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A lot's been written about how dangerous Bill C-2 is. I looked at the legislation and I'm not convinced it is. But I do think it is evidence of a very important change in governance. This article explains the legislation and lays out what led me to think this.
#Carney #BillC-2 #StrongBorders
I am concerned that both of our 2.5 political parties are completely captured by corporate and foreign government interests. Policy decisions are not made to give Canadians a better quality of life, they are made to benefit politicians and CEOs.
This is death by degrees for our privacy, handing over the keys to the police.
Do not allow this to pass. Write Carney. Write your MP. Call them.
Fuck this bill.
Who cares about strong borders when half of canadians are living paycheque to paycheck and 1200 famlies own more than the bottom 80%
None of the current politicians care about the 80%
I'd say at least some of these problems are caused by the 'opportunity costs' I mentioned in the article. When I write my second article I plan on dealing with this issue. As I see it, most people fear that a strong govt will oppress the citizenry. In my case, I think we need a strong govt to protect people from the free market and capitalism. And I'd suggest the oppressive way our legal and bureaucratic system does things gets in the way of those politicians who might actually want to fix things. But until people of good will are willing to redefine what government needs to do, we aren't going to get to a better place. :-(
I don't know about the Canada Post changes but "the government reading your mail doesn't matter because snail mail is obsolete anyway" doesn't seem like a good attitude to bring to it.
I don't know about the refugee law changes but "government needs the authority to act on the fly unconstrained by the rule of law in case there's a crisis" doesn't seem like a reasonable kind of thing to say about it.
You seem to have no comment on the part about foreign states being "empowered to compel the production" of data or the other changes relating to "subscriber information and transmission data" which seem quite dangerous and are the things I've most often seen other people worried about.
And then of course you don't mention at all the "lawful access" part, both horrific and easy to understand, wherein electronic service providers can be obligated to assist CSIS and the cops in spying on their users in every way possible, and forbidden from telling anyone when they've been ordered to do so.
I'm not an expert by any stretch, so I'm happy to be corrected. But here's my response.
****About opening mail. ****How would you deal with things like smuggling carfentanil through the mail? It just seems to me that so few people write snail mail letters anymore that it seems kinda odd to make a big fuss about it--especially when large envelopes and packages have been routinely opened for years. (I worked in a mail room once in a while and remember seeing large manila envelopes with their corners cut off once in a while---I assumed that this was so a detector could test for illegal substances.)
About 'unconstrained by the rule of law': By definition, it would be constrained by the rule of law---Bill C-2 changes the law, it doesn't just rip of the concept of rule of law. Moreover, there is still a chain of command and a paper trail that would point out when the decision was made and who made it.
About empowered to compel the production. I wouldn't mind a specific reference so I could see what you are talking about. The big reason why I wrote that article was because I kept hearing statements on podcasts and reading them in articles, yet no one produced the actual wording they were so concerned about. And, as I also pointed out, it's very difficult to work through a government Bill and try to figure out exactly what it means.
About Lawful Access Again, if the law says something, anyone who follows that law is, by definition, following the law. There is a process for creating warrants and a paper-trail that identifies who was behind the decision to force access to the data centre. The law has been police are able to get a judge's say-so to bug a phone, plant a tracking device, or raid an office and seize all the paper records for a very long time. Sure thing this could be abused---but as I tried to point out in the article, there's also an opportunity cost associated with making the process of accessing data from server farms so difficult that it allows malefactors to get away with crime.
Beyond these quibbles, there's also the point to remember that this is just a first draft of a policy that is going to go through committee meetings both in the Commons and the Senate. So if there are substantive changes that should be made, there will be ample opportunity for people to raise them. And with a minority govt, there's every chance that these will be listened to if they are in good faith.
The part about foreign states being "empowered to compel the production of transmission data or subscriber information" is in 22.07 under the heading "Enforcement of Foreign Decisions for Production" and some of the implications were recently discussed by Citizen Lab.
My mention of "lawful access" was a demonstration of my bad habit of putting in quotation makes things that are not direct quotes — for which I apologise. It's a phrase that has historically been used to describe the sort of thing described in the bill as "Supporting Authorized Access to Information" in part 15, which I remain surprised that more people do not find outrageous. Michael Geist is one person who's noticed it. The way it's written seems to me absurdly over-broad and simplistic, even if it were basically a good idea which it isn't. I'm no legal expert either, but the language in the bill seems quite plain.
Sure, it's just a "first draft." As I said in a previous comment the committee will have it's work cut out for it. Based on what I understand along with what others have persuaded me of I don't think it's possible that a good bill can result from this starting point. Assuming that the government stands by any of it, we'll see which principles the opposition is willing to stand up for.
Sorry to bug you, but what are you referring to with "22.07"? Do you mean the 7th clause of part 22? (There are only 16 parts.) Are you talking about Bill C-2 or are you referring to the existing legislation? I'm also having a hard time finding the title "Enforcement of Foreign Decisions for Production" in my copy of Bill C-2. Are you working from an original copy or are you referring to someone else's analysis? (I hope you aren't using a so-called AI program--.)
Would it be possible to provide an actual link to the part of the bill in question? If you are looking at the Bill on-line, I think you can just copy the anchor tag on the index part of the page and put that in your reply. That will allow me to find the exact part you are mentioning.
I looked at the links you gave me but couldn't find any actual reference to the relevant language. They are quite long and I don't have the time to do general research over a large amount of information. A large part of the reason why I produce Hulet's Backgrounder is because I find a lot of journalism doesn't offer enough detail of this sort to satisfy myself that what's being reported is actually true. And I have a background in activism, radical politics, and journalism---which has taught me to be wary of people to go off "half-cocked" on a wide variety of issues.
Sorry, I just thought "22.07" would be a convenient thing to search for in the document rather than figuring out how to reference it properly. The phrase appears in that amended section of the "Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act" in part 14 of the bill.
If you want a shorter summary of what are seen as the problems (and can read French) I thought today's article in La Presse was good.
I've done a quick scan of part 14 of Bill C-2 and it seems to me that the decision to share data with another country isn't automatic. It requires that it pass the scrutiny of a judge and be signed-off on by the relevant cabinet minister. So I'd suggest that this isn't a question of handing over information to a foreign country.
One thing I'd like to ask you is "have you considered the opportunity costs of not having some sort of Ministerial control over this issue?" For example, if we don't agree to having some mechanism for sharing info with another country will that mean we won't have treaties that allow us to get information from them? And if we don't, what impact will that have on attempts to control money-laundering, tax avoidance, dealing with misinformation being spread on the web (remember Cambridge Analytica, FaceBook, and Brexit), etc.? Remember that a Cabinet Minister is allowed to consider the good of the nation---whereas the legal system and bureaucracy is forbidden to consider anything except the letter of the law.
It is true that there could be (and probably will) instances where Ministers do bad things for dumb or venal reasons. But that happens already. Both Trump and Harper have effectively told the Supreme Court to go pound sand and gotten away with it. The Crown and Police routinely pick and choose which laws to enforce and which to turn a blind eye towards. But as long as we have the vote, citizens can punish Ministers for doing stuff we don't like. And if we create an above-board mechanism that records who made what decision, we have a better chance of getting things fixed than if stuff gets done by bureaucrats who "lose the paperwork" or just decide to not have the funds for enforcement of one particular rule.
When I post the second article, I'm planning to get into these issues. The first one is mostly to set the issue up in people's minds---not deal with the core point I want to make.
The situation is more politically complicated as it relates to international treaties than one could appreciate from simply reading the bill. Not being party to the treaties it seems designed to enable does not strike me as a "cost" to be avoided. I think Citizen Lab did a good job (as they always do) in writing about that. See part 2, in which they explain how one such treaty could leave people "vulnerable to arbitrary and abusive data collection practices." The references they provide in support look rather convincing.
As a whole, the 2AP’s proposed method of expediting higher volumes of cross-border sharing of evidence is by eliminating or diminishing human rights safeguards, including the obligation to obtain prior, independent judicial authorization when seizing private information and sharing it with foreign law enforcement authorities. Rather than “establishing high standards, the protocol prioritizes law enforcement access at almost every turn.”
The convenient data sharing with foreign law enforcement in combination with the unprecedented new powers for CSIS to spy on everyone — aside from being out of place buried in the middle of a bill ostensibly about border security — is a bizarre and sudden departure from the country's previous level of respect for human rights and I'm mystified as to why you're trying to defend it.
You don't see any opportunity cost at all in making it hard for law enforcement to chase down data that's been hidden in another jurisdiction? I've noticed that you haven't even tried to answer the issue I raised there through the analogy of housing costs exploding due to regulation. That's not unusual. Every time I've tried to raise this issue in various venues all I've ever gotten was an "X-Files answer"---that's when someone just looks away and ignores the question you've raised. ;-)
I feel like you are probably right about housing. It's far from the only problem in that industry, but misguided and convoluted zoning laws sure do contribute to our woes. In many places it seems to me that things like minimum parking space requirements, building code problems, and restrictions on mixed residential/commercial development do make it illegal to build well-designed neighbourhoods. I've seen one ambitious cooperative housing project in particular that was stopped in its tracks because of such things.
On the other hand we are not really burdened with a surplus of thorny privacy laws that make our lives difficult. We do not even have anything much like the GDPR. Rather than being a growing burden on law enforcement, electronic communications and new tech have already given the spies and the cops more power than they've ever had before to collect information about us all in ways that would've been unimaginable in centuries past. Automated license plate readers. Mass Internet data collection. Social media. Surveillance cameras everywhere. Face recognition software. Credit cards. Satellites. Stinger. Automobile telemetry. Trackable cards instead of tokens for the subway. Bugs and wiretaps that are undetectable. Data brokers. And so on. Meanwhile, which new data privacy laws do you object to?
There is an urgent need for more housing. There is no urgent need to give US law enforcement the ability to get location data from my phone without judicial approval through a fully-automated system that the telecom was ordered to install and prohibited from telling anyone about.
I'm not an expert on anything except philosophy, but I have written a lot of stories on the housing crisis, which is why I feel confident using that as an example.
But as I pointed out in my article on opioids that I referenced I did find it bizarre that I was getting spam about how easy it would be to buy carfentanil and other drugs on line and then have them sent to me. There were even on-line chats to work customers through the process and a delivery guarantee. It seems to me that sort of brazen behaviour suggests that it is far to easy to hide behind an international border. I've also done stories about money laundering (which incidentally has an impact on the cost of housing) and tax evasion. Both of those involve hiding data behind borders.
And recently there was an operation in France that involved sharing information across many borders to break up international organized crime syndicates. (One delightful group of individuals was sharing videos of them grinding up victims and dumping the paste into a river.) If memory serves, part of this involved the French police arresting and threatening the founder of Telegram with long time in prison if he didn't let them access his servers---which he did.
Another example that comes to my mind is how countries are going to get sleazes like Mark Zuckerberg under control if we can't create international treaties that force companies like Meta to disclose information. I'd love to see the internal correspondence at Meta around things they did like the Cambridge Analytica manipulation of the Brexit campaign. (I wrote a story about that and was absolute aghast about what they did.) I'd also like to see more info about the genocide they helped create in Burma.
I know people are afraid of authoritarian governments. But the opportunity cost of over-doing protecting ourselves from stuff like this is it ties the government's hands when it comes to building international laws around protecting people from criminals, tax evasion, and sleazy tech-lords.
If an online fentanyl retailer wants to "hide behind an international border" they will presumably pick one that is not party to the treaty. As is often the case, the criminal bogeymen used to justify new intrusions upon privacy will have the easiest time evading them. It will be the rest of us who suffer the consequences. The new opioids are by their nature easily-smuggled, and determined people will continue to have ways to gain access to them. No feasible amount of totalitarian police state oppression is really going to change that. Other approaches seem more promising.
Other approaches to fighting off the sickness that is Meta also seem more advisable. Consult Cory Doctorow for ideas.
Certainly we do sometimes need cooperation between nations in law enforcement. Perhaps in some areas even more of it than we already have. There is no need for it to come at the expense of our privacy, security, and freedom from unwarranted cross-border surveillance — I think the amount of that we already have is sufficient.
Are you a specialist with specific information that causes your concern? Again, what I read says that there will be a warrant required from a judge plus a ministerial sign-off. Are you opposed to any search warrants at all? Or just in this specific case? Do you not trust any elected officials? If so, why do you think such untrustworthy people would be bothered to follow the existing laws. I really want to parse out whether these concerns are based on real, substantive issues or just a vague 'they're all bastards' feelings. I notice this with regard to the housing crisis, where people simply don't want to admit that there is a supply problem and blame everything on greedy landlords. They do that because they don't want to admit that the equity on their homes is based on sweating it out of young people. (I have lots of arguments with my fellow boomers who don't want higher density housing in their neighbourhoods.
My feelings about elected officials do not come into it except to be dismayed that any of them would come up with or vote for such legislation. I voted NDP due to having some admiration for their local candidate if that means anything by way of answering your questions.
As I understand it (and as other commentators e.g. La Presse have confirmed) some of the new data collection powers in the bill require a warrant, others do not. Phone location data appears to sometimes fall on the "not" side along with anything voluntarily shared, "subscriber information", and other metadata. There are many other parts besides which look problematic. But it's Part 15 which for me is the worst.
The relevant expertise I have is in telecom and computer technology. I was around for the "crypto wars" in the 1990s, the previous big push towards making secure communications illegal in the USA. The good guys won, that time, and as a result people today can communicate safely with friends and family around the world using apps like Signal. Aside from all other problems with this bill, whatever in it alarms me and compels so many others to decry it, for me it's part 15 that exemplifies the kind of egregious and unjustifiable attempt to do away with privacy and security I never thought I'd see in Canada.
Interesting you should mention phone location data not requiring a warrant. About ten years ago at work we had a problem with a student who'd posted a message somewhere that they were considering suicide. Someone else who saw this contacted the police, who came with a social worker and asked me to help find the person. (I used to work in an academic library as a porter.) The police said they had 'pinged' her phone, which allowed them to identify which corner of the building she was in. With a description, we were able to find her. So it would appear that there is already some ability to find phone locations without a warrant already.
As for the 'voluntarily shared, "subscriber information"', my understanding is that's pretty much sold to data brokers by most companies---which means the government could just buy if if they wanted. This gets back to my concern that if we tie up the hands of the government too much we end up with a situation where the government--even if it wanted to--couldn't protect us from big business. FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram, TicToc, etc---that's what really scare me, not Mark Carney. I get to vote for my government, but not Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
Also, about being affected by 'too much privacy' legislation, I disagree. I sponsored my wife as an immigrant and I can tell you that the layers of privacy nonsense that the government lays on top our interface with it can be irritating as Hell. It basically means that I cannot use the web-based system to interface with it because I use open source software. Another example, my wife has an account with the CRA but she can't access it on line because they insisted on mailing her a password through snail mail. It got lost. And to get this problem fixed, she has to contact them either through the CRA website (which she cannot access without the password) or call them on the phone number that's never answered and just kicks you off if you wait too long to get an answer. In addition, I still cannot use email to contact my doctor because of privacy rules---and I can only use the phone because the rules were waived during the COVID crisis.
There are a lot of problems with misapplied privacy rules that haven't been created or implemented with any appreciation of the opportunity costs involved. They add a huge burden on the efficiency of government programs and also the private sector when it interfaces with the government. I suspect that if the government tried to streamline the system in the way that Estonia has, it would be fought tooth and nail by people in support of privacy rights---although I think it would be just fear of change more than anything else. See: https://billhulet.substack.com/p/the-estonian-zero-bureaucracy-project
So it would appear that there is already some ability to find phone locations without a warrant already.
Yeah, I imagine there is some kind of exemption to whatever legal convention, regulation, or perceived risk of liability normally prevents them handing out that information to anyone who asks which applies in case of medical emergencies. Perhaps somewhere in the regulation pertaining to e911, at a guess. But mobile phones are of course are already a privacy disaster as they operate now. Society is still in the process of becoming accustomed to that. I imagine you're probably aware that the advice not to bring a phone if you go anywhere near a protest march is now commonly heard.
The phone company is of course happy to assist law enforcement — and anyone who can convincingly impersonate law enforcement — in any way they can get away with, so long as it doesn't cost them money. That is why all the provisions in C-2 protecting and providing new opportunities for the "voluntary provision of information" are themselves consequential. What they're not permitted to share with the cops, they are definitely not permitted to simply sell to data brokers either — but for some types of data it's law enforcement that has been restrained in what they're allowed to ask for, not the telcos that were prevented giving it away. That's what creates the situation you mention with data brokers, which new privacy law could usefully address.
When it comes to Facebook and Twitter, I believe that one way or another the surveillance advertising business model ought to be outlawed. But that's another story.
Medical data is one place where there are some serious laws about privacy, I grant you. It's a rare exception to the general rule. Some of the problems you perceive to be about privacy law seem to be more the result of simple incompetence and ignorance on the part of whoever designed e.g. the immigration website you were trying to use. It seems much like the familiar situation where online banking software won't work on custom Android ROMs or their website refuses to load on Firefox — they will claim it's for the benefit of your security and privacy but you should not believe them.
I suspect a lot of the 'privacy' excuses that various agencies use to make things difficult are ultimately bogus. But that too is an opportunity cost of setting up too many rules. Saying that it isn't is something of a 'no true Scotsman' argument.
Let's just agree to disagree. I'm not particularly set in my ways about this issue, but I don't think you've convinced me yet. Luckily, the decision isn't up to me. But I still am going to use opposition to Bill C-2 as a means of introducing the points I want to raise in the second article on this subject--which I am convinced are important.
As an aside, I just want to mention how civil this conversation has been. It reinforces my feeling that there's no need for social media to be so damn divisive--it's just that the private sector systems are designed to encourage outrage and fear. Yeah Lemmy! Yeah Fediverse!
All right well it was nice chatting with you. I had some strong feelings about C-2 and the discussion has left me more confident that I didn't miss anything, that it's just as bad as it looks.