In Canada, No Expectation of Privacy On the Net 206
Posted
by
kdawson
from the if-you're-not-doing-anything-wrong dept.
from the if-you're-not-doing-anything-wrong dept.
The_AV8R writes "In a recent interview, Peter Van Loan, the new Canadian Public Safety minister, says ISPs should be able to provide private user information without a warrant. (The only example he gave was cases of child pornography; the interviewer pointed out that in these cases ISPs are already at liberty to divulge customer information without a warrant, but that the proposed rules would make that mandatory whenever the police ask.) He was adamant that in regard to IP addresses, names, cell phone numbers, and email addresses: '...that is not the kind of information about which Canadians have a legitimate expectation of privacy.' The minister denied — even when presented with an audio clip proving otherwise — that his predecessor had promised never to allow the police to wiretap the Internet without a warrant."
correct (Score:5, Insightful)
No expectations of privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Anywhere, anytime, it seems.
Re:correct (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh oh! He's in for it now! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:correct (Score:5, Insightful)
well yeah, but i dont do anything illegal so i am not attracting the attention of the authorities
Right. You ain't doin nuthin wrong so you don't have anything to worry about.
Why even bother with warrants at all? The police never go after someone who has done no wrong.
As a Canadian... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:correct (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing was, before this you had to attract the attention of the authorities, now the authorities might just wonder who IP XXX.XXX.XXX is and find something to arrest you for.
anonymous proxy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:correct (Score:3, Insightful)
well yeah, but i dont do anything illegal so i am not attracting the attention of the authorities, it is the identity thieves and trolls that would like to cause harm to people is what i am concerned with
Wow, you are really, spectacularly missing the point.
All those measures you take to protect your privacy? As of now, they apparently mean absolutely nothing if you live in Canada. Maybe you'd like to believe it's only the "identity thieves and trolls" who have to worry about official attention, and hell, maybe you're even right. But if you have no right to privacy online, then your life is as much an open book as if you appended your full name, date of birth, and credit card numbers to every post you made.
Obviously no expectation of democracy either eh! (Score:4, Insightful)
Supposedly Canada is a liberal democracy... clearly the powers that be think differently... Sieg Heil Harper and the Queen! The brand of fascism that is sweeping Canada is spooky for sure.
My parents and grand parents didn't fight off the Nazi's to have the likes of the new Canadian fascism take hold.
I'm sorry to tell the government boobs but yes we Canadians don't like them interfering with our private lives or spying on us.
Take your delusion of government power and shove it up your where the sun don't shine.
Peter Van Loan, the new Canadian Public Safety minister can suck on my big fat ___.
It's assholes like Peter Van Loan that give government a bad name and make the entire notion of government an idea whose time has past into the dust bin of history.
I guess I'll be having a knock on the door in the middle of the night tonight and be taken away because I expressed the view that governments are simply groups of power grubbing nobs who don't have anything better to do with their time than attempt to control the minutia of people's lives. Come through my door without permission and I have a surprise waiting government brown shirts.
Search Engine Podcast (Score:2, Insightful)
You can listen to it Here [tvo.org]
Re:correct (Score:5, Insightful)
b.) Relying on the ISP to not divulge the connection between your name and your IP address is obfuscation, not to be confused with actual security. One should use an anonymous proxy to post things you do not want traced back to you.
c.) You should destroy all your porn after viewing and fapping.
d.) Relying on the authorities not having the inclination to prosecute you is also a bad idea.
Re:correct (Score:5, Insightful)
This argument is extremely naive to say it gently. Just wait until you get some virus or trojan and the damned thing starts to serve some terrible content from your IP or start doing spam or DOS. Then you will have to prove to authorities that "you did nothing wrong", while they have lots of evidence on you.
Re:correct (Score:5, Insightful)
a.) Listening to the video would not get you in trouble, but uploading it might.
Says who? The only reason why the RIAA has not actively pursued these cases is because the most popular is owned by Google who can afford great lawyers and with an informed judge might create some copyright reform. Plus the damages would be too small for them to activly pursue them... Yet.
In July 2008, Viacom won a court ruling requiring YouTube to hand over data detailing the viewing habits of every user who has watched videos on the site. The move led to concerns that the viewing habits of individual users could be identified through a combination of their IP addresses and login names. The decision was criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which called the court ruling "a set-back to privacy rights".[36] U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton dismissed the privacy concerns as "speculative", and ordered YouTube to hand over documents totalling around 12 terabytes of data.
If viewing these things were no big deal why would Viacom demand the logs?
b.) Relying on the ISP to not divulge the connection between your name and your IP address is obfuscation, not to be confused with actual security. One should use an anonymous proxy to post things you do not want traced back to you.
Sure, but I should have the expectation of privacy. Just like I should have the expectation of privacy when I shower with the door locked. Could someone break down the door? Sure. But I still have the reasonable expectation of privacy. Similarly, I should assume my ISP would not divulge my IP with names unless there was a warrant.
c.) You should destroy all your porn after viewing and fapping.
Sure, but what happens if they use logs to figure out of viewing it, even on a webpage?
d.) Relying on the authorities not having the inclination to prosecute you is also a bad idea.
Thats why we have search warrants in the first place. In the 1700s and 1800s when the America's governments were being established, you had a lot more privacy. Crimes could only be prosecuted with solid evidence. One of the points of that was to get rid of unpopular laws because if everyone broke them it would be too much of a hassle to prosecute them unless they were doing something really wrong. Fast forward to the 2000s and we have an unpopular copyright law that suddenly becomes enforceable when you take away the search warrants.
Re:correct (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Minority (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh look, uniformed voter in the ranks.
Let me enlighten you on the voting process and how it works:
1)Take traction issue one. Apply to minority parliament. Wait for bill to die, or be defeated by opposition.
2) Await for opposition to pull something to cause parliament to collapse.
3) Get general election call.
Start running ads:
4) Take legislation from step 1.
5) Note ads, and apply these to the opposition and how they failed to uphold Canadian values.
6) Note polls, and apply ads as need be to key riding's. Hope it's not another minority win/loss.
7) Success/Fail
8) Repeat at step 1 in 1-2 years if we're back at step 6.
9) Use voter apathy and pissed offness about repeated minority governments and $300m elections
All political parties want power. No party can get power without creating traction, the only way to create traction is by creating issues in many cases. Welcome to Canadian politics. I am Canadian, I do study politics, and yes I've got a pretty good idea of when we're going to have our next election. Either this fall, or this upcoming spring.
It should be noted that the Liberal party isn't any different then the Conservatives on Law and Order. They only differ slightly on social policy. If you think differently you haven't studied either parties platforms(and in the case of the Liberals) how little they've put up.
No surprise here (Score:3, Insightful)
Van Loan is one of the neo-cons currently blighting the Canadian political stage. They've been wandering around like lost sheep ever since Obama was elected in the US, and this kind of wholesale destruction of personal privacy is just their version of pigging out on comfort food when things go wrong.
I bet you are break the law with out even knowing (Score:3, Insightful)
In BC if you are driving along the highway at 80kph and the speed limit is 80kph, but if everyone else is going 90kph, you are actually breaking the law because you are driving at an unsafe speed in relation to the cars around you. If you speed up to 90kph you will now be breaking the speed limit, but are no longer breaking the unsafe speed law.
There are quite a few of these catch 22s. Even the most law abiding people they've found are breaking laws inadvertently. Sometimes there is no way not to break a law.
Now in the right hands the powers of this proposed bill would not be a problem, but our Police time and time again have shown themselves to be less than honest and upright. Even if they were now, what's to say the people replacing them would be?
Requiring the warrent provides that extra check to try to make sure that the Police are not fishing for information, because if you look in anyone closet, you'll find things no matter how clean it is.
Re:correct (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is parent modded insightful? It's clearly a joke...
Because it was an insightful joke.
Re:correct (Score:5, Insightful)
well yeah, but i dont do anything illegal so i am not attracting the attention of the authorities
What if:
Do you get the idea? You don't need to do anything wrong for people to come sniffing.
If someone looks hard enough they will probably find something that is embarassing, it doesn't need to be illegal for you to not want the world to know... would your employer like to know that you have been visiting the jobs web sites; your pastor that you visited, well, all manner of innocent things that he might not like; your spouse that you exchanged email with an old flame (quite innocently); ...
"expect" (Score:3, Insightful)
You are using the English definition of "expectation" (i.e. something that one believes/predicts will happen) rather than seeing it as technical legal jargon.
In technical legal jargon, an "expectation of privacy" basically means a desire for privacy, to such an extent that some (though not all) governments go to the trouble of creating an unnatural right that broadcasts of information, which passes through countless intermediate systems (literally countless, since most users simply have no idea what all is involved), where no efforts are made by the users to keep the information private (not even a 30-year-old 56-bit cipher), will be treated as though it were private. You labeled the information with the recipient's name, so everyone who reads your "private" information knows who to forward it too, and we all know that gentlemen do not read one another's mail.
Many misunderstandings and flamewars have been caused by the stupid lawyers who coined the term "expectation of privacy" in such a way that created that vast chasm between their jargon and plain speech.
Anyway, yes, nobody really believes that information that is recklessly spread without regard for who might see it, will remain private. But that's now what anti-crytography privacy advocates are talking about. They're saying that we have created a social convention where we have all agreed to pretend that recklessly transmitted information is private, and in the .0000000000001% of the instances of pseudo-privacy "violations" where someone finds out that it was violated, then the convention will be enforced.
The message to spies is this: don't get caught. As long as you don't get caught, nobody has a problem with what you're doing, and everyone knows that you're doing it. We've agreed to look the other way, because acknowledging the ridiculousness of our policies would be too embarrassing. But if you get caught, that's even more embarrassing because it just points out how stupid we've been. We get trapped into gritting our teeth and saying things like "I didn't know anyone could read my email," while everyone else points and laughs at us, seemingly ignorant that their own reputation for having common sense might be sacrificed next. ("When they came for the reckless fools, I didn't say anything...")
The Canadian government has decided to take the position that this convention is so unrealistic and counter to every single person's experiences with networks, and that the awkward situations described in the previous paragraph are so awkward, that they're no longer on board with the convention anymore. It was a fantastic convention while it lasted, maybe too fantastic.
But that's Canada. Back in the US..
Well, you should. How can we violate your privacy, if you don't help? Please, start expecting the unexpected. It's for your own good. It's Your Rights Online -- the right to be reckless with your own safety without facing the consequences. We're all here to stick up for your rights.
Re:Reality injection (Score:3, Insightful)
So what happens when the ISP shares your dynamic IP address with the pedo around the block who has the same ISP ?
Would you like your information tied to his web searches ?
Better yet, I could be running an open wireless point, or a TOR end-point, which could contain god knows what traffic on it ?
how about during the time you have your computer off, I happen to spoof your ip address and you would never know about it.
Re:correct (Score:1, Insightful)
The claim is a LIE. People do expect privacy. The guy should have said 'but we have decided otherwise'. If ihe is stalked by camera journalists - by his own words - he has no expectation of privacy.
However - the silver lining is that the ISP is free to snoop and provide ISP details of Ministers and officials and their families to RIAA and the profile to the press. A bit like British 'Family Value' pollies that has a loose interpretation on same values.
Re:correct (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah right. If that were the case we wouldn't be filling up our prisons with non-violent drug offenders. Gimme a break. Prisons in this country are a for profit business run by private industry.