Canada’s Bill C-22 is riddled with privacy problems that affect millions of people. Instead of jamming it though on an arbitrary deadline, it should be debated fully. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

No matter your political views, all Canadians deserve strong privacy protections! Petition e-7237 asks Parliament to improve oversight of political party data practices. ✍️ Sign and share: www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en... #cdnpoli @bcfipa.bsky.social @cancivlib.bsky.social

“CLEAR…allows users to retrieve thousands of data points about any individual: current and historical addresses, known associates and family members, vehicle info…The platform was built specifically to help users locate and identify individuals. That is the functional definition of surveillance.”

I cannot say this loudly enough: we need everyone to know what is happening at Delaney Hall. 300 detainees inside are on Day 7 of a hunger and labor strike as of today. ICE is beating, gassing, tasing and assaulting protestors outside every night, and it is getting worse.

More breaking news for TR, with an expanded proposal in response to evasive language

Looks like the Pope would be against data brokers @lisalevesque.bsky.social

“Psychologically harmful material accumulates when mass surveillance is the basis for collection…to fix the problem, we have to return to its roots, questioning what really is in the data, questioning the whole premise of its wide-scale, indiscriminate seizure.” - Karen Hao, Empire of AI, p. 138

What a day for AI resistance resources! 1) The AI Resist List from @karenhao.bsky.social and colleagues at DAIR at airesistlist.org 2) The Luddite Lab from @alexhanna.bsky.social and colleagues at DAIR at labor.dair-institute.org

Don't fire prison librarians, you doinks. www.stopfiringprisonlibrarians.ca

Bill C-22 has gone off the rails. My post explains how the government scrapped one bad lawful access provision, but created a two-headed monster of mandatory metadata retention and a technical capability mandate that could apply to all digital providers. www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/05/the-...

"While the dollar values of these contracts are significant, they are modest relative to the companies’ total revenues. Thomson Reuters generated more than $7 billion last year. RELX is comparably large. The $22.8 million LEIDS-5 contract represents a rounding error in Thomson Reuters’ earnings."

"I want to remind you that the future is yours, and it is not known — not by you, not by Georgetown, not by Sam Altman or Elon Musk, not by the chatbot, not by me. And that is a beautiful thing."

"I did what anyone should do—I raised the alarm. Thomson Reuters’ response was to fire me.” www.404media.co/thomson-reut...

Bill C-22, three days of House debate: - One paragraph on mandatory metadata retention - A process answer on encryption back doors - An admission this is only "a first step" - A defence of the lower threshold as "higher than mere suspicion" Full analysis below.

Dozens of civil liberties, racial justice, LGBTQ+, press freedom, abortion access & human rights orgs have spoken out against these dangerous and misguided “age verification” laws, several of which have already been struck down as unconstitutional in other states. www.eff.org/pages/age-ve...

The more I read about this bill, the more infuriating it is. It would force telecommunications companies (not defined) to mass surveil Canadians so this data could be available if req with a warrant. The government wants the public to pay for its own surveillance through compensation for telecoms.

Great article which links to employee letters concerned about the sale of this data and describes how this data is blended into Palantir technology.

❤️ Love this

Next week, I'm giving another presentation on 'AI' and the Law: Maybe the Luddites were on to something." I'll talk about what 'AI', is, and isn't and how misuse, overreliance, or misunderstanding of 'AI' can expose lawyers to liability, reputational harm, and ethical risk. 7780647.hs-sites.com

While talking to a chatbot isn't the best way to go about this, it is interesting theatre. And, it's really interesting to see data brokers brought up, given how rarely they came up even a year ago in public discourse.

"a lot of people in power view knowledge as dangerous. Knowledge is not some sort of kind of neutral thing that you just either have and don’t have or whatever. It’s a site of contestation about what to know, what you’re allowed to know, who is allowed to know what"

I talked with @prisonculture.bsky.social, Alison Macrina, and Katie Clark about libraries as public infrastructure, contested political terrain, and spaces of possibility—and about what it means to fight for them in this fascistic moment.

It's incredible to see the MLA, an organization best known for a citation guide, pivot in their video content from scholarly research to DOGE Bro videos. This is a result of their lawsuit www.mla.org/Resources/Ad... A great "what radicalized you" moment www.youtube.com/@ModernLangu...

"It is shocking to me how fast some of my [library] colleagues have abandoned their stated values to get on board the AI hype-train. I get a bitter taste in my mouth every time I think about the ones that were giving land acknowledgements...and now champion AI." AI Killed My Job: Education workers

My blood pressure....

This Alberta school book ban is terrible. They've banned a book series about the Trojan war because some of the characters beget other characters, implying (never showing) sex was had at some point? They're trying to ban the concept of having children from...children?

Everyone in this podcast episode provides a master class on how to speak politely on an outrageous topic. Canadians should be pissed at the proposed permissive, non-coherent privacy legislation slipped into this affordability act.

"Stripping anonymity from the internet would constitute one of the most sweeping rollbacks of civil rights in recent history. It would allow for unprecedented levels of mass surveillance and censorship, endangering the most marginalized members of society."

I can’t believe the “cheat-on-everything” guy would do this.

"If the theory of digital hallucinations is confirmed, this Superior Court ruling would be a first in the country. Never before, in Quebec or in Canada, has the use of AI by a judge led to such inaccuracies in a verdict." From La Presse, "Has a judge succumbed to the temptation of AI?"

ICE holds people in disgusting conditions. Now it’s turning warehouses into camps | Moira Donegan

Welp, old news that's new to me, & I'm reeling from it ChatGPT suggested "Nuremberg-style tribunals" to a conspiracist user prompt. "We analyzed 47,000 ChatGPT conversations. Here’s what people really use it for" by Gerrit De Vynck, Washington Post www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Privacy is patriotic! Use a VPN. Install an ad blocker. Quit Google and Meta, use privacy-forward alternatives like Proton, Duck Duck Go, and the fediverse instead. Throw out your “smart” devices. Use Permission Slip to request data deletion from corporations. If not for yourself, then for America

404 Media has published the full user guide for ELITE, the tool Palantir made for ICE to bring up addresses for deportation targets. @evystadium.bsky.social has more. Scoop here by @josephcox.bsky.social: www.404media.co/here-is-the-...

Scrolling through the photos of Pam Bondi's "Minnesota rioters," it's just hero after hero. Every photo includes a cowardly DHS agent with their back to the camera. Bondi thinks she's going to win the propaganda war with this shit, but it's never been more clear that they're losing.

It’s the big day! The appeal hearing @cycletoronto.bsky.social’s successful Bill 212 case is being heard at Ontario’s Court of Appeal. Time permitting I’ll try and live post the proceedings, like I did for the Ottawa convey injunctions back when #lawtwitter was a thing.

How migrants "act as responsible community members leave substantial data trails: paying taxes, purchasing utilities, [etc]....law-abiding immigrants are encouraged to integrate into society. But the more they do, the greater the risk of being id'd by Accurint and of deportation" - Needle & Ruben

For law library people, the data sources of this tool are discussed at minute 9+ and include CLEAR, which they indicate is likely the Thomson Reuters product, the parent company of Westlaw. This reporting is important for understanding the mechanics of ICE raids and the data behind it.

Once again, I'm astounded at the scale of data collection by brokers. From a recent dissertation: "Profits Over Privacy" "With data brokers, many focus on a select few attributes. For example, Redmob, a Singapore-based location and demographic data broker collects data from more than 50 sources...

I've really enjoyed The Secret Life of Data and would recommend it to anyone learning about surveillance. A central idea is that “data, fundamentally, have no fixed meaning,” which is why your metadata can be coopted by powerful entities. search.worldcat.org/title/139077...

It's so interesting to see the renewed interest in zines. There are several learning to make zines events in my periphery right now and several zines specifically about ICE!

Act now: email the Ontario government telling them to remove the unnecessary limitations on @lufappul.bsky.social's right to free and fair bargaining. Send your letter here: actionnetwork.org/letters/act-...

"The sheer amount of records that data brokers are accessing almost defies comprehension....[t]housands of data broker companies exist worldwide and their surveillance capacity only grows with each new technological development." - Kanwal & Walby We're talking trillions of data points.

Grok is being used to remove clothes from random peoples' photos. Journalists think they got the chatbot to 'apologize'. What are you doing? An LLM cannot apologize. It doesn't know what is happening. A journalist doing this is a form of AI psychosis. Full ep here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT9l...

Adding my own void of fluff to this trash news day.

The video that will make your day better: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet by @doctorow media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-pos...

"This long-running war on knowledge [represented by book bans] and expertise has sown the ground for the narratives widely used by AI companies and the CEOs adopting it. Human labor, inquiry, creativity, and expertise is spurned in the name of 'efficiency.'"

"The twin modalities of luxury and imposed surveillance may look different on the surface, but they represent two faces — carrot and stick, if you will — of a challenge to the bases of democracy and social freedom." - Gilliard & Golumbia, "Luxury Surveillance" reallifemag.com/luxury-surve...

New Issue Alert: Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (#EPLIP; Vol. 20 No. 4 (2025)) is Now Available Online journals.library.ualberta.ca/eblip/index.... #libraries #librarians