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:If there is a lawful mechanism... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, in times of war gone by, ALL transoceanic mail was subject to opening and reading. Nevermind communication monitoring across the iron curtain during the cold war.
What's new is that we have this low cost, high bandwidth communication medium that everybody is using.
In the past, you were restricted from broadcasting your ideas past the local pub - and even there, people would listen and repeat to the local authorities things they overheard.
Seems like a good thing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:If there is a lawful mechanism... (Score:3, Interesting)
As wbr1 said, in democratic societies, there was no legal mechanism to do such seizure outside of a specific accusation.
However, it's more than that. There has been no practical mechanism to monitor all communications. Even if you could gather and record all of the phone calls of all of the people, you couldn't use it. Someone would have to sit down and listen through every conversation you wanted to find out about. You had to target specific groups.
Modern technology means that you can gather every email anyone ever read into an indexed searchable archive. You can then, at your leisure, make connections and links between different people. You want to "persuade" someone to cooperate? Find a crime his grandparent committed and then threaten to lock the grandparent away for the rest of their life if your target doesn't do what you want. Want to blackmail someone? Go look through everything that everyone else ever said about them, even if it wasn't sent to your mark.
The internet is different simply because it is possible to monitor it. The whole thing. That has never happened before.
Re:Telcos in *every* country supporting surveillan (Score:5, Interesting)
In many countries, the telcos are SOEs [wikipedia.org]. In the USA, given our dislike for big government, they are privately owned (nod, wink). Which actually plays into the government's hand quite well. Given our Constitutional restrictions on warrantless searches and our right to be secure from government (but not private) surveillance, having a private entity do the data collection as an agent of the government sidesteps this little annoyance neatly. But in countries where there is no such restriction on the governments' snooping, they just run the network themselves.
At least you folks know where you stand when you pick up a phone. Us Americans can only wonder.