Canadian Govt To Introduce Massive Internet Surveillance Law

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Bill provokes privacy fears/6142986/story.html

Because they are a bunch of c***s! Because of the way our parties are set up - we have a left, a center, a center right and a far right and because the votes split up the far right has won despite not being favoured by the majority of Canadians. This is pretty much the bill that they tried to introduce last time but now they have the seats in the house to ram it through. We will protest it as well as we can and we shall see. We would have been better off if the Liberals had more seats but this is what we can expect from a Conservative government.

Funny thing is, as far as my limited dialog with a Canadian friend who worked for a Conservative Party Parliament menber was a bit of an eye opener for both of us. He was absolutely for gun control and he thought only the government should have firearms. Vs my view that all freeman/freewoman have the right to bare arms and the government should not have the right to do away my rights. He wanted a nice strong central government that had control over many aspects of life to create a wonderful society. I, OTOH, wanted to shrink government and I wanted them to do less with less. We are both conservatives, but that label means little on our individual ideology.

Conservative comes from the party of the old ruling class in the UK, the Lords and the crown. They wished to conserve the power to themselves (and based that on "God given rights" that dictated the old order and on tradition). Liberals, on the other hand, believed in individual responsibility and freedom and that a governments job was to protect liberty - and to protect liberty one must oppose the concentration of power. Current concentrations of power are in the churches, the military, banking and corporations. These are all things that the founding fathers all worked against so that they would not be a threat to individual liberty. Conservatives the world over are still wedded to the idea of restoring the "natural order" of god chosen elites to rule over the rest of the people. They do not shrink from claiming to represent liberal ideals while at the same time denigrating those people who hold those ideals as "liberal".

Dammy, not sure what your friend was talking about, but your views would most certainly be closer to that of Stephen Harper. Fact is, the Conservatives completely scrapped the national gun registry program. Gun ownership isn't the hot topic in Canada as it is in the US, but even still, Harper made a big deal about it.

And like many hard-on-crime Republicans, Harper is all about more jails and longer jail terms despite the fact that crime rates have been going down across Canada. And to make sure that people don't call him on that he's made it harder for Statistics Canada to actually collect statistical data that can measure that sort of thing. So ya, I'm sure you'd love him. You know, I think most Canadians would love to send you Stephen Harper, he'd make a wonderful Republican. More importantly, Israel would love that idea the most.

sounds like another guy that should go on that cheney hunting trip

This is of course being discussed on Ars Technica. The best user comment I read so far suggests that in return the citizens should be able to tap into the phones and computers of our politicians, after all honest politicians have nothing to hide. Hmm... Somehow I doubt that one's gonna fly...

Interesting, my friend was all for gun control and didn't see a reason for individuals to have them, just law enforcement and the military.

Why is that?

Why Israel would be happy? Because Harper is considered the head of state most friendly to Israel right now. More friendly than Obama is. And really, since Turkey and Israel are no longer friends, well, that pretty much leaves Harper. Luckily, Canada is in no position to act on that friendship in a meaningful way.

One of the things that Iranians have used to circumvent government surveillance has been the use of encrypted communications and darknets. Software both for computers and smart phones is being developed specifically for activists in Iran, Syria, etc. This of course means that they will do a good job of beta testing these apps for their eventual use in a real Western "liberal" democracy such as Canada.

From encryption to darknets: As governments snoop, activists fight back

In that case I suspect such software will be useless here. Expect that CSIS and the NSA already have the keys.

Sounds like Canada is just "harmonizing" with what's going through the US senate at the moment and for the same excuse. We are going to watch everyone so we can protect the children.

I think it's open source in many cases. Keys are often random. Things like Freenet Project rely on plausible deniability - the trick is the system is always downloading random bits of encrypted data and uploading it as well, so it's very difficult for an outsider to prove what YOU downloaded.

In the end there won't be a distinction. Those sort of loopholes will be fixed if they exist. It will come down to - if you participate you are guilty. If you are receiving those kind of packets then you are part of a criminal conspiracy (which, of course, you would be - if that was a crime).

Turkey isn't a friend to much in NATO at this point in time and I'm wondering when they are going to leave NATO entirely, which I won't be too unhappy about. And I do agree, the first Muslim (by birthright) POTUS isn't a good friend of Israel.

You know, I remember in history about a bunch of guys who liked to talk like that. Ended up shooting and imprisoning and gassing people because of who their parents and grand parents and great grand parents were - Jewish by birthright.

This is true, but I hope we're a long way from that. Some of the stuff used in Iran was designed to look legit. Considering that more authoritarian regimes are struggling with blocking communications, it will likely resort to a cat and mouse game. At any rate, I've even heard of attempts of using a bunch of ad-hoc wireless "dark" networks strung together. This is highly decentralized and technically NOT the internet, but apparently has some potential in terms of covering a large area and still being off the radar (because it's not on the internet). These are still vulnerable to attacks, but requires much more effort, technology and know how. This probably won't take off until we really need it.

Anonymous is not impressed: Anonymous threatens attack on Vic Toews

That's one enemy I'd like to never have.

love it

real transparency

Gets even more interesting. Had the Jewish birth right issue been put to bed, that entire ugly history would have been avoided. Hitler's father was half Jewish, rejected by this father and his father's family because he was not born by a Jew but a Gentile. Had Hitler's grandfather and great grandfather accepted Hitler's father as a Jew, WW II would never had happened.

So yes, Obama is a Muslim by birth right.