on Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuse.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
For the last year, private prison companies and corporate interests have been quietly lobbying to place millions of immigrants under electronic surveillance, according to records uncovered by The Lever. Now that a second Trump administration will soon assume power, with a former prison lobbyist set to be his top legal adviser, there are signs the plans are already moving forward.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Over the past year, analysts and writers in the mainstream press as well as in some left-wing media have argued that China has upended its relationship with Israel in its defense of Palestine in the wake of October 7. But China’s relationship with Palestine is not so clear-cut: While it has offered moderate rhetorical criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, China has maintained investments in…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In his 1959 classic book, The Sociological Imagination, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote that ordinary people are often reduced to moral stasis and feel trapped and overwhelmed by the glut of information that is available to them. They have great difficulty in an age of fact to make sense of the connections between their personal lives and society, to see the links between biography and history, self and world. They can’t assimilate all the information and need a “new” way of thinking that he called “the sociological imagination” that would allow them to connect history and biography, to see the connections between society and its structures. He wrote:
What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summation of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves.
That was long ago and is obviously much truer today when the Internet and digital media, not the slow reading of books and even paper newspapers and magazines, are the norm, with words scurrying past glazed eyes on cell phones and computers like constantly changing marquees announcing that the clowns have arrived.
In an era of soundbites and paragraphs that have been reduced to one sentences in a long campaign of dumbing down the public, it may seem counterintuitive to heed Mills’ advice and offer summations. However, as one who has written long articles on many issues, I think it is a good practice to do so once in a while, not just to distill conclusions one has arrived at for oneself, but also to provoke readers into thinking about conclusions that they may question but may feel compelled to reconsider for themselves. For I have reached them assiduously, not lightly, honestly, not guilefully.
With that in mind, what follows are some summations.
• With the musical chair exchanges between Democratic and Republican administrations, now from Biden to Trump and previously the reverse, we are simply seeing an exchange of methods of elite control from repressive tolerance (tolerant in the cultural realm with “wokeness” under the Democrats) to tolerant (“promotion” of free speech, no censorship) repression under the Republicans. Under conditions of advanced technological global capitalism and oligarchy, only the methods of control change, not the reality of repression. Free elections of masters.
• The exertion of power and control always revolves around methods of manipulating people’s fear of death, whether that is through authority, propaganda, or coercion. It takes many forms – war, weapons, money, police, disease (Covid-19), etc. Threats explicit and implicit.
• Contrary to much reporting that Israel is the tail wagging the U.S. dog, it is the U.S. dog that wags Israel as its client state, doing what is best for both – control of the Middle East. Control of the Middle East’s oil supplies and travel routes has been key to American foreign policy for a very long time.
• There is no deep state unless one understands that the U.S. government, which is an obvious and open warfare state, is the “deep” state in all its shallowness and serves the interests of those who own the country.
• The CIA’s public assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, sixty-one years ago to the day as I write, is the paradigmatic example of how the power elite uses its ultimate weapon of coercion. Death in the public square for everybody to see together with the spreading of fear with all its real and symbolic repercussions.
• The mass acceptance and use of the cell phone by the public has exponentially facilitated the national security state’s surveillance and mind control. People now carry unfreedom in their pockets as “the land of the free” has become a portable cage with solitude and privacy banished. What evil lurks in the hearts of men? the 1930s popular radio show’s “Shadow” once asked – now the phone knows and it is shadowing those who carry it.
• The power of art and the artist to counter and refuse the prevailing power structure has been radically compromised as alienation has been swallowed by technology and dissent neutralized as both have become normalized. The rebel has become the robot, giving what the system’s programmers want – one dimensional happy talk.
• Silence has been banished as ears have been stuffed with what Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 called seashells (earbuds). Perpetual noise and screen-watching and being watched have replaced thought in a technopoly. Musing as you walk and dawdle is an antique practice now. Smile for the camera.
• The U.S. wars against Russia, China, and the Palestinians have been waged for more than a century. Like the slaughtered native peoples, American black slaves, the Vietnamese, Iraqis, and so many others around the world, these people have been considered less than human and in need of elimination. There is no end in sight for any of this to change. It is the American Way.
• The pathology of technophilia is connected to the quantification of everything and the transhumanist goal of making people into dead and inert things like the consumer products that are constantly dangled before their eyes as the next best secret to happiness. I have asked myself if this is true and the answer that came back is that it is a moot point with the margin of error being +/- 11.000461 %.
• Then there is the fundamental matter of consciousness in a materialist society. When people are conditioned into a collective mental habit of seeing the outside world as a collection of things, all outsides and no insides, contrary to seeing images with interiors, as Owen Barfield has written in History, Guilt and Habit, they are worshiping idols and feel imprisoned but don’t know why. This is our spiritual crisis today. What William Blake called the mind-forg’d manacles. Those manacles have primarily been imposed on people through a vast tapestry of lies and propaganda directed by the oligarchs through their mass media mouthpieces. Jim Garrison, the former District Attorney of New Orleans who brought the only trial in JFK’s assassination, called it “the doll’s house” in which most Americans live and “into which America gradually has been converted, [where] a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.” There are signs that some people are awakening to this fact, with the emphasis on “some.” It will take the use of all the sociological and spiritual imagination we can muster to get most people of all political persuasions to recognize the trap they are in. Barfield writes: “It sounds as if it ought to be easy enough, where the prison in question is not made of steel and concrete, but only a mental habit. But it is not. Remember it is not just my mental habit, or your mental habit. It is our mental habit. . . . [a] collective mental habit, which is a very different matter.”
But I am getting wordy and drifting from Mills’ advice to create lucid summations, some of which I have listed above.
So let me just quote a few true words from Pete Seeger:
We’re — waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on
Bad advice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) has written to the Minister for Space Judith Collins and Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck to warn that satellites being launched from the Māhia Peninsula are “highly likely” to conduct surveillance for Israel.
And also to assist in the commission of war crimes in Gaza and in Lebanon, said PSNA national chair John Minto.
“Three companies are of particular concern to us: BlackSky Technology, Capella Space, and HawkEye 360,” Minto said in a statement.
“In particular, BlackSky has a US$150 million contract to supply high temporal frequency images and analysis to Israel,” Minto said.
“We believe it is highly likely that BlackSky provides data to Israel which it uses to target civilian infrastructure across Gaza and Lebanon.”
Minto said that PSNA understood that Rocket Lab had launched satellites for BlackSky since 2019.
The advocacy group also aware that by the end of 2024, Rocket Lab was expected to begin deploying BlackSky’s constellation of next generation earth observation satellites, with improved capability.
Asking for suspension
“We are asking the minister and Rocket Lab to suspend all further satellite launches for BlackSky, full stop,” Minto said.
“For Capella Space and HawkEye 360, we are asking that the minister suspend satellite launches from the Māhia Peninsula until an investigation has taken place to assure New Zealanders that further launches will not put us in breach of our commitments under international law.
“New Zealanders don’t want our country used to support war crimes committed by Israel or any other country”, he said.
“If we are serious about our responsibilities under international law, including the Genocide Convention, then we must act now.”
Stopping the satellite launches was the “least we can do”.
A PSNA support lawyer, Sam Vincent, said: “New Zealand has solemn responsibilities under international law which must trump any short-term profit for Rocket Lab or the convenience of our government.”
He said that all three companies were sponsors of a geospatial intelligence conference in Israel taking place in January 2025 [Ramon GeoInt360], of which the Israel Ministry of Defence and BlackSky were “leading partners” and HawkEye 360 and Capella Space were sponsors.
Minto added: “All the alarm bells are ringing. These companies are up their eyeballs in support for Israel.”
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Prominent Tibetan language rights advocate Tashi Wangchuk was detained for 15 days on charges of ‘disrupting social order’ and allegedly spreading false information on social media and is now under strict surveillance, RFA Tibetan has learned.
Wangchuk’s detention comes as China intensifies its policies to suppress — or even eradicate — Tibetan and other ethnic languages and cultures and replace them with Mandarin and Han Chinese customs.
According to a release notice issued by the Yulshul (in Chinese, Yushu) City Detention Center obtained by RFA, Wangchuk, 39, was arrested by the Internet Police Unit in China’s Qinghai province on Oct. 20. After an investigation, he was detained for 15 days in the Yulshul Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture until his release on Nov. 4.
The document, dated Nov. 4, said Wangchuk — a former political prisoner — was accused of posting “false information” on social media platforms since June, for “repeatedly insulting and ridiculing government departments” and “negatively impacting the online environment and public order in society” by allegedly distorting and rejecting government policies.
Despite his release, Wangchuk remains under strict surveillance and is being subjected to ongoing interrogation, said a source familiar with his situation, who spoke to RFA on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
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A shopkeeper from the Yulshul township of Jyekundo, also called Gyegu, said Wangchuk was released from prison in January 2021 after he completed a five-year term for discussing language restrictions with Western media, but rights groups had continued to express concerns about his health and safety amid ongoing controls on his freedom.
‘Forced assimilation’
Maya Wang, associate China director at New York-based Human Rights Watch, said Wangchuk’s case reflects the Chinese government’s broader efforts toward assimilation.
“Tibetans who have pushed back for Tibetan language rights – notably Tashi Wangchuk – and for their rights to express themselves, practice religion and culture in the way they prefer, have been imprisoned and harassed for doing so,” Wang told RFA.
“This is all part of the Chinese government‘s efforts to forcibly assimilate what they consider to be ’ethnic minorities’ and subsume them into what [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] considers to be a rising Han Chinese nation,” she said.
Wang noted that the Chinese government has systematically replaced the Tibetan language with Mandarin as the medium of instruction in primary, middle and secondary schools, except for classes studying Tibetan as a language – treating it akin to a foreign language.
While China claims to uphold the rights of all minorities to access a “bilingual education,” Tibetan-language schools have been forced to shut down and kindergarten-aged children regularly only receive instruction in Mandarin Chinese.
Observers say such policies are aimed at eliminating the next generation of Tibetan speakers and part of a broader effort by the government to destroy Tibetans’ cultural identity. Similar policies are deployed against Mongolians in Inner Mongolia and Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Earlier prison term
Since 2015, Wangchuk has been advocating against China‘s policies undermining the Tibetan language, calling for language protection as guaranteed in laws governing the country’s autonomous regions.
Wangchuk rose to prominence that same year through an interview with The New York Times about his efforts to sue local authorities in eastern Tibet after Tibetan language classes were canceled.
After the release of The New York Times documentary featuring his interview, Wangchuk was arrested in 2016 and tortured by Chinese authorities.
Since his release in from prison in 2021 Wangchuk has traveled throughout Tibet raising awareness of Chinese authorities’ suppression of the Tibetan language in schools, as well as petitioning government officials to defend and preserve Tibetan language and culture.
Activists and his lawyer say that Wangchuk has been under continued surveillance since his release.
In July 2023, human rights lawyer Lin Qilei said in a post to the social media platform X that he had met Wangchuk in Yushu, but their meeting and time together was cut short due to restrictions on their communication and local police pressure.
“Tashi Wangchuk’s case makes the harassment and scrutiny that former political prisoners face even more evident,” said Tenzin Khunkhen, researcher at the Central Tibetan Administration’s Human Rights desk.
Khunkhen also raised concerns about Wangchuk’s well-being, stating that his arrest and detention reflects the Chinese government’s ongoing crackdown on political prisoners in Tibet.
Translated by Dawa Dolma and Tenzin Pema. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Tenzin Dickyi and Dickey Kundol for RFA Tibetan.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This content originally appeared on Amnesty International and was authored by Amnesty International.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
COMMENTARY: By Robert Reid
The Enemy Within, by Maire Leadbeater is many things. It is:
• A family history
• A social history
• A history of the left-wing in Aotearoa
• A chilling reminder of the origin and continuation of the surveillance state in New Zealand, and
• A damn good read.
The book is a great example of citizen or activist authorship. The author, Maire Leadbeater, and her family are front and centre of the dark cloud of the surveillance state that has hung and still hangs over New Zealand’s “democracy”.
What better place to begin the book than the author noting that she had been spied on by the security services from the age of 10. What better place to begin than describing the role of the Locke family — Elsie, Jack, Maire, Keith and their siblings — have played in Aotearoa society over the last few decades.
And what a fitting way to end the book than with the final chapter entitled, “Person of Interest: Keith Locke”; Maire’s much-loved brother and our much-loved friend and comrade.
In between these pages is a treasure trove of commentary and stories of the development of the surveillance state in the settler colony of NZ and the impact that this has had on the lives of ordinary — no, extra-ordinary — people within this country.
The book could almost be described as a political romp from the settler colonisation of New Zealand through the growth of the workers movement and socialist and communist ideology from the late 1800s until today.
I have often deprecatingly called myself a mere footnote of history as that is all I seem to appear as in many books written about recent progressive history in New Zealand. But it was without false modesty that when Maire gave me a copy of the book a couple of weeks back, I immediately went to the index, looked up my name and found that this time I was a bit more than a footnote, but had a section of a chapter written on my interaction with the spooks.
But it was after reading this, dipping into a couple of other “person of interest” stories of people I knew such as Keith, Mike Treen, the Rosenbergs, Murray Horton and then starting the book again from the beginning did it become clear on what issues the state was paranoid about that led it to build an apparatus to spy on its own citizens.
These were issues of peace, anti-conscription, anti-nuclear, de-colonisation, unemployed workers and left trade unionism and socialist and communist thought. These are the issues that come up time and time again; essentially it was seditious or subversive to be part of any of these campaigns or ideologies.
Client state spying
The other common theme through the book is the role that the UK and more latterly the US has played in ensuring that their NZ client settler state plays by their rules, makes enemies of their enemies and spies on its own people for their “benefit”.
It was interesting to read how the “5 Eyes”, although not using that name, has been in operation as long as NZ has had a spying apparatus. In fact, the book shows that 3 of the 5 eyes forced NZ to establish its surveillance apparatus in the first place.
Maire, and her editor have arranged this book in a very reader friendly way. It is mostly chronological showing the rise of the surveillance state from the beginning of the 19th century, in dispersed with a series of vignettes of “Persons of Interest”.
Maire would probably acknowledge that this book could not have been written without the decision of the SIS to start releasing files (all beit they were heavily redacted with many missing parts) of many of us who have been spied on by the SIS over the years. So, on behalf of Maire, thank you SIS.
Maire has painstakingly gone through pages and pages of these primary source files and incorporated them into the historical narrative of the book showing what was happening in society while this surveillance was taking place.
I was especially delighted to read the history of the anti-war and conscientious objectors movement. Two years ago, almost to the day, we held the 50th anniversary of the Organisation to Halt Military Service (OHMS); an organisation that I founded and was under heavy surveillance in 1972.
We knew a bit about previous anti-conscription struggles but Maire has provided much more context and information that we knew. It was good to read about people like John Charters, Ormand Burton and Archie Barrington as well more known resisters such as my great uncle Archibald Baxter.
Within living memory
Many of the events covered take place within my living memory. But it was wonderful to be reminded of some things I had forgotten about or to find some new gems of information about our past.
Stories around Bill Sutch, Shirley Smith, Ann and Wolfgang Rosenberg, Jack and Mary Woodward, Gerald O’Brien, Allan Brash (yes, Don’s dad), Cecil Holmes, Jack Lewin are documented as well as my contemporaries such as Don Carson, David Small, Aziz Choudry, Trevor Richards, Jane Kelsey, Nicky Hager, Owen Wilkes, Tame Iti in addition to Maire, Keith and Mike Treen.
The book finishes with a more recent history of NZ again aping the US’s so-called war on terror with the introduction of an anti and counter-terrorism mandate for the SIS and its sister agencies
The book traverses events such as the detention of Ahmed Zaoui, the raid on the Kim Dotcom mansion, the privatisation of spying to firms such as Thomson and Clark, the Urewera raids, “Hit and Run” in Afghanistan. Missing the cut was the recent police raid and removal of the computer of octogenarian, Peter Wilson for holding money earmarked for a development project in DPRK (North Korea).
When we come to the end of the book we are reminded of the horrific Christchurch mosque attack and massacre and prior to that of the bombing of Wellington Trades Hall and the Rainbow Warrior. Also, the failure of the SIS to discover Mossad agents operating in NZ on fake passports.
We cannot but ask the question of why multi-millions of dollars have been spent spying on, surveilling and monitoring peace activists, trade unionists, communists, Māori and more latterly Muslims, when the terrorism that NZ has faced has been that perpetrated on these people not by these people.
Maire notes in the book that the SIS budget for 2021 was around $100 million with around 400 FTEs employed. This does not include GCSB or other parts of the security apparatus.
Seeking subversives in wrong places
This level of money has been spent for well over 100 years looking for subversives and terrorists in the wrong place!
Finally, although dealing with the human cost of the surveillance state, the book touches on some of the lighter sides of the SIS spying. Those of us under surveillance in the 1970s and 1980s remember the amateurish phone tapping that went on at that time.
Also, the men in cars with cameras sitting outside our flats for days on end. Not in the book, but I have one memory of such a man with a camera in a car outside our flat in Wallace Street, Wellington.
After a few days some of my flatmates took pity on him and made him a batch of scones which they passed through the window of his car. He stayed for a bit longer that day but we never saw him or an alternate again.
Another issue the book picks up is the obsession that the SIS and its foreign counterparts had with counting communists in NZ. I remember that the CIA used to put out a Communist Yearbook that described and attempted to count how many members were in each of the communist parties all around the world.
In NZ, my party, the Workers Communist League, was smaller than the SUP, CPNZ and SAL, but one year near the end of our existence we were pleasantly surprised to see that the CIA had almost to a person, doubled our membership.
We could not work out why, until we realised that we all had code names as well as real names and we were getting more and more slack at using the correct one in the correct place. Anyone surveilling us, counting names, would have counted double the names that we had as members! We took the compliment.
Thank you, Maire, for this great book. Thank you and your family for your great contribution to Aotearoa society.
Hopefully the hardships and human cost that you have shown in this book will commit or recommit the rest of us to struggle for a decolonised and socialist Aotearoa within a peaceful and multi-polar world.
And as one of Jack Locke’s political guides said: “the road may be long and torturous, but the future is bright.”
Robert Reid has more than 40 years’ experience in trade unions and in community employment development in Aotearoa New Zealand. He is a former general secretary the president of FIRST Union. Much of his work has been with disadvantaged groups and this has included work with Māori, Pacific peoples and migrant communities. This was his address tonight for the launch of The Enemy Within: The Human Cost of State Surveillance in Aotearoa New Zealand, by Maire Leadbeater.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) joined eight human rights and digital rights organizations on October 15 to provide comments to the U.S. Commerce Department in response to its proposed rules to strengthen surveillance technology export regulations.
The joint comments assess and offer recommendations for the Commerce Department to help curb the proliferation of such surveillance technologies.
The comments also note the U.S. government’s use of export controls to protect human rights, including through the Joint Statement on Efforts to Counter the Proliferation and Misuse of Commercial Spyware and the Export Controls and Human Rights Initiative.
While these actions are welcome, the United States and other governments around the world must do more to curb the abuse of surveillance technologies.
CPJ has repeatedly documented the use of surveillance technology, including spyware, to undermine press freedom and journalist safety around the world.
Read the joint comments here.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
— Hannah Arendt
In a perfect example of the Nanny State mindset at work, Hillary Clinton insists that the powers-that-be need “total control” in order to make the internet a safer place for users and protect us harm.
Clinton is not alone in her distaste for unregulated, free speech online.
A bipartisan chorus that includes both presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump has long clamored to weaken or do away with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which essentially acts as a bulwark against online censorship.
It’s a complicated legal issue that involves debates over immunity, liability, net neutrality and whether or not internet sites are publishers with editorial responsibility for the content posted to their sites, but really, it comes down to the tug-of-war over where censorship (corporate and government) begins and free speech ends.
As Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes for Reason, “What both the right and left attacks on the provision share is a willingness to use whatever excuses resonate—saving children, stopping bias, preventing terrorism, misogyny, and religious intolerance—to ensure more centralized control of online speech. They may couch these in partisan terms that play well with their respective bases, but their aim is essentially the same.”
In other words, the government will use any excuse to suppress dissent and control the narrative.
The internet may well be the final frontier where free speech still flourishes, especially for politically incorrect speech and disinformation, which test the limits of our so-called egalitarian commitment to the First Amendment’s broad-minded principles.
On the internet, falsehoods and lies abound, misdirection and misinformation dominate, and conspiracy theories go viral.
This is to be expected, and the response should be more speech, not less.
As Justice Brandeis wrote nearly a century ago: “If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
Yet to the government, these forms of “disinformation” rank right up there with terrorism, drugs, violence, and disease: societal evils so threatening that “we the people” should be willing to relinquish a little of our freedoms for the sake of national security.
Of course, it never works out that way.
The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, the war on COVID-19: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns only to become weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands.
Indeed, in the face of the government’s own authoritarian power-grabs, coverups, and conspiracies, a relatively unfettered internet may be our sole hope of speaking truth to power.
The right to criticize the government and speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.
You see, disinformation isn’t the problem. Government coverups and censorship are the problem.
Unfortunately, the government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power, reveals its corruption, exposes its lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. Every day in this country, those who dare to speak their truth to the powers-that-be find themselves censored, silenced or fired.
While there are all kinds of labels being put on so-called “unacceptable” speech today, the real message being conveyed by those in power is that Americans don’t have a right to express themselves if what they are saying is unpopular, controversial or at odds with what the government determines to be acceptable.
Where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.
Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.
This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.
This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.
This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.
For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.
Thus, no matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.
Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. For instance, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools.
We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.
The next phase of the government’s war on anti-government speech and so-called thought crimes could well be mental health round-ups and involuntary detentions.
Under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.
This is how it begins.
In communities across the nation, police are already being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, based solely on their own judgment, even if those individuals pose no danger to others.
In New York City, for example, you could find yourself forcibly hospitalized for suspected mental illness if you carry “firmly held beliefs not congruent with cultural ideas,” exhibit a “willingness to engage in meaningful discussion,” have “excessive fears of specific stimuli,” or refuse “voluntary treatment recommendations.”
While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, they could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”
As the Associated Press reports, federal officials are already looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.
Make no mistake: these are the building blocks for an American gulag no less sinister than that of the gulags of the Cold War-era Soviet Union.
The word “gulag” refers to a labor or concentration camp where prisoners (oftentimes political prisoners or so-called “enemies of the state,” real or imagined) were imprisoned as punishment for their crimes against the state.
The gulag, according to historian Anne Applebaum, used as a form of “administrative exile—which required no trial and no sentencing procedure—was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.”
This age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by making them disappear—or forcing them to flee—or exiling them literally or figuratively or virtually from their fellow citizens—is happening with increasing frequency in America.
Now, through the use of red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, and pre-crime policing prevention programs, the groundwork is being laid that would allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling those whistleblowers, dissidents and freedom fighters who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates.
Each state has its own set of civil, or involuntary, commitment laws. These laws are extensions of two legal principles: parens patriae Parens patriae (Latin for “parent of the country”), which allows the government to intervene on behalf of citizens who cannot act in their own best interest, and police power, which requires a state to protect the interests of its citizens.
The fusion of these two principles, coupled with a shift towards a dangerousness standard, has resulted in a Nanny State mindset carried out with the militant force of the Police State.
The problem, of course, is that the diagnosis of mental illness, while a legitimate concern for some Americans, has over time become a convenient means by which the government and its corporate partners can penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors.
In fact, in recent years, we have witnessed the pathologizing of individuals who resist authority as suffering from oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), defined as “a pattern of disobedient, hostile, and defiant behavior toward authority figures.”
Under such a definition, every activist of note throughout our history—from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. to John Lennon—could be classified as suffering from an ODD mental disorder.
Of course, this is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced, declared unfit for society, labelled dangerous or extremist, or turned into outcasts and exiled.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how you subdue a populace.
The ensuing silence in the face of government-sponsored tyranny, terror, brutality and injustice is deafening.
The post Disinformation Isn’t the Problem: Government Coverups and Censorship Are the Problem first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Authorities in the Chinese capital are stepping up security measures ahead of celebrations of the 75th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China on Tuesday, slapping restrictions on who may enter the city, rights lawyers and activists told RFA Mandarin.
Police have been following rights activists and lawyers, detaining their family members, or preventing them from entering Beijing, while the phones of outspoken journalist Gao Yu remain blocked ahead of the National Day holiday, they said.
The moves form part of China’s “stability maintenance” operations, which kick in ahead of politically sensitive dates or major events, in a bid to stave off potential threats to the ruling Chinese Communist Party before they can occur.
One of the first to be targeted was Li Wenzu, the activist wife of prominent rights attorney Wang Quanzhang, who was detained on entering Beijing in recent days, Wang told RFA in an interview on Monday.
“Li Wenzu got back to Beijing from out of town a few days ago, and was stopped by police at the railway station,” Wang said. “They detained her in the police station on the pretext of checking her ID.”
“This was because Oct. 1 is a major holiday,” said Wang, in a reference to China’s National Day, which marks the founding of the People’s Republic of China by late supreme leader Mao Zedong on Oct. 1, 1949.
“She was detained for a few hours, before being picked up by officials from the local government [where we live],” he said. “Li Wenzu has been to Beijing dozens of times in the past and has never been stopped or had her ID checked.”
“It shows that they’ve stepped up their so-called stability maintenance operations,” Wang said.
Wang said he was also followed by state security police for 50 kilometers while driving away from Beijing on Sunday.
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Independent political commentator Ji Feng, a former student leader of 1989 pro-democracy movement on Tiananmen Square, said he has been barred from entering Beijing.
“I’m currently in Yanjiao,” Ji said, referring to a town just outside Beijing city limits in the northern province of Hebei. “Beijing is just across the river.”
But Ji, who once lived in Beijing but was exiled to his hometown in southwestern Guizhou province in June 2023, has been warned off trying to cross the bridge by state security police.
“They straight up told me I can’t enter Beijing, that no politically sensitive figures are allowed in during sensitive periods,” he said.
“This year is the 75th Anniversary, which is a medium-importance milestone compared with the major milestones every 10 years,” Ji said.
While a person familiar with the situation of the Tiananmen Mothers, who campaign for the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, said they haven’t been forced to leave the city, the authorities have stepped up monitoring of key activists who already live in the city.
State security police are on high alert, and one activist told RFA Mandarin they have left the city of their own accord to avoid unwanted surveillance, and plan to return after the National Day celebrations are over.
Communication blocked
Meanwhile, a friend of independent political journalist Gao Yu, who has been incommunicado since last month, said police have succeeded in blocking all of her attempts at making phone calls or going online in recent weeks.
“A well-wisher recently gave Gao Yu a sim card, but when she inserted it into her phone and went to make the first call, the phone was blocked again,” Gao’s friend told Radio Free Asia on Monday. “Gao Yu can’t even make a phone call.”
“She needs to use the phone to make an appointment with her doctor,” they said.
Rights activists in Wuhan, Shanghai, Changsha and other parts of China have told RFA Mandarin that they have also been told by local authorities not to go anywhere during the National Day celebrations, and that they will be under close surveillance during the holiday period.
But a shortage of money means that fewer activists are being taken on supervised, out-of-town “vacations” than in previous years, one activist said.
Instead, the authorities are stepping up surveillance of people in their own homes to save time and money, they said.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Joshua Lipes.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chen Zifei for RFA Mandarin.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Campaign group Big Brother Watch warns that workplace surveillance is on the rise. It is hosting a presentation of a report at the Labour conference. And it highlights the dangers of this for our health, rights, privacy, and democracy. But will Keir Starmer listen?
After a nine-month investigation, the group has released the report Bossware: The dangers of high-tech worker surveillance & how to stop them. In the worst cases, it says, these practices include:
- Spyware recording every click and keystroke of desk workers, often on work from home devices in sectors including insurance and recruitment.
- Construction workers, forced to use biometric sign-ins and GPS tracking apps while on site
- National Express coach drivers subject to AI-powered “fatigue monitoring” while they’re at the wheel
- Office workers’ attendance monitored using Wi-Fi connection records
- Supermarket workers’ ‘pick rates’ and performance assessed by handheld computers
Big Brother Watch has been “working alongside some of the UK’s largest trade unions” to finalise some recommendations that could limit the most offensive aspects of workplace surveillance. But that will require putting pressure on Keir Starmer’s Labour Party government to implement them. These suggestions are:
- Legally require employers to be more transparent about high risk workplace surveillance and to consult staff and unions before introducing it
- Update data protection law to protect workers from automated decisions being made about them
- Make AI bias testing mandatory and make employers proactively responsible for using discriminatory algorithms
- Prevent employee tracking from being used to ratchet performance targets or for disciplinaries without good reason
- Ban so-called “emotion-recognition” surveillance from workplaces
- More guidance should be published by the UK’s privacy regulator, the ICO, to protect workers from surveillance
In a campaign email, the group insisted that:
Excessive workplace surveillance can breach individuals’ data and privacy rights, but it also directly undermines the democratic health of the country.
It added:
We need to get the message out that power imbalances in the workplace leave workers particularly vulnerable to having their data rights infringed upon.
Big Brother Watch is hosting the launch of its report at the Labour conference:
Tomorrow: We're launching a groundbreaking NEW REPORT on workplace snooping at #LabConf24
23 Sept at 3pm
Hilton, Liverpool
@DawnButlerBrent | @silkiecarlo | @IWGBunion | @FutureWorkInst
Get your ticket now
https://t.co/EbbmuCREC7 pic.twitter.com/mVdjnUGQ5E
— Big Brother Watch (@BigBrotherWatch) September 22, 2024
However, given the party is in thrall to bosses, it is unclear whether Starmer and Co will listen or not.
For more, check out the full report or their video on 5 ways your boss could be spying on you at work:
Featured image via Big Brother Watch and the Canary
By Ed Sykes
This post was originally published on Canary.
Three recent books offer a searing portrait of the calculated brutality of the ongoing Uyghur genocide.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
September 11. Melbourne. The scene: the area between Spencer Street Bridge and the Batman Park-Spencer Street tram stop. Heavily armed police, with glinting face coverings and shields, had seized and blocked the bridge over the course of the morning, preventing all traffic from transiting through it. Behind them stood second tier personnel, lightly armed. Then, barricades, followed by horse mounted police. Holding up the rear: two fire trucks.
In the skies, unmanned drones hovered like black, stationary ravens of menace. But these were not deemed sufficient by Victoria Police. Helicopters kept them company. Surveillance cameras also stood prominently to the north end of the bridge.
Before this assortment of marshalled force was an eclectic gathering of individuals from keffiyeh-swaddled pro-Palestinian activists to drummers kitted out in the Palestinian colours, and any number of theatrical types dressed in the shades and costumery of death. At one point, a chilling Joker figure made an appearance, his outfit and suitcase covered in mock blood. The share stock of chants was readily deployed: “No justice, no peace, no racist police”; “We, the people, will not be silenced. Stop the bombing now, now, now”. Innumerable placards condemning the arms industry and Israel’s war on Gaza also make their appearance.
The purpose of this vast, costly exercise proved elementary and brutal: to defend Land Forces 2024, one of the largest arms fairs in the southern hemisphere, from Disrupt Land Forces, a collective demonised by the Victorian state government as the great unwashed, polluted rebel rousers and anarchists. Much had been made of the potential size of the gathering, with uncritical journalists consuming gobbets of information from police sources keen to justify an operation deemed the largest since the 2000 World Economic Forum. Police officers from regional centres in the state had been called up, and while Chief Commissioner Shane Patton proved tight-lipped on the exact number, an estimate exceeding 1,000 was not refuted. The total cost of the effort: somewhere between A$10 to A$15 million.
It all began as a healthy gathering at the dawn of day, with protestors moving to the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre to picket entry points for those attending Land Forces.
Over time, there was movement between the various entrances to prevent these modern merchants of death from spruiking their merchandise and touting for offers. As Green Left Online noted, “The Victorian Police barricaded the entrance of the Melbourne Convention Centre so protestors marched to the back entrance to disrupt Land Forces whilst attendees are going through security checks.”
In keeping with a variant of Anton Chekhov’s principle, if a loaded gun is placed upon the stage, it is bound to be used. Otherwise, leave it out of the script. A large police presence would hardly be worthwhile without a few cracked skulls, flesh wounds or arrests. Scuffles accordingly broke out with banal predictability. The mounted personnel were also brought out to add a snap of hostility and intimidation to the protestors as they sought to hamper access to the Convention. For all of this, it was the police who left complaining, worried about their safety.
Then came the broader push from the officers to create a zone of exclusion around the building, resulting in the closure of Clarendon Street to the south, up to Batman Park. Efforts were made to push the protests from the convention centre across the bridge towards the park. This was in keeping with the promise by the Chief Commissioner that the MCEC site and its surrounds would be deemed a designated area over the duration of the arms fair from September 11 to 13.
Such designated areas, enabled by the passage of a 2009 law, vests the police with powers to stop and search a person within the zone without a warrant. Anything perceived to be a weapon can be seized, with officers having powers to request that civilians reveal their identity.
Despite such exercisable powers, the relevant legislation imposes a time limit of 12 hours for such areas, something most conspicuously breached by the Commissioner. But as Melbourne Activist Legal Support (MALS) group remarks, the broader criteria outlined in the legislative regime are often not met and constitute a “method of protest control” that impairs “the rights to assembly, association, and political expression” protected by the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities.
The Victorian government had little time for the language of protest. In a stunningly grotesque twist, the Victorian Premier, Jacinta Allan, defended those at the Land Forces conference as legitimate representatives of business engaging in a peaceful enterprise. “Any industry deserves the right to have these sorts of events in a peaceful and respectful way.” If the manufacture, sale and distribution of weapons constitutes a “peaceful and respectful” pursuit, we have disappeared down the rabbit hole with Alice at great speed.
That theme continued with efforts by both Allan and the opposition leader, John Pesutto, to tarnish the efforts by fellow politicians to attend the protest. Both fumed indignantly at the efforts of Greens MP Gabrielle de Vietri to participate, with the premier calling the measure one designed for “divisive political purposes.” The Green MP had a pertinent response: “The community has spoken loud and clear, they don’t want weapons and war profiting to come to our doorstep, and the Victorian Labor government is sponsoring this.”
The absurd, morally inverted spectacle was duly affirmed: a taxpayer funded arms exposition, defended by the taxpayer funded police, used to repel the tax paying protestors keen to promote peace in the face of an industry that thrives on death, mutilation and misery.
The post Protecting the Merchants of Death: The Police Effort for Land Forces 2024 first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.