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Canadian Govt To Introduce Massive Internet Surveillance Law
An anonymous reader writes "The Canadian government will introduce
new Internet surveillance legislation tomorrow that will mandate a
massive new surveillance infrastructure at all Canadian ISPs and remove
the need for court oversight of the disclosure of customer information.
Michael Geist has a detailed FAQ
on the history of the bill, the likely contents, the lack of government
evidence supporting the need for the invasive legislation, and what
Canadians can do about it."
Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said the law will give the tools to police to adequately deal with 21st-century technology, and said anyone opposing the laws favours "the rights of child pornographers and organized crime ahead of the rights of lawabiding citizens."
If that's true, why do you need to avoid court oversight? If you're going after real criminals, what exactly is stopping you from getting a *warrant* to track them and get their information? Are Canadian judges uniquely reluctant to sign warrants when actual criminal activity is involved, so much so that you need to bypass them?
Or are you REALLY looking to go after someone else, someone that a judge is NOT going to sign a warrant for?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I give up. Just implant the video recorder in my brain already. Its the eventual result anyway.
What they want:
Step 1: assume all citizens are involved in organized crime
Step 2: observe until you can find a case
Step 3: issue fines
Step 4: revel in revenue increases due to above fines
It gets a lot harder when someone is asking "what probable cause do you have to watch this one?"
...for a change? I have another proposition: Lets pass a bill for a full massive surveillance infrastructure at all politicians, and here comes the important part, WITHOUT court order. Who is with me?
Won't somebody think of the children?
Typical slimeball politician - he'll probably come out with "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" next.
Don't forget - Canada doesn't have freedom of speech, so the police will be able to use this to harass thought criminals and other doubleplusungood types.
Travel light to Canada.
Have gnu, will travel.
It brings a tear to my eye to see that our beloved secret police will no longer get to enjoy the local bar, pub or coffee shop while listening in on people's conversations. Instead now they are going to be relegated to dank little cubes in the cellars of mammoth government buildings poring over endless text files of internet data. I can just imagine the deceased members of the East-German Stasi rolling in their graves.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
That is an extremely thin veil. The politicans really want to ultimately be able to control dissent. I grow weary of this crap but human ingenuity finds a way around little problems like these. I am waiting for the time when communities come together to build community-owned, decentralized networks nullifying the point of creating such laws as these. If the internet were really owned by the people, a surveillance law would be practically impossible to enforce. It just shows that government is afraid of the people and it should be. People should not fear their government.
I guess all Canadians are presumed Guilty, until you can afford to provide your innocence.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Make if easier for the government to do its job. At the end of every day email copies of your internet activity to Public Safety Minister Vic Toews.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Actually we do. It's 'freedom of expression' in our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Then one of the Jewish backed lobby groups got some 'hate speech' mechanism added - which is used to crush reporting of Israel's warcrimes, and patently ignored when peddling war propaganda about any of Israel's enemies.
Yeah, Canada is getting more like the US every day. Sorry to hear that, guys. You had a helluva nice civilised country up there.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Oddly enough, he seems to be going with the line that opposing this bill is questioning the integrity of front-line police forces. Of course, I'm questioning the integrity of front-line police forces. The entire system is built around the fact that we can't expect to trust all individuals to behave.
It's a thinly veiled excuse.
Just like the misconception that free distribution of independent literature would:
1) turn the peasants into hedonists (Confucianism - moveable type press)
2) put "the beast" into people (Catholic church - Gutenberg printing press)
Well, the governments were "right" back then so they must be "right" now aswell.
-- no sig today
This may be close to your last chance to be an anonymous coward, so sign the petition at openmedia,
http://openmedia.ca/StopSpying
Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said the law will give the tools to police to adequately deal with 21st-century technology, and said anyone opposing the laws favours "the rights of child pornographers and organized crime ahead of the rights of lawabiding citizens."
That's quite right, actually, I do "favor" their rights. They have a right to due process of law. Any government official who says they do not favor the rights of any individual under the law is not fit for office, and should probably be impeached. One of those rights is to privacy from government surveillance without a warrant.
Not that that quote even makes sense, anyways: anyone who opposes the bill favors the rights of everyone.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Can we start a petition to evict Canada from North America? They're giving us a bad name. Mexico is welcome to stay.
So you have no problem with that form the DHS now requires all US citizens to fill out when they "leave" the US for any reason be it business trip or vacation? I don't know of any other country in North America that requires its citizens to report to the government when the "leave".
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Just an observation... it seems that anything with great potential to be good to mankind always seems to come with something equally bad... maybe its some kind of conservation of benefit equality.. but if you think about it.. theres not too many things that come along with benefits that do not come with equal detractors. The Internet, with its promise of global communication and sharing has now become the tool for government control of the global masses. Sounds about right. Sadly.
I love how they are always trying to protect the children when all they want is to make their jobs easier. Can you imagine if say Coca cola were able to make laws. How many laws would they pass to make selling cola easier?
What this all boils down to is that they have all the tools they already need to nail organized crime as any judge will sign warrants for that. Where the judges are "uncooperative" is when it comes to trolling to see if protesters are planning on embarrassing the government or police.
What Canadians want is more protection of our rights and more exposure of what the police and government are hiding. This law proposes the exact opposite.
I can't imagine the surveillance they will now rain down on someone who say does a freedom of information request on the RCMP. A situation that no judge in a million years would agree to.
A good example of a law that most Canadians would want is that the police can't use a drone without a warrant. I don't want them peeking over my bushes.
Back in the 1030s Hitler is reported to have said something along these lines. "If you want to pass a draconian piece of legislation wrap it in 'protecting our most precious resource, our children' such legislation will never be defeated." He went on to use this tactic in regards to several pieces of anti-Jewish anti-Polish legislation.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
We have a myriad of technical solutions to this problem.
Tor and the .onion domains effectually neutralise the ability of a third party (The state or any other organisation) to perform survailance on internet traffic.
Freenet enables the disemenation of whatever material anybody cares to share, to anybody.
Bitcoin allows unregulated trade.
It should be our goal to spread these existing tools and develop new methods of ensuring information can be transferred between people without fear, censorship, or interferance of any other person.
We did this to ourselves, you know. Canada had three chances to toss the Harper government out, and the third time, we handed them a majority despite their myriad offences that would have toppled prior governments (butchering Statistics Canada, running endless attack ads, blowing a billion dollars turning Toronto into a police state for the G20, proroguing parliament to avoid answering difficult questions, complicity in torture of Afghan detainees, being found in contempt of parliament... And these are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head). As a nation, we deserve exactly what we're getting for not turfing that clown Harper at the first opportunity.
Remind me why I should ever vote for you again? I have voted against you in the previous number of federal elections (even while considering myself conservative) because of this stuff. You're not helping change my mind!
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
I don't understand what it is with this recent(?) obsession with wanting to bypass warrants? It just outright baffles and frustrates me.
BS. There's a 100% optional form available if you wish to register items you're taking abroad to avoid any hassles about duty on reentry, but it's sort of a waste of time IMHO which is absolutely not legal advise. If you have knowledge of any requisite form that millions of people departing the US each year are apparently not filling out, please let us know.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
the conservative base is retarded. they will always support surveillance and spying because 'they have nothing to hide'. thats all the excuse they need in their retarded heads.
Only a moron would think that conservative or liberal has anything to do with it. You need to open your eyes to the fact that ALL politicians the world over are in it for their own benefit. Chances are, in this case, that these laws are motivated by the intellectual property lobby.
You can't vote a government out, you can only vote another government in... and they would probably be doing pretty much the same as this one.
And Canada was doing OK with a minority government until the left decided to commit suicide by forcing yet another election that no-one wanted. That has to be one of the worst 'shot myself in the ass' moments in political history.
Perfect, I can't wait to pay the new Internet Surveillance Fee of $7.85 on both my home internet and my cell phone to cover the cost of this ridiculous display of Harper's majority government. I hope you conservatives are happy, way to ruin Canada.
"The new system would require the disclosure of customer name, address, phone number, email address, Internet protocol address, and a series of device identification numbers. "
That part about the "series of device identification numbers" will likely be a hardware profile similar to the kind used for DRM'ing software and not just a MAC address, if every access point records this profile then this type of surveillance is extensive, very extensive.
Your Internet fingerprint as it were.
For some reason I never associated Canada with this draconian crap, but there it is, along with Australia's equally intrusive measures soon the Internet will no longer be a forum of open discussion but rather one demoted to "content delivery" system, just like TV.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
That's not true. The Liberals lost their government for far less with the sponsorship scandal. By comparison, the Conservatives have done far, far worse in their favouritism, their contempt for evidence-based policy, and utter lack of transparency which they were elected to improve in the first place, and to suggest the Liberals would have done the same if they were in power is disingenuous at best.
Also, the election really came down to a last minute NDP surge, an anomaly in the campaign. If the left's power hadn't diluted at the last possible minute, then the Conservatives would have gotten a minority, which would have resulted in a joint Liberal/NDP government rule, given that the two parties had expressed no intention in working with the Conservatives should another Conservative minority come to pass. It was a political gamble that the left lost, but a failed gambit is far from 'committing suicide' or 'shooting themselves in the ass'.
This may be close to your last chance to be an anonymous coward, so sign the petition at openmedia,
http://openmedia.ca/StopSpying
And don't forget to donate as well
Yes, the election gave our Supreme Leader Stephen Harper license to build his police state (practiced during the G20), once he has legislation like this in place - and all the new prisons have been completed, and that might be seen as a "shot myself in the ass" moment I admit. Harper now has free reign to remake the country according to his own plan - and its all Right-Wing, all the time for him. I am ashamed of my fellow Canadians for electing this charlatan to office repeatedly.
However, from the point of view of the political Left (i.e. the New Democratic part, since even our old Liberals were very conservative much of the time, and sliding more so), it raised them from an also-ran with only a few seats in the house to being the official opposition for the first time in history. It also exploded the Liberal party which is all but dead at the moment.
The election polarized Canada politically. Now what remains to be seen is if Canadians can find the wits to throw Harper out on his fucking ass in the next election and elect an NDP prime minister. Sadly, Jack Layton died after the election and I think only he might have pulled that off.
Personally I think its probably too late for Canada now. Harper is in and he is going to stay in, using/abusing all the powers of his office to stay in power. I am quite prepared to believe that the Conservatives will find some manner to abuse this legislation once it passes to help stiffle the opposition or find dirt to spew out in attack ads.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Fourteen years ago I was invited to speak to Canadian MPs about "Internet safety." The only MPs that showed up (sober) were Conservative MPs. Other MPs (Liberals, NDP, and Bloc) were in the same building partying with the Lumber Lobby and the strippers they brought with them. A few Bloc MPs showed up a little later but were so drunk they could hardly walk.
To say I'm disappointed with this current turn of events is an understatement given what I have done to avoid it. That said, anybody who thinks that this is because the Conservatives are in power is, frankly, just an ignorant troll. Governments want control. All governments. You're job as the populace is to vocally encourage them to focus their efforts on methods of "protecting the people" (the initial and still principle role of government) that do so in a way that does not infringe on their rights as citizens.
If you're concerned about it (and you should be), be sure to contact your MP and tell them how you feel, what they should be doing differently, and how this is going to effect your vote in the next election.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
The easiest way for them to do this is to adopt another legal fallacy: like corporations are people, encryption is a munition, money is speech, the national "border" is 200 miles thick (100 miles to each side), and DRM is effective protection, declare the Internet as a public space and you can surveil with impunity.
(Acknowledged, those are US official legal fallacies and this is about Canada.)
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Ubiquitous surveillance catches misdeeds on both sides, this is very much a "Be careful what you wish for!" situation. This will create a whole new class of criminals specializing stealing everyone's stored information. If legislation like this is enacted I predict the rise of a peer to peer internet that circumvents ISPs entirely.
Guarantee of Rights and Freedoms 1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
(d) freedom of association.
In other words, you only have as much fundamental freedom of expression as the law allows.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
And then in the 20th century one of his family did the same thing.
You can't vote a government out
Yes you can. We Americans did it a few hundred years ago at the tip of a bayonet.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
The proposed lawful access legislation that will give law enforcement sweeping new powers, put a tremendous strain on smaller ISPs, and put all Canadians at risk of inappropriate and unnecessary surveillance. This 1984-like legislation is something that has been in the works in one form or another since 1999. It seeks to add far more warrantless Internet surveillance options for law enforcement officers. While I very much respect and support our fine police men and women, the information that the proposed bill will grant, without warrant or or oversight, should concern all privacy-loving citizens. Ontario’s fantastic privacy commissioner, Ann Cavoukian, outlines her concerns eloquently in an interview with Search Engine’s Jesse Brown:
http://searchengine.tvo.org/blog
Anyone interested, and we should all be interested, should read up on the details, listen to what others are saying, and let your MP know how you feel about this potential invasion of our privacy. If you feel strongly about this, you may also want to fill out the Open Media petition.
http://www.realprivacy.ca/write-my-mp
http://openmedia.ca/StopSpying
The Internet is what we make it. We should all be active participants.
Mod parent up. Every "free speech" provision in countries that have it has a "reasonable limits" clause, for yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theatre or "Kill the Jews!" to incite a crowd to violence.
Yes you can. We Americans did it a few hundred years ago at the tip of a bayonet.
And seem to have forgoten how since then.
There's an attitude hidden in your comment that is the root cause of the issue we're currently experiencing... it can be found in the sentence "I am ashamed of my fellow Canadians for electing this charlatan to office repeatedly." Unless you're talking about your fellow Canadians the members of Parliament, you have no point. Canada is supposed to be a representative democracy where you elect your MP to office, and the MPs come together to select a leader to act as Prime Minister.
If everyone actually voted for their best local representative and political parties were limited, if not disbanded, we'd have a MUCH different political landscape in place.
We need electoral reform to make the system work the way it was intended to work, not as some sort of distorted reflection of the US system.
As a result, this bill will change nothing new on that front. It can be assumed that the US has been spying on Canada extensively and sharing almost everything it gathers with Canada since 1947. (And vice versa)
What I believe it will achieve is a dramatic increase in the size of the intel databases, allowing intel to go from detective-style work to wholesale data mining.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
"Required"?
[Bill] Clennett can't remember if Chretien hurt him with the choke hold because it all happened so fast. But he did end up breaking the crown on a tooth during the scuffle.
A couple of months later, Clennett says the RCMP showed up at his door and offered to pay the $560 dental fee.
While he initially hesitated, Clennett says he took the money in order to buy an ad in the local French newspaper Le Droit, criticizing the Liberal government.
Even the aggressor/victim says the RCMP came to him and offered to pay. Clennett never even filed a lawsuit. How very Canadian of both the RCMP and Clennett.
Of course someone ordered the RCMP to make the offer, but that's a far cry from the implied "required by a court", and Chretien wasn't personally required to pay.
Perhaps you'd like to look into the aftermath a bit closer?