Slashdot Mirror
Canadian Telcos Secretly Supporting Internet Surveillance Legislation
An anonymous reader writes "Canada's proposed Internet surveillance was back in the news last week after speculation grew that government intends to keep the bill in legislative limbo until it dies on the order paper. This morning,
Michael Geist reports that nearly all of the major Canadian telecom and cable companies have been secretly working with the government for months on the Internet surveillance bill. The secret group has been given access to a 17-page outline (PDF) of planned regulations and raised questions of surveillance of social networks and cloud computing facilities."
If you think the telcos and ISP's in your country are the exception, you're kidding yourself.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Nothing new - governments have always monitored "the media," the Internet is the new media.
Not so secret anymore....
sudo make me a sandwich
...to monitor communications, seize property, or perform searches before "the internet", should there not be a mechanism to do the same with communications on the internet (email, web sites, social media, etc.)? Or is something about the internet fundamentally different that means "the government" shouldn't be able to monitor it? If so, why? How does this reconcile with the rule of law and the social contract in democratic societies?
Slashdot on government: "How dare governments track everything we do! This is outrageous!"
Slashdot on Google: "Eh, whatever. I willingly let them index my browsing history, search history, email, voice mail, text messages, online purchases, and even archive my mom's passwords on her unencrypted WiFi. How dare the government investigate them for privacy violations."
Nearly all the major ISPs in Canada are also supplying traditional content. Some are even creators of that content. They are the last companies that want to see the internet become a pipe.
All of these companies need to be forced to separate their old business from the new business with the understanding that the new company's goal is to be the best pipe possible and not to try propping up their old business models. Otherwise the interests of these companies is in direct conflict with the interests of a modern Canadian population. Check out the rates and services of 3rd world Caribbean countries and it is mind boggling. Jamaica offers 6Mbs unlimited cellular Internet for $40 US a month. The sell a D-Link router for you to have Wi-Fi for all the devices in your house. Canadian companies get all wound up about tethering your smart phone to a laptop because you might actually use some data that way.
Their arguments keep going on and on about how they need to spend so many billions on infrastructure and these high rates are justified to pay for that. I guess we need the Jamaicans to come up and show us how to do it right.
"Telco's everywhere are secretly supporting internet surveillance".
All countries are interconnected. All western countries are looking to pass legislation to mandate surveillance. As such all people, everywhere, are being surveilled.
This isn't acceptable any more.
One minute the U.S. is trying to pass internet surveillance legislation. The next it is Britain. Then Australia jumps on the bandwaggon. Now its Canada. ------- The people lobbying for this BS need to be fought decisively. Otherwise we can forget the "free" internet as we know it today.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
This surveillance will be mostly used to catch people downloading movies from torrent. No, it won't be used to catch people looking for child porn - media industry (which is owned by same people as telcos) is not interested in catching them, they are after 'pirates'. So, all 'pirates' go to jails (like half of the country), nobody subscribes to the internet anymore, telcos die, PROFIT. Also, this would probably kill movie industry as well because most of their clients that go to the cinema and pay real cash (i.e. youth) will be in jails. Piracy would be eliminated because there is nothing to pirate anymore. Isn't this great? The next reasonable move would be to make all those jailed 'pirates' work on uranium mines. This will solve Canadian carbon emission problems as well. Great future is coming, cannot wait!
It bothers me that so many years after snooping became both commonplace and well-known that most forms of communication on the Internet are still completely transparent to anyone who cares to listen.
I would think the Slashdot audience would be the ones who would help provide a solution to this problem, by building an internet communications architecture that was very secure by default. Instead we sit and watch as governments and critics around the world argue over just how far they should go, given that realistically very little stands in the way of them going as far as they want, technically speaking.
The way things are going, in a few years every communication you make is probably going to be stored in a big database somewhere, people will still be complaining about it, but still nothing will have been done to actually put any real solution in place by design.
the Internet is not just the new "media". It is also a channel for private communication.
Up to a few years back, private peer-to-peer communication (paper letters) was really private. (At least in The Netherlands we have strict laws on secrecy of correspondence.) Nowadays, chats, emails and everything else is being monitored.
.sig: No such file or directory
In many countries, the telcos are SOEs. In the USA, given our dislike for big government, they are privately owned (nod, wink). Which actually plays into the government's hand quite well. Given our Constitutional restrictions on warrantless searches and our right to be secure from government (but not private) surveillance, having a private entity do the data collection as an agent of the government sidesteps this little annoyance neatly. But in countries where there is no such restriction on the governments' snooping, they just run the network themselves.
At least you folks know where you stand when you pick up a phone. Us Americans can only wonder.
Have gnu, will travel.
Because if you are, you don't want to be !!
Who, after all, WANTS to be canadian, I ask you !! NO ONE !! That's who.
Let us look at them, now:
Rich Little
Bill Shatner
Alan 'sick of the night' Thicke
Those kids in the hall again
Everyone in Toronto (hate the french)
Everyone in Montreal (hate the canadians)
That guy from Lexx
and the countless others who just want to be anything but canadian, only they can't so they are secretly canadian !!
Your right they have. But if you take a look at what always happens after they implement that surveillance, you might understand why many, many people do not want it.
every single government in history has turned on the people it governs. Your casual attitude implies that you and your government are the exception. I hope your not that nieve.
You guys really need to fucking stop with the rollover-to-play ads. I've always read slashdot on my browser that doesn't have an ad-blocking plug-in because I like you guys and if something were to come up that interested me (e.g., ThinkGeek stuff), I'd be down to help you out and see if there's something I wanted to buy. Until such time as you fix this, though, you're going in my browser for interesting but junky sites. It seems like another sign of your demise, though hopefully it's just a fuck-up.
What do you think CISPA is about? It even gives the telocs legal immunity for doing it.
WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMAN. It is unacceptable.
>>>having a private entity do the data collection as an agent of the government sidesteps this little annoyance
Not quite. You can still sue the private telephone company for sharing your private data w/o your permission. That's why CISPA in in Congress now..... to eliminate your ability to sue them. (Only Netscape/Mozilla is opposing this; the other companies support its passage.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Why do they do this? I don't understand what's in it for the Telco/ISP.
Said it before: do unto them what they do unto you.
(from Holland, greets!)
While not surprising that it happens, it is vital that it be exposed for the power grab that it is. The problem is that the new forms of communication lack even the weak forms of protection afforded to old modes. For instance, telephone wiretaps require warrants, and postal mail is illegal to intercept by default as well. Compare that with the internet, where there are no legal prohibitions against snarfing the whole works, and great compulsion to do so.
There are multiple answers, of course, to make this process as difficult as possible. Social cohesion helps, as shown by the misery that the #TellVicEverything Twitter meme caused for Vic Toews' (Wullerton spit here) staffers. Encrypt everything, whether it needs it or not, and let the bastards sort out themselves what's important to them. Improved peer to peer protocols and the like could help blend traffic together, and make it harder to tell where the useful metadata is too, which email and other headers keep plaintext now. If you can't even tell who is communicating with whom, the challenge of where to serve the lawsuits makes it much more difficult to proceed. Finally, those who care the most about privacy, including the criminals themselves, will find off-line ways to communicate. The real bogey-men aren't dumb enough to throw everything out on the net to be archived, they'll go back to old, tried and true spycraft techniques.
It is also a channel for private communication.
Yes! But people are refusing to use it as such.
Tools to make it suitable for private communication have been available for 15 years or so, yet people not only refuse to use them, they actively go the OTHER direction - moving more and more of their private communication onto services designed explicitly to make it NOT private. Using facebook, google mail, and other such things for what could actually be private if they cared.
End to end encryption is the only way to ensure privacy. It is available in everything from instant messaging to email, yet I bet not one person in thousands uses it.
That's why privacy on the internet is dead. Nobody acted to save it when it was clear the direction was towards ever more government and commercial monitoring.
http://shop-js.sourceforge.net/crypto2.htm
Public Key Cryptography using RSA
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/12/public_key_cryptography_using.php
I guess unlike you, some Slashdot users actually think teaching *is* a real job. Go back to your Santorum rallies if you want to talk to someone who thinks a college education makes you "elitist".
Money. The telcos / cable companies have competing businesses.
For example, as I posted in the "Who's Pirating Game of Thrones?" thread, it costs a Canadian with Shaw about a grand to watch HBO in HD after taxes, fees, DVR rental, service upgrades, etc. It might be cheaper in other markets, but you have to remember that you can't trust what Bell or Rogers say on their website.
Pay-Per-View the latest release for $5.95 (plus the required minimum service levels, a box to support the service, etc)! Netflix is cheaper? Well, we're the content licencer for that show in Canada so we won't let Netflix show it up here. Sorry, did I say $5.95?
Now they can see if someone is getting the shows for free and turn them in to the regulatory agency / Crown prosecutors without any oversight, warrants, or anything else. You pay the telco / cableco their protection racket money and you don't get sent to prison for five years.
100% of the costs on this service will be simply added onto the monthly bills of every ISP, cell phone, and land-line in the country, and that's if you're lucky. It'll likely end up being double the actual cost. Moreover, the PC party will be able to say "see, it's not costing taxpayers a penny, the whole thing is set up so that the offenders pay for everything."
Man, this post is incoherent.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
And I don't get it. People in western democratic countries didn't tolerate the government opening their regular paper mail for monitoring purposes except during time of war. Now we just quietly accept that it is happening? Worse, we accept that it happening without even requiring a judicial warrant for each and every bit of it?
That's it! From now on, the only mail you will get from me is the one that I can lick.
Mmmm..encryption...yea....you like that isps..you like that encryption..yeah...
What's going to get fun is when they start banning encrypted communication :)
Simple reason - whomever gets to monitor private information wins. By helping make the winner, telcos become the winner's friend. Who cares if privacy goes out the window?
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
its not banned, it just tells us you are a terrorist ;)
I guess Cmdr. Taco is not yet forgotten.
It goes in cycles - McCarthy / JE Hoover were a high point, somewhere between Nixon and Clinton was a low, I hope we've topped out after more than a decade of "war on terror" - only time will tell.
You are a few years too late. A FISA reform bill, passed in 2007, grants telecoms immunity from civil suits for just such cases. Initially, Obama campaigned against immunity, but switched positions on it.
Personally, I can't really blame him for backing down. In this country, if you confront the shadow government or its minions, you get a limo ride through Dealey Plaza.
Have gnu, will travel.
All my professional email is encrypted automatically by way of my BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Additionally, S/MIME and/or PKI can be used on an as-needed basis. If the authorities come bursting through my door the server is running on encrypted drives which I can remotely force into shutdown state. The only use I have for speed-dial. I have nothing to hide per se except the highly sensitive research information, to which the government has no right to access, produced by my organization.
I used to work for a medium-sized telco/ISP operation. The RCMP showed up over a year ago with ideas for what they wanted to do. This bill has been in the works for a long time.
Don't listen when they say it's hard to do. They want open access on their terms; when and where they want. Think mirrored ports and a box you don't control.
Canada wants to be the Uber USSR that the UK struggles to achieve prior to the Olympic Games on the backs of its citizens who they the Excecker loves to butt-fuck regularly, as in daily. The Brit Gov loves butt-fuck activites amongst ministers ... builds character ... they The Royals say.
This is why the US Border Patrol and TSA hack/monitor/alter/fabracate TCP/IP packets from Canada Telcos to US Telcos and why Canadian citizens are regularly beaten and robbed of cash and credit/debit cards and butt-fucked at the US/Canada borders (especially those lacking of credit/debit cards or cash) by US Border Patrol and TSA 'agents' 24/7/365-6 (need to mind the leap year .. important for taxes ... and itemizaitons thingeys ... Ho .. Ho ... Ho ..).
LoL
The governments and corporations of the world might have better success with marginalizing the majority of their populations if they were to do it on top of the kitchen table instead of in bed with each other.
802.11s, where are you when we need you? We need to develop a grass roots, public non-muthercorped internet that is actually free (as in uncensored and non-draconian and can't be draconian). Heavy handedness in the public internet will lead to private (and free) internii.
I didn't say it was banned.
I said when.
The only reason people are moving in that direction is that it's already built into the legislation. If the law said that governments could open your snail mail without a warrant, people are not going to start suddenly encrypting their letters to each other.
The same thing is happening now: the law allows governments to obtain relatively private correspondences with relatively little probable cause. People haven't started caring less about their privacy; the governments are simply better at disguising the purpose and reach of introduced legislation.
And don't think that you are protecting yourself by not using social media. Do you really think it matters that you don't post your information online if most of your friends and family do because they don't know any better? Fixing the laws or keeping these sorts of things in TFA from becoming law are the only way to reverse the trend.