Slashdot Mirror
Secret Memo Slams Canadian Police On Inaccurate ISP Request Records
An anonymous reader writes Last fall, Daniel Therrien, the government's newly appointed Privacy
Commissioner of Canada, released the annual
report on the Privacy Act, the legislation that governs how
government collects, uses, and discloses personal information. The
lead story from the report was the result of an audit of the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police practices regarding warrantless requests for
telecom subscriber information. Michael Geist now reports
that a secret internal memo reveals the situation was far worse,
with auditors finding the records from Canada's lead law
enforcement agency were unusable since they were "inaccurate and
incomplete."
But when you break the rules you have to keep good records so we can find out how you broke the rules!
Lazy, incompetent, and don't want actual oversight.
So they have sloppy record keeping, because they don't give a crap, and because they have been getting what they want so why bother.
The solution: take away the ability to get this crap without oversight, and let these clowns fall on their face.
If they won't abide by the law and the rules, they get nothing.
This is a classic case of law enforcement not giving a fuck about the law and their legal obligations. Which means you have to distrust them and treat them like children, otherwise they'll just keep abusing us and our rights.
This is precisely what happens when police have sweeping powers and nobody is keeping tabs on them.
It's time to stop giving these idiots the benefit of the doubt, and assume they're lying to us and crapping on our rights -- because, apparently they are.
Unfortunately, the clowns who make up government are keen to give them even more powers with even less oversight
"The power of investment bankers over governments rests on a number of factors, of which the most significant, perhaps, is the need of governments to issue short-term treasury bills as well as long-term government bonds. Just as businessmen go to commercial banks for current capital advances to smooth over the discrepancies between their irregular and intermittent incomes and their periodic and persistent outgoes (such as monthly rents, annual mortgage payments, and weekly wages), so a government has to go to merchant bankers (or institutions controlled by them) to tide over the shallow places caused by irregular tax receipts. As experts in government bonds, the international bankers not only handled the necessary advances but provided advice to government officials and, on many occasions, placed their own members in official posts for varied periods to deal with special problems." --Quigley
Great, now who's going to fucking jail for this? Nobody? Thought not.
This kind of abuse is why the latest round of "anti-terrorism" legislation from the Conservative jackboots who currently run our country needs more oversight. Having one person in charge of the oversight is just rife with the potential for sweeping issues under the rug and failure to detect problems.
I firmly believe that a committee of at least three politicians and one "specialist" should be overseeing all of these Canadian privacy-related issues, regardless of "national security" issues -- one from each of the major parties. (The only reason I don't say four is May is a whackjob and there are no other Green Party members of parliament -- that woman isn't qualified to oversee lunch.)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
>secret internal memo reveals the situation was far worse, with auditors finding the records from Canada's lead law enforcement agency were unusable since they were "inaccurate and incomplete."
To be fair, it's hard to write an accurate and complete records when you're riding a horse.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
The problem here is chasing idiots US ideas of Law Enforcement. Treat police like Law Enforcement as revenue agents with arrest and ticket quotas and you end up with ignorant guard dogs, not police officers. The reality is policing should be based around the idea of exemplary citizens which is basically what they are mean to be. Citizens who step forward in times of crisis to aid the public. This includes initial response emergency medical services, fire fighting and emergency rescue as they are far more spread on the ground than those other services and are in the best position for a rapid response and early assessment to ensure those other services can respond accordingly.
Part of the whole idea of exemplary citizen is of course upholding the law, not forcing others to do so but doing it themselves. When they see others failing to do so, they either just remind them of their responsibilities or initiate an arrest and pass that on higher up the legal chain to the courts where the laws are enforced.
Cheap right wing moronic attitudes have turned what should be exemplary citizens, carefully selected and extensively trained of the highest moral character into base ignorant guard dogs capable of nothing but putting the bite on citizens because revenue first, last and everything in between and sick dreams of privatising it all. From law enforcement, to the courts and, to the jails. Poor and you are guilty of anything a rich person accuses you and of course that rich person is always innocent, just like the feudalism period that so many of the 1% adore.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Also from a fiscal perspective, I am fairly certain that all those millions of information requests that get sent to ISP's from police services that they get paid per request. So not only are you paying police services to spy on your private information unnecessarily (i.e. unimportant enough not to require a warrant), that your tax dollars are also being funneled into ISP's to provide the information in the first place.
At one point once upon a time when the Feds were looking at expanding the practice (the Bill got shot down eventually after some embarrassment about personal information on Ministers, it was called something like the Save the Children Terrorism Act or something), it was to be so widespread that the ISP's got together and said if you want to do it on such a level, we need a better information management system to track it all and we're not paying for it, the tax payers would need to, and the cost of that was to be 30-40 million dollars.
Anyway sufficient legal practices are available (i.e. get a damn warrant if you really need the information), they should not have a carte blanche to everything whenever whimsy takes them. If you do not have enough evidence that a Judge would not allow for a warrant, then perhaps the invasion of privacy isn't warranted in the first place (pardon pun).