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When Safety Impacts Liberty: Congressional Hearing Reveals Deep Concerns About Federal Surveillance Practices

10 April 2025 at 23:37
by Anthony Kimery | Biometric Update America’s surveillance architecture has grown from an opaque counterterrorism framework into a complex and far-reaching system with deep implications for civil liberties. The federal government’s expanding use of facial recognition, AI, and data aggregation tools has prompted urgent concerns among civil rights advocates, legal scholars, technologists, and lawmakers. And their message is clear: without stronger oversight, warrant requirements and transparency, the very technologies deployed in the name of safety may become the greatest threat to Americans’ freedoms. Last year, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights detailed in a 194-page report how federal agencies are […]

U.K.’s Crime and Policing Bill 2025 Reignites Facial Recognition Controversy

10 April 2025 at 23:19
by Laura Harris | Natural News The United Kingdom’s Crime and Policing Bill 2025, now at the Committee stage, grants police access to over 50 million driver’s license photos for facial recognition searches. The bill revives a dropped Conservative plan, with Labour justifying it as necessary to combat crime, terrorism and violence against women. Big Brother Watch warns that the bill enables mass biometric surveillance, risking misidentification and unjust tracking of innocent citizens. Russia plans a 2025 rollout of facial recognition payments via 2 million terminals, linked to its state biometric database (UBS). Both systems face criticism for enabling government […]

First They Came for the Op-Ed Writers

4 April 2025 at 21:12
by James Bovard | Mises Wire On March 25, six masked federal agents seized a Turkish graduate student on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. Rumeysa Ozturk—who was wearing a hajib—is a Fulbright scholar working on a doctorate at Tufts University. She was abducted and vanished into the maw of the federal prison system. The Trump administration ignored a federal court order and took Ozturk from Massachusetts to Louisiana federal detention facilities. But the Trump administration knew Ozturk had criticized the government of Israel a year earlier, enough to seal her doom according to the latest iron-fisted political correctness dictates. She […]

AI-Powered Surveillance Takes Off in Texas

4 April 2025 at 19:43
by Francesca D’annunzio | Texas Observer via Truthdig Over the past several years, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) has quietly built out an expansive surveillance apparatus — one that’s increasingly powered by artificial intelligence. Many of these technology acquisitions have been made under the auspices of Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, an $11 billion program that has supercharged the state’s decades-long border militarization. The powerful and well-funded state police agency has not just expanded its existing surveillance capabilities, which include a fleet of spy planes, unmanned drones and a network of wildlife game cameras that are deployed across […]
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