Slashdot Mirror
Bill Would Let Police Monitor Email
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."
Clearly, no abuse could come from this!
Kneel Before Christ!
Him, again?
main(char O){O++&&(((O-291)*O+27788)*O-868020?1:putchar(O++
Sometimes cops better judgment gets clouded because of the situation (relationship to the victim, gravity of the crime, etc), so the whole point of making it mandatory for a court order is you get an unbiased approval or denial for this type of surveillance. Turning this authority over to the police department would be a great disservice to sanctity of an individual's privacy.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
Not a chance of this happenning. The minority government would not dare to this, especially that there is an election looming within the next 9 months.
Because the bad guys would NEVER use encryption or even just offhand references to something in their planning that they transmit over an open, public medium, right?
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
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.
Almost everyone integrating GNUPG with their email solution so that all email is encrypted point to point. If the cops figured out a way around that, like, say, trying to make encryption illegal, then people will just switch to Steganography and send all their email using Goatse pictures.
Take THAT, Mr. Pig-man. It's GOATSE time!
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
With news like these, at first we all think of encrypting our mail with PGP/GPG but... how do we know that it will make a difference?
Maybe governments know how to decode it but it's kept in secret in order to create a false sense of security
Quick, the tinfoil hat!
--
Dreamhost superb hosting.
Kunowalls!!! Random sexy wallpapers.
Hosting 20G hd, 1Tb bw! ssh $7.95
Back when the telephone tapping legislation was first created, some wise law maker decided a judge should look at the evidence and allow or deny the police the ability to monitor people.
Now what would happen if that same legislation (on phone tapping) was created today? Would the police and 'security services' be able to listen to anyone they wanted without any kind of oversight?
Where did our legal right to privacy go? And why do governments have no respect for people's right to communicate over the internet? Like it is some second class method of communication.
Even I thought that was too incredible to believe.
A guy walks into a bar... well, I forgot the joke, but the punchline is that he's an alcoholic.
No hearing, no trial, no independent psychiatric evaluation, no appeal, nada.
I wonder how much one has to criticize the government(s) before the Provincial Psychiatrist serves your bank with an order to turn over your money.
You could've hired me.
... so let's get rid of it.
- scsg
That easy, are you sure? If the police can intercept your e-mail, then most likely it will become forbidden to encrypt it - or the allowed encryption level will be far too weak to be usable. Or... if they happen to intercept your e-mail and they can't figure out the encryption, they may hold it against you and send you to court. And so on. The possibilities (of awful stuff happening) are endless. And once again, the whole mass of citizens will suffer in order to get protected. Meanwhile, crime and terrorism will have no problems finding ways to circumvent all this protection crap. So basically, you haven't got any more protection, you have no privacy left and what's more, you voted for all that. Yay.
"It's the police. The police always want maximum powers,"
Try not to stereotype. Just because there are a few bad apples doesn't mean that the other 2% are rotten.
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.
And sometimes had out warrants when they shouldn't. The lack of bias isn't important, the fact that there's a record is. If an officer has to come and present a reason for a warrant (the reason gets recorded) then there's a record. The warrant and related information is kept in the court record, and can be later reviewed to determine if the search was improper.
With something like this the police could just keep it all hush-hush and then make shit up at a later date to justif it. Since there's no record to compare it to see if it's the truth. Far too easy for someone to say "Well we had all this evidence so we started monitoring him and look! We were right" when the actuality was they had no evidence at all.
The Americans use the NSA to monitor mon american communications because under their laws, foreigners have no rights. The Canadians use CISIS to monitor american communications for the same reasons. Then they trade data.
I once sent and email to Australia when the net was young and in it I used some words that could be interpreted in isolation as suspicious. Then I put a note in the email to the effect I knew it was going to be read by the NSA and I made a comment that if they were worried about what I was "really up to" they should check out www.blah.com.
Within 12 hours the server picked up hits from the NSA. Then they were dumb enough to be using windows machines. For anyone wanting to penetrate their security - its pretty trivia. A simple honeypot is a good start.
There seems to be just no limit to the depths of depravity that paranoia will drive these people. Then they think they are being righteous. Meanwhile as they go off chasing ghosts they are perfectly willing to ignore huge white collar crimes in the way of frauds that are being perpetrated via stock market and other swindles on an almost daily basis. Enron is just one example.
6 of the 9-11 terrorists came through canada, on the catferry from NS to bar harbor to get to boston
You have a source for this? I realize that it became a meme that terrorists came from Canada, and it is true that Rassam came from Canada on an attempt to bomb LAX, however it was my impression, and this was reiterated many times, that not one of the 9-11 terrorists came through Canada. Not that it matters anyways, as ferry or not they're still going through US Customs, and thus it's still up to the US to maintain its security (just as it does, or rather didn't do, when all of the others flew right in and should have raised every red flag).
6 of the 9-11 terrorists came through canada, on the catferry from NS to bar harbor to get to boston.
While I'll happily concede if you can name a credible source, I did search and found that this is an urban myth that the slackjawed right-wingers use to imagine that the rest of the world is to blame, rather than themselves. There is, according to what I can find (in actual credible news) zero proof that any of the 9/11 terrorists ever touched foot in Canada. Instead they were busy spending their time taking advantage of all the US had to offer.
The message didn't last too long, though, because a couple of people took it too seriously.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
We're an Outlook shop.
Bill already lets anyone monitor our email.
(Thank you! I'll be here all week!)
Steganography is an arms race. The technique you describe is easily detectable today (low-order color bits have differect statstical patterns than compressed or encrypred data). The techniques that aren't detectable today are probably going to be easy to detect in five to ten years. A disturbing thought given how easily the police could archive your email for later review.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.