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Bill Would Let Police Monitor Email

Posted by samzenpus on from the careful-what-you-write dept.

Duuk2k2 writes "The Canadian federal cabinet will review new legislation this fall that would give police and security agencies vast powers to begin surveillance of the Internet without court authority. The new measures would allow law-enforcement agents to intercept personal e-mails, text messages and possibly even password-secure websites used for purchasing and financial transactions."

3 of 439 comments (clear)

  1. Aw, Canada by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Of course Canada needs these invasions of our freedom. After those terrorists crashed those planes into the CN Tower in Toronto, how can we possibly go back to that pre-9/11 thinking? If only the RCMP had intercepted their emails, we would have nabbed them on their commute from Pickering. Then there would have been no more terrorists, and we could get our freedom back from the nice Progressive Conservatives tirelessly toiling to protect us.

    After all, it's not like military lawyers stopped intelligence agencies from intercepting Mohammed Atta and his fellow planebombers a year before they did any damage. You're thinking of that third-world failed regime to the South.

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  2. Re:Easy... by Tackhead · · Score: 5, Interesting
    > Hello, PGP.

    Hello, RIP

    Simply demand passphrases - under penalty of law - from anybody whose packetstream, when decoded, contains the string "BEGIN PGP KEY BLOCK".

    And RIP, privacy.

  3. Re:Easy... by Tackhead · · Score: 5, Interesting
    > Yes, it would really suck if we had both laws on the books, but there is nothing even on the horizon that would similarly compel people to give up their passphrases like that here in Canada.

    You miss my point -- once upon a time, there was no RIP in the UK, either.

    This law is useless without a Canadian equivalent to the RIP. Therefore, the Canadian government will be forced to implement an RIP-equivalent law within a year or two of implementing the "all your connections are subject to permanent sniffing" law.

    The reason you implement these laws piecewise is so that Citizen Canuck can look at the law and say "That won't affect me, because I'll just use encryption", (or so Ernest Englishman can say "It's a fair cop, but they 'ave to get a court order to gather the evidence they'll use before demanding my password under RIP").

    And because, under a parliamentary system such as that used in the UK (and Canada), by the time the second half of the law is drafted, it's already too late.