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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
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.
>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!!
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."
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.
Bob: Hi, I'm Bob Mackenzie, this is my Big Brother Doug.
Doug: How's it going eh?
Bob: Not good, eh. Cuz, we still haven't gotten our two-four for findin' that mouse in the beer bottle yet, have we?
Doug: No, eh. It was like, the thing that is in Bottle 101 is the worst thing in the world.
Bob: But didn't we make Strange Brew in 1983, not 1984, which was like, one year later eh?
Doug: Oh, take off!
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?
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....
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
}
All hail Big Beaver.
- - - "Some people hate the English. I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers."
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.
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.
Thanks. You would think two contiguous countrys with similar governments would be closer than they have seemed to be in the past. I have friends who visited Canada and enjoyed themselves immensely and having lived in Florida previously, I can tell you Canadian tourists seem to enjoy themselves in the US. Maybe it's just us commoners who know how to get along.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
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?
If you use Tor, you're actually going through a sequence of several proxies, using different encryption keys for each hop along the route. The first proxy in the chain knows who you are, but can't see where you're going; it can only see the next proxy in the chain. The last proxy in the chain can see where you're going, but it doesn't know who you are, because all it can see is the previous proxy in the chain. Those in the middle can't see either the origin or the destination.
Unless an attacker manages to compromise all the nodes along your route (which changes every few minutes), the Tor network can't figure out who was going where.
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?