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Pirate Party of Canada Promises VPN For Freedom

Posted by timothy on from the at-least-we-don't-need-it-in-the-u.s. dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Pirate Party of Canada has announced that it will extend a VPN originally set up to allow people in Tunisia to browse freely while internet censorship was imposed there. Canada may soon be added to that list since the ruling Conservative Party has vowed to introduce a bill that would provide unprecedented systematic interception and monitoring of Canadians' personal communications. So the Pirate Party of Canada has announced it will extend that service to Canadians."

2 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Whats the use? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's not true, if the VPN _doesn't_ use a cert from one of the major SSL cert providers (which may already be compromised by governments) and you check the cert. It's trivial to use openssl (possibly with a wrapper like TinyCA) to issue your own certs, so if the VPN provider is doing that, it's much harder in some ways for a government to MITM (in fact, if they do manage it, it means either (1) they've compromised the VPN provider itself or (2) RSA is broken)

    This is why gpg security is "better" in some ways than SSL CAs - no central CA authority to compromise. It's weird that we haven't seen a gpg encryption option for TLS yet though, there's no technical difficulty I can see.

  2. Re:PPoC is a joke by Nimatek · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Pirate Parties around the world are one-issue parties"

    This is incorrect. The scope of the Pirate Party movement differs from country to country. In countries like Sweden and Germany they evolved from being one-issue parties and worked out programs that cover a whole range of political issues, while their membership and electorate keep growing steadily. Here is the party program of the German Piratenpartei, for example: http://wiki.piratenpartei.de/Parteiprogramm

    You can't have a 'traditional' party right from the start, there need to be certain levels of momentum, manpower and support, for it to be able to branch out and compete with the established parties on their turf. The cool thing about new parties is that you can take part and contribute to shaping the program and course significantly, which is exactly what they need. If you agree with their general aims - contribute. Pirate Parties won't magically materialize out of thin air and change politics by people just waiting for them to do so.