Comment 74475

By Feeling Chilly (anonymous) | Posted February 16, 2012 at 10:05:58

Toews remarks go beyond rude and distasteful. As a Minister of the Crown with responsibility for law enforcement, his suggestion that dissent on policy equals support for criminals is disturbing. It is designed, quite clearly, to silence critics. But the more sinister undertone, particularly in discussing a bill like this, is that those who do not support the policy are suspect, and perhaps deserving of surveillance themselves. It's "you're either with us, or we'll be taking a very close look at you." It's intimidation, worthy of a dictatorial state rather than a participatory democracy.

This approach, however, goes beyond Toews remarks. The very title of the Act, the "Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act", is designed to limit dissent. It sets up an argument that those who oppose it are willing to put children at risk. But the operational text of the Act says nothing about children. It extends enhanced powers to the Competition Bureau as well as the police. I'm pretty certain the Competition Bureau is not regularly involved in investigating child pornography.

The litmus test will be the willingness of the government to accept an amendment to the legislation that restricts its application to investigations concerning child exploitation. If the government is not willing to adopt such an amendment, then the sham of their marketing of this Act will be exposed. The enhanced surveillance capabilities they seek will be shown to be desired for much broader purposes.

Much has been made of the requirements in the Act that ISP's and phone companies turn over subscriber information without a warrant. While this is troubling, the fact is that at present no law prevents an ISP from turning over this information to law enforcement. In fact, many already do. The potentially larger implication is the requirement that ISP's construct and maintain their networks in such a way that enhanced surveillance is possible, what Ontario Privacy Commissioner Dr. Ann Cavoukian calls "surveillance by design". It establishes a new normal. As more and more of our lives are networked and online, mining and connecting data becomes incredibly powerful. A detailed picture can be assembled of what a person does, where they go, what they think, what they buy and who they communicate with, and this picture can be closely examined without the person's knowledge. When the Federal government proposes legislation that requires, by law, that our communications infrastructure be built to facilitate this sort of surveillance, we have to be very cautious about not only how they currently intend to use it, but how it might be used in the future. For once the tools are there, governments and law enforcement will face increasing pressure, and desire, to use them.

This week, the selling feature of the bill is "protecting children". But if the infrastructure requirements are accepted, it is not difficult to see how they will be incrementally expanded. Data retention requirements could be gradually expanded, as storage becomes cheaper. Once the concept of surveillance by design is accepted, expansion becomes a mundane, technical detail that happens below the public's radar. And when the next major public "security event" happens, be it a terrorist attack, civil unrest, a biker war, or another G20 summit, law enforcement will have in place the tools to execute widespread invasions of privacy on a scale never before possible. During the G20, we witnessed massive denials of some of the most fundamental freedoms "guaranteed" in our Charter. Police suppressed freedoms of speech and assembly, often violently. They arrested thousands without cause, imprisoned them, and then released them without charge. All in the name of "security".

Once the surveillance infrastructure is built, with data retention, data mining and pattern recognition designed in, we leave ourselves open to granting access to government every detail of our lives. The next major public security crisis could produce the "Protecting Canadians From Terrorists Act", or the "Protecting Canadians From Organized Crime Act." This Act would be short and to the point - grant the government unrestricted access to all of the data now being routinely collected. And the techniques will be the same: if you oppose it, you'll be standing with the terrorists, or standing with the Hell's Angels.

Rights are rarely taken away in a sudden, dramatic fashion. They are worn away, like erosion on the banks of a river. It can be so gradual that it is hard to see. But eventually, you find yourself at the bottom of a deep river valley, with no way back to the top. And you wonder, how could this trickle of water have cut so deeply into the bedrock of the land? And how did it happen without you even noticing?

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