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Canadian ISP Shoulder Surfing
1nfamous writes "Canada's Largest ISP, Bell Sympatico, has informed its customers that it intends to 'monitor or investigate content or your use of your service provider's networks and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy any laws, regulations or other governmental request.' The new customer service agreement is effective June 15, 2006."
The chief difference between Canada and America? At least the Canadians get fair warning.
Clearly, the Canadian government is going to have to work on that...after all, we can't tip our hand to the terrorists, right? These things must be kept secret, because unless they're explicitly informed, the terrorists will have no reason to believe their internet access is being tracked, just as they had no reason to believe that their phone calls may have been bugged and their financial records traced, that is, until the meddling fourth estate decided to educate them, much to the peril of all freedom-lovers.
(Sorry....my sarcasm button was stuck there for a while...)
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: it's time to start encrypting everything. Just one question...anyone out there familiar with the current legality of crypto in Canada?
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
... Big Brother
I wonder how long before people start being bothered by this kind of behaviour?
And I don't mean us, but the majority of sheeple...
Will it be too late then?
Ignore this signature. By order.
Yep, yet another reason I am glad I left Sympatico ages ago.
First the MSN merger, then the Usenet removal, now this.
>to disclose any information necessary to satisfy any laws, regulations or other governmental request Which Gov.? The Canadian of US?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
start your encryptors.
In a sane world, the Internet's HTTPS:HTTP ratio would be skyrocketing. Does anyone have trend graphs?
--
make install -not war
If you are a capitalist and believe in "the magic of the marketplace", you have to believe that this trend will eventually result in ISPs who advertise the opposite: that they don't snoop, that they dump any logs within hours or minutes, and so forth. That is, if they are allowed to do so by law.
I believe most problems of this type can be self correcting with market forces. If I don't like having my ISP spying on me, I'll choose another ISP. If enough people literally don't care, (like me), then this ISP will stay in business.
Of course, the point is moot... All ISPs cache data to a certain extent. And all governments can strong-arm or bribe companies... It's just that this particular ISP is being honest and saying, "Yea, we'll hand your stats over."
So much for "sympathy"....they need to change their name from "Bell Sympatico" to "Bell Antipatico"
But then again...it is a Bell company....after the AT&T thing, I expect nothing less.
See, there's the difference between America and Canada.
We make sure that the customer's don't know when we're spying on them.
The new customer service agreement is effective June 15, 2006.
Retroactive by 13 days? Isn't that just a kick in the face. Sure, you can cancel right now, but then they'll just look through that data out of spite. After all, you're no longer a customer and they no longer have to abide by their privacy policy.
doesn't canada have very strict internet privacy laws.
if they snoop and give it away to anyone in violation of those laws class action suits will follow.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Hmmmm. Yet another example of a corporation trying to provide the LEAST acceptible product the market will accept.
Economists will argue that consumers have a "choice" and should vote with their feet to another provider if they don't like this practice.
But every corporate entity under capitalism is driven to provide the MINIMUM quality they can get away with (If they don't they fail), so the alternatives are typically not much better for consumers.
There is still no real voice for individuals to counter the "voice" (read: money) of corporate entities.
*sigh*
There ARE real alternatives, but people don't take them seriously.
if I screw this up...but I remember something from a few years back where a court ruled that logging IMs was equal to recording a phone conversation and could be help under the same notification laws. This is typically not a problem in the states since most, all but 12, require single party notification, so since I know I am recording the conversation it is legal.
Now, if courts did uphold that monitoring and logging IMs, and presumably other means of electronic communication, is covered under the call recording notification laws, would this not create a dilemma for the ISP that is monitoring (and presumably logging) network traffic of users, which would include IMs and e-mai, when their users begin to communicate with individuals from the states who live in one of those 12 states that require both parties to consent?
I am fairly certain on the court ruling I mentioned, I even jokingly added a warning to people in my status message, but I am not sure if this ruling was ever contested or of my full interpretation of the law that follows.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Time to start browsing gay porn web pages featuring fake photos of Stephen Harper.
I can only imagine how they formulated such a modern concept:
What's the next step?
This is bad news for Canada. Here in the United States, we have strict privacy laws which protect us from such intrusive "techniques"
This slashdot-related signature is a stub. You can help kihjin by expanding it.
So in the near future if I wanted to communicate securely I will either have to learn how to use smoke signals or train pigeons to carry letters to my friends? All the while I thought all these advances in communications was a good thing... I guess not.
' The new customer service agreement is effective June 15, 2006. '
Good speedy update, would of preferred to of known that 14 days ago if it mattered to me. Way to be ontop of it all!
I would like to see the false positives and true negatives that result from these arrests. That is, I would like to see a two by two matrix such that:
Breakdown of arrests from statute blahThe bottom left square & upper right square would give you an idea of:
- The effectiveness of this statute or law.
- The error rate.
- How prone it is to being abused.
- An attempt at quantifying how much life, liberty and pursuit of happiness we have wrongfully intruded upon.
- Do you need more laws & procedures to catch the lower left block?
For other countries (like China) where the trial system may not be present, I would like to see them publish trials online and in print from the unadulterated viewpoint of the prosecutor and the defendant in regards to each of these statutes. Hell, I'd be interested in skimming those daily for every country! I think that if countries were more open about their success rates & their law enforcement convictions, we'd be in much better states to criticize them. More importantly, the criticism could be warranted and productive.My work here is dung.
I think that anyone who thinks they have any privacy on the net is fooling themselves. Sympatico are announcing that they are going to do this monitoring, but no doubt they could know what traffic went in and out of a particular IP address within the hour if they needed to do so. While a lot of people think that net privacy is a sacred cow, this is just sheer fantasy. There hasn't been a government on this planet that didn't regulate or make provision to monitor communications and really that is what the internet is at it's heart.
Bad people do exist on the net and use its power for their own ends. This has always been the case. Especially in the black and white areas we all can agree are bad, like using the net to lure kids. The dicey part is who gets to decide what is "bad" in the grey areas and that has also always been the case. It ain't going away.
At least they had the decency to let you know it was going on....I'm just curious as to what they plan to do with this information? To quote the article -
' Bell Sympatico has informed its customers that it intends to "monitor or investigate content or your use of your service provider's networks and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy any laws, regulations or other governmental request."...A spokeswoman for Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said no decision has been made on the bill, known as the Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act. But she noted that Day has spoken to telecom industry officials and legal experts about bringing it forward as early as the fall session.'
This means Sympatico users are agreeing to disclose to the government whatever Bell feels like disclosing! No mention has been made of getting a warrant,etc....to prove that this should be carried out for a specific reason. There's no real mention of disclosure criteria.
On a side-note - Stockwell Day is a bit of a dingleberry - a creationist who believes the earth was created 5000 years ago....the sharp swing to the right has begun in Canada....looks like the terrorists are winning when our freedoms start to get whittled away, bit by bit....
To help you surf the web without being spyed on I recommend installing Tor then installing FoxyProxy.
Tor takes care of the proxy encryption, and FoxyProxy lets you use all those proxies while you surf.
Invaluable for the privacy conscious, or rather anyone living in the 21st century.
Meet new people, and kill them.
Stating that you will disclose information that is required by law is obvious. But disclosing information that you are not allowed to disclose and do not have to disclose, makes no sense. I can see no benefit to the company. What gives?
Monopolies should not be allowed to impose terms like this as part of being allowed to be a monopoly in the first place. Seems that customer's only recourse here is to get it legally overturned, since you can hardly move to a choice of other providers.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
that they could go to court and justify anything.
It does seem the people holding the information are allowed to define what information must be held. The whole point seems to be protecting the information they collect, which they are required to define. So, if they define that they collect "ALL of X" they only need to secure "All of X" to be in compliance.
Like most laws made these days there are sections used to sell it to the public and those "other" sections which are used to get it approved by businesses and others.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Wow, Stuff like this makes me so glad that I'm an American where we aren't subject to this kind of wholesale violation of our privacy.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
Watching for Terrorism or watching for copyright violation? .... Or is copyright violation soon going to be considered a terrorist act... seems like a slippery slope to me
David
Unfortunately 99.99% of internet users have no clue about encryption, they have never heard of PGP, probably don't know when they are even viewing an https page. The mass bumbles along in ignorance and any attempt to educate them is blocked by an enourmous inertia of apathy.
It would take several years of media coverage about invasion of privacy and some high profile cases before the masses would rise from their slumber and do something about Bell Sympatico. It's the same as what the US government (and the UK government) are doing to strip away freedom in the name of security.
It's sad but true, if you understand the issues you are in a tiny minority. Don't expect and change anytime soon.
while sco {
wget -O
}
You, my friend, have just hit upon the secret of 21st century "free-market" (ha, ha) capitalism. The "customer" is no longer king (that's so old-skool) - just an exploitable means to an end. The end is, of course, satisfaction the real customer - the shareholder.
O Canada... *shakes head sadly*
Of course, I am a Canadian living in the USA.
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
IANACL, but even if it's legal to say "we are changing our service agreement," how can it possibly be okay to say "we have changed our service agreement as of two weeks ago?" The first at least allows you to cancel your service in response.
Unless this is some amazing cock-up, it probably means that some sort of Internet dragnet went into operation on June 16 and got the goods on a bunch of Bell Sympatic customers.
This is not my sandwich.
Is it possible to force my DHCP to churn addresses? I figure that if they ("they" being the MAFIAA and the US govt...even in Canada thanks to the fine work of Beverly Oda and Stephen Harper) want data, let's give them plenty.
We always used to joke about spies listening in on our coversations 20 years ago. We all knew that the gov did wiretaps and listened in on our communications from time to time. But only the loons really thought that "average joe" was being spied on. We honesly didn't worry about it.
Well, now it's too late. Total Information Awareness is upon us and all of our communications by phone/cell/computer are being listened in on and filtered through. There really is nowhere go but downhill. You watch. Within 5 years all foreigners visiting the US will have to have GPS enabled chip implants. Within 10 all prisoners will have them. Within 15 it will be a Felony for any US citizen to remove/disable their chip implant. Anyone want to join me while I go live in cave somewhere?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I may be paranoid (and that doesn't neccessary mean that people aren't waching me) but considering the retro-active nature of the change what springs to mind is that they have already disclosed everyone's useage data and then realized (whoops) that that was illegal so then changed the TOS (retro-actively) to cover their butts.
That's what my little voices are telling me anyway.
Cuz that really made me laugh.
They're just the RIAA/CRIA's buttmonkey!
ere in the United States, we have strict privacy laws which protect us from such intrusive "techniques"
Someone please mod parent up +1 Funny.
That is a hilarious example of SNL-type sarcastic humour.
Even if they "terrorists" are clueless wannabes with no knowledge or skills or anything, with no resources (one of their big requests was boots that would fit them) and the government even has to supply them with a camera to take pictures of their "targets."
Terrorists? Ha! Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
--MarkusQ
I'm a customer and haven't received a thing.
Has anybody? Or should I assume that they are notifying us through an article in the Globe and Mail and not via email/snail mail?!?
I just called to cancel my Sympatico account. It will be disconnected tomorrow morning before 8:00. The alternative, Rogers, used a heavy advertising campaign bragging "No cap, now or ever" to lure customers to their new 5Mb service, then proceeded to implement a 60GB cap a few months later. We cancelled that too. There is apparently no non-evil ISP in my area.
I just noticed that an HTTPS to /. conveniently redirects you to the non-secure page. ...
The sad thing is that essentially all Canadian (over the phone) ISPs essentially ARE Bell. The others are just Resellers. Primus? Nope, they resell Bell. (I know, I worked there). This is because Bell owns nearly all the phone lines in the country. So switching providers won't get you out of it. It's also the reason why when you call your provider, their Tech support can't do Jack-All when Bell is having an 'outage'.
This is an outrage. And here I thought that all the news about it happening in the US was not affecting me... so much for that.
Jesse Hirsh of openflows.org will be on CBC radio commenting on this story today at 5:15-20pm. Tune in 99.1FM toronto, or hit
http://www.cbc.ca/listen/index.html to listen online.
(someone mod this up a bunch please)
-math
Um, no, only one choice is much more commonly understood to be a monopoly. And as another poster elsewhere stated: A "Free Market" argument presupposes that there is competition for the consumer to take advantage of. What the GP poster here describes is decidedly not a "free market".
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
"I am also willing to learn French."
Sorry but you won't fit in with the vast majority of English speaking Canadians:)
We only learnt it when we had to... back in high school.
Bonjour!
Many people are suggesting "Just go through a proxy". My question, seriously, how do you trust a proxy? How can you be sure that it's not just a honeypot, looking for "security concious" people, then logging every single thing they do? Sure, we can examine the client-side setup to see what's going on, but do we have any clue what's happening at the proxy end? What's to stop them from copying every single link and byte that goes through the proxy for future evaluation?
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Thankfully, the companies that lease the lines from Bell and then sell their DSL to the customers aren't affected. I live in Toronto and my ISP is a small business called 3web, which does exactly that. I called them up, and this only affects the lines that direct Bell customers use.
For anyone keeping track, both Rogers and Bell officially suck as ISPs now, with Rogers' 60GB bandwidth cap and hugely overpriced services and bloatware software.
I for one welcome our telco spying overlords...
@^#*%#&*^%@$**@ NO CARRIER
Move along, nothing to see here...
look.ca offers a high speed service that does not use phone lines (dsl). It uses microwave towers and requires line of sight and a small antenna. This is kind of a secret as most people I tell either don't know about it or believe it's out of business. It's not. Being wireless it's not effected by power outages, I know as I've surfed during the last few. I just plug the modem and my laptop into a UPS. In a traceroute to my co-lo server I don't see any bell routers just a few owned by look then the big pipe. If you are lucky enough to be in view of one of the towers (one is on the CN Tower which should cover a lot of Toronto) They also offer TV and a higher speed, fixed IP service.
I suspect this is being presented backwards. Mabye all ISPs do that because each country's respective government makes them (US and UK governments certainly require this kind of thing), and this ISP is just too honest not to admit it...
"Canada's [former] Largest ISP, Bell Sympatico.."
Now with Rogers High-Speed Internet you get the follow features! 3 Months at a "special" introductory price! Free Installition Faster speeds than dial up, and Bell DSL and now with 50% less spying! . . On a personal note they also don't constantly call you trying to sign you up for garbage and rip-off deals. My hate knows no bounds for Bell. I finally got fed up with them and canceled my landline. These days with a bit of ingenuity you don't have to promote the old monopolies that really don't give a shit about you as a customer because they don't have to. Various Cell companies and Cable companins can fullfil the same role now (though many cable companies are only marginally better).
I know that I will be demanding from Bell every month to delete all personally identifiable information that is not required to do business. Please read for yourself: http://www.qp.gov.ab.ca/documents/acts/F25.cfm
Why is this modded offtopic? It's perfectly relevant. Somebody not reading context while meta-modding?
and I have had about enough of it. This will probably be the straw that broke the camel's back. They use the most underhanded tactics to screw over their customers and their employees. As technical support, my primary job function is to SELL SELL SELL! Technical support takes a back seat - telemarketing is now my job function. When a customer calls in with a problem, say for instance they have a virus, I have to try and sell them our anti-virus software. Problem is - if the machine is already infected, installing an antivirus is not going to work. They will call back when they get their CD and complain that it won't install, then we tell them to go see a tech. Meanwhile - their computer is screwed and we continue to charge them for their service and the antivirus software. We are expected to make sales targets. I feel like a slimy used car salesman. Now I guess I am expected to invade the privacy of the customers I am supposedly helping. It doesn't seem right. I'm looking for another job.
Under the Canadian Freedom of Information Act, you are entitled to a number of things. One of which is the ability to request all information that someone has on you so you can review it.
If I was a Sympatico customer, I'd simply start a campaign where on a regular interval, people can request to view all the information Bell Sympatico is tracking on my account. Thats going to cost them a fair amount of time and money if enough people do that.
All the thick people who couldn't bother spending 15mn to find a decent ISP here in Canada are getting overcharged for their DSL by Bell Sympathico AND now spied upon! This is close to being funny.
Really, I cannot be sympathic to the people using Sympatico...I suppose one could relate that to AOL-users love from Slashdotters.
"Famously, this is the reason that the OpenBSD project is based in Canada and not the US"
I believe it has more to do with Theo de Raadt living in Calgary at the time he split from NetBSD to form OpenBSD, although the extra freedom Canadians enjoy is another nice benefit to the project.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Is there a Canadian/Toronto ISP that does provide low cost/ high speed DSL- without a bunch of nonsense - sur charges, down time etc.? I'm guesssing there are a boatload of Torontonians here ready to switch. If not lets start one - a co-op. I'll donate/volunteer time. I have had enough of Bell.
...then the people in the government who know very little will try to regulate it, to control it, to stop it. After all doesn't everyone know that if you don't reveal all of your data at all times you must have something to hide. If you have something to hide, you must be breaking the law, and therefore should be arrested.
OK, the new law will read something like, if you use encryption, you will arrested for violation of the Patriot Act v2.1 and will have all criminal charges brought against you. Of course, if the encryption is not broken in 96 hrs, then the charges are doubled because you really really are a criminal.
Does anyone out there know at what level they are eavesdropping?
Bell Sympatico provides DSL. The "DSL" portion is really provided via Bell Canada, who according to Canadian law, must provide similar services and use of its infrastructre to other ISPs that offer DSL connectivity. The result of this is that all DSL traffic goes over Bell Canada's wires at some point, regardless of the ISP providing the resulting internet connectivity.
Will changing DSL providers make a difference? Or does this spying happen at the ISP level?
I'd like to know because I'd like to stick with DSL, but I'm not going to stick with Sympatico on general principal.
--- posted anonymously to protect my identity so I'm not suspected of terrorist activity just for asking a question. Christ, has it really come to that?
The way you look at the world changes when you grow up like that. I could see the truth that most Americans never think of. I knew who the next likely enemy was after the cold war ended. I knew our intelligence agencies were ill equipped to fight the new threat (And still aren't.) I knew that just about the entire world likes to hate America. I knew it was only a matter of time before there was a major terrorist attack in the USA. I know that it's only a matter of time before there'll be another one.
Most Americans seem to have become complacent again. They'd rather live in ignorance, and they like to think that the government is proetecting them. They keep telling themselves that. "Oh it'll be all right, the government is protecting us." Ask someone who knows what the government's been up to, though, and you'll find that it's more by luck than by skill than we haven't had a big successful attack since 9/11. I don't care what your politics are, the level of incompetence displayed at all levels and on all sides should disgust you.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
actually they are doing more. By explicitly warning that they "monitor content" they are saying that literally a human being will be looking at your personal emails, the same web pages you do, your MSN chats etc and read what you read, invetigate what company web sites you visit. You have no more expectation of privacy in that context, and they are thereby entitled to more or less do anything they want with that information. including and not limited to using it to publically humiliate you by telling your boss you have a AIDS. God help you if you are a politician that Sympatico doesn't like. Or perhaps you are the CEO of a large corporation and sympatico wants to glean some stock tips by reading your email.
peons are not the ONLY people who use ISPS.
Until an ISP goes so far as to tell you they are looking at the CONTENT of your communication, they are subject to criminal prosecution under the criminal code for illegal interception of wire communications. The phone company is not allowed to listen to your phone conversations... nor is an ISP allowed to intentionally monitor the content of your data. if they overhear accidentally that is one thing. intentionally snooping on the content is a CRIME. (unless they tell you in advance... and for all intents and purposes... Sympatico has just done that).
Everyone by law is OBLIGATED to hand over whatever information/object etc they have when faced with a search warrant authorising that seizure. They aren't merely saying "yea, we'll hand your stats over [when presented with a warrant]." they are saying "yea well record everything you do even though we have no legitimate reason to. We'll look at it. and yea, we'll hand it over if any government (even china) asks with or without a warrant'.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
"Bell Sympatico, has informed its customers".
Have they really? How? When?
I am a Bell Sympatico user at home, and the IT contact person for a company, which is using Bell Sympatico services - but I have not received any notification as of today.
Has anyone?
It may not be long before North Americans are using encrypting proxies in China to gain access to content on the 'web. (Okay, we'd likely use South American or European servers, but hey that's not as controversial, is it?)
I might have to investigate going back to the cable companies for my broadband access.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Canada's Largest ISP, Bell Sympatico soon to be Canadas smallest ISP now that this story is breaking.
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. Dwight D. Eisenhower
You can use any of these DSL providers. Vote with your dollars people.
well, unfortunately making the "customer" the means to the end is driving the quality of life for most people down.
it means that only owners get to have power in the world, not people who produce - while I'm not in favor of socialist (power to the workers) mentality, the ieda that the only way to have any freedom or power in the owrld is to own companies is one that most people should find horrifying.
how is this redundant? I wish I had MOD points
I suspect that if you were to examine history, you would find that attacks against civilians by military or paramilitary units have been utterly commonplace. Even in these supposedly more enlightened times, military attacks against civilian targets have been justified in the name of some greater good.
Of course, the judgement of whether an act of aggression against civilians was justified depends on who won (and subsequently wrote the history books!). After all, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
The only difference is that this time, the US has been attacked. In the past, the US had largely been immune to this sort of violence. Unfortunately, the notoriety of the 9/11 attack, coupled with the unfortunate presence of opportunistic politicians has lead some to believe that things have changed, or that these sorts of attacks never happened before.
If there is such a thing as an age of terror, it started a few thousand years ago. Sadly, there is no indication it is coming to a close.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Truecrypt has an option to hide an encrypted volume within the random-ish data of another. You have a different password for each, and they suggest leaving sensitive-looking stuff in the outer one. See, I showed you what was there, can I go home now?
You seem to have confused "Ontario" with "Canada".
http://tor.eff.org/ - distributed encrypted anonymous socks5 proxy client (and server, for those who do care), a successor to freenet
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2464/ - firefox extension that enables tor proxying only for urls that match user-defined patterns
I may be wrong but I'm reasonably certain all residential DSL in Ontario goes through Sympathetico. One advantage to living in a remote (read that as dial up only) area is no DSL and no Sympathetico. The route between my desk and my servers in the US does not go through Sympathetico.
Oh I'm sure IF the bill passed then they MIGHT get around to making my small ISP knuckle under. Like I give a shit. I don't care if the guvmint reads everything I do. They'll find I'm a weird and quite boring person.
But yes, it's the princple of the thing. Geist is dead on when he points out there's no oversight in this proposed law and that current laws seem to work citing the arrest here of 17 terrorists.
I think in a large sense this is much more political than it might appear to the average American. Tradidionally we've had a Liberal party and a Progressive Conservative party and a always-5% ultra left National Democratic Party. Our conservatives are somewhat to the left of the US Republican party.
A few years ago the Conservatives lost. Badly. Very badly. Very very badly. As in "Tories, party of two, your table is ready". A right wing whacko bunch called (spit) "reform" began to make headway and eventually merged the burned ashes of the conservative party and pretend to the tories but are in name only.
The fuckwit that recently got eleced as our current PM and is one of the all time worst PM's if for nothing else, being a Bush ass-kisser. As, in they refer to him as Vice President, not Prime Minister.
As an example of some of his dangerous lunacy the Canadian government has followed suit and like the (spit) Bush administration will no longer allow the arrival home of dead bodies from Iraq to be televised.
Now, we don't have many dead bodies coming back (you yanks running out of bullets?) but it did raise a very large furor here recently when some young lady came back in a box and this was censored.
So, and sure I'm a conspiracy theorist, but I suspect that this stupid proposed law originated in the White House, not in Ottawa.
Not that we'll EVER know the truth, mind you.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Where does your SSH tunnel go to? Someplace down the
line it needs to emerge unencrypted (assuming you aren't just surfing to
your own remote server(s)).
Perhaps this has been addressed before, but I can tell you that as a layman user, the notion of encryption is baffling... layman users just don't know where to start. I mean, c'mon, it's not like there's a PGP for Dummies site running... or is there?
Any help posted here about how to get started using encryption, its traps and pitfalls, would be helpful.
Um
I thought they could monitor us regardless? Something called wiretapping? Any records the ISP holds can be subpoena'd by a court, criminal or otherwise.
Interesting tidbit that I thought I'd throw out there: Don't forget, Bell is a Crown Corporation, not a privately-owned one.
When are all the people who moved to Canada after Bush won the election going to move back due to this?
Don't let the ISP see what you are up to. anoNet (http://anonet.org) is an anonymous encrypted IP network which can protect those Canadians from their ISP. Setup takes two minutes. Just install OpenVPN and double click on the config file on the website. Pretty easy eh?
Recently M$ slid itself in as "technology partner". I noticed an immediate reduction of quality and found that the routing was constantly being forced around in circles inside the sympatico net and started to include trips via Washington state. I found communication with bell sympatico to always be poor and network changes and outages were never posted in advance. It was worse as Microsoft installed new web based services that would only work with windows products. EVEN THOUGH THE SERVICE WAS BILLED MAC COMPATIBLE!!! To make it all worse I was having a local telephone line noise problem that they were never able to remove.
I now have look.ca which is a smaller service that provides my net connection and TV over wireless microwave antenna.
Both of your assumptions are likely to be proven false.
Although the current Conservative government is a minory government, they have been reading/swaying public opinion rather well and some of their other recent announcements have been met with everything from total apathy to considerable support.
For example, hot on the tails of the filing of the $30,000,000 MySpace lawsuit (14-year-old girl assaulted by 19-year-old boy she met online), the Canadian government announced that it intends to raise the age of consent in Canada "to protect 14 year old girls from adult predators". The local talk/news radio stations started doing polling and found out that about 97% of respondents were in favour of a revised law. The thing that makes this interesting isn't the law - it was part of the election platform - but the fact that they waited until there was a high-profile case in the media to lubricate its entry into the House. If not for the high-profile MySpace lawsuit then the bill would have received higher scrutiny and people would be less afraid to point out its shortcomings. As it is now, anyone who objects to the new law is painted as coddling pedophiles...
The fact that the police arrested terrorists in Toronto should prove that a new surveillance law isn't required, but instead it simply scared people into thinking that trading liberty for security is a good idea, the same way 9/11 did in the USA.
Conservative politicians use FUD to push their anti-liberty, legislated morality agendas on people on both sides of the Canada/USA border.
The problem with Slashdotters using encryption for everything is that we're such a small minority of the ISP population that we will become both obvious and "bite-sized" targets for extra attention. The odds of ever reaching the tipping point where encryption isn't automatically considered reasonable evidence of guilt (except where the IP resolves to a bank) is probably quite low.
To my knowledge, it is legal to use crypto software in Canada. Here is an overview on Canada's Policy on Cryptography
Here is a copy of the overview (for those too lazy to click the above link):
"I could see the truth that most Americans never think of. I knew who the next likely enemy was after the cold war ended"
e tta2.htm
I know you won't hear about this on Fox news, but both Saddam Hussein and bin Laden were at one time US intelligence assets in the middle east. Bin Laden sent into Afghanistan to ferment opposition to the Soviets and Hussein, a one time hit man for the CIA put up to organizing a coup against his own Ba'ath Party. Their chief crime being trying to organize unification with Syria. You see a fragmented middle east is much easier to control that a united Arab front. Of course one of the side effects of this policy is out of control 'freedom fighters` organizing suicide bombings. This wasn't considered a problem until they attacked the US.
The war against terror being largely bogus as once the USSR collapsed the US had to create another pretext to occupy the worlds mineral rich territories. You see we here in the gap have been suffering from terrorism for a long time (the Lockerbie bombing, Canary Wharf etc) the difference is we never saw the need to cancel democracy.
"My world was a world of security fences and guards carrying AK47s"
Are you sure what continent your grew up on. The AK47 was designed by Timofeevich Kalashnikov and used primarily by the Red Army.
'"They keep telling themselves that. "Oh it'll be all right, the government is protecting us."`
Who's going to protect us from your government.
"I want everyone to remember, why they need us!"
Adam Sutler
http://quotations.about.com/od/moviequotes/a/vend
davecb5620@gmail.com
But I digress. I don't know much about my great grandparents, but my grandfathers both served in World War II. Mom was stationed in Turkey and Libya when she was little and talks about how well my granddad got on with the Arabs there. From what she said it was a bit unusual -- most of the military families holed up with the other Americans and didn't interact with the locals much, but my grandad was in the OSI and had to have contacts to gather intelligence. He made an effort to learn about the culture, language and traditions of the people there and because of that the locals never gave him any trouble. I'm pretty sure that the America we're seeing now does not represent the ideals that my grandfathers and father fought to protect, and I'm pretty sure that if we'd used my grandfather's approach of understanding who and what we were dealing with, we'd be in much better shape in the middle east than we are now.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana