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Govt Docs Reveal Canadian Telcos Promise Surveillance Ready Networks
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Geist reports
that Canadian telecom and Internet providers have tried to convince
the government that they will voluntarily build surveillance
capabilities into their networks. Hoping to avoid legislative
requirements, the providers argue that "the telecommunications
market will soon shift to a point where interception capability will
simply become a standard component of available equipment, and that
technical changes in the way communications actually travel on
communications networks will make it even easier to intercept
communications."
We kill Hitler, a new one emerges.
The typical reason for doing this is "if we don't do it first, subsequent legislation will require us to implement an even more onerous system".
Let's see how that works in practice:
The government simply waits to see what the telcos implement. If it's *more* than they wanted, they stop and say "well done!". If it's *less* than they wanted, then they proceed with legislation, which they were planning to do anyway.
In game theory terms, what does this type of policy maximize?
The problem is it will be abused. It will be used for things beyond the scope they claimed it will be. It will essentially suffer from the same kind of scope creep all of this surveillance shit does.
What they say now as "oh, we'll only use this for national security stuff" becomes tomorrow's "well, we had to invent parallel construction to conceal what we do with that stuff we promised was only for national security".
This stuff is designed to give law enforcement unfettered access to anything, while keeping that access secret from the rest of us. And in the case of Canada, this pretty much bypasses privacy legislation
I'm pretty much convinced that all elected officials voting in favor of this crap have forfeited all right to claim any of their information is private while saying they have access to all of our information.
These clowns have been undermining some of the basic premises of Western societies.
Worthless bastards.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Have gnu, will travel.
You store your phone calls and text messages in the cloud?
Sure. NSA's cloud. Epsilon's cloud. CSEC's cloud if you're in Canada.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Even if you don't believe that the government will use these backdoors for evil, what's to stop anyone else? The more backdoors and surveillance they build into the system the more likely it is that someone one will find and exploit them. Plus, there's a lot of money in information. I don't think it would take too much convincing to get someone with access to go rogue and start feeding corporate/tech info to the highest bidder.
X
Sure if its just janie talking to grandma, they can leave it all in the clear.
Wouldn't it be better if everything were encrypted, so stuff that's actually important / private doesn't stick out like a xmas tree lit in a forest?