I am more afraid of the police than being raped again. – survey comment
“Sexual misconduct targeting vulnerable women” sounds so much nicer than “rape”:
Two [typical and representative] West Midlands [cops] who [manipulated women into submitting to rape by threatening men in their lives]…have been jailed. Anthony Ritchie…and Steven Walters…even targeted the same woman…Walters previously served a four-year sentence for [raping] two different women in 2015 whilst [wearing his magical clown costume]…Ritchie began [manipulating one]
…woman in 2014 after he [arrested her partner on] a…domestic violence [charge]…Walters [had already raped]…the same woman [a year earlier]…Ritchie [got another woman to submit to rape] in 2014…[by threatening] to arrest her son…
The naive can’t understand why so many women are reluctant to report rapes:
Three-quarters of respondents to the largest ever survey of rape and sexual assault survivors in England and Wales said their mental health was damaged “as a direct result of what police did, or failed to do, in their case”…The survey…exposes multiple failures in the policing of serious sexual crimes, and reveals that “countless respondents said their rapist went on to sexually offend again against them and/or others because police did not take their report seriously”. Women described feeling more traumatised by their experience with the police than they had been by the original rape…Only 14% of respondents said they felt safer as a result of what the police did, while 39% said they felt less safe…56%…said they would be unlikely to report any future rapes…
The Florida Department of [Torturing Humans Locked in Cages] paid $2.5 million to California-based Leo Technologies to begin using its surveillance program called Verus beginning in August. The program scans incoming and outgoing calls, including to inmates’ friends and family…for keywords selected by prison officials and…uses speech-to-text technology…to transcribe the content of conversations that include those keywords…The only calls that the company [claim]s are excluded from monitoring are communications with lawyers, doctors and spiritual advisers. The company [belched out the keyword]… “criminal”…[to justify exposing people’ private speech to pigs and] prosecutors. C[age stacks] have for decades [spied on] incoming and outgoing phone calls…[but] using a[lgorithms allows the spying to be constant]…A 2021 Reuters news story examining the use of the technology in eight other states found that Verus was programmed to record conversations that included words like “abogado”…Spanish…for lawyer. In Alabama, the technology listened for keywords that could potentially help a sheriff fight off lawsuits from [his victims] and civil rights activists regarding prison safety and sanitation…
Given the cases routinely filed against prison collaborators like Securus for recording attorney-client calls, Leo’s claim that it doesn’t do this is hardly credible.
In the 21st century, censorship & surveillance are tightly bound together:
A federal judge [has] issued an injunction blocking the California attorney general from enforcing the controversial California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (CAADCA), which was passed last year after lobbying from a British baroness. U.S. District Judge Beth Freeman stated that “the law’s commercial speech restrictions likely violate the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment”…trade group NetChoice sued last December to block CAADCA, claiming the law “would pressure private companies into becoming ‘roving censors’ of content that California deems harmful, or else face ‘draconian penalties’ as high as $7,500 per child per violation”…
I guess we can’t expect anything but hypocrisy from any part of any government:
The movement to reform sex work laws in Canada took a blow…[when] Ontario’s Superior Court [asserted that an unconstitutional law is actually constitutional]…The verdict…was in response to a constitutional challenge launched in 2021 by the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform (CASWLR), which is made up of 25 groups from across the country that support and provide services for sex workers. The constitutional challenge [pointed out] that Canada’s laws around sex work infringe on sex workers’ Charter rights to bodily autonomy, equality, safety and security, as they increase stigma, prevent sex workers from discussing consent with a client and invite targeted arrest and violence…
…the Online News Act…has been an utter disaster, leading to millions in lost revenues with cancelled deals, reduced traffic for Canadian media sites, declining investment in media in Canada, and few options to salvage this mess…While the Australian experience lasted a few days, the blocking in Canada has now gone on for weeks and there is little reason to believe that [Facebook] will reverse its position [and start paying a]…4% [link tax]…for a minimum of $234 million…The effect of the news link blocking in Canada has led to smaller and innovative services laying off staff or stopping all new hiring. Some report losing as much as 50% of their website traffic…there is little hope that [Facebook] will return to news in Canada. If Google follows suit, no Internet company will be subject to [this deeply stupid law]…investment in the sector has ground to a halt, Canadians have lost access to news on social media, and small and independent media are particularly hard hit…
Hypocritical trash behaving like hypocritical trash:
The North Carolina Senate voted unanimously…to mandate age verification on adult websites, after a [sleazy politician] snuck a copycat amendment mirroring other states’ requirements into an unrelated bill…[to] add a computer science class to the state’s high school graduation requirements…[Amy] Galey…[claimed] that overall traffic to adult websites in Louisiana dropped 80% after that state’s age verification law passed…
Correction: 80% of Louisianians who visit porn sites started using VPNs rather than let the government snoop into their private affairs.
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