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Pay To Have Your Phone Tapped
An anonymous reader writes "The Globe and Mail is running an interesting story over who should carry the cost of wiretapping (registration may be required): 'Canada's police chiefs propose a surcharge of about 25 cents on monthly telephone and Internet bills to cover the cost of tapping into the communications of terrorists and other criminals.'"
On your phone bill or through your taxes elsewhere.
The phone company (Bell) will eventually win, jacking up prices at this suggestion for the supposed costs involved in the physicaly act of wiretapping. The government can't win, as it has a) the Bell Canada lobby against it and b) the canadian public totally against it. Eventually, these fees will be hidden in the cost of the phone service, per line, with no explanation, except that the fees will be diverted to a waretapping fund.
Police say they cannot - and should not - be forced to pay the often hefty costs involved in carrying out court-approved wiretaps and message searches, warning that investigations will suffer if they are expected to pick up the tab.
BS. Law enforcement is publically funded. If it's not funded enough, fine; we the voters will think about giving you more money. But making an end run around the process just because law enforcement in the new millenium is sooo expensive, thereby giving them a cash flow that actually encouragesthem to wiretap frivolously, is not an appropriate solution.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
Who do you think pays for wiretapping, already? Magical fairies?
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
I actually think this whole thing is doublespeak.
...
... it's a charge that is wholly the result of national security concerns. As such, it belongs (a) being regulated by external oversight (not just giving Grue a blank check for some amount that results from charging each customer what seems to be not an overly burdensome amount); and (b) coming from the public in the form of a tax.
...).
/.'er has said, the public will cover the costs, it's just a question of who has to stick them with the bill. So this story is about all of these people playing musical chairs to avoid getting stuck with delivering the check. Not even covering it. And it's a totally appropriate expenditure in my mind.
The company -- Bell Canada -- is doing a nice job of saying that it's concerned for the customer. Doesn't want to increase costs covered by the customer,
But what they mean is that (a) they don't want the customer to see this charge as part of their Bell Canada (TM) phone bill; AND (b) they don't want to cover the costs for processing that charge...
But mostly Bell Canada doesn't want to be seen as the SOURCE of this cost. Which is completely understandable AND completely fair. This is not a charge related to upgrading their network or switches or
Grue doesn't want to have to justify the costs to the public and so that's why he wants to just pass it onto them under the auspices of the phone company, always an easy villian (behemoth,
As every
At least the phone company says it's willing to split the costs: half coming from LE, half from the phoneco itself; whereas LE just wants to charge everyone a quarter b/c, as Grue says, that seems about right (next breath he says that he hadn't done the analysis on those numbers yet--whatever).