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
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.
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.