Author: 4am Research

  Author: Keri Bennett As of February 1, 2023, two new sections of the British Columbia Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (“FIPPA”) and associated regulations are in force. All public bodies governed by FIPPA in the province of British Columbia (generally speaking all government ministries and the broader public sector) are now required to report privacy breaches to individuals and the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner and develop a “privacy management program”. What is a privacy breach? A privacy breach is…

The western Canadian province of British Columbia on Tuesday began a three-year pilot program to stop prosecuting people for carrying small amounts of heroin, meth, ecstasy, or crack cocaine, as part of an effort to fight a drug overdose crisis. B.C. accounts for about a third of the 32,000 deaths due to overdose and trafficking nationally since 2016, according to official data. The province declared drug overdose a public health emergency that year. The problem worsened with the COVID-19 pandemic,…

As Joe Biden contemplated his next move in 2017 after decades in government, he considered a familiar path — creating a Washington-based think tank to focus on international affairs and diplomacy. It proved an easy sell and a lucrative one, too. Soft landings in the capital are common for officials with a resume like Biden’s, and the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement was born, with a grand view of the Capitol. The former vice president brought with…

Canada’s Supreme Court found one mandatory minimum sentence for a firearm offense unconstitutional and upheld two others in a pair of decisions published on Friday. Two of the three cases at issue used hypothetical scenarios that defense counsel argued could render these mandatory minimums unconstitutional because they would constitute cruel and unusual punishment in certain instances. Mandatory minimum sentences have come under fire in Canada from advocates and lawyers who say they take discretion from judges and disproportionately penalize Indigenous…

The Justice Department announced today that it has concluded there is reasonable cause to believe that the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections (LDOC) routinely confines people in its custody past the dates when they are legally entitled to be released from custody, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. 

Defence Minister Anita Anand says she has “no news to share” on whether Canada is willing to send some of its battle tanks to Ukraine — should Germany greenlight the export — following a meeting of 50 allied defence leaders this week. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly issued pleas for tanks, although members of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group failed to come to an agreement on what to send after meetings at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany this…

Home finance companies General Commercial Group Pty Ltd (formerly known as Urban Commercial Group) and Eden Capital (Australia) Pty Ltd (formerly known as Southside Lending) have each been penalised $50,000 by the Federal Court for failing to cooperate with the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA). General commercial director Dale Brendan Heremaia and his son, Eden Capital director Benjamin Eden Heremaia, were ordered to pay $30,000 and $20,000 respectively for their roles in the misconduct. The court outcome means for the…

On January 4, 2023, the Irish Data Protection Commission (“DPC”) announced the conclusion of two inquiries into the data processing practices of Meta Platforms, Inc. (“Meta”) with respect to the company’s Instagram and Facebook platforms. As a result of the investigations, the DPC fined Meta a combined €390 million for breaches of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) and, following consultation with the European Data Protection Board (“EDPB”), notably held that Meta can no longer rely on the GDPR’s…

A New York judge on Friday fined Donald Trump’s family business the maximum penalty possible of $1.6 million for committing tax fraud. The sum, paltry to the billionaire real estate developer’s amassed fortune, is nevertheless symbolically significant as the ex-president eyes the White House again amid a host of legal woes. The Trump Corporation and Trump Payroll Corp., entities of the Trump Organization, were found guilty last month of running a years-long scheme to defraud and evade taxes through falsifying…

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced on January 4, 2023, that it has fined Meta a total of €390 million after finding that the company’s Facebook and Instagram platforms lacked proper legal grounds for processing millions of Europeans’ personal data for targeted advertising. In addition to posing challenges for Meta’s business model, the DPC’s two decisions reflect growing disagreement among European data protection authorities (DPAs) on two fronts.  The first relates to the use of ‘contractual necessity’ as an appropriate…

On December 29, 2022, the French Data Protection Authority (the “CNIL”) announced that it imposed an €8,000,000 fine on Apple for violations of the French rules on targeted advertising and the use of cookies and similar tracking technologies. Background The CNIL received a complaint concerning Apple’s ad personalization practices on the App Store and carried out several investigations between 2021 and 2022. The CNIL’s investigations concluded that Apple was collecting the identifiers of users that visited the App Store using…

On November 25, 2022, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (“DPC”) released a decision fining Meta Platforms, Inc. (“Meta”) €265 million for a 2019 data leak involving the personal information of approximately 533 million Facebook users worldwide. In the decision, the DPC argued that Meta failed to comply with the GDPR’s requirement of providing privacy “by design and default” when it failed to prevent the disclosure of users’ phone numbers, email addresses, full names, dates of birth and other personal information on…

Please note that Bittrex is a crypto exchange / trading platform. Crypto exchanges are like merchants that sell and trade cryptocurrencies, while cryptocurrencies (like Monero, Bitcoin, ZCash, etc.) are the ‘products’ sold by the merchants. The failure of a merchant does not entail that there is a failure in the product. Cryptocurrency experts recommend that if you are going to own any cryptocurrency, you should never leave it on an exchange. Keep it on a hard wallet such as Ledger…

Jun 27, 2022. The European Union’s governing body has published a list of new sanctions against Moscow, accusing Russia of a “continuing war of aggression against Ukraine.” The sixth batch of restrictions since February contains a phased embargo on oil imports, restrictions against some Russian banks and broadcasters, and the blacklisting of people Brussels accuses of war crimes. The Council of the European Union officially announced the sanctions package on Friday. EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy…

June 15, 2022. Eva K Bartlett: RT had me on yesterday to discuss Ukraine’s kill list & my entry on it. I highlighted Canada’s cozy relationship with Ukraine, including with the Nazi battalions, Chrystia Freeland’s Nazi-collaborating grandpa , and why I feel safer living in Russia than I would were I back in Canada where Ukrainian nationalists & Nazi supporters run rampant and could easily harm or kill me. I also spoke of how while independent Canadian media reached out…

June 1, 2022. Public inquiry into the federal government’s unprecedented use of the Emergencies Act seeks access to cabinet secrets. The public inquiry into the federal government’s unprecedented use of the Emergencies Act wants access to cabinet secrets as it warns it will be hard to complete its work by next February, as required under a legally-mandated timeline. In its first substantial move since Ontario judge Paul Rouleau was appointed in April to lead the inquiry, the Public Order Emergency…