Member of Modi’s inner circle behind Canadian criminal plot, official says
A senior official in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is alleged to have authorized a campaign to intimidate or kill Canadians, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs David Morrison told MPs Tuesday.
Morrison joined other senior officials testifying before MPs on the public safety and national security committee. MPs on the committee are asking questions about the RCMP’s shocking claim two weeks ago that agents of the Indian government were complicit in widespread crimes in Canada, including murder, extortion and intimidation.
Conservative MP Raquel Dancho, the party’s public safety critic, led off the hearing with questions about information the Canadian government shared with the Washington Post.
The newspaper reported that Canadian officials identified Indian Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah as one of the senior officials who authorized intelligence-gathering missions and attacks on Sikh separatists in Canada.
“The journalists called me and asked me if it was that person. I confirmed it was that person,” Morrison said.
Shah has been described as India’s “second most powerful man” and is one of Modi’s closest confidants.
Before Tuesday, Canadian officials would only state on the record that the plot could be traced back to the “highest levels of the Indian government.”
The advocacy group Sikhs for Justice issued a statement Tuesday calling for Shah to be prosecuted.
“Amit Shah has weaponized India’s security agencies to hunt down and eliminate pro-Khalistan activists, even beyond India’s borders,” Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the group’s legal counsel, said in the statement.
“The assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil is not just an isolated crime — it is part of a well-thought-out policy executed under Shah’s directives to crush the voices of Sikhs advocating for self-determination and justice,”
RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme also testified Tuesday. He has said police evidence shows Indian diplomats and consular staff collected information for the Indian government, which was used to issue instructions to criminal organizations to carry out acts of violence in Canada.
He said the Mounties also have assembled evidence of credible and imminent threats to members of the South Asian community, specifically members of the pro-Khalistan movement seeking a separate homeland for Sikhs.
On Thanksgiving Monday, the federal government announced it had expelled six Indian diplomats — including the high commissioner, India’s chief envoy to Canada. India has denied the accusations and swiftly retaliated by kicking Canadian diplomats out of its territory.
Commissioner Mike Duheme tells Power & Politics that RCMP allegations about acts of violence and extortion in Canada link to the upper echelons of India’s government, and provides an update on police progress against threats to public safety.
Duheme said police have warned 13 Canadians since September 2023 that they could be targets of harassment or threats by Indian agents. Police say some of those individuals have received multiple threats.
Duheme told CBC he believes those people are safer since the Indian diplomats were expelled.
India has denied working with criminal organizations to target Sikh separatists in Canada and has accused Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of having a “political agenda” behind the allegations.
Published at Tue, 29 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000
Fake content is getting harder to suss out. This Canadian Nobel Prize winner has an idea to help
Artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton says it’s getting more difficult to tell videos, voices and images generated with the technology from material that’s real — but he has an idea to aid in the battle.
The increased struggle has contributed to a shift in how the British-Canadian computer scientist and recent Nobel Prize recipient thinks the world could address fake content.
“For a while, I thought we may be able to label things as generated by AI,” Hinton said Monday at the inaugural Hinton Lectures.
“I think it’s more plausible now to be able to recognize that things are real by taking a code in them and going to some websites and seeing the same things on that website.”
Hinton spoke at the first of the two-night Hinton Lectures event at the Global Risk Institute, taking place this week at the John W. H. Bassett Theatre in Toronto.
Hinton, who is often called the godfather of AI, took the stage briefly to remind the audience of the litany of risks he’s been warning the public about that the technology poses. He feels AI could cause or contribute to accidental disasters, joblessness, cybercrime, discrimination and biological and existential threats.
He said the labelling approach would verify content isn’t fake and imagines it could be particularly handy when it comes to political video advertisements.
“You could have something like a QR code in them [taking you] to a website, and if there’s an identical video on that website, all you have to do is know that that website is real,” Hinton explained.
Most Canadians have spotted deepfakes online and almost a quarter encounter them weekly, according to an April survey of 2,501 Canadians conducted by the Dais, a public policy organization at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Deepfakes are digitally manipulated images or videos depicting scenes that have not happened. Recent deepfakes have depicted Pope Francis in a Balenciaga puffer jacket and pop star Taylor Swift in sexually explicit poses.
At a news conference after the event, Hinton shared more about what he has done with his half of the $1.45 million he and Princeton University researcher John Hopfield received when they won the Nobel Prize for physics earlier in the month.
Hinton said he has donated half his share of the award to Water First, a Creemore, Ont., organization training Indigenous communities in how to develop and provide access to safe water systems.
He initially mulled giving some of the money to a water organization actor Matt Damon is involved with in Africa, but then he said his partner asked him: “What about Canada?”
This year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics is Geoffrey Hinton, a British Canadian known as the ‘godfather of AI.’ He speaks with CBC chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton about how governments should regulate the technology and its use in election campaigns.
That led Hinton to discover Water First. He said he was compelled to donate to it because of the land acknowledgments he hears at the start of many events.
“I think it’s great that they’re recognizing [who lived on the land first], but it doesn’t stop Indigenous kids getting diarrhea,” he said.
Hinton previously said some of his winnings will also be directed to an organization that provides jobs to neurodiverse young adults.
‘Worried pessimist’
The bulk of the evening even Monday was dedicated to a talk from Jacob Steinhardt, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and statistics at UC Berkeley in California.
Steinhardt told the audience he believes AI will advance even faster than many expect, but there will be surprises along the way.
By 2030, he imagines AI will be “superhuman,” when it comes to math, programming and hacking.
He also thinks large language models, which underpin AI systems, could become capable of persuasion or manipulation.
“There is significant headroom, if someone were to try to train [them] for persuasiveness, perhaps either an unscrupulous company or a government that cared about persuading its citizens,” Steinhardt said. “There’s a lot of things you could do.”
He told the audience he sees himself as a “worried optimist,” who believes there’s a 10 per cent chance the technology will lead to human extinction and a 50 per cent chance it will cause immense economic value and “radical prosperity.”
Asked at a later news conference about Steinhardt’s “worried optimist” label, Hinton called himself a “worried pessimist.”
“There’s research showing that if you ask people to estimate risks, normal, healthy people way underestimate the risks of really bad things … and the people who get the risks about right are the mildly depressed,” Hinton said.
“I think of myself as one of those, and I think the risks are a bit higher than Jacob [Steinhardt] thinks — let’s say around 20 per cent.”
Published at Tue, 29 Oct 2024 23:44:31 +0000
