alt Hacker NewsCanada’s Bill C-22 Is a Repackaged Version of Last Year’s Surveillance Nightmare
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I know this will be an unpopular comment but I actually somewhat like it when governments show their totalitarian side. It's both a wake-up call for some in denial and also drives my favorite type of innovation. That is, anything that subverts censorship. It won't be a lot of people but there will be splinter groups that break away from the big centralized platforms. It's not usually a big deal but it's also not nothing and that's maybe good enough for me.
In the past this occurred in the US as a result of having a totalitarian style Attorney General John Ashcroft in the early 2000's. Many new protocols and applications popped up around his time and his leveraging of the fears around 9/11. There were many articles written about his time in power if anyone was curious.
Just keep bringing legislation back eventually it gets through.
I've noticed a lot of bad digital rights stuff on HN over the last couple weeks - more pushes on age verification, attacks on end-to-end encryption, and now this. Is there something about the time of year? Maybe because the world cup is coming and people will be distracted?
If someone from the EFF is reading this, could we get a French translation of that article so I can send it to my MP and share around to friends and family. We need a mass movement on that to block it.
Curious: what motivates the Canadian government to implement such law? It's not like Canada wants to be a police state in anyway. On the contrary, Canadian government looks pretty chill most of the time, except maybe during the Covid era when they were hellbent on implementing the Covid policies. Or it's the same "for your own good and the state knows how to take care of you" kind of European shit?
These things will keep on popping up until they destroy the careers of the politicians and civil servants who do. This is how you stop it. And you make this happen by getting organized and acting.
There would of course be much more of a public uproar about C-22 and the steady diet of online censorship and surveillance bills served up over the last 6 years if they were being pushed by a Conservative government. But it's the Liberals, and they get a free pass from mainstream media who are subsidized handsomely for their complicity.
If anyone believes the real intent behind this authoritarian legislation is to protect the kids or crack down on organized crime or to keep the public safe, I have a bridge to sell you. This is an administration that did away with mandatory minimum sentences for serious crimes, considers pedophilia to be a minor offence, allow repeat violent offenders out on bail repeatedly, refuses to convict migrants if it might impact their chances of obtaining citizenship, has allowed thousands of terrorists to enter the country with minimal vetting, and openly tolerates election interference from China. Public safety is far, far down the list of their priorities. They are very thirsty to silence their online detractors, however.
Comments are locked on reddit and brigades are downvoting the articles about it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/1rrxqje/liberal_gov...
The is the thing and it happens in every Country. If a bill fails to pass it or none like it should be brought up for 5 years.
I know doing that would be crazy, but Companies keep trying and trying until it is passed.
Tin Foil hat time: It almost looks like it is a way to funnel Political Contributions (bribes) to the politicians. The politicians fail the bill because they felt they did not get enough Contributions :)
I worked in privacy and security in canada for decades. We could only hold them off so long. The whole country is being demolished to be reinvented as a technocrat machine levered against human desire.
It means the solutions aren't technical, and nobody votes their way out of this. I've checked out because the demoralization campaign worked, and there is nothing to save. The outs are Alberta separation, US annexation, civil war, or MAID. There is no longer a political solution. If there were, these surveillance controls would not be necessary.
Im confused by the supposed poor definitions of the bill that people keep pointing out. Doesn't the escape-hatch provided in the "systemic vulnerabilities" definition clearly signal that companies could absolutely refuse to implement backdoor encryption?
>(5) A core provider is not required to comply with a provision of a regulation >made under subsection (2), with respect to an electronic service, if compliance >with that provision would require the provider to introduce a systemic >vulnerability related to that service or prevent the provider from rectifying >such a vulnerability
The definition to me reads to me as very obviously blocking the government from demanding an encryption backdoor, especially since the Act allows for the company to challenge such an order in court.
>"systemic vulnerability means a vulnerability in the electronic protections of >an electronic service that creates a substantial risk that secure information >could be accessed by a person who does not have any right or authority to do >so. "
So what exactly is the problem with this definition?
Why this is not treated as act of terrorism by law enforcement?
how are Canada and America different from China/Russia?
Free software, free society. The FSF, GNU and Stallman were serious about this. Your communications should be private under liber (free as in freedom) software. OFC no one should enter your home without a warrant. Your computer data should be dealt in the same way. Your libre OS, your rights. Also, to hell with age fields laws on your own computing, and if Meta's services cant compete against the bots AI the social network themselves promoted, go cry a river and the sooner your lobby mafia collapses down, the better.
Back in the day Gopher required a fee to serve content. Where's Gopher now? They allowed it after seeing the web were eating their lunch like crazy because the web has neither fees nor bullshit licenses. Too late. These laws will suffer the same fate, the lobbies like it or not.
Minitel from the French, where in the 80's they were pioneers for a lot of things in Europe? Adieu, au reviour, bye, adios, killed by the web and open standards. No centralized idiocracy, no fees, no gateway, no nothing. It was Angelfire, Geocities or your duct-taped homesever with Slackware and Apache.
And today ISP's are trying to ban user hosting/sharing by either disabling some ports or enforcing NAT/CGNAT so they purchase premium plans, but even networks like Yggdrasil are throwing these parasites down and letting every citizen no matter where they are from to create their own sites and freely hosts them without asking anyone what to do with their freedom of speech.
The Nazis tried, they collapsed down from and outside. The Francoists tried the same. In the 60's even the die hard Falangists understood that with science and progress their 19th century bound regime was doomed. Even more with the landing on the Moon, there was a craze about the space, rockets, UFO... times just marched on. Ditto with Soviets and censorship. Good economy plans are useless if you don't allow your "camarades" to spend their resources on anything they like. You know, you could just implement... taxes, as Cubans are trying to do with small companies and co-operatives. Ditto with the Chinese, they learnt a lesson with the Mao famines and the Deng Xiaoping's openness.
But unless they open their regime a little on speech, you can have a great economic plan, for sure, but people burns out. Machines can work without getting tired according to bureaucracy, but humans can't.
You can perfectly set some laws making healthcare better; that works. But the moment you enter on personal lives, telecomms, privacy... you are playing with fire. The Communists don't understand this. Telecomms worked far better in Spain being deregulated and stating net neutrality (and user rights) as something good to be state supported/mandated, but not for the prices, which were really high for a state monolopy. Liberalization plumetted the prices down.
DItto with classical liberals, but for opposite reasons. Illnesses are too random to be managed by individuals. Worse: a pandemic can wipe your own state, economy and every business if you let the random Joe vaccine or isolate on their own. If they can't afford the costs, they will lie and in weeks it would be too late, your populace can't sustain your business, 1929 but mixed with George Romero.
Said this, if it's illegal to break packages by mail (snooping and intercepting it it's a serious crime in Spain with jail sentences or really high fines), your digital data must be under the same laws. Ah, yes, protect the children, the terrorists, yaddah, yaddah, for sure all the NSA spying with Echelon did prevent the Esptein and Dutroux cases among terror attacks in NYC, Madrid and London . F*ck off, please.
Terrorists can just use pens, paper and table bound encryptions or, you know, cheap $1 devices with cardboard-printed spinning wheels.
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Canada like all commonwealth countries is descending into authoritarianism. It’s not far off from making speech critical of politicians and government “hate speech”, in some cases it already is. I suspect Canada has about 15-20 years before it transitions fully into a state like Venezuela, and the economy will follow shortly after.
I'm reminded of a speech Barack Obama gave many years ago about the difficulty and necessity of finding a "happy medium" between protecting individual liberties and providing law enforcement with the abilities to provide security in a digital world.
I think the topic itself is difficult for everyone involved - there will likely be a lot of uproar for many years as we get closer to finding this happy medium.
Both the mandatory data retention and encryption backdoor requirements will cause encrypted messaging services like Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, Matrix, and others to block both Canadians and Canadian businesses from their services.
If you live in Canada or are impacted by this legislation, then you need to tell both your MP and the Minister of Public Safety of Canada to reject this legislation.
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The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) published information about Bill C-22 here just over a week ago: https://ccla.org/privacy/coalition-to-mps-scrap-unprecedente...
The blanket metadata retention and encryption backdoor requirements of Bill C-22 are illegal in the European Union.
Multiple groups have made easy to use tools for sending your MP and (other members of government) an email about rejecting this terrible legislation in its current form:
* The Internet Society's tool: https://www.internetsociety.org/our-work/internet-policy/kee...
* OpenMedia's messaging tool: https://action.openmedia.org/page/188754/action/1
* ICLM's messaging tool: https://iclmg.ca/stop-c-22/
I'd also recommend emailing Minister of Public Safety of Canada (Gary Anandasangaree: [email protected]), and the Minister of Justice (Sean Fraser: [email protected]).