Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “News”
According to a recent report by Canada’s privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien and three provincial counterparts, Clearview AI has broken Canada’s privacy laws. Therrien told reporters that the company’s technology and actions amounted to an illegal mass surveillance of Canadians. While Clearview AI no longer operates in Canada, its recent activities indicate the challenges that Canada faces in regulating facial recognition …
January 22nd marked a historic milestone for nuclear disarmament as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) came into force, officially becoming part of international law. Adopted by 122 states in 2017, the TPNW began a 90-day countdown to entry into force last October, when Honduras became the 50th state to ratify it. While many Canadians are celebrating, …
In the run-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Joe Biden pledged to end arms sales to countries fueling the war in Yemen—specifically, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Only seven days into the Biden presidency, the U.S. government announced a hold on weapons worth tens of billions of dollars to these countries, including “precision-guided munitions” to Saudi Arabia …
January 22nd 2021 marked a historic milestone for nuclear disarmament as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) came into force, officially becoming part of international law.
During a week of virtual sessions hosted in September at the Geneva offices of the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, Canada remained silent. Not once in the last year has Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs focused on autonomous weapons when explaining Canada’s foreign policy priorities.
With a global pandemic and a still undecided U.S. election forming a dramatic backdrop, on November 6, the German Foreign Office hosted a virtual conference, “Capturing Technology. Rethinking Arms Control.” This event, combined with an experts’ preparatory workshop on November 5, were used to shine a light on the transformational capabilities of new technologies on both “old” issues of arms control, such as nuclear weapons, and new ones, including autonomous weapons and drone swarms.
On October 24, Radio Canada International reported that Canadian-based Bombardier Recreational Products (BRP) had suspended the export of aircraft engines to “countries with unclear usage.” This action followed reports that these engines were being used in Turkish-built Bayraktar TB2 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that Turkey had sent to support Azeri forces in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
On September 28, Ploughshares Senior Researchers Jessica West and Branka Marijan participated in an online panel on the future of peace and conflict hosted by the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Event description From the invention of the machine-gun, to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to the use of armed drones, technological advances in war craft have transformed geopolitical rivalries …
Want to learn more about killer robots? Are you in university or high school? Join us for an interactive discussion! Killer robots, or autonomous weapons, are a very real concern for international security. We will discuss the issue of autonomous weapons, where the international discussion stands, Canada’s role and what civil society organizations are doing.
On August 19, a human F-16 fighter pilot engaged with an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm in a virtual simulation of a dogfight. The human pilot lost all five rounds. So was this a historical moment for military use of AI? AI wins again For some observers, and for the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that organized the …
