As more people end up experiencing homelessness, they’re also facing increasingly punitive and reactionary responses from local governments and their neighbors. Such policies could become legally codified in short order, with the high court having agreed to hear arguments in Grants Pass v. Johnson.
Originally brought in 2018, the case challenged the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, over an ordinance banning camping. Both a federal judge and, later, a panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck the law down, saying that Grants Pass did not have enough available shelter to offer homeless people. As such, the law was deemed to be a violation of the Eighth Amendment.
The ruling backed up the Ninth Circuit’s earlier ruling on the Martin v. City of Boise case, which said that punishing or arresting people for camping in public when there are no available shelter beds to take them to instead constituted a violation of the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause in the Eighth Amendment. That applied to localities in the Ninth Circuit’s area of concern and has led to greater legal scrutiny even as cities and counties push for more punitive and restrictive anti-camping laws. In fact, Grants Pass pushed to get the Supreme Court to hear the case, and several nominally liberal cities and states on the West Coast are backing its argument. If the Supreme Court overturns the previous Grants Pass and Boise rulings, it would open the door for cities, states, and counties to essentially criminalize being unhoused on a massive scale.
Oh boy… Digital ID is not about tracking citizens movement. If you file your taxes every year or change your mail delivery at the post office they already know where you are roughly. It’s a government services key meant to streamline services and provide insurable encryption protection for government sign ins to try and keep service Canada digital information more secure. Those service Canada sign ins already exist and they already log location data the same way your Gmail account does to flag potential insecurity in the system. The Digital IDis just designed to try and be an anti phishing measure. The thing is also completely voluntary because like any encryption it isn’t perfect.
The reason the Liberals are not happy about the whole individualized digital ID for porn is that they are listening to the techs and have concerns that even if the porn people were watching was kosher the encryption would have to handshake with the sketchiest sites who would be able to mine location data from users by default and potentially cause issues with identity theft issues. If some phishing scammer manages to crack the system you could have a situation where people start cloning the IDs and creating prime blackmail material. Imagine if you will someone telling you that they have your Digital ID and they are gunna go use it on some kiddie porn if you don’t do what they want.
There’s also just logistical concerns because the handshake has to go both ways. To make it work you have to give the code that can be easily backwards engineered to the owners of the websites.
The Digital ID the Conservatives are proposing crack downs would also be would be basically semi mandatory. Honestly it would probably just drive more people to get their wanking material from even less legitimate places that don’t require the ID…funneling more people into the porn black market.