News Round-Up: How Big Companies Monitor Employee Messages, Woke Culture in the British Army and the German Government Going after Opposition Funding
News Round-Up: How Big Companies Monitor Employee Messages, Woke Culture in the British Army and the German Government Going after Opposition Funding
Every week, the editorial team of Freedom Research compiles a round-up of news that caught our eye, or what felt like under-reported aspects of news deserving more attention.
Over the past week, the following topics attracted our attention:
Walmart, Starbucks, and others are using AI to monitor employee messages.
UK Defence Secretary: Woke culture weakens the British army.
Canada: A recent federal court ruling on Trudeau's abuse of power has opened the way for citizens' lawsuits against the Canadian state.
German Minister of the Interior planning to restrict funding for opposition parties under the guise of fighting far-right extremism.
Scotland: Setting dress codes for your children could lead to jail time in the future.
Walmart, Starbucks, and others are using AI to monitor employee messages
Many of the world's largest companies are using an AI tool to monitor employee communications, CNBC reports. The tool, developed by Aware, a company based in Ohio in the US, analyses employee messages in popular work communication environments such as Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and others. Jeff Schumann, head of Aware, says AI can help companies "understand the risk within their communications" by getting real-time insights into employee sentiment instead of relying on an annual or biannual survey. Managers at large companies that are Aware's customers can use the tool to see how employees of a certain age group or in a particular region react to a company policy or marketing campaign, according to Schumann. Aware has developed solutions that can analyse textual content as well as process images, and can also detect bullying, harassment, discrimination, noncompliance, pornography or nudity, and other inappropriate behaviour, according to Schumann.
If by default their tool does not identify the names of individual employees in the overall analysis, this is still possible using a separate add-on application. According to Schumann, identification is used in the case of extreme threats or risk behaviour pre-determined by the client company.
The tracking capabilities offered by Aware are already used by a number of large companies in the US and Europe. Starbucks, Walmart, Delta Air Lines, Nestle, AstraZeneca, T-Mobile, Chevron, and others are some of the best known examples.
UK Defence Secretary: Woke culture weakens British army
UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps is unhappy with the state of the British Army, saying that it has been infiltrated by the 'woke' and 'extremist culture', reports The Telegraph. According to Shapps, the military should not waste time and resources promoting political agendas aimed at relaxing security checks to increase 'diversity'. The Telegraph also wrote last week that the army does have such a diversity agenda and that it wants to relax security checks for overseas recruits to increase ethnic diversity.
However, Shapps said it was inconceivable that he would allow security clearance standards to be relaxed in the midst of heightened threats from Russia and the Middle East crisis.
In his comment, the Defence Secretary opposed the woke agenda, which pursues 'diversity' instead of recruiting the best. In the army, diversity is not only pursued on the basis of race and ethnicity but also on the basis of gender and sexual orientation. "This extremist culture has infiltrated public life over the years and it is time for a proper shake-up, designed to refocus the military on its core mission – being a lethal fighting force," Shapps said, noting that instead of pitting individuals against each other, the army needs a common set of values which can deliver the military needed to defend the country and its allies.
Shapps' view found many supporters who saw the issue as problematic. For example, a former veteran who used to be in the army recruiting pointed out that white men are no longer recruited into the army for diversity reasons because soldiers of a different race and gender are preferred. However, the Defence Secretary's statement also drew criticism, as women in the military are said to feel less safe after these remarks.
Canada: Recent federal court ruling on Trudeau's abuse of power has opened the way for citizens' lawsuits against the Canadian state
A recent ruling by a Canadian federal judge that the use of the Emergencies Act was not justified in dispersing the Covid protests in Ottawa, the country's capital, and elsewhere in early 2022 is likely to lead to a series of further civil lawsuits against the state, reports The Epoch Times.
The Freedom Convoy protests against the particularly strict Covid measures in Canada began at the end of January 2022. In addition to the capital, the protesters led by truckers also blocked the Coutts Bridge in Alberta, an important link for trade between Canada and the United States. The peaceful protests continued for several weeks until the government decided to use the Emergencies Act to suppress them with a massive and brutal police crackdown. In fact, it was the Emergencies Act that gave Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government the broad powers to ban protests and use the police to break them up. In addition, the law allowed the state to freeze the assets of people and companies involved in the protests, which the state did.
However, in January, federal judge Richard Mosley ruled that the protests, which took place in early 2022, although damaging to Canada's economy, did not rise to the level of a threat to national security as defined in the Act. "I have concluded that the decision to issue the Proclamation (of the Emergencies Act) does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness – justification, transparency and intelligibility – and was not justified," the judge wrote in the ruling. The use of the Emergencies Act to create a no-go zone in downtown Ottawa in order to chase protesters away violated the freedom of expression of peaceful participants, he added. He also pointed out that the seizure of the protesters' accounts did not consider how it could affect the relatives of the seized account holders. The right of relatives to be protected against unjustified search and seizure was thus violated.
In the wake of the ruling, several protesters whose rights were violated say they also intend to bring legal action. One such action will be brought by former police officer Vincent Gricys and army veteran Eddie Cornell, both of whose bank accounts were frozen. They will be joined by protestor Jeremiah Jost. The plaintiffs plan to take further legal action against “those in government, the financial institutions who froze people’s bank accounts, and the police officers who beat up and injured innocent Canadians.”
The plaintiffs are also raising funds for the lawsuit, and they say the legal team will eventually decide whether the litigation will take the form of a class action or a tort suit.
German Minister of the Interior plans to restrict funding for opposition party under the guise of fighting far-right extremism
Germany's socialist democrat Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser, together with Thomas Haldenwang, head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz - BfV), and Holger Münch, head of the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt), presented a new plan entitled “Resolutely combating right-wing extremism”. Under the plan, 13 new measures will be introduced, focusing in particular on the financing of so-called "right-wing extremism", Remix News reports. “No one who donates to a right-wing extremist party should remain undetected,” minister Faeser explained. “Those who mock the state must deal with a strong state,” she said, adding that the BfV is working closely with financial institutions to make them more aware of the problem of financial flows linked to the so-called far right. The minister also said that right-wing extremist networks should be prosecuted in the same way as organised crime.
Although Faeser did not explicitly mention it, the government's plan is thought to be aimed primarily at the country's second most popular political party, Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD). The party, which has positioned itself as opposing climate policies and viewed as 'anti-immigration', has seen its support rise again to over 20% in recent opinion polls. The AfD's popularity has long been a source of irritation for the country's political elite, and there is serious talk in the society of banning the party.
Scotland: Setting dress codes for your children could lead to jail time in the future
Parents in Scotland who do not allow their teenage children to dress in sexually provocative clothing could face jail time in the future, reports The Telegraph. The government, led by the Scottish National Party (SNP), wants to ban so-called conversion therapy. In the past, conversion therapy has been used to refer to attempts to convert homosexual people into heterosexuals. Today, however, it increasingly deals with the issue of transgenderism, for example, by explaining to boys who think they are girls that they are not girls and vice versa.
However, a planned law banning such interference in Scotland, critics say, would also cover, for example, parents who do not allow their children to dress in clothes of the opposite sex. Specifically, it would seek to ban any attempt to “change or suppress” a person’s gender identity or sexuality, or an expression of them, or face criminal investigation and potential jail time. “This definition of coercion would clearly therefore include parents seeking to control how their child ‘presents’ in terms of, say clothes, make-up, and hairstyle,” Scottish advocate Aidan O'Neill commented. “Thus parents who actively and consistently and directly oppose their child’s decision to, for example, present as a different gender from that given at birth would be committing a criminal offence,” he said.
“A parent’s inflexible and absolute ban forbidding, say, their 14-year-old daughter going out publicly dressed in what might be regarded, by her parents, as an overly sexualised and sexually provocative and explicit way could, in principle, be criminalised under this proposed legislation,” he warned.
The government has previously argued that the new law would not impose any further restrictions on family life and freedom of speech, religion, and belief.