Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?"
But then they'll only see what you see. They also want to hear what you hear, touch what you touch, taste what you taste and above all else, know what you think. They're still on the fence about smelling what you smell, because that would be taking it too far.
...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
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
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.
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.
"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."
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
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.
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.
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.