Both the mandatory data retention and encryption backdoor requirements will cause encrypted messaging services like Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, Matrix, and others to block both Canadians and Canadian businesses from their services.
If you live in Canada or are impacted by this legislation, then you need to tell both your MP and the Minister of Public Safety of Canada to reject this legislation.
The blanket metadata retention and encryption backdoor requirements of Bill C-22 are illegal in the European Union.
Multiple groups have made easy to use tools for sending your MP and (other members of government) an email about rejecting this terrible legislation in its current form:
I'd also recommend emailing Minister of Public Safety of Canada (Gary Anandasangaree: gary.anand@parl.gc.ca), and the Minister of Justice (Sean Fraser: sean.fraser@parl.gc.ca).
These people don't answer their messages and have an [unelected] majority- it doesn't matter how you vote in this country, and the group that keeps the group of carneys in power want it that way.
You need to branch out a bit, and take a look at how countries on the brink actually operate. Go check out Hungary for a country that almost lost their democracy, or check out Russia for a country that never had it but tries to pretend like it does.
Canada is measurably not even close to countries like Russia, where voting truly does not matter (and could actually be hazardous to your health.)
Having spent my fair share of time in 3rd world shitholes, though I wouldn't particularly like Russia, most of them have levels of freedom in day-to-day life you could only dream of north of the Mexican border in the Americas.
In a great deal of area, no one bothers to get a license plate. You can just build a house, no government asshole to block you, and if they do they are only looking for a small bribe. There is no CPS for the next Karen to call to come harass your kids for them playing independently. Very little intervention in family disputes nor practical ability to extract alimony because your wife decided she was "bored." The cash economy thrives. The ability of the government to tax is weak. There is not the money nor personnel available to do Orwellian surveillance and the state has to very strategically pick how to spend its few resources oppressing the populace.
Canada and USA have more freedom on paper. If you don't count the fact you're spending 1/4 or 1/3 of the year slaving to pay taxes, burning another 1/3 of the year to make rent because it's illegal to just erect a shack on a postage stamp and live in it for next to nothing, and that the precious 'rule of law' means instead of the policeman asking for a bribe they'll just arrest you on one of the gazillion laws (ignorance of the law is no excuse!) on the books to get their money instead.
This isn't to say it's better. But a great deal of my family that could immigrate from the third world... have not.... or they use North America as a cash vacuum while they invest in their 3rd world hometown where they can actually get shit done without a gigantic pile of paperwork and environmental reviews with a gazillion rules attached to start and run a business.
I don't want to get into a big debate on libertarianism, but the The "freedoms" being celebrated here are largely freedoms from accountability: the freedom to build without inspections that protect neighbors from fire hazards or ensure you're building on land you own; the freedom from alimony that ensures a financially dependent spouse who made shared life decisions isn't left destitute because those decisions reduced their personal earning potential; the freedom to abuse and neglect your children to whatever extreme degree you wish.
The weak state and cash economy being romanticized also tend to mean no enforced worker safety, no recourse when a business defrauds you, and no accessible courts for the poor - all freedoms that disproportionately belong to whoever is strongest or most corrupt. Regulations are often irritating precisely because they encode hard-won protections for people who aren't you.
Isn't that what all freedom is? Every restriction on freedom is for the benefit of society. At least according to those making those restrictions. Even the soviets thought that the reason suppression was necessary was so that those at the top could fix the country and make it better for everyone.
You've been watching too much CBC. PP's douchiness levels are low and nowhere near Trump. The only reason you think so is the red vs. blue tribalism we're all infected with.
I know this will be an unpopular comment but I actually somewhat like it when governments show their totalitarian side. It's both a wake-up call for some in denial and also drives my favorite type of innovation. That is, anything that subverts censorship. It won't be a lot of people but there will be splinter groups that break away from the big centralized platforms. It's not usually a big deal but it's also not nothing and that's maybe good enough for me.
In the past this occurred in the US as a result of having a totalitarian style Attorney General John Ashcroft in the early 2000's. Many new protocols and applications popped up around his time and his leveraging of the fears around 9/11. There were many articles written about his time in power if anyone was curious.
The Liberal leader was asked which nation he admired most. He responded: "There's a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime."
But, is it possible to undo any of the policies put into place? Seems like once the machinery gets implemented, everyone in government embraces it (my assumption being due to all the spending/enrichment of friends/family gov contractors).
It has been said that the worst government is the one in power, regardless of time or location. That is because they rarely teardown the bad ideas of the past.
Look to the US, regardless of the two parties, most of the time they just keep building on the pervious groups work no matter what the messaging to the people was.
"They look after number one, you ain't even number two" - Frank Zappa
I honestly don't know how things will (d)evolve from here. Official back-doors a.k.a. lawful intercept to encryption is an interesting twist, not a new proposal by any means but in the past this always ended up being hush-hush with small trusted inner circles of people at tech and telephony companies as they could never get such laws passed.
If this passes I suspect it will be much harder to monitor terrorist activities as terrorists will just move to self hosted or non technical solutions. That leaves us plebs to monitor and find excuses to make arrest quotas. People will need to be careful how they speak as anything that can be taken out of context will be taken out of context.
And you are right, such frameworks never go away even if they officially go away. There have been projects that have changed names so many times I can't even keep up with them. Total Information Awareness was renamed a few times. The lawful intercept code that was embedded in the firmware of all smart phones Carrier-IQ changed names a few times and last I checked it didn't even have a name any more which means people can't really talk about it.
You do realize that in all totalitarian states there is no significant "anti-censorship innovation" of note? Basically you are playing with fire and the only way playing with fire end is when everything burns to ashes. Not just the dust in the corner and that broken toy you don't like, but also everything you like too.
Oh I totally agree that once a nation goes entirely totalitarian nobody is circumventing anything. If people act even slightly suspicious it's boots on necks and gets far far worse from there. The UK, US and even Canada have quite a ways to go to reach that level even if people may think otherwise. A sign that we are approaching such levels would be nobody wants to enter those nations legally or illegally any more.
Canada is still trying to take away everyone's firearms and still trying to figure out how they will avoid turning many of their citizens into felons by October.
Well, the proper preventative step is to open up the constitution and make an amendment to the chart of rights and freedoms. All that is needed is 7 provinces representing at least 50% or more of the population being in agreement and not taking the opportunity to demand extreme concessions from the rest of the country at the same time! Hahahahah, oh dear.
If someone from the EFF is reading this, could we get a French translation of that article so I can send it to my MP and share around to friends and family. We need a mass movement on that to block it.
I've noticed a lot of bad digital rights stuff on HN over the last couple weeks - more pushes on age verification, attacks on end-to-end encryption, and now this. Is there something about the time of year? Maybe because the world cup is coming and people will be distracted?
Part of it is Meta (well Zuck) trying to get ahead of the curve by lobbying lawmakers to put the onus of age verification on OS's rather than platforms.
That article appears to be slightly biased in favor of attacks on privacy, and it omits important details like the UK's ongoing consultation includes questions on banning VPNs.
My engineering team would all take long lunches to catch matches, and most of us would have windowed streams for games not aligning to a lunch break. I'd be willing think it would be a larger intersection that you think it is
There would of course be much more of a public uproar about C-22 and the steady diet of online censorship and surveillance bills served up over the last 6 years if they were being pushed by a Conservative government. But it's the Liberals, and they get a free pass from mainstream media who are subsidized handsomely for their complicity.
If anyone believes the real intent behind this authoritarian legislation is to protect the kids or crack down on organized crime or to keep the public safe, I have a bridge to sell you. This is an administration that did away with mandatory minimum sentences for serious crimes, considers pedophilia to be a minor offence, allow repeat violent offenders out on bail repeatedly, refuses to convict migrants if it might impact their chances of obtaining citizenship, has allowed thousands of terrorists to enter the country with minimal vetting, and openly tolerates election interference from China. Public safety is far, far down the list of their priorities. They are very thirsty to silence their online detractors, however.
Because there's zero electoral accountability, and the voting bloc that insist it be that way are so obsessed with importing all the bad parts of the Commonwealth here that this will not change for the foreseeable future.
That Commonwealth, of course, imports all the cultural ideas and outlooks Coastal Americans have with about a 5 year delay, usually with anti-Americanism as the excuse, at the expense of the local culture.
This is just what happens when you import American politics without the American system that restrains it to just being noise.
It's a confluence of two things: (i) Canada's government policy community tends to be heavily influenced by legislative trends in the UK/Aus/NZ; this particular one is almost a direct import from the UK's ill-advised Online Safety Act, though worse in some ways, and (ii) a series of Canadian Supreme Court decisions, most notably 2024's Bykovets, which the security intelligence apparatus in Canada feels has totally hamstrung data collection.
Both (i) and (ii) have led the government to this dark place, thinking they're doing good.
I think there could also be some lobbying from Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P). C3P's site is filled with anti-encryption and anti-privacy disinformation, and they are a major Chat Control lobbyist in the EU. They are also currently trying to kill the Tor Project by attacking anyone who funds it.
That's hardly surprising. I assume C3P is staffed by parents who have lost their kids. One can hardly blame them for trying to subvert privacy. Frankly their presence is a good thing; the more people who lose their kids to creeps, the stronger the social reaction to preventing that should be.
But factually I suspect we're almost as safe as we've ever been, so thankfully, their voices aren't too loud.
> led the government to this dark place, thinking they're doing good.
I'll take the other end of the bet claiming that they think they are doing good. I am pretty sure they know what they are doing full well, and it ain't good.
I'm in the middle. I have some sympathy for the Canadian intelligence community's perspective here; in recent years, much intelligence potentially preventing major criminal public safety incidents has had to come through five eyes partners because the legal situation for domestic collection has become unworkable. CSIS refers to the situation as "going dark", which is an unfortunate US terminological import.
That being said, C-22 goes way beyond what would be halfway reasonable to solve the main issues in a fair and rights-respecting way, and I have absolutely no sympathy for the reasoning and goals imported from the UK's Online Safety Act.
When I was young I believed this was the explanation. I though I was smart and everyone else (with politicians at the top of the list) are stupid. But then I learned humility, and I don't believe in good intentions anymore. They can claim good intentions, and mostly they do, but their motives are far from anything that can be called "good intentions". They are not stupid, you know. They just try hard to look stupid. The more stupid politician looks like, the more chances he is just pretending to avoid responsibility. The purpose of their actions is exactly what they get as the result. If they succeed of course.
What a deeply troubled time. It's accelerating so fast. All this age verification/surveillance shit is intensifying super fast.
Meanwhile personal computing is being savagely destroyed, as consumer channels to ram and storage disappear.
It's so bad. These people need to be punished. This is so so so unacceptable and the forces for state intrusion into all digital systems and pervasive survelliance have gotten so so so far in the past couple years.
There's an exceptional amount of money to be had in creating the new digital feudal state.
Given that most everyday digital technology is in the hands of a few powerful monopolies they feel they have the opportunity to actually pull this off.
It's not clear to me. Can you please elaborate on how it is to you? In particular I'm interested as to how you've fully excluded corporations from involvement.
To me, I don't believe you can have one without the other, in particular since so much of this power grab requires the instruments of corporations in order to accomplish. If _either one_ of Google or Apple said "we're not implementing these draconian controls, sue us" it would be over. It is interesting they're willing to use this tactic when it comes to protecting their app stores or in-game purchase streams but not when it comes to clear undemocratic overreach.
To be clear I'm not suggesting this is a natural outcome of capitalism in general, just that, in the wake of extreme monopolization, the current crop of mega corporations have become insulated from competitive reality, and are therefore hopelessly corrupt. They're willingly allowing their technology stacks to be used by the government in this way in exchange for the opportunities it affords them and the lack of enforcement it creates.
The is the thing and it happens in every Country. If a bill fails to pass it or none like it should be brought up for 5 years.
I know doing that would be crazy, but Companies keep trying and trying until it is passed.
Tin Foil hat time: It almost looks like it is a way to funnel Political Contributions (bribes) to the politicians. The politicians fail the bill because they felt they did not get enough Contributions :)
> If a bill fails to pass it or none like it should be brought up for 5 years.
The republicans would bring up a bill for everything they don’t like and ceremonially vote it down which would make it inaccessible to the next round of democratic leadership.
I'm reminded of a speech Barack Obama gave many years ago about the difficulty and necessity of finding a "happy medium" between protecting individual liberties and providing law enforcement with the abilities to provide security in a digital world.
I think the topic itself is difficult for everyone involved - there will likely be a lot of uproar for many years as we get closer to finding this happy medium.
There is no happy medium. Government will continuously push for the greatest surveillance power possible, because surveillance is in the government's own interest and personal liberties are not. Obama oversaw the NSA, which blatantly violated the US constitution and showed exactly where his idea of a "happy medium" lies (ie. complete and total surveillance of all Americans' prviate information), so anything he said on the subject is nothing more than lipservice utilising his charisma to prime people to accept more surveillance. He certainly wasn't suggesting a "happy medium" to convince people that less surveillance was needed to reach the target equilibrium.
> I'm reminded of a speech Barack Obama gave many years ago about the difficulty and necessity of finding a "happy medium" between protecting individual liberties and providing law enforcement with the abilities to provide security in a digital world.
Yeah the problem is you'll never get a politician to say "OK, _this_ is what we've determined the 'happy medium' is and we're going to codify in law that it will never go beyond this point." It'll just keep inching further and further and anytime someone complains, just go back to step one and dish out some more "elder statesman" wisdom about having to find a "happy medium." Rinse and repeat. Worked on you, didn't it?
Don't we all inherently know that government surveillance will constantly increase over time if we give in? In theory, we could achieve a "happy medium," but the same access used by a thoughtful law enforcement agency are the same tools that a fascist government would use to suppress dissent or other "wrong" thinking.
Both the mandatory data retention and encryption backdoor requirements will cause encrypted messaging services like Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, Matrix, and others to block both Canadians and Canadian businesses from their services.
If you live in Canada or are impacted by this legislation, then you need to tell both your MP and the Minister of Public Safety of Canada to reject this legislation.
---
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) published information about Bill C-22 here just over a week ago: https://ccla.org/privacy/coalition-to-mps-scrap-unprecedente...
The blanket metadata retention and encryption backdoor requirements of Bill C-22 are illegal in the European Union.
Multiple groups have made easy to use tools for sending your MP and (other members of government) an email about rejecting this terrible legislation in its current form:
* The Internet Society's tool: https://www.internetsociety.org/our-work/internet-policy/kee...
* OpenMedia's messaging tool: https://action.openmedia.org/page/188754/action/1
* ICLM's messaging tool: https://iclmg.ca/stop-c-22/
I'd also recommend emailing Minister of Public Safety of Canada (Gary Anandasangaree: gary.anand@parl.gc.ca), and the Minister of Justice (Sean Fraser: sean.fraser@parl.gc.ca).
That won't do a damn thing, and you know it.
These people don't answer their messages and have an [unelected] majority- it doesn't matter how you vote in this country, and the group that keeps the group of carneys in power want it that way.
Yeah, I contacted my MP (via email). No response. :\
You need to branch out a bit, and take a look at how countries on the brink actually operate. Go check out Hungary for a country that almost lost their democracy, or check out Russia for a country that never had it but tries to pretend like it does.
Canada is measurably not even close to countries like Russia, where voting truly does not matter (and could actually be hazardous to your health.)
Having spent my fair share of time in 3rd world shitholes, though I wouldn't particularly like Russia, most of them have levels of freedom in day-to-day life you could only dream of north of the Mexican border in the Americas.
In a great deal of area, no one bothers to get a license plate. You can just build a house, no government asshole to block you, and if they do they are only looking for a small bribe. There is no CPS for the next Karen to call to come harass your kids for them playing independently. Very little intervention in family disputes nor practical ability to extract alimony because your wife decided she was "bored." The cash economy thrives. The ability of the government to tax is weak. There is not the money nor personnel available to do Orwellian surveillance and the state has to very strategically pick how to spend its few resources oppressing the populace.
Canada and USA have more freedom on paper. If you don't count the fact you're spending 1/4 or 1/3 of the year slaving to pay taxes, burning another 1/3 of the year to make rent because it's illegal to just erect a shack on a postage stamp and live in it for next to nothing, and that the precious 'rule of law' means instead of the policeman asking for a bribe they'll just arrest you on one of the gazillion laws (ignorance of the law is no excuse!) on the books to get their money instead.
This isn't to say it's better. But a great deal of my family that could immigrate from the third world... have not.... or they use North America as a cash vacuum while they invest in their 3rd world hometown where they can actually get shit done without a gigantic pile of paperwork and environmental reviews with a gazillion rules attached to start and run a business.
I don't want to get into a big debate on libertarianism, but the The "freedoms" being celebrated here are largely freedoms from accountability: the freedom to build without inspections that protect neighbors from fire hazards or ensure you're building on land you own; the freedom from alimony that ensures a financially dependent spouse who made shared life decisions isn't left destitute because those decisions reduced their personal earning potential; the freedom to abuse and neglect your children to whatever extreme degree you wish.
The weak state and cash economy being romanticized also tend to mean no enforced worker safety, no recourse when a business defrauds you, and no accessible courts for the poor - all freedoms that disproportionately belong to whoever is strongest or most corrupt. Regulations are often irritating precisely because they encode hard-won protections for people who aren't you.
Isn't that what all freedom is? Every restriction on freedom is for the benefit of society. At least according to those making those restrictions. Even the soviets thought that the reason suppression was necessary was so that those at the top could fix the country and make it better for everyone.
Carney’s current majority is correlated to PP’s douchiness levels and Trump adjacent language.
I’m not in love with bankers running the country either, but give us another option.
You've been watching too much CBC. PP's douchiness levels are low and nowhere near Trump. The only reason you think so is the red vs. blue tribalism we're all infected with.
"unelected"? seriously?
Yes, you win as a Conservative then scam your district crossing the floor to Liberal.
I know this will be an unpopular comment but I actually somewhat like it when governments show their totalitarian side. It's both a wake-up call for some in denial and also drives my favorite type of innovation. That is, anything that subverts censorship. It won't be a lot of people but there will be splinter groups that break away from the big centralized platforms. It's not usually a big deal but it's also not nothing and that's maybe good enough for me.
In the past this occurred in the US as a result of having a totalitarian style Attorney General John Ashcroft in the early 2000's. Many new protocols and applications popped up around his time and his leveraging of the fears around 9/11. There were many articles written about his time in power if anyone was curious.
The Liberal leader was asked which nation he admired most. He responded: "There's a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/justin-trudeau-s-fool...
2013. Canadians went on to elect him again and again...
But, is it possible to undo any of the policies put into place? Seems like once the machinery gets implemented, everyone in government embraces it (my assumption being due to all the spending/enrichment of friends/family gov contractors).
It has been said that the worst government is the one in power, regardless of time or location. That is because they rarely teardown the bad ideas of the past.
Look to the US, regardless of the two parties, most of the time they just keep building on the pervious groups work no matter what the messaging to the people was.
"They look after number one, you ain't even number two" - Frank Zappa
I honestly don't know how things will (d)evolve from here. Official back-doors a.k.a. lawful intercept to encryption is an interesting twist, not a new proposal by any means but in the past this always ended up being hush-hush with small trusted inner circles of people at tech and telephony companies as they could never get such laws passed.
If this passes I suspect it will be much harder to monitor terrorist activities as terrorists will just move to self hosted or non technical solutions. That leaves us plebs to monitor and find excuses to make arrest quotas. People will need to be careful how they speak as anything that can be taken out of context will be taken out of context.
And you are right, such frameworks never go away even if they officially go away. There have been projects that have changed names so many times I can't even keep up with them. Total Information Awareness was renamed a few times. The lawful intercept code that was embedded in the firmware of all smart phones Carrier-IQ changed names a few times and last I checked it didn't even have a name any more which means people can't really talk about it.
You do realize that in all totalitarian states there is no significant "anti-censorship innovation" of note? Basically you are playing with fire and the only way playing with fire end is when everything burns to ashes. Not just the dust in the corner and that broken toy you don't like, but also everything you like too.
Oh I totally agree that once a nation goes entirely totalitarian nobody is circumventing anything. If people act even slightly suspicious it's boots on necks and gets far far worse from there. The UK, US and even Canada have quite a ways to go to reach that level even if people may think otherwise. A sign that we are approaching such levels would be nobody wants to enter those nations legally or illegally any more.
Canada is still trying to take away everyone's firearms and still trying to figure out how they will avoid turning many of their citizens into felons by October.
Just keep bringing legislation back eventually it gets through.
theres a majority now, so it will definitely pass if brought forward by the government
Yep, if it fails this year it will be back next year under a new name.
Only need to get it through once. We have to defend against it repeatedly.
The legislative process has a check valve. Vote on it until passes, then it can't be undone ever.
That's p-values for you.
Well, the proper preventative step is to open up the constitution and make an amendment to the chart of rights and freedoms. All that is needed is 7 provinces representing at least 50% or more of the population being in agreement and not taking the opportunity to demand extreme concessions from the rest of the country at the same time! Hahahahah, oh dear.
If someone from the EFF is reading this, could we get a French translation of that article so I can send it to my MP and share around to friends and family. We need a mass movement on that to block it.
The linked CCLA article is available in French [0].
[0]: https://ccla.org/fr/intimite/coalition-to-mps-scrap-unpreced...
I've noticed a lot of bad digital rights stuff on HN over the last couple weeks - more pushes on age verification, attacks on end-to-end encryption, and now this. Is there something about the time of year? Maybe because the world cup is coming and people will be distracted?
Part of it is Meta (well Zuck) trying to get ahead of the curve by lobbying lawmakers to put the onus of age verification on OS's rather than platforms.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9q3x19ddl7o is perhaps an unintentionally good summary of this situation.
That article appears to be slightly biased in favor of attacks on privacy, and it omits important details like the UK's ongoing consultation includes questions on banning VPNs.
I mean, what do you expect from state-controlled media?
I'm doubtful the venn diagram intersection of engineers and the world cup is as big as you think it is.
My engineering team would all take long lunches to catch matches, and most of us would have windowed streams for games not aligning to a lunch break. I'd be willing think it would be a larger intersection that you think it is
engineers sure
non-permanently-online activists on the other hand...
In my hometown, we're quashing human rights to make room for the world cup! It's not a smokescreen, it's the justification.
https://www.pivotlegal.org/city_of_vancouver_s_new_fifa_byla...
From your link: “Further, the enforcement of this Bylaw, like all laws enacted in our current colonial and racist legal system…”
Practically no Vancouverite would read this page and take it seriously.
How is this not bigger news?
Fatigue. They just keep proposing the same thing.
Comments are locked on reddit and brigades are downvoting the articles about it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/1rrxqje/liberal_gov...
There would of course be much more of a public uproar about C-22 and the steady diet of online censorship and surveillance bills served up over the last 6 years if they were being pushed by a Conservative government. But it's the Liberals, and they get a free pass from mainstream media who are subsidized handsomely for their complicity.
If anyone believes the real intent behind this authoritarian legislation is to protect the kids or crack down on organized crime or to keep the public safe, I have a bridge to sell you. This is an administration that did away with mandatory minimum sentences for serious crimes, considers pedophilia to be a minor offence, allow repeat violent offenders out on bail repeatedly, refuses to convict migrants if it might impact their chances of obtaining citizenship, has allowed thousands of terrorists to enter the country with minimal vetting, and openly tolerates election interference from China. Public safety is far, far down the list of their priorities. They are very thirsty to silence their online detractors, however.
The major parties are usually just two sides of the same coin. This is a good example of it.
Why are they so determined to do evil?
Because there's zero electoral accountability, and the voting bloc that insist it be that way are so obsessed with importing all the bad parts of the Commonwealth here that this will not change for the foreseeable future.
That Commonwealth, of course, imports all the cultural ideas and outlooks Coastal Americans have with about a 5 year delay, usually with anti-Americanism as the excuse, at the expense of the local culture.
This is just what happens when you import American politics without the American system that restrains it to just being noise.
It's a confluence of two things: (i) Canada's government policy community tends to be heavily influenced by legislative trends in the UK/Aus/NZ; this particular one is almost a direct import from the UK's ill-advised Online Safety Act, though worse in some ways, and (ii) a series of Canadian Supreme Court decisions, most notably 2024's Bykovets, which the security intelligence apparatus in Canada feels has totally hamstrung data collection.
Both (i) and (ii) have led the government to this dark place, thinking they're doing good.
I think there could also be some lobbying from Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P). C3P's site is filled with anti-encryption and anti-privacy disinformation, and they are a major Chat Control lobbyist in the EU. They are also currently trying to kill the Tor Project by attacking anyone who funds it.
That's hardly surprising. I assume C3P is staffed by parents who have lost their kids. One can hardly blame them for trying to subvert privacy. Frankly their presence is a good thing; the more people who lose their kids to creeps, the stronger the social reaction to preventing that should be.
But factually I suspect we're almost as safe as we've ever been, so thankfully, their voices aren't too loud.
It's LPC policy to listen to these kinds of lobby groups, no matter how unhinged they might be.
A significant participant in a lobby group with similar aims, Nathalie Provost, is actually a sitting MP in Quebec.
> led the government to this dark place, thinking they're doing good.
I'll take the other end of the bet claiming that they think they are doing good. I am pretty sure they know what they are doing full well, and it ain't good.
I'm in the middle. I have some sympathy for the Canadian intelligence community's perspective here; in recent years, much intelligence potentially preventing major criminal public safety incidents has had to come through five eyes partners because the legal situation for domestic collection has become unworkable. CSIS refers to the situation as "going dark", which is an unfortunate US terminological import.
That being said, C-22 goes way beyond what would be halfway reasonable to solve the main issues in a fair and rights-respecting way, and I have absolutely no sympathy for the reasoning and goals imported from the UK's Online Safety Act.
> Both (i) and (ii) have led the government to this dark place, thinking they're doing good.
You can summarize a lot of government actions of any spectrum with: "The road to hell is full of good intentions"
When I was young I believed this was the explanation. I though I was smart and everyone else (with politicians at the top of the list) are stupid. But then I learned humility, and I don't believe in good intentions anymore. They can claim good intentions, and mostly they do, but their motives are far from anything that can be called "good intentions". They are not stupid, you know. They just try hard to look stupid. The more stupid politician looks like, the more chances he is just pretending to avoid responsibility. The purpose of their actions is exactly what they get as the result. If they succeed of course.
What a deeply troubled time. It's accelerating so fast. All this age verification/surveillance shit is intensifying super fast.
Meanwhile personal computing is being savagely destroyed, as consumer channels to ram and storage disappear.
It's so bad. These people need to be punished. This is so so so unacceptable and the forces for state intrusion into all digital systems and pervasive survelliance have gotten so so so far in the past couple years.
Usually? Money.
There's an exceptional amount of money to be had in creating the new digital feudal state.
Given that most everyday digital technology is in the hands of a few powerful monopolies they feel they have the opportunity to actually pull this off.
This is clearly a government power grab, not a corporate one.
It's not clear to me. Can you please elaborate on how it is to you? In particular I'm interested as to how you've fully excluded corporations from involvement.
To me, I don't believe you can have one without the other, in particular since so much of this power grab requires the instruments of corporations in order to accomplish. If _either one_ of Google or Apple said "we're not implementing these draconian controls, sue us" it would be over. It is interesting they're willing to use this tactic when it comes to protecting their app stores or in-game purchase streams but not when it comes to clear undemocratic overreach.
To be clear I'm not suggesting this is a natural outcome of capitalism in general, just that, in the wake of extreme monopolization, the current crop of mega corporations have become insulated from competitive reality, and are therefore hopelessly corrupt. They're willingly allowing their technology stacks to be used by the government in this way in exchange for the opportunities it affords them and the lack of enforcement it creates.
Because we've removed the ability for anyone non-evil to succeed politically.
The is the thing and it happens in every Country. If a bill fails to pass it or none like it should be brought up for 5 years.
I know doing that would be crazy, but Companies keep trying and trying until it is passed.
Tin Foil hat time: It almost looks like it is a way to funnel Political Contributions (bribes) to the politicians. The politicians fail the bill because they felt they did not get enough Contributions :)
> If a bill fails to pass it or none like it should be brought up for 5 years.
The republicans would bring up a bill for everything they don’t like and ceremonially vote it down which would make it inaccessible to the next round of democratic leadership.
Why this is not treated as act of terrorism by law enforcement?
I'm reminded of a speech Barack Obama gave many years ago about the difficulty and necessity of finding a "happy medium" between protecting individual liberties and providing law enforcement with the abilities to provide security in a digital world.
I think the topic itself is difficult for everyone involved - there will likely be a lot of uproar for many years as we get closer to finding this happy medium.
There is no happy medium. Government will continuously push for the greatest surveillance power possible, because surveillance is in the government's own interest and personal liberties are not. Obama oversaw the NSA, which blatantly violated the US constitution and showed exactly where his idea of a "happy medium" lies (ie. complete and total surveillance of all Americans' prviate information), so anything he said on the subject is nothing more than lipservice utilising his charisma to prime people to accept more surveillance. He certainly wasn't suggesting a "happy medium" to convince people that less surveillance was needed to reach the target equilibrium.
> I'm reminded of a speech Barack Obama gave many years ago about the difficulty and necessity of finding a "happy medium" between protecting individual liberties and providing law enforcement with the abilities to provide security in a digital world.
Yeah the problem is you'll never get a politician to say "OK, _this_ is what we've determined the 'happy medium' is and we're going to codify in law that it will never go beyond this point." It'll just keep inching further and further and anytime someone complains, just go back to step one and dish out some more "elder statesman" wisdom about having to find a "happy medium." Rinse and repeat. Worked on you, didn't it?
Don't we all inherently know that government surveillance will constantly increase over time if we give in? In theory, we could achieve a "happy medium," but the same access used by a thoughtful law enforcement agency are the same tools that a fascist government would use to suppress dissent or other "wrong" thinking.