Featured image: Still from “The Naked Gun” (1988) starring Canadian Leslie Neilson. From a scene where detective Frank Drebin tells the crowd to disperse, and that there’s “nothing to see here,” despite chaos in the background.
By Grant Warkentin
Don’t worry about your privacy, everything is FINE, says the federal government as it tries to pass more legislation this week to insert itself into the private lives of Canadians.
In the 2003 version of the film “The Italian Job,” the characters use FINE as an acronym to signal that they are not, in fact, “fine.” It stands for “Freaked Out, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional.” Classic rock fans will also note the 1989 Aerosmith song “F.I.N.E.” uses the same acronym with one minor, but much more blunt, difference.
It’s a good way to describe the reactions to Bill C-22 from people who have actually read it and understand its implications. Those people include constitutional lawyers, security researchers, Apple’s engineers, and Canadian tech companies threatening to leave the country if the bill passes without significant changes.
But this is Canada, where people are NICE, so the general public is almost completely unaware of the pending legislation, and what it will mean in the future. Canadians are Naïve, Indifferent, Compliant, and Eager to remain that way, it seems.
MP says bill expands ‘surveillance state’
Our North Island – Powell River MP Aaron Gunn has grave concerns about the bill.
“This proposed legislation has the potential to massively expand the surveillance state in Canada and significantly lower the threshold for the government to access your personal information (including location data),” he said in a recent social media post. “Now, law enforcement does have real and valid concerns about how long it takes to obtain crucial information (known as production orders) on genuine criminals.
“But that problem can be solved without turning the entire country into a massive surveillance state and without turning every electronic device into a tool that can spy on Canadians.”
No time for complacency
The real problem is complacent Canadians.
Privacy? Eh, who cares. The government already knows everything about us anyways, right?
No, and we should be fighting for what little privacy we have left in the 21st century. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Franklin wasn’t talking about Internet privacy when he wrote that in 1755, but the man who spent his life opposing secret and unaccountable power would not likely object to his words being used to defend free speech and restrict government powers in the digital era.
Eye-popping powers handed to anonymous enforcers
The biggest problem with this bill, and other related freedom-restricting bills in the legislative pipeline, is that most Canadians have no idea what they mean, or that they even exist.
Most people don’t know that C-22 will force Internet providers to retain up to a year’s worth of customer “metadata” – who they communicated with, when, for how long, device identifiers, and crucially, the locations where those communications happened.
“That’s not lawful access — that’s the architecture of a surveillance state, and it has to go,” says Matt Hatfield, Executive Director of OpenMedia.
It gets worse.
Hatfield says “[C-22] enables secret ministerial orders to any digital service Canadians rely on, with no public registry, no parliamentary approval, and no right for Canadians to even know it’s happening.”
Surely he’s exaggerating, right? You probably don’t have anything to worry about.
But just in case you might do something bad in the future, the government will have the power to collect and archive information about you without your consent or knowledge via a mandated back door for law enforcement installed by your Internet Service Provider.
That back door probably won’t be exploited by hackers from hostile foreign states, and the legions of bureaucrats who will have access to that information definitely won’t abuse it or leak it.
Canada already spies on its citizens
Canadians have mostly forgotten that time when Canada’s spy agency CSIS got slapped by the Federal Court in 2016 for keeping an illegal archive of a decade’s worth of citizen metadata. This new bill legalizes what they’ve already been doing since the dawn of the modern Internet. Who knows what they’ve been up to since then.
Thankfully there are independent groups such as Citizen Lab in Toronto, “watchers watching the watchmen” to paraphrase Juvenal. They have gone through the bill with a fine-toothed comb since its first incarnation as Bill C-2, which failed last October.
“When initially advanced, these proposals are never presented as a ‘backdoor’ or an attempt to undermine encryption, but rather as a mechanism for Public Safety and other government agencies to access secure data on a case-by-case basis,” the organization says. “All have been shown to present a significant cybersecurity threat.”
Why is our government forcing it through the House of Commons as fast as possible? If this bill is so great, there should be lots of time and room for debate and discussion to explore its merits.
Latest bill is part of a bigger picture
Canadians are overreacting, bill boosters say. There’s no reason to worry that these new laws, coupled with C-34, which will force age restrictions for Internet access, C-9, which introduces a host of vague definitions and penalties for “hate speech,” C-18, which has left Canadians unable to share news links on Facebook for years, and C-63, which will remind readers of the “Pre-Crime” division in the 2002 film “Minority Report,” will negatively affect you or your children.
In fact, they will tell you with a straight face, this is ACKSHUALLY all about protecting the children.
Apparently the best our government can come up with to protect children is gatekeeping the Internet by collecting IDs from every single Canadian who uses it, storing them in a government-run digital silo with a “PLEASE DO NOT HACK” sign, and assuming child predators won’t find a way around the velvet rope dividing adults from children online.
It’s definitely not about forcing everyone to use a government-mandated digital ID, it’s about protecting kids, and don’t you forget it.
Who benefits? Not citizens
Cynicism aside, the worst thing about C-22 and the other related bills is that no one asked for them.
Over 300 civil-society groups demanded the withdrawal of the earlier C-2 bill and more than 10,000 members of OpenMedia wrote in to condemn it. But thanks to the floor crossers who gave Mark Carney a majority, we’re getting what we get, and we better not get upset, or once all the bills pass, we may find ourselves facing UK-style arrests for offhand posts on social media.
The federal government doesn’t even seem to believe its own claims about the bill: the Privacy Commissioner was not invited to testify at clause-by-clause reviews, which should be wrapping up this week. Why not? Can’t the bill stand on its own merits? Is someone concerned about what the commissioner might say?
We’re getting the “hard sell” because the demand for this bill, and the powers it will grant, is coming from the agencies that will wield the power, not from the public. We are being bamboozled.
But hey, try to remember that it’s all FINE here, and at least Canadians can continue to pat themselves on the back for being so NICE.
Leave a Reply