The Disastrous Privacy Consequences of Canada's Anti-Terrorism Bill

An anonymous reader writes "Canada's proposed anti-terrorism legislation is currently being debated in the House of Commons, with the government already serving notice that it plans to limit debate. Michael Geist argues that decision has enormous privacy consequences, since the bill effectively creates a "total information awareness" approach that represents a radical shift away from our traditional understanding of public sector privacy protection. The bill permits information sharing across government for an incredibly wide range of purposes, most of which have nothing to do with terrorism and opens the door to further disclosure "to any person, for any purpose." The cumulative effect is to grant government near-total power to share information for purposes that extend far beyond terrorism with few safeguards or privacy protections."

Comments

Hopefully this will be Harper's death knell

[Piata]

It's amazing how one man can so completely destroy a country, both politically and culturally in under a decade. The CRA (the Canadian version of the IRS) is currently doing audits of non-profit organizations and revoking the non-profit status of organizations that have political ideologies that go against the Conservative agenda.

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I can't wait for the next election and I sincerely hope the PC's are so savagaley beaten at the polls that they'll be laughed out of town on the oil wagon they rolled in on.