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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.
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.
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