[Gunnair]

Quote:

Andrew Coyne Feb 20, 2012 – 8:03 PM ET | Last Updated: Feb 20, 2012 10:03 PM ET


When the Liberal government of Paul Martin introduced the Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act in November of 2005, it received comparatively little attention. As the columnist Thomas Walkom described it in the Toronto Star, the bill would require Internet and telephone companies “to install equipment that would allow the state to monitor all of their customers… [I]t would give police … the power to demand, without the need for court warrants, any information that [these] companies keep on their customers — including addresses, passwords and credit card information.” The public safety minister at the time, Anne McLellan, was quoted to the effect that the police needed the new powers to go after terrorists and child pornographers.

In other words, more or less the same legislation, supported by more or less the same arguments, as Bill C-30, whose purported horrors have convulsed the nation this past week. Yet it caused nothing like the same fuss. For that matter, neither did an earlier version of the current bill, C-52, introduced in the last Parliament: concern, yes, but not the all-consuming fireball that C-30 detonated.

None of this is to defend the legislation. Privacy advocates make a convincing case that it gives too many people too much personal information with too little justification. Neither am I arguing the Liberals are necessarily hypocrites to oppose it (though that’s certainly possible), or that their own sins cancel those of the bill: that other parties, and other countries — similar legislation is already on the books elsewhere — may have been willing to erode their citizens’ liberties in this way is not an argument for doing so in the present case, nor does the long list of surveillance powers to which Canadians are already subject make the case for adding another.

I’m just interested in the discrepancy. Why has this bill, this invasion of privacy, aroused such heated opposition, where others haven’t? When did we all become such civil libertarians?

One possibility is that this bill is more invasive than its predecessors. Yet this is plainly not the case. The Liberals’ bill would have granted police warrantless access to subscribers’ names, addresses and “any other identifiers.” Bill C-52 translated that open-ended list into 11 specific bits of subscriber information, half of them aimed at identifying specific devices like a cellphone. The latest bill shortens that to six, the most controversial of which is the subscriber’s IP address, marking the point on the Internet where access was gained.

Another possibility is that the public has simply become more alert to the dangers of granting police excessive surveillance powers. If so, all to the good. As much as the Internet might present new threats in the form of child pornographers and other predators, the potential for private information to be improperly collected and distributed, whether by private or public agencies, is also deeply worrying. But why would we have awoken to this only in the last week?

I think a large part of the escalation in rhetoric has to do with the general climate of hysteria in which politics is conducted these days — on all sides. Recent days have seen a Conservative MP refer to gun registry advocates in the same breath as Hitler, and a Liberal MP declare that the government’s values were so abhorrent as to cause him to contemplate separation. Most notorious, of course, was the invitation from the Public Safety Minister, Vic Toews, to a critic of Bill-C30 to stand with the government or “stand with the child pornographers,” a ludicrous sortie that said far more about him than his intended target.

But even that doesn’t explain it. What has added fuel to many recent controversies, particularly those involving Internet access and digital rights, is the arrival of the online community as a political force. This is often celebrated as a democratic breakthrough, and in many respects it is. But it is not unalloyedly so. Though fond of referring to themselves as “the public,” the digital vigilantes leading this battle are hardly a representative sample. Hyper-informed as they can be on these issues, they are also prone to a peculiarly over-the-top, take-no-prisoners style of rhetoric, encouraged by the individual anonymity and reinforced by the armies of the like-minded that are the hallmarks of social media. As a means of asserting the superiority of the speaker over other life forms, this is quite effective; as a means of persuading the unenlightened, not so much.

Hence, a week that began with the threat to privacy represented by Bill C-30 ended with the wholesale publication via Twitter of the details of the minister’s years-old, and very messy, divorce case. Rather than debate how much those in power should know about the public, we instead debated how much the public should know about those in power. The relevance of such information to the issue at hand, the fairness of publishing it without offering the minister the chance to respond, the morality of attacking another person’s reputation without putting your own name on the line — all these were dismissed as distractions, the concerns expressed by working journalists, who deal with these questions for a living, waved away as no more than the dismay of the “gatekeepers” at the loss of their traditional role.

Perhaps it is. Perhaps that does not make it entirely wrong.

[bootlegga]

I was against it then (as I was against the Liberal's copyright bill), but as Shep noted, it's rather hypocritical for legislation like this to come from the Conservatives...

Quote:

There's a kind of glaring irony to the fact that the same government that opposed the long-gun registry and the long-form census on the grounds that they invade the privacy of Canadians is now proposing a law that would give police access to Canadians' phone numbers, IP addresses, e-mail addresses and other information without a warrant.

{Globe and Mail}

Besides, I think a lot of outrage is in the vagueness of the legislation. Things like sections 33 & 34 in the bill are vague and could lead to abuse;

Quote:

First, Section 33 tells us that, "The Minister may designate persons or classes of persons as inspectors for the purposes of the administration and enforcement of this Act."

Quote:

Next, Section 34 spells out the sweeping powers of these "inspectors." And, if they sound Orwellian, welcome to the world of Section 34.

The inspectors may "enter any place owned by, or under the control of, any telecommunications service provider in which the inspector has reasonable grounds to believe there is any document, information, transmission apparatus, telecommunications facility or any other thing to which this Act applies."

And, once he or she is in, anything goes.

The inspector, says the bill, may "examine any document, information or thing found in the place and open or cause to be opened any container or other thing." He or she may also "use, or cause to be used, any computer system in the place to search and examine any information contained in or available to the system."

You read that right. The inspector gets to see "any" information that's in or "available to the system." Yours, mine, and everyone else's emails, phone calls, web surfing, shopping, you name it. But, if that sounds breath-taking enough, don't quit now because the section is still not done.

The inspector — remember, this is anyone the minister chooses — is also empowered to copy anything that strikes his or her fancy. The inspector may "reproduce, or cause to be reproduced, any information in the form of a printout, or other intelligible output, and remove the printout, or other output, for examination or copying."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2 ... l-c30.html

Far too reaching and vague for me to think it's a good thing.

We don't need an internet Patriot Act on this side of the border, thank you very much.

[Gunnair]

Agreed. It is beyond perplexing that this came from the same party that is so hard over against the LGR.

Topping it off is Toews efforts to bed shit his way through it.

[BeaverFever]

Quote:

Toews’s 'child pornographers' gaffe aside, Bill C-30 has real dangers

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
Published Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2012 8:47AM EST
Last updated Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2012 9:42AM EST

....Contrary to what you might have heard, the new bill, C-30, doesn't invite police to monitor your every online move without a warrant. It does, however, require Internet companies – loosely defined - to cough up your name, Internet protocol address and a few other identifiers if the police ask for them, even without a warrant. This means that the police could conceivably collect a pseudonym you've been using to comment on websites, present it to the relevant company, and say, “Who is this person?”

By trading pseudonyms for IP addresses, then IP addresses for real names and addresses, and repeating the process, police could get a pretty clear picture of what you've been up to online. (The list of exactly which identifiers police can present to Internet service providers in exchange for information has yet to be nailed down.)

“Investigations are going to change in character, to what we call fishing expeditions,” said Tamir Israel, a lawyer at the University of Ottawa's privacy-minded Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, who's been following this bill's evolution for years.

What's more, there is no guarantee that details uncovered in the course of this work will stay tucked away in police notebooks. For better and for worse, police do leak. Just ask Rob Ford, Toronto's beleaguered mayor, whose 911 calls wound up in the national news. One of the many uses of online anonymity is to let people in the public service raise their voices in public. Knowing that the local police force has the power to unmask anonymous commenters at will can only cause a political chill.

But another part of this bill could have even further-reaching impacts. The Internet today, for all its vulnerabilities, is not really built to facilitate centralized, wiretap-style surveillance. The Tories want to change that. This bill would require Canada's ISPs to rework their systems, at considerable expense, so that just such an option exists.

Now, actually carrying out this surveillance would require a warrant. This law is not designed to give anyone unfettered access to your online connection. But once we've rebuilt the Internet machine to feature a big, red “Spy” button that wasn't there before, we'll never be entirely sure who's using it.

After all, a system that allows for real-time surveillance, or for the archiving and sorting of your data, would be the holy grail for criminals (and possibly the office intern), whether they're out for profit, political ends or a good time. You can't bring oil barrels full of honey to the forest and then act surprised when bears show up.

Security disasters already happen with alarming regularity. The Government of Canada got hacked. Sony got hacked, compromising customer data. Google itself got hacked. Do you trust your ISP's security know-how more than Google's?

Finally, consider what could happen if other laws changed, too. Woe betide all of us if, a few years down the line, copyright infringement should become a criminal offence. (This isn't inconceivable: After all, video recording in a movie theatre already is.) If it did, these surveillance powers and tools could be turned against people who break digital locks by ripping DVDs, or download the tools to do so.

The enemy here is not Vic Toews, that inept amplifier of talking points. Nor is it law enforcement – the police have a job to do, and will use every tool at their disposal to do it.

The enemy here is the law of unintended consequences. By stripping away checks and balances, and turning the Internet into a wonder of surveillance, we lay ourselves at its mercy.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/digital-culture/ivor-tossell/toewss-child-pornographers-gaffe-aside-bill-c-30-has-real-dangers/article2344551/

[andyt]

BeaverFever wrote:

The enemy here is not Vic Toews, that inept amplifier of talking points. Nor is it law enforcement – the police have a job to do, and will use every tool at their disposal to do it.

The enemy here is the law of unintended consequences. By stripping away checks and balances, and turning the Internet into a wonder of surveillance, we lay ourselves at its mercy.

[url]

Sorry, the enemy is the CPC. Unintended circumstances can rear their head anytime, for anything. We're not laying ourselves at the mercy of the internet, the CPC is laying us at the government's mercy.

[Curtman]

This and the digital locks provisions of their attempted copyright "reform" were the reason I stopped voting Liberal. Now the Harperites are doing the same things, and listening to the same lobbyists. They should at least notice where it got the Libs, but they're too drunk with power.