Stockwell Day calls for changes to cybercrime bill:
Former public safety minister Stockwell Day says he hopes the Conservative government takes “another look” at its bill to fight cybercrime and curtails some of the powers it would give to police.
This is a unexpected voice, now added to the chorus of experts calling for the lawful access provisions of C-13 to be split from the anti-sexting aspects of the legislation.
Cyber-bullying, privacy measures should be dealt with separately:
“I am concerned about some of the other unrelated provisions that have been added to the bill in the name of Amanda … and all of the children lost to cyberbullying attacks,” she told the committee. “I don’t want to see our children victimized again by losing privacy rights.
“We should not have to choose between our privacy and our safety. We should not have to sacrifice our children’s privacy rights to make them safe from cyberbullying, sextortion and revenge pornography.”
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Carol Todd showed a tremendous amount of courage Tuesday. The government should honour her request to split out the cyber-bullying provisions, accept the NDP’s offer to fast-track them, and then turn its attention to finding a more reasonable solution to fighting online threats.
Based on comments during that hearing, I and highly doubtful the government of Canada will split the legislation in two. Still, we can always hope…
It is telling that among the prime minister’s most trenchant critics these days is Tom Flanagan, once one of his closest advisors, an academic-cum-political strategist who is at once both deeply conservative and shrewdly pragmatic. This government is neither. It is reckless, not in the style of governments that overread their mandate, but in an aimless, scattershot way. It is partisan, but for no purpose other than stubbornness and tribalism. It will take every fight to the limit, pick fights if none present themselves, with no thought to the consequences of either victory or defeat but seemingly out of sheer bloodlust. Like the proverbial dog chasing the car, it has no idea what it will do when it catches it.
Andrew Coyne, “The Harper Government Playbook: Frontal Assault or Spectacular About Face”
Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can’t afford the time to think.
Noam Chomsky (via zeitgeistrama)
Post-secondary education is neither necessary nor sufficient to change society. Those of us with degrees need to stop acting like university uniquely equips us to improve or transform the institutions in which we operate. On average, we’re less indebted and more able to pay off that debt as a share of our income than those without degrees, so I’d suggest their debt loads are more of an urgent problem.
(via jakke)
I think that the problem is less “time to think” than “time to act.” If you believe that highly educated people can bring useful skills to bear on pressing problems, but that there are often minimal financial resources to pay educated workers to bring those skills to bear, then debt loads may preclude spending time focusing on those particular problems. In effect, if you can’t pay people to do the work then the socially-pressing work may not be done by those best suited to do it.
To contextualize: when I finished my degree there was a minimum amount of income I had to make to service my debt loads while simultaneously surviving in whatever city I ended up living in. That minimum income immediately meant that a series of jobs that would have been politically and intellectually engaging had to be set aside on the basis of insufficient monetary remuneration. It’s this kind of issue that Chomsky is getting at.
Information watchdogs, researchers, media and others say government, institutions keeping citizens in the dark even as opportunities for transparency increase.
A good long form piece about the existing deficits in Canada’s access to information policies and laws. These laws are designed to let Canadians understand their governments and hold them to account. Unfortunately, our laws have become so atrophied that they are often more helpful for getting documents of some (routinely minor) historical import instead of getting documents that can meaningfully enable citizens to be active in their democracies.
Source: Canadians’ rightful access to public information being blocked, experts say
Low-level federal judges balking at law enforcement requests for electronic evidence:
Among the most aggressive opinions have come from D.C. Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola, a bow-tied court veteran who in recent months has blocked wide-ranging access to the Facebook page of Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis and the iPhone of the Georgetown University student accused of making ricin in his dorm room. In another case, he deemed a law enforcement request for the entire contents of an e-mail account “repugnant” to the U.S. Constitution.
For these and other cases, Facciola has demanded more focused searches and insisted that authorities delete collected data that prove unrelated to a current investigation rather than keep them on file for unspecified future use. He also has taken the unusual step, for a magistrate judge, of issuing a series of formal, written opinions that detail his concerns, even about previously secret government investigations.
“For the sixth time,” Facciola wrote testily, using italics in a ruling this month, “this Court must be clear: if the government seizes data it knows is outside the scope of the warrant, it must either destroy the data or return it. It cannot simply keep it.”
Broad based access to telecommunications information can be extremely revealing: law enforcement know this, civil advocates (and defence attorneys) know this, and (increasingly) justices know this. And as justices in particular become more cognizant of just what law enforcement agencies are accessing, and of authorities’ decisions to not target their searches but instead collect (and retain) the entirety of people’s personal information, we’ll see more and more pushback against authorities’ overreaches.
Politics and justice tend to move slowly, often to the point where they ‘lag’ a decade or more behind technology and social norms. However, even these conservative systems tend to eventually correct themselves. As federal American judges ‘balk’ at over collection we’ll see these issues of evidence collection rise through the courts until, hopefully, a good ruling is issued by the Supreme Court of the United States. And then we’ll move onto the next overreach that authorities identify and begin exploiting…
Third, and most important: The Conservative government, read the prime minister, has ignored this glaring strategic reality: To counter a Trudeau-led Liberal party and a Mulcair-led NDP, the Conservatives needed to curb their anti-democratic tendencies — epitomized by omnibus bills and constant, intransigent resistance to compromise, which looks like the arrogance of long-held power — and make themselves credible on the environment. Unfortunately for their more moderate supporters, they have done neither; if anything, they’ve doubled down.
Core Conservative support, just under 30 per cent of the voting population, has kept the party more than solvent; but it can’t win it a majority. That is a fundamental problem for the Harper team, and one it has precious little time to solve.
While I’d like to agree that the current governing party of Canada’s anti-democratic approaches should cost it seats, if not the election, I have strong doubts. I often speak with Canadians (of various political stripes) and ask whether they want decisive action (demonstrated in the form of the current government’s omnibus legislation) or a more drawn out periods of action as parties communicate to develop some kind of quasi-consensus on issues (often as characterized in a minority government situation). Save for the extremely rare person, most state a preference for decisiveness and regard omnibus legislation as efficient. The rationale is almost always that ‘government should be doing things, not stuck just talking for a long time and wasting taxpayer monies’.
Personally, I find such responses extremely depressing. But if my anecdotal conversations have any resonance with the broader Canadian public then I’d be doubtful that ‘anti-democratic’ approaches to governance will be what relieves the current governing party from power. Scandal, perhaps, but I don’t even think the Duffy affair is sufficiently scandalous to cost the government too much.
Beyond a short press release announcing its decision to drop the Wright probe on the eve of a state funeral, the RCMP’s top brass has taken up residence in the cone of silence to skirt all sorts of uncomfortable, unanswered questions about this discreditable affair.
The ordinary citizen part of me is perturbed by yesterday’s surprising events — which signal, yet again, that the rich, powerful and politically-connected are seemingly immune from any meaningful accountability for their actions.
The former investigative reporter in me is resigned to it all. I recall that the RCMP decided not to do a damn thing when it was revealed that former prime minister Brian Mulroney pocketed at least $225,000 in cash-stuffed envelopes from Karlheinz Schreiber, a notorious Austrian financier and arms dealer, while the pair met in New York soon after Mulroney left office in 1993.
Andrew Mitrovica, on the sadness and frustration that passing 90K to a sitting Senator is apparently neither a summary or indictable offence.
Source: The Wright affair: The RCMP falls off its horse … again
The border agency says that in 2012, only 25 of its 19,000 requests were refused by the telecoms, and only 13 customers were notified that the government had sought their records. Aspects of the handovers seem to happen automatically – with the telecoms typically charging only $1 to $3 for a “BSI” request and the answers usually coming back within three business days.
Every other federal investigative agency says it cannot or will not publicly provide such precise details of their relationships with the telecoms.
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In this context, the CBSA disclosure is important and unprecedented, say digital privacy experts, who argue that the agency’s numbers suggest many more exchanges are occurring between the telecoms and other government agencies as well.
“It makes me wonder what other structures and costs are in place,” said Christopher Parsons, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. He pointed out that the Mounties and Canada’s intelligence agencies failed to release data.
Though CBSA is being pilloried at the moment for the number of times that it accessed telecommunications data (18,849 times in 2012), the agency should be congratulated as comprehensively responding to MP Borg’s questions. Only the Transportation Safety Board provided a comparable degree of accountability to the Parliamentarian. While I’d like CBSA to go further – we shouldn’t depend on a Parliamentarian’s curiosity to learn about state surveillance practices – the agency has, ultimately, created the model that other federal institutions ought to be forced to follow.
Source: Border agency asked for Canadians’ telecom info 18,849 times in one year
…Justice Canada says the proposed legal shield against liability offers nothing new. “This protection already existed under the jurisprudence,” said spokeswoman Carole Saindon in an e-mail responding to Globe questions. She added that the “language in the bill is not a substantive change.”
Privacy advocates are not reassured by any of this.
The “unaccountability is absolutely unacceptable,” blogged Chris Parsons, a researcher for the University of Toronto Citizen Lab on Thursday. “And it’s made worse by the fact that the currently proposed lawful-access legislation, C–13, would indemnify [Internet Service Providers] for sharing even more information with state authorities while not requiring these authorities to report on how often, and to what extent, they ‘request’ such information.”
Needless to say, I fundamentally disagree with Justice Canada’s position that they sufficiently account for federal agencies’ surveillance programs. And if the liability shield that is being introduced in C-13 isn’t needed and the language not a substantive change then the government should be happy to remove it when the lawful access bill goes to committee.
Excited Pixels