From PJMedia.com
If you saw the Tom Cruise flick “Minority Report,” the headline above this column should immediately make sense. In Canada, America’s closest neighbor to the north, a genuinely dangerous proposal is making its way through Parliament.
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That proposal would permit law enforcement authorities to arrest individuals on the basis of suspicion they are about to commit a crime or cause one to be committed by somebody else.
Read that again — “On the basis of suspicion they are about to commit a crime or cause one to be committed by somebody else.”
Conor Friedersdorf describes the Canadian proposal:
The Online Harms Act states that any person who advocates for or promotes genocide is “liable to imprisonment for life.” It defines lesser “hate crimes” as including online speech that is “likely to foment detestation or vilification” on the basis of race, religion, gender, or other protected categories.
And if someone “fears” they may become a victim of a hate crime, they can go before a judge, who may summon the preemptively accused for a sort of precrime trial. If the judge finds “reasonable grounds” for the fear, the defendant must enter into “a recognizance.”
A recognizance is no mere promise to refrain from committing hate crimes. The judge may put the defendant under house arrest or electronic surveillance and order them to abstain from alcohol and drugs. Refusal to “enter the recognizance” for one year results in 12 months in prison.
Just imagine what happens when every far-Left radical Karen heads to federal court claiming fear they are about to become victims of criminal acts stemming from the “hate speech” of a neighbor who expressed support for Donald Trump during a neighborhood get-together.
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As Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary wrote last month on Mind Matters, “Americans should NOT assume that ‘it can’t happen here,'” as it appears to be right around the corner in her native country.
And O’Leary is right: It can happen here, thanks to the growing censorship alliance between government agencies like the FBI and digital giants like Google and Facebook, plus the advance of AI.
Think about it: It’s not much of a reach from censorship by the government of what private individuals can read, watch, and listen to, combined with pervasive government social credit system-type surveillance of everybody’s finances, social activities, recreation, and spiritual and political conduct, and AI-based conduct-predictive technology.
Once such a combination of factors coalesce, laws will soon follow permitting preemptive arrests of individuals accused of “hate speech” before criminal acts that are predicted to follow such utterances actually occur. Once that happens, the First Amendment might as well be tossed into the trash can because it will be a meaningless relic of a lost constitutional past.
Worries about pre-crime laws are not new, but they moved from the realm of science fiction to imminently conceivable reality with the 9/11 Islamic terrorist attacks in New York, rural Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., which killed 2,997 Americans.
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“While pre-empting threats was a well-established trend within criminal justice prior to 9/11 contemporary counter terrorism measures have taken it to a new level. The current wave of pre-crime counter terrorism measures has its antecedents in United States led wars on drugs and crime,” Judith McCulloch and Sharon Pickering wrote for the Center for Crime and Justice Studies (CCJS) in London in 2010.
Only two years later, “Minority Report” was in theaters across America. The opening scene in the trailer should send chills down your back. Before you dismiss it as excessively imaginary, check out Forbes’ description of the status of pre-crime law in a 2018 analysis:
One-third of all U.S. cities either use or are considering predictive policing. Hartford, Connecticut, has implemented a system of pre-crime technology to keep watch over its citizens. Hartford will add new software and surveillance cameras (bringing the total to nearly 1,000) — a $2.5 million investment of state funds — as well as a network of drones. While the stable cameras are used for constant surveillance, software also analyzes the footage in real time to determine patterns.
Foot traffic, for example, at a particular house could indicate a location for drug deals. Drones can pursue stolen vehicles or track suspects. Hartford’s system does not include facial recognition technology yet, but its equipment could incorporate this in the future. Hartford also does not store information for outside entities.
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Forbes quoted law Professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson’s description of pre-crime law as being an application of public health regulation. Ferguson caught Forbes’ attention with a 2017 Time Magazine piece in which he observed:
Person-based predictive policing began in 2009 as an attempt to apply a public health approach to violence. Just as epidemiological patterns reveal environmental toxins that can increase health risks (like getting cancer), criminal patterns can increase life risks (like getting shot). The key is to identify the predictive risk factors and try to remedy the underlying environmental causes.
In other words, if and when oppressive pre-crime suppression eventually does become commonplace in America, they will tell us it’s for our own good.
All articles possibly rephrased by InfoArmed.com