Canadian Telcos Secretly Supporting Internet Surveillance Legislation 79
An anonymous reader writes "Canada's proposed Internet surveillance was back in the news last week after speculation grew that government intends to keep the bill in legislative limbo until it dies on the order paper. This morning,
Michael Geist reports that nearly all of the major Canadian telecom and cable companies have been secretly working with the government for months on the Internet surveillance bill. The secret group has been given access to a 17-page outline (PDF) of planned regulations and raised questions of surveillance of social networks and cloud computing facilities."
Re:Telcos are usually content distributors (Score:2, Informative)
In the case of the internet, the sources and destinations of data are spread thinly over a ~10,000,000 sq km area.
Well, no.
The population is not even remotely close to evenly distributed. In fact, if you look at a map [nrcan.gc.ca] it's fairly clear that it's not necessary to provide wireless service to the vast majority of that land area. Put differently -- yes, Canada is really big but most of it is virtually uninhabited. For the most part, the white areas on that map have no meaningful mobile phone coverage.
Claiming that Canada's low population density is somehow an excuse for extremely high mobile phone rates is a very simplistic excuse. When you consider the area where anyone would actually consider providing coverage, the effective population density is probably not significantly lower than most other developed countries (although 30 seconds of googling couldn't provide me with hard numbers on this, ymmv).