Proposed Canadian Anti-Spam Rules Restrict Secret ISP Monitoring

New submitter Fnordulicious writes "Although Canada's anti-spam legislation is already in place, the rules to implement it have been under development for more than a year. This weekend the proposed rules from the Department of Industry were published in the Canada Gazette. Kady O'Malley reports on the CBC Inside Politics Blog that Canadian ISPs will not be allowed to secretly monitor activity except in the case that the activity is illegal and represents an 'imminent risk to the security of its network.' In addition, consent would be required for monitoring of legal activities 'that are merely unauthorized or suspicious.'"

Re:This sounds good, but what is consent here?

[Meneth]

Even if the ISP looks, they can't determine if something is illegal or not. A court of law is required for that.

Re:Some scary stuff therw

[dskoll]

Does this mean that Rogers/Bell can start pushing agents/SW on their subscribers computers which in turn allow them to control your access?

It may read that way, but I don't think that's the intent. I think it's meant to allow Bell and Rogers to remotely update the firmware on their modems and routers. My mother uses Bell, but she runs Linux so Bell would have a fairly difficult time installing anything on her computer anyway. (To monitor her, they wouldn't need to... they could just install something on the router they provided.)