A bookstore owner writes about how her bookstore has continued to operate…as a surveillance system.

She presents this as a story of triumph over adversity, disregarding the implications of imposing surveillance on all purchases. For me, this outcome is perverse and alarming. Paying for a book with a credit card tracks people and what they read. So does shipping it to the customer.

I won't give a store any information that could identify me, and especially not a bookstore. So until there is a store that lets me enter, browse, pay cash, and take the book away, I won't buy a book from a bookstore. If bookstores "survive" by converting themselves into collectors of data, all of which is available to the FBI without a warrant under the law Biden helped write, they will become part of the problem.

Can we count on them to let people pay cash again some day?

The WHO has been given so little power to coordinate response to epidemics that it can only plead with national governments.

The bully has told border thugs to deport asylum seekers summarily, without an asylum hearing.

Schools are trying to make students take exams via vicious snooping software.

The article says how nasty the program's behavior, and the company's behavior, are.

But even before we get to the nastiness of the surveillance, and the painfulness of the hoops (such as to stare at the screen and never look away), even installing the program violates your freedom. It is surely not free software, so just by running on your computer it denies your freedom, and (I expect) it requires an equally unjust operating system in order to install it.

(I tried to check those things, but the company's web site would not let me connect.)

I see two ways to avoid this in justice.

• Invite the school to set up its own computer for you to take the exam on. I'd go along with using the school's computer to talk with the school, and it would only be for the exam.
• ask to take the exam when it can be given live.

Your stand will have more power if you join together with other students as a group to refuse.

Tracking coronavirus may be a good idea, but doing this by tracking every individual creates a threat of repression.

A clever system to detect who an infected person has come close to, without reporting where any person has been, is described here.