Canadian Internet Surveillance Dies a Quiet, Lonely Death

Dr Caleb writes "According to the Globe and Mail, 'The Internet surveillance legislation sponsored by Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has disappeared down a dark legislative hole. For all intents and purposes, the bill is dead. If the Harper government still wants to pass a law that would make it easier for police to track people who use the web to commit crimes, it will have to start from scratch.' The bill has been sent to a public safety committee for extensive revision, but it must be debated for five hours on the House floor first, and that won't happen before summer recess. This is a followup to the story we discussed in February titled 'Against Online Surveillance? You Must Be "For" Child Porn.'"

Comments

Quiet? Lonely?

[Cyphase]

Weren't we all there cheering?

Re:Quiet? Lonely?

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I am cheering. I am sure I am not alone.
There is a system in place. I don't see any reason for a new law. I personally would bet that any law enforcement official asking a judge for a warrant for a pedo case is going to get their warrant in a flash.
Deserved or not, pedophiles are the biggest boogiemen of our time.

Re:Quiet? Lonely?

[MightyMartian]

Orders in Council can only be made where legislation has given the Government the authority to do so. It cannot concoct new government powers out of thin air.

Re:Quiet? Lonely?

[tixxit]

Recently discussed this with a cop. It isn't so easy. He said most warrants for wiretaps are 600-odd pages and take a god awful long time to get through. Part of the bill would let them tell the phone company to start collecting data on someone while they went through the process of getting warrant signed. Once the warrant was approved, then they'd get access to all the data and could make their case. One of the problems, even with pedos, is that they know the guy is a Bad Dude, they know he's committing crimes, but they can't get the evidence because they can't get the wiretap in time. I definitely don't agree with the bill, but it isn't so cut a dry as some people make it out to be.

Re:Quiet? Lonely?

[deimtee]

It should not be easy. I think the 4th amendment to the US constitution has it pretty close to right.
However, it also shouldn't take 600 pages. If you can't say what you want to intercept and why in a couple of pages, you shouldn't be doing it anyway.

Re:Quiet? Lonely?

[realityimpaired]

Why not since I can buy the same gun that was used in the Montreal Massacre? How come that wasn't banned?

The Browning 9mm HP is a restricted firearm, meaning you need a special permit to own it, it is illegal to transport it unless it's locked in a case in a "made safe" state (firing pin removed, not loaded, magazine stored in a separate case). Additionally, it doesn't support a fully automatic firing mode like an MP5 or an AK-47, and the maximum legally allowed magazine size is 5 rounds.

These laws/requirements existed before the Ecole Polytechnique massacre, btw... the reason the laws didn't get updated is because the person who was responsible for the massacre was already violating a half dozen gun laws. More laws wouldn't have made a difference in that case, and the one thing that they *could* have done to prevent it from happening has already been done: it's *significantly* harder to get a restricted weapons permit today than it was 20 years ago. Of course, the cons scrapped the gun registry, which was the *other* law that got changed as a result of that event.

But

[future assassin]

the Cons are in full swing to get Bill C11 passed http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6488/125/

I'm am of the belief that only taking up arms is the way to go in the next 15 years to remove corruption and corporate influence and introduce liability to political positions and decisions.

Re:But

[addie]

In Canada we reached just over 61% turnout in the federal election in 2011, which was a slight rise from a historically low 59% in 2008. With the way our first past the post system works, that meant the Conservative Party of Canada became government with only about 40% of the total vote - working out to just 5-6 million people out of a country of 35 million.

Getting people to vote is extremely important, yes. But having a voting system that is fair and accurately represents voter preference is also necessary.

Re:But

[billcopc]

We had a 61% turnout last year, but since the FPTP system is so retarded, our Canadian version of Dubya won a (narrow) majority despite getting less than 40% of the votes.

The way most of us read the results, it means over 60% did NOT want that guy to win. Either way, since getting his majority he's been ramming all these big brother bills down our throat, along with unprecedented military spending and all the other abusive stuff you neighbours have been subjected to for the last few terms. Shit's going downhill fast and riots are become more and more frequent. Amazing how easiy one sellout can ruin a country for millions of people.

Re:But

[Beardo the Bearded]

Economists? Interesting.

Jim Flaherty's first budget in 2006: 468 billion

Today's debt: 584 Billion

That's $116 BILLION in overspending in the last six years.

Conservatives. Discuss and define, please.

Re:But

[mirix]

I've always been partial to Crime Minister Harper.

Re:But

[willy_me]

There's nothing sanctified or noble about not showing up at the polls. It's just sheer idiocy and laziness.

If one is indifferent as to who gets elected then it is best that they do not vote. If they vote then, on average, they will vote for whoever invested the most in advertising. This is not the way it should be. If you don't care or are insufficiently informed of the candidate's policies then stay at home or cast a blank vote.

If only 50% of a population votes then that tells you the other 50% do not care which party gets elected. There is nothing wrong with that. Should the governing party screw up then you know that you will get a much higher turnout at the next election. It is the ability to vote that is important and keeps the politicians in line not the actual vote.

System is Working

[tomhath]

Despite all the howling we've been hearing, it sounds like the democratic system worked as designed. Public debate, bad ideas squashed, eh?

Re:System is Working

[MightyMartian]

Oh give me a break. When the Liberals were falling to pieces, they were blaming the media for being right wing.

I can't remember who said it, but the saying "A politician complaining about the press is like a captain complaining about the sea."

The Tories have gotten bad press because they've done bad things. In their incarnation as a minority government, they invented out of thin air the notion of executive privilege, which has never existed in the Canadian constitution. They used prorogation to evade a confidence motion, becoming only the second government in Canadian history to use it to avoid censure by Parliament (the first being good old Sir John A Macdonald who was trying to avoid paying the price for the Pacific Scandal). Now they have a pretty silly crime bill that it looks like at least some provinces are going to refuse to pay for, and have been caught fibbing about F-35 cost estimates. And what, you want the media to ignore that and just say nice things?

Omg... proof read

[Anonymous Coward]

How hard is it to proof read a story before submitting it?
It's "For all intensive purposes" ffs.

Re:Omg... proof read

[istartedi]

OK, you brought me out of the woodwork. Everybody knows it's "for all in tents and purchases".

harper didn't keep us from sinking

[Chirs]

I rather suspect that Harper himself (and the Conservatives in general) had little to do with our economic stability. That's more likely due to huge resource exports as well as stricter banking regulation.

Tightening up on crime while the crime rate is dropping is a joke. The claim that they have a majority "mandate" with 40% of the vote is a joke. They've been found to have breached parlimentary privilege multiple times, they've been found to be in contempt of Canadian parliament. They intentionally violated the election spending limit, they prorogued parliament twice to avoid nonconfidence votes, they fired the President of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission for reporting that the Chalk River nuclear facility had a high risk level, they lowballed the F-35 spending costs, they lowballed the Libya mission costs, and a string of other problems.

Re:harper didn't keep us from sinking

[MightyMartian]

And now they're running neck-in-neck with the NDP. The problem in the end isn't the Tories, it's that the bottom fell out of the Liberal party, and someone had to govern in the meantime. Now that it looks like the Bloc is about to be taken off life support and Quebec has decided to re-engage with Federalism, and the majority of center and left-of-center voters have decided to send the last remaining major Western liberal party into the dustbin and gone with a left-of-center party, we ought to see things change.

Yes, Harper's policies, or at least some of them, are pretty fucking stupid. But it's not like the Liberals before the didn't have stupid policies. You go back to Confederation, and it's littered with stupid policies, and some outright abusive ones. Canada has survived far worse governments than Harper's, but because so many people are either just as ideologically handicapped as Tory supporters are, or have so little knowledge of the country's political history, they make Harper into this almost comically Darth Vaderesque figure. It's moronic. He isn't that good and he isn't that bad, and he's now facing a country that's basically throwing the Liberals into a distant third place rump and saying "Those NDP guys look interesting."

And you know what, if the NDP gets in, they'll pass a bunch of stupid policies, and you'll have a bunch of right wing morons of about your equivalent mental capacity comparing Mulcair to Josef Stalin and claiming Canada is going to become a Communist state, blah blah blah,