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
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I am concerned that both of our 2.5 political parties are completely captured by corporate and foreign government interests. Policy decisions are not made to give Canadians a better quality of life, they are made to benefit politicians and CEOs.
This is death by degrees for our privacy, handing over the keys to the police.
Do not allow this to pass. Write Carney. Write your MP. Call them.
Fuck this bill.
Who cares about strong borders when half of canadians are living paycheque to paycheck and 1200 famlies own more than the bottom 80%
None of the current politicians care about the 80%
I’d say at least some of these problems are caused by the ‘opportunity costs’ I mentioned in the article. When I write my second article I plan on dealing with this issue. As I see it, most people fear that a strong govt will oppress the citizenry. In my case, I think we need a strong govt to protect people from the free market and capitalism. And I’d suggest the oppressive way our legal and bureaucratic system does things gets in the way of those politicians who might actually want to fix things. But until people of good will are willing to redefine what government needs to do, we aren’t going to get to a better place. :-(
I don’t know about the Canada Post changes but “the government reading your mail doesn’t matter because snail mail is obsolete anyway” doesn’t seem like a good attitude to bring to it.
I don’t know about the refugee law changes but “government needs the authority to act on the fly unconstrained by the rule of law in case there’s a crisis” doesn’t seem like a reasonable kind of thing to say about it.
You seem to have no comment on the part about foreign states being “empowered to compel the production” of data or the other changes relating to “subscriber information and transmission data” which seem quite dangerous and are the things I’ve most often seen other people worried about.
And then of course you don’t mention at all the “lawful access” part, both horrific and easy to understand, wherein electronic service providers can be obligated to assist CSIS and the cops in spying on their users in every way possible, and forbidden from telling anyone when they’ve been ordered to do so.
I’m not an expert by any stretch, so I’m happy to be corrected. But here’s my response.
****About opening mail. ****How would you deal with things like smuggling carfentanil through the mail? It just seems to me that so few people write snail mail letters anymore that it seems kinda odd to make a big fuss about it–especially when large envelopes and packages have been routinely opened for years. (I worked in a mail room once in a while and remember seeing large manila envelopes with their corners cut off once in a while—I assumed that this was so a detector could test for illegal substances.)
About ‘unconstrained by the rule of law’: By definition, it would be constrained by the rule of law—Bill C-2 changes the law, it doesn’t just rip of the concept of rule of law. Moreover, there is still a chain of command and a paper trail that would point out when the decision was made and who made it.
About empowered to compel the production. I wouldn’t mind a specific reference so I could see what you are talking about. The big reason why I wrote that article was because I kept hearing statements on podcasts and reading them in articles, yet no one produced the actual wording they were so concerned about. And, as I also pointed out, it’s very difficult to work through a government Bill and try to figure out exactly what it means.
About Lawful Access Again, if the law says something, anyone who follows that law is, by definition, following the law. There is a process for creating warrants and a paper-trail that identifies who was behind the decision to force access to the data centre. The law has been police are able to get a judge’s say-so to bug a phone, plant a tracking device, or raid an office and seize all the paper records for a very long time. Sure thing this could be abused—but as I tried to point out in the article, there’s also an opportunity cost associated with making the process of accessing data from server farms so difficult that it allows malefactors to get away with crime.
Beyond these quibbles, there’s also the point to remember that this is just a first draft of a policy that is going to go through committee meetings both in the Commons and the Senate. So if there are substantive changes that should be made, there will be ample opportunity for people to raise them. And with a minority govt, there’s every chance that these will be listened to if they are in good faith.
The part about foreign states being “empowered to compel the production of transmission data or subscriber information” is in 22.07 under the heading “Enforcement of Foreign Decisions for Production” and some of the implications were recently discussed by Citizen Lab.
My mention of “lawful access” was a demonstration of my bad habit of putting in quotation makes things that are not direct quotes — for which I apologise. It’s a phrase that has historically been used to describe the sort of thing described in the bill as “Supporting Authorized Access to Information” in part 15, which I remain surprised that more people do not find outrageous. Michael Geist is one person who’s noticed it. The way it’s written seems to me absurdly over-broad and simplistic, even if it were basically a good idea which it isn’t. I’m no legal expert either, but the language in the bill seems quite plain.
Sure, it’s just a “first draft.” As I said in a previous comment the committee will have it’s work cut out for it. Based on what I understand along with what others have persuaded me of I don’t think it’s possible that a good bill can result from this starting point. Assuming that the government stands by any of it, we’ll see which principles the opposition is willing to stand up for.
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.
As a whole, the 2AP’s proposed method of expediting higher volumes of cross-border sharing of evidence is by eliminating or diminishing human rights safeguards, including the obligation to obtain prior, independent judicial authorization when seizing private information and sharing it with foreign law enforcement authorities. Rather than “establishing high standards, the protocol prioritizes law enforcement access at almost every turn.”
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. ;-)
