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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?
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.
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.
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!
As wbr1 said, in democratic societies, there was no legal mechanism to do such seizure outside of a specific accusation.
However, it's more than that. There has been no practical mechanism to monitor all communications. Even if you could gather and record all of the phone calls of all of the people, you couldn't use it. Someone would have to sit down and listen through every conversation you wanted to find out about. You had to target specific groups.
Modern technology means that you can gather every email anyone ever read into an indexed searchable archive. You can then, at your leisure, make connections and links between different people. You want to "persuade" someone to cooperate? Find a crime his grandparent committed and then threaten to lock the grandparent away for the rest of their life if your target doesn't do what you want. Want to blackmail someone? Go look through everything that everyone else ever said about them, even if it wasn't sent to your mark.
The internet is different simply because it is possible to monitor it. The whole thing. That has never happened before.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
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.
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.
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.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.