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."

Comments

Re:If there is a lawful mechanism...

[JoeMerchant]

Actually, in times of war gone by, ALL transoceanic mail was subject to opening and reading. Nevermind communication monitoring across the iron curtain during the cold war.

What's new is that we have this low cost, high bandwidth communication medium that everybody is using.

In the past, you were restricted from broadcasting your ideas past the local pub - and even there, people would listen and repeat to the local authorities things they overheard.

Re:Telcos in *every* country supporting surveillan

[PPH]

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.