Slashdot Mirror
Canadian Bill C-416 to Require Wiretapping
Matthew Skala writes "Bill C-416, recently introduced in the Canadian Parliament, would if passed require Internet providers to provide wiretapping facilities to law enforcement — without a warrant, and with 'confidentiality' requirements reminiscent of the secret-spying cases we've seen recently in the States. This new Act is a reprise of last Parliament's C-74, which failed when the Government's term ended. Coming back as a Liberal "private member's Bill" in a minority government, it will have little chance of success without cross-party support; but with the Conservatives in charge, all bets are off if they can find a way to claim it's about terrorism or child pornography."
If this keeps up where am I going to go when the USA is a police state? Canada? No good, Britain same over there. How about France?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
It's like Canada, the UK, Australia, and the USA are in a race to reach full Orwellian Status before anyone else does. I don't get it either; these are all supposed to be FREE countries.
Please, can we stop editorial comments like this: "but with the Conservatives in charge, all bets are off if they can find a way to claim it's about terrorism or child pornography."
Okay, I know Conserviative-bashing has been "the cool thing to do" in Canada for a while, but at least look who introduced the bill: "Marlene Jennings (Notre-Dame-de-Grâce--Lachine)." Click on her name, and you'll see she's part of the LIBERAL party. Believe it or not, the liberals have been responsible for a lot of crap too- stop blaming the Conservatives for every little thing that goes wrong up here.
Canadian speaking.
but with the Conservatives in charge, all bets are off if they can find a way to claim it's about terrorism or child pornography
It's comments like this that I find really anti-productive -- why do you assume that just because the current government is conservative that it's *not* about terrorism or national security?? Believe it or not, we conservatives are not interested in invading your private space, go live your life and have fun -- but we DO care if you die in a terrorist bombing or if your kids get raped and photographed by some perv.
Believe me, I don't want to live in Nazi Germany, but I don't want to die in a subway bombing either. Let's stop the partisan stuff and find a balanced solution.
I can see it now... giant portraits of a mustachioed man, their captions all reading "Big Brother is watching you, eh?"
When are people going to start using basic encryption (or better yet onion routing and strong anonymity)? There are technical solutions that make all this surveillance useless. We must implement steganographic techniques too so that there's no way to block the crypto.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
The government is not allowed to read my mail without a warrant.
The government is not allowed to listen in on my phone without a warrant.
Why the hell should they be allowed to read my internet packets without a warrant?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This is a Liberal bill and the author wishes to peg it on the Conservatives?
Well, duh...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It wont pass for two reasons. One, the three other (very liberal) parties wont let it happen and two, it's a private members bill.
p x?Language=E&Mode=1&Parl=39&Ses=1/
You can tell it's a private members' bill because of its high number, in a majority parliament situation a double digit numbered bill (c-16 c-42 etc) will pass, PMB's rarely pass.
Here is a list of the current PMB's:
http://www2.parl.gc.ca/HouseBills/BillsPrivate.as
As you can see there are hundreds of them to be considered with this one being at the end of the line.
I highly doubt this will ever be voted on in legislative session in this session of parliament.
Private members' bills almost never come up for a first vote, let alone a second or final one. They almost never pass. I can count on one hand the number of these bills that passed in the last parliamentary session, and they were mostly ceremonial.
This has no chance.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
...and thousands of years of democracy go down the drain.
We're entitled to everything, we give up some things to ensure safety and equality. How much we give up is also up to us, or at least it is supposed to be. To say the opposite is to invite totalitarianism, which is the proper word for what most people mean by 'communism.' A society without freedom can happen no matter what you call your government or what the idiots in office preach.
Stopping the government from doing stupid things (in the absence of a reliable voting system) means protest. Protest means organization. The right to assemble is protected by the first amendment. To nullify this right you only need two ingredients: the ability to investigate and detain any criminal without oversight, and a policy of 'those who speak against the government in wartime are criminals.' All surveillance without oversight does is make it easy to assume everyone is guilty without actually saying it. We punish criminals by taking their rights and freedoms, the purpose of the criminal justice system is to way the potential for taking the rights of the innocent versus the public interest in taking the rights of the guilty.
We are in yet another endless war, millions of our people won't die, so no one will think to do anything to stop it. Instead yet more of our rights will be lost, and our country will start looking even more fundamentalist. We added "under god" to the pledge to respond to 'the evil communist atheists.' What will we do to respond to 'the evil terrorist muslims?' Maybe we'll put a crucifix on the flag, or on the Great Seal. It's true that symbolic actions like this take away no one's rights, but they contribute to a culture of intolerance, which is exactly what is intended.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
Privacy, yeah, he respects privacy by wishing he could tell us who we can marry. The bedroom, that's a good public place for conservatives to govern, isn't it? We already know that he's happy to tell me what substances I can put in MY body, that's mighty libertarian of him. Next thing you know they'll be messing around with people's wombs. Oh, opposed to big government (but not a big military), sure, so long as that works for big business, and when big business calls the policy, that's a good substitute for democracy and government, is it? Oh, and censorship; we don't really know about that yet, do we? It's a minority government.
Unless, of course, you'd rather listen to what a politician says, rather than watch what they do. Then you'd be perfectly right.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I was going to moderate another post in this thread, but after reading your post I must object to some of the language you have used to make your point.
"(in which only about 6 people were killed in terrorist attacks)."
ONLY 6 people? Would invoking the War Measures Act have been more acceptable to you if there had been a hundred or a thousand killed by terrorists?
"sent in military troops to occupy Canadian territory"
You make it sound as the Canadian Forces are a foreign entity in their own land.
"the RCMP carried out hundreds of illegal searches and wiretaps."
Technically the searches and wiretaps were NOT illegal, because essentially martial law was in effect.
"allowing U.S. draftees to escape to Canada during the Vietnam war"
They did no such thing as allow them to "escape." They weren't prisoners.
"There was full-on military style domestic counter-insurgency operations being conducted on a huge scale in Canada in most people's lifetime."
It was NOT Iraq. There was no street-to-street fighting, no sieges of holy shrines, no massive numbers of casualties. True there were tanks in the neighbourhoods and soldiers on street corners, but they were relatively few and far between compared to the image your statement invokes (I know because I was there). This was not a massive military presence, and it was limited to Québec. The military was nowhere to be seen in the rest of Canada. You make it sound as if the entire country was "occupied" as you put it. It was not a "huge scale".
"Far crazier stuff has gone down in Canada's recent past!"
The October Crises was 36 years ago. MANY things have changed since then, and much of that change was because of the invocation of that draconian law, which was one of the only counter-insurgency tools available at the time. Smashing a fly with a sledgehammer? Certainly, but it worked. There have been no real terrorist threats since. Thankfully.
You could have simply been informative in your post, but instead you chose to editorialize, while seemingly ignoring the context of the time. This does a disservice to people, who are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves, after studying the links you provided, if the government of the time (not just Pierre Trudeau) acted improperly or excessively. You and I may agree that the War Measures Act was an outdated and overreaching Act, but if we choose to say that there were alternatives to invoking it, it should be our responsibility to show what those alternative were, and that they were would have been effective in ending the crisis of murder, kidnapping and terrorism.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
I met with these crazy bastards. They really do want to do what they are describing in the article, and what's more, they want the ISPs to pay for it all. Here's what they want:
Access to up to 10% of the ISP's membership at any time with their own GigE (or 10GigE) port which mirrors all data flow that crosses the ISP's network. Yeah, that sounds easy.
Up to seven enforcement agencies including Interpol would have access to that 10% of the membership at any time, all at once if necessary. The ISP would be required to provide that access from remote, possibly meaning that a separate Internet transit grouping faster than the primary ones customers utilize would be required just to ship the data.
Physical access to the ISP's server rooms and network gear at any time by any of the seven agencies.
Full 24/7/365 co-operation and possibly dedicated employees for these tasks, again at the ISP's expense.
And there's more. I asked about 30 questions and in fact was by far the most vocal of the group when it came to the discussion, much to my chagrin. The big players at the table (Bell Canada, Rogers) simply said "this is ridiculous and we'll oppose it to the end," whereas I asked them pointed questions about the whole deal and gave examples of how burdensome the bill could be, especially to a relatively small player. They don't care. Adapt or die.
The cops, as usual, were rubbing their hands in glee. More budget! More cops! Less liberties! Less privacy! Lower quality of life! It's all for the good!
...Steve
Funny, reading her biography, I would have hoped for better from her:
...
"Ms. Jennings is the Liberal critic for Justice and a member of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights"
"Ms. Jennings has been Vice-Chair of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology,"
"She was a member of the Joint House of Commons-Senate Standing Committee on Scrutiny of Regulations, of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics"
She seems to have the makings of a good, upstanding netizen, who would be protecting our rights
I have sent her a note, and am still reading the bill. I would encourage all Canadians to do the same:
Parliamentary Office:
416 West Block
Ottawa ON K1A 0A6
(613) 995-2251
jennim@parl.gc.ca
Constituency Office:
6332 Sherbrooke St W
Suite 204
Montreal QC H4B 1M7
(514) 489-8703
Time to exercise your democratic muscles and express displeasure at such things, no matte which party this comes from.
And, while I am no fan of conservative politics in Canada, or anywhere else, editorial comments such as the one on this article are unnecessary. Keep comments like that to your myspace page.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
The Bill would not permit wiretapping without a warrant. It would require TSPs to build an infrastructure that facilitates greater levels of wiretapping - but only with warrants/judicial authorization (as currently required).
The Bill would also require TSPs to provide subscriber name and address info to police upon request, without a warrant. TSPs are currently permitted to hand over this (and more) information to police without warrants, but they can refuse unless presented with a warrant. The Bill would remove that discretion in the case of certain basic subscriber information.