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emptybits
Regarding warrantless searches and access ... reading the text of the bill (OP link) warrants seem to be required. Simple, right?
Well, no, this is a recently inserted block of text in the bill (confirm at the link above):
Exception
(2. 7)(b) However, a copy of the warrant is not required to be given
to a person under subsection (2. 6) if the judge or justice who issues
the warrant sets aside the requirement in respect of the person, on
being satisfied that doing so is justified in the circumstances.
therealpygon
Are you suggesting that when investigating members of a criminal organization, they should be notified? It seems pretty reasonable for there to be cases where making a target aware of investigation would be detrimental to proving the illegal activity they are currently engaged in but would likely discontinue if literally told “we are monitoring you specifically now”.
TheJoeMan
This is an interesting perspective, because from my point of view, the criminals ceasing their illegal activity would be a "win". Whereas, the alternative is the government knowingly allowing illegal activity to continue as they build their case with the goal of a "big bust" and larger jail sentences.
therealpygon
If their co-conspirators were also to cease, I would agree. But if that were realistically the case, arresting a single person would stop all crime.
reactordev
What ever happened to hanging around, being a nuisance, and asking them questions? The real problem is cops are scared to cop. A detective used to show up around a place and just make their presence known. That was enough to notify you of investigation prematurely. Now, in the digital surveillance age, they can just sit in the basement eating Cheetos and phone in a SWAT.
therealpygon
What happened? We collectively over the course of time decided that the individual right not to be “harassed”, valid or not, overrides the ability to behave in such a manner. That happened because other officers proved they could not be trusted to exercise such power responsibly. “Being a nuisance” is a toe-length away from “harassing an ordinary citizen” when you don’t actually have proof. So, harassing a citizen to gain proof in order to prove it wasn’t harassment has an obvious problem.
thenewnewguy
So we're worried about cops violating civil liberties by not getting a warrant, but we'd rather they go harass random (potentially innocent) civilians to do investigations?
armchairhacker
Yes, but the warrant should be revealed eventually. Worst case, if you can't prove or disprove someone committed a crime after X time, you should alert them to discourage future crime (they may have already done more crimes during X time; besides public interest, it also forces you to cut your losses when the alternative would be to dig a deeper hole).
Do these warrants have a fixed maximum duration of secrecy?
reactordev
“warrant should be revealed eventually. Worst case, if you can't prove or disprove someone committed a crime after X time”
This is the normal thinking, normal brained, route. It’s what we should all strive towards. Anyone who doesn’t agree needs therapy. There should be a window of discovery. 30 days, 90 maybe. But if you don’t have enough to justify notification of investigation, that’s it. No more resources spent. This is how normal precincts work. If they suspect, enough times, to build a large enough case file, to connect the dots and prove you are guilty, they issue a warrant.
Normal, brained, behavior.
lionkor
This isn't about criminal organizations. One person somewhere can decide to target you, monitor you for 30 years with all the government's resources, and never need to tell you or anyone about it. I don't like that personally.
p0w3n3d
the problem is that in democracies anybody can be dubbed 'criminal organization'. Today you're pro-life? criminal organization. Tomorrow you're pro-choice? 'criminal organization'. You're making protests in your big trucks? Criminal...
gzread
Are you suggesting that police should not be allowed to investigate anyone?
sunir
Consider: you don’t give a warrant to a wiretap subject. That itself is not that big a loophole. And therefore is unlikely to provoke change.
b112
I don't even understand the concern here. Perhaps the parent thought this meant "a warrant is not required", which is absolutely untrue. Instead, the judge still creates the warrant, and any trial/arrest/action must have a warrant.
(Finding out what ISP a user belongs to, isn't really that private. If you look at the US comparatively, Homeland has a list of every single credit card transaction ever. The US doesn't need to ask an ISP if someone is a customer. What this does is simply confirm, and then the judge can create a warrant specific for that ISP.)
Such as compelling the ISP, or what not, to take action. The ISP is not the subject here. And obviously hiding the warrant from the ISP makes zero sense, as they're going to know who the person is anyhow.
This is stuff that goes back to phone taps. Nothing new here.
naasking
Does a warrant ever expire? How long can they monitor you once the warrant is issued? Do they ever have to notify you or anyone else that you were being monitored and they found no criminal conduct? Don't you see the potential for abuse here?
post-it
I don't really see an issue with this section. A judge still needs to issue a warrant, they can also additionally waive the requirement that the cop gives you a copy right away, in special circumstances.
Like are you envisioning a "I totally have a warrant but I don't have to give it to you" type situation? I think it's fairly unlikely, and you would likely be able to get the search ruled inadmissible if a cop tried it.
0xbadcafebee
Are you familiar with parallel construction? That's what this is for. If they have a warrant and show it to you, it says what they can search and why. If they don't tell you what they're searching for and why, they can look for anything, and then construct a separate scenario which just happens to expose the thing they knew would be there from the first fishing expedition. They then use this (usually circumstantial) evidence to accuse you of a crime, and they can win, even if you didn't commit a crime, but it looks like you did. And now they can do it with digital information, automatically, behind the scenes, without your knowledge. (or they can take your laptop and phone and do it then)
SecretDreams
But the warrant still has to originally exist with, presumably, a timestamp that shows it existed prior to the search. And modification of the timestamp or lack of such a feature would be a good way to get the evidence thrown out?
mnw21cam
I don't see the problem with this. It's inadvisable to try to stop the police from doing whatever they want to do if they assert that they have the right to do it. You then get the lawyers involved and sort it out afterwards. Comparing the timestamp on the warrant to the time of the police action should hopefully determine whether parallel construction is taking place.
8note
i know this is an american thing, but does it actually happen in Caanda?
1123581321
It’s a huge problem. The warrant is the document the absence of which lets the public know something wrong is being done to them. A warrant is not just a term for judicial approval.
The public must have the ability to easily verify police conduct is appropriate, and it must match the cadence of the police work.
dataflow
> The warrant is the document the absence of which lets the public know
Er, the warrant is still there to be examined later, no? It's just not necessarily shown to the subject at the time of investigation.
_heimdall
Unless I'm mistaken, it doesn't define what such special situations are. It leaves the determination of providing the warrant to the suspect entirely to a judgement call of the court.
There may well be reasonable scenarios a majority of people would agree that providing a warrant isn't feasible, but that needs to be codified in law in more detail than whenever the judge deems it so.
mpalmer
If the statute doesn't lay out exactly where exceptions can be made, it can be abused.
And everyone should be skeptical enough of government power that they mentally switch out "can" with "will".
b00ty4breakfast
why even allow for the possibility of misuse? what is the utility of this little addendum?
layla5alive
Why... would you think this is unlikely? Have... you seen videos of ICE agents claiming to have warrants when they don't?
godelski
I'm not Canadian, but it seems similarly written to how laws in the US have been exploited to be used to spy on Americans. And despite not being Canadian, as an American I have a horse in this race, as the OP notes...
| many of these rules appear geared toward global information sharing
Investigative work *should* be difficult.
| It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.
This frame of thinking is critical with laws too! When the law fails how do you want it to fail? So you need to think about that when evaluating this (or any other) law. When it is abused, how does it fail? Are you okay with that failure mode? How easy is it to be abused? Even if you believe your current government is unlikely to abuse it do you believe a future government might? (If you don't believe a future government might... look south...)
A lot of us strongly push against these types of measures not because we have anything to hide nor because we are on the side of the criminals. We generally have this philosophy because it is needed to keep a government in check. It doesn't matter if everyone involved has good intentions. We're programmers, this should be natural too! It doesn't matter if we have good intentions when designing a login page, you still have to think adversarially and about failure modes because good intentions are not enough to defend against those who wish to exploit it. Even if the number of exploiters is small the damage is usually large, right?
This framework of thinking is just as beneficial when thinking about laws as it is in the design of your programs. You can be in favor of the intent (spirit of the law), but you do have to question if the letter of the law is sufficient.
I wanted to explain this because I think it'll help facilitate these types of discussions. I think they often break down because people are interpreting from very different mental frameworks. Disagree with me if you want, but I hope making the mental framework explicit can at least improve your arguments :)
oceanplexian
> A lot of us strongly push against these types of measures not because we have anything to hide nor because we are on the side of the criminals.
I had this view as well until I realized it’s predicated on living in a high trust society. At some point you reach a critical mass of crime that is so rampant, and the rule of law has so broken down that it’s basically Mad Max out there, and then these idealistic philosophies start to fall apart.
You can look to parts of SE Asia or the Middle East to see some examples where that happened, and where it was eventually reigned in with extreme measures (Usually broad and indiscriminate capital punishment).
I know your comment is about fixing failure modes in the legal system, and I’m not defending government surveillance, or the idea of considering someone innocent until proven guilty, but what happens when the entire system fails due to misplaced idealism? Much worse things are waiting on the other end of the spectrum when people don’t feel like the government is adequately protecting them.
somenameforme
I think a practical argument against what you're saying here is simply that solving the mad max stuff doesn't require anything at all like this. The type of crime that's scary and impactful (e.g. terrorism is scary, but so extremely rare that it can't really be considered impactful) is generally trivial to bust.
_heimdall
Are you of the opinion that peoples' default state is a Mad Max-like existence?
The question isn't about idealism or the realistic possibility of said idealism. The question, in my opinion, is whether we can only succeed as a species if a small number of people are entrusted with creating and enforcing laws by force when necessary.
That isn't to say we never need some level of hierarchy or that laws, social norms, etc aren't important. Its to say that we need to keep a tight reign on it and only push authority and enforcement up the ladder when absolutely necessary.
It will end poorly if we continue down the road of larger and larger governments under the fear of Mad Max, and this idea many people have that "someone has to be in charge."
modo_mario
>I had this view as well until I realized it’s predicated on living in a high trust society.
Building down these high trust scenarios has been the consequence of active policies. You don't just miss these trends and correlations. Not to this extent.
dv_dt
The Mad Max stuff is occurring at scale more due to unchecked governments, and governments that don't work for society than it is from insufficient surveillance
protocolture
>I had this view as well until I realized it’s predicated on living in a high trust society. At some point you reach a critical mass of crime that is so rampant, and the rule of law has so broken down that it’s basically Mad Max out there, and then these idealistic philosophies start to fall apart.
I see "High Trust Society" so much as a weird racist dogwhistle, but feel free to disabuse me of that notion.
I live in an extremely high crime area. Because cops abuse the law to keep their numbers up. If someone checked they would see that my local McDonalds car park is one of the biggest crime hotspots in the country because of administrative detections made on minor drug deals there.
It just so happens that my area is also where the government dumps migrants, refugees and poor people. Its also the case that they test welfare changes here.
I haven't had a single incident here in 6 years. We often forget to lock our doors. My wife takes my toddler walking around the neighborhood at night. I wave hello to the guy across the road who I have like 99% certainty is dealing drugs (Or just has a lot of friends with nice cars who visit to see how long it has been since he trimmed his lawn).
That said, if you turn on the tv 2 things are apparently happening. 1. We are under attack by hordes of immigrants tearing the country apart. 2. We are under attack by kids on ebikes mowing kids down in a rampage of terror.
Politicians, in order to be seen to be doing things, bring laws in to counter these threats. People bash their chests and demand more be done.
But the issue is that its just not happening. My suburb is great. The people are generally lovely, even those in meth related occupations.
When you complain about the trustiness of the society, consider that your lack of trust might actually be the problem? Nothing is necessarily going to break down because you didnt make your neighbors life worse by supporting another dumb as shit law. "Oh no crime is so rampant" buddy you need to get over yourself. Societies don't fail because of socially defined Crime they fail because people prioritise their perceived safety over everyones freedom.
> I’m not defending government surveillance, or the idea of considering someone innocent until proven guilty
Exactly what you are defending.
>what happens when the entire system fails due to misplaced idealism?
Its at threat from the idealism that you can just pass one more law to fix society.
>don’t feel like the government is adequately protecting them.
They come up with a bunch of dumbshit laws like the OP. Thats the result.
godelski
> until I realized it’s predicated on living in a high trust society.
> You can look to parts of SE Asia or the Middle East to see some examples where that happened
> but what happens when the entire system fails due to misplaced idealism?
High authority + low trust + abuse gives you situations like we've seen in Russia, Iran, North Korea. These are pretty bad. The people have no faith in their governments and the governments are centered around enriching a few.
High authority + high trust + abuse is probably even worse though. That's how you get countries like Nazi German (and cults). The government is still centered around enriching a few but they create more stability by narrowing the targeting. Or rather by having a clearer scale where everyone isn't abused ad equally. (You could see the famous quotes by a famous US president about keeping the white population in check by making them believe that at least they're not black)
None of the outcomes are good but I think the authoritarian ones are much worse.
> when people don’t feel like the government is adequately protecting them.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, right? That implies that the road to hell isn't paved just by evil people. It can be paved even by good well intentioned ones. Just like I suggested about when programming. We don't intend to create bugs or flaws (at least most of us don't), but they still exist. They still get created even when we're trying our hardest to not create them, right? But being aware that they happen unintentionally helps you make fewer of them, right? I'm suggesting something similar, but about governments.
mx7zysuj4xew
"He who gives up a little freedom for security deserves neither"
gotwaz
People are let go off all the time. Not because of the law but because who needs the work of chasing and punishing every law breaker in the land. In your own workplace,family and friend circle, count how many times you have seen some one do something dumb(forget illegal) that has caused a loss or pain to some one else. And then count how many times you have done something about it.
sundvor
I use the speed chime in my Model 3 car to alert me if I'm more than 2 km/h over the posted speed limit, which it infers from its database with the autopilot camera providing overrides.
If I'm over that when passing a speed camera in Victoria, AUS, I'll be pinged with a decent fine to arrive shortly.
Imagine if instead of a chime I got fined every single time, everywhere? All this new monitoring makes it a bit like that, at an extreme. I don't want to live in such a society.
canadian000
Canada does not have a concept of civil liberties in the way USA (supposedly) does. There is no illusion that the government has complete control to monitor, track, and even arrest anyone they want. They do this all the time, even physically tracking and boxing in protesters to beat them.
SpaceNugget
This is obviously a bot comment. Is there really no room for automoderation of new accounts on HN?
PunchyHamster
I see people forget how govt de-banked people in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_convoy_protest pretty quickly
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therealpygon
Bot? It sounds to me more like the words you’d hear from an astroturfing American who doesn’t understand anything about Canadian laws. I say that as an American familiar with only some Canadian law, but enough to at least be aware of Rights and Freedoms.
verisimi
I think warrantless access, deanonymising the internet, etc, are things that go together. If you want auto-governance (technocracy), to micro-manage every citizen, these are the foundations you need. As it is already determined that this is what will be happening, no amount of discussion will make a material change - the legislation is going in whether people want it or not. The individual justifications for each legal step in the construction are either going to be done with low visibility, or a trope like ('for the children/terrorists') will be wheeled out. Works every time, so why change?
b112
There is no warrantless access to data here though. None. It's merely showing the warrant to the person being 'searched'. As mentioned elsewhere, the same has been true for decades with someone's phone being tapped.
The ISP can see the warrant. The judge creates a warrant. The court sees the warrant.
ALLTaken
Is Canada (greatly) defunct? Many canucks around the world that I met seem to be of this opinion, but I've never been there and only know Canadians as hard workers.
iinnPP
I imagine you met the people who got tired of all the slobs.
Look at the recent report on CRA service inquiries and their accuracy. An amazing 17%. It's not hard work that got us there.
edit: Just one of many examples. People rarely even hold doors anymore, we're a far way from our prime.
Sharlin
Next you're going to tell me that Canadians have stopped bothering to apologize!
_hugerobots_
Meeting expats from any nation will hold a bias untoward the place they're from, so you're asking a poisoned well how thirsty it is.
ALLTaken
Oh I really didn't think about this, that makes a lot of sense to be honest. But a good portion of them were also just tourists from Canada.
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everdev
This makes police indistinguishable from thugs.
natas
Quick summary for the impatient (the original looks like an extract from Orwell's 1984):
Bill C-22 (Canada, 2026) updates laws to give police and security agencies faster and clearer access to digital data during investigations. It expands authorities to obtain subscriber information, transmission data, and tracking data from telecom and online service providers and from foreign companies. The bill also creates a framework requiring electronic service providers to support access requests.
ranger_danger
Sounds like a Canadian version of CALEA to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...
mhurron
You missed 'warrentless' in your summary. It's sort of important.
The push by the government here is because Canada is the only one of the Five-Eyes countries that doesn't have these powers, and for the government that's a bad thing.
downrightmike
That access has produced nothing for the USA, the director of the program has stated such to congress. Complete waste of time and money
like_any_other
> You missed 'warrentless' in your summary. It's sort of important.
Less than you would hope: https://web.archive.org/web/20140718122350/https://www.popeh...
Notably, a single secret warrant authorized the surveillance of everyone on the Verizon network:
That warrant orders Verizon Business Network Services to provide a daily feed to the NSA containing "telephony metadata" – comprehensive call detail records, including location data – about all calls in its system, including those that occur "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
I know those are about the US and this law is Canada, but the same things can happen.
shirro
The problem for all 5 eyes (or 9 or 14) is that our co-operation dates back to the cold war and the institutions and thinking have not caught up to current geo-political and technical changes. If anything we are accelerating our co-operation at a time when many voters are seriously questioning the future of the US alliance.
I wish some of our leaders would be more forthcoming about the amount of foreign pressure their governments are under. We talk about the negative influence on social media and politics of countries we are not allied with often but there is an astonishing silence when it comes to the biggest player. There is a very real threat to local values and democracy.
dataflow
Silence? Didn't Canada's prime minister give some very loud speeches regarding the US and the changing geopolitical landscape, and start making deals in response to such?
eucyclos
Carny seems like two people when talking about trade vs security/military
tick_tock_tick
No he bent the knee pretty badly and made a few headline sounds deals that do little to impact Canada's standing. Frankly Canada doesn't really have any choices the USA will never allow them to "distance" themselves and Canada doesn't really get a choice in the matter.
hedora
Speeches are just talk. If I understand this bill, it makes it illegal for service providers that operate in Canada to avoid gathering unnecessary metadata about end users. It also makes it illegal for them to demand a warrant when the government (or US government) asks for the data.
We don’t have to imagine what this data will be used for. If someone goes through an airport and privately spoke to a Trump critic, CBP will use that to extort or disappear them.
The goal of this bill is to let the US censor private communication overseas.
halJordan
Letting a few cold feet throw away your relationship with the US is absolutely just as stupid as Trump throwing away the US's relationship with Europe/whoever.
Spivak
I think you can justify this logic only in the case you sincerely believe that the current admin is a fluke and things will return to roughly the previous status quo on the order of a few years. And that isn't unreasonable to think, but you might also want to have a backup plan.
shirro
I think it is very clear from the way all US allies have reacted to various provocations that we are taking a long term view. That is the reason we are still spying on our domestic populations for the US despite our reservations about the current executive and their actions.
BLKNSLVR
Less so if the US is going to try to request current (prior?) allies to assist in a war against Iran which has already been declared 'won' and was recommended against by pretty much everyone outside of current participants.
protocolture
No the US clearly believes they would be better off not part of the rest of the world, the best thing we can do is not to drown in that tantrum, and provide the economic embargo they clearly think will bring them prosperity.
nanobuilds
If you're upset about this bill:
- Call your MP (find yours at ourcommons.ca). - Back organisations that fight back (OpenMedia and CCLA have killed surveillance bills in the past - Submit written opposition.
The Cannabis Act angle is interesting.. extends full computer search-and-seizure powers to cannabis enforcement.
unsupp0rted
Just don't back those organizations too publicly or too loudly if you don't want your bank account summarily frozen
16mb
Do you have a source of people’s bank being frozen for backing those orgs?
unsupp0rted
"I'll grant that dozens were imprisoned for protesting on a Tuesday, but do you have a source proving that anybody was imprisoned for protesting on a Wednesday?"
jdlyga
The endgame is clear. Mass surveillance combined with AI agents. Would almost be like having a personal government spy watching each individual person.
nickvec
Yep. Everyone can have their own “AI FBI agent” following their every move.
HerbManic
Just have to worry about the AI hallucinations.
mx7zysuj4xew
Yup, it makes living in stalinist Russia seem like a libertarian paradise
People don't seem to understand how incredibly oppressive society is becoming
anal_reactor
They do and they like it. That's what libertarians don't get. Majority of people do support such measures.
briandw
The bill claims that it doesn’t grant any new powers. Then it goes on to explain that if you don’t collect meta data and retain it for up to a year, that you can be fined or jailed.
r2vcap
It feels like many democratic leaders are starting to think the CCP model—mass surveillance of citizens—is the right direction, with growing demands for chat control, facial verification, age verification, and more. Fxxk any politician who thinks they are above the citizens in a democracy.
eucyclos
I've been in mainland China for the past year and I wish western politicians would get it through their skulls that most of the ccp model's upsides come from CCTVs in public areas and a police force that prioritizes stopping street crime.
ranyume
Do they de-prioritize or ignore other crimes that are not visible in the streets? This is an honest question, I want to know if actually focusing only on the streets makes people feel safe even if other types of crimes are rampant.
EDIT: I guess I could add examples of what "other crimes" could be. Fraud, corruption, sexual abuse, all victimless crimes, hitmen?
eucyclos
Victimless crimes definitely. For example, street vendors without permits are asked to leave, but not fined. Car accidents are investigated but there seems to be no 'ticket quotas' like in the west, etc.
I don't know much about the other categories you mentioned but I do know that president Xi is associated with a 'tough on corruption' stance that's widely seen as a major positive of his administration.
throwawaysleep
Eh, if you see the reaction to Flock Safety, people object to that one as well.
someguyiguess
The problem is that those cameras aren't being put in areas where crime occurs in order to keep citizens safe. They are being put on busy streets to prevent people's ability to travel without being tracked.
eucyclos
Not familiar with that conversation, but is the concern that it will be used to raise ticket revenue from victimless crimes without doing much to prevent the other kind?
augment_me
I believe that's it's sadly a necessity for control of the population when you have other superpowers employing this.
If you are Europe, and you have democratic elections, you have an informational power asymmetry towards the states that have mass surveillance and control. You are (as we saw last year with the Romanian election that was swung to 60% in 2 weeks over TikTok) susceptible towards influence of other superpowers. Even if you want to keep democratic elections, you need to somehow make sure that the citizens are voting in their interest. If the citizens at the same time are victims of the attention economy, their interest will be whatever foreign superpowers want it do be.
One well-tried solution is to engage and educate the population. However, this takes years, not weeks as the campaigns take, and takes immense resources as people will default to convenient attention economy tools.
Other option is to ban platforms/create country-wide firewalls. It's a lot harder in democratic societies, you ban one app and a new one takes it's place. Cat is kind of out of the bag on this one.
Last and easiest option is mass surveillance. Figure out who is getting influenced by what, and start policing on what opinions those people are allowed to have and what measures to take to them. Its a massive slippery slope, but I can clearly see that it's the easiest and most cost-effective way to solve this information-assymetry
armchairhacker
As always, the devil is in the details. How will "mass surveillance" be implemented? How will bad opinions be suppressed? How will misguided officials be blocked?
Even the vague outline you've provided has issues. You can't prevent someone from having an opinion. You can't figure out who is "influenced" vs merely "exposed" (and visible intrusion shifts people towards the former).
You should actually consider the downsides and failure modes of implemented mass surveillance, not "it prevents malicious foreign influence better than my other proposals", because it may be worse than said influence (which does not necessarily translate into control; keep in mind that Georgescu only won the primary and would've lost the runoff had it not been annulled). The world under free information is the devil you know.
I always hold that the problem with mass censorship and state overreach is, they are too powerful and people are too selfish and stupid. There's no good solution, but my prediction is that any drastic attempt to prevent foreign interference will backfire and fail at that (liberal leaders can't use authoritarian tools as effectively as authoritarians). Even Democracy, "the worst form of government except for all others that have been tried", is a better countermeasure; all you need, to prevent anti-democratic foreign capture and ultimate failure, is to preserve it.
augment_me
I think the definition of what is "anti-democratic" is as hard as the initial 3 questions you pose. If you push second-order ideas, for example by using refugees as indirect fuel for anti-democratic sentiment, is that anti-democratic? The Romanian election propaganda in itself was not anti-democratic, the coordination from a foreign state was. This means that the future of this kind of interference could be a more diffuse approach, or an approach where this is done from within Europe.
Any countermeasure you propose will just lead to moving one level of abstraction, or finding another point of entry.
I do think it's a better idea than mass surveillance, but I believe that the states will see it as harder. It can be that mass surveillance is implemented, and then the states do not know what to do with the data and nothing is achieved.
hn111
Regarding banning platforms I’d say just ban the attention driven business model online by forbidding all social media platforms from serving ads entirely.
thfuran
Ban all third party advertisement. Or taking payment for it at any rate.
mvkel
To what end would you say the surveillance is for?
So you surveil your citizens and precog their opinions... to do what? Make them have state-sponsored opinions? Don't we already have that without the surveillance?
It's trivial to predict how a human will behave without any surveillance at all. Facebook abandoned their Beacon system not because of the backlash, but because they realized all they really needed to predict user behavior was the user's credit card statements, which they could easily buy.
At some point the constitution is the backstop, and unless we amend it, it should hold true.
augment_me
I don't think that the EU member states have the same data access as companies in the US like Facebook do, and therein lies the problem. There is no good way to gather and connect data like Meta or Palantir can, you can't just sell things to the maximum bidder here. I think that's where the necessity comes from.
xtiansimon
> "control of the population"
Who is doing the controlling in this take? "The Government"? Calling for more government control when some say--at least in the US--too much government is the heart of our current political strife. Unless this argument is for corporate surveillance?
As for elections in the age of social media, why not just pass Blackout laws around the date of the election? One week not sufficient? Make it two.
But instead the answer is mass surveillance? To do what? Arrest & detain people, and let the judicial system incarcerate them for months or years while the process plays out?
augment_me
I am not for mass surveillance, I am saying it's the cheapest option to achieve the goal without disturbing the individual and causing social unrest. If you have a blackout, you will have businesses stopped, people will complain, people will use VPNs anyways, massive economic costs. Mass surveillance will just allow you to monitor, flag and perhaps later exclude people without affecting the rest.
thfuran
>when some say
Some say very nearly anything you could imagine and many things you couldn’t.
pydry
>If you are Europe, and you have democratic elections, you have an informational power asymmetry towards the states that have mass surveillance and control. You are (as we saw last year with the Romanian election that was swung to 60% in 2 weeks over TikTok) susceptible towards influence of other superpowers
When Georgia tried to implement a law to inhibit this type of foreign meddling from all superpowers it was widely branded a "pro russia law", presumably because the west had invested more in astroturfing Georgia.
Which is no different to what the US and Europe was already doing in Romania on an ENORMOUS scale before Russia ran its Tiktok campaign. Russia's campaign evidently resonated with the populace far more than what the NED were doing.
Democracy is a bit like freedom of speech - either you support it even when it makes decisions you dont like (e.g. in opposition to western imperialism) or you hate it. There isnt a middle ground.
If you support the Romanian secret services' decision to cancel the election over a tiktok campaign which was more convincing than better funded NED campaigns which they permit, you probably just hate democracy.
If you think "pro russia law" is an accurate designation of what Georgia was trying to implement - again, you just hate democracy.
worldsayshi
Thank you. Haven't seen this problem framed in quite this way before. I find the point quite persuasive.
But, I don't understand how this step could possibly work:
> start policing on what opinions those people are allowed to have and what measures to take to them
A much more effective counter to this would be to rebalance the information asymmetry by giving citizens the tools to coordinate against state sponsored influence.
augment_me
It's a good suggestion, but the thing is that the average person does not care and does not want to use your tools. You can make an app that gives you correct news, where you can vote for local political issues, etc. Most people don't give a shit, you as a state are competing against the attention economy(evolving into an affection economy given LLM use).
You are competing against companies that are using biologically wired mechanisms, like short-burst 3-second information overload together with marketing signaling(consumer neuroscience) to make you do choices and then confabulate the choice to yourself as your own.
Any tool would have to either be made in a landscape where ALL of the attention/affection-economy tools are banned, OR use the same mechanisms.
Meneth
> A much more effective counter to this would be to rebalance the information asymmetry by giving citizens the tools to coordinate against state sponsored influence.
Which tools, specifically? I know none.
frig57
Your last paragraph spunds misguided
_heimdall
Said leaders are only really democratic based on the literal name of the party they signed with when running for office. There's nothing democratic about these types of programs and I have to assume that a plainly explained referendum spelling this out on a ballot would fail miserably.
canadiantim
Canadian leaders are currently very consciously choosing to partner with China as opposed to the U.S.
I get diversification, that’s a good call, but adopting policies that actively harm Canada to the benefit of China is where we’re at and it’s so far beyond the pale. Just take a look at Canada, who for as long as I have known, have tried to maintain its industrial base in Ontario, eg the cross-border supply chain for automobiles, but then this "new" government comes in and is like y’know what we really need right now? To compound the effects of tariffs, piss off our biggest trading partner, risk NAFTA (CUSMA) and our entire cross-border supply chains with the US all so we can get some cheap electric cars from China, which won't even be manufactured here (atleast not with Canadian jobs); meanwhile we just spent close to $100 billion in subsidies explicitly to try and kickstart electric vehicle manufacturing in Canada. May have been more productive to turn that $100 billion into pennies and throw them down a wishing well...
HerbManic
This is a systemic problem of modern information technology. With social media for instance, either you let the technology run rampant and the worst case scenareo plays out. That is misinformation, tribalism, bidy dysmorphia and the pletora of other issues. The worst case pesamistic mode of what the technology can do, that is self termination. The alternative is that you have to have the watchmen over watch everything and you have the full dystopia model.
While there is a middle road, it is almost never taken as it is the hardest path. The real trick is to not invent the torment nexus but you cannot know this as the n'th order effects are decades beyond the initial creation. But that is so incredibly difficult to anticipate.
Think about it, the transistor was invented in 1947, 70 years later it turned into the surviellance panopticon. Very few could have seen that coming.
I dont have answers just explanations here.
throwawaysleep
Look at what social media considers to be safe countries.
You are absolutely bombarded with messaging about how Dubai and Chinese cities are the safest places in the world. I have friends who live in each who consider North America and Europe crime ridden shitholes because theft is possible to get away with.
If society believes that crimes is utterly rampant despite it collapsing over the past few decades, there is nowhere else to go but mass surveillance to make sure that even the smallest of visible crimes are stamped out.
indiangenz
The streets of Dubai and pretty much any where in China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam etc are orders of magnitude safer than UK, US, France, and other western European countries. Crime appears to be tolerated and reporting crimes doesn't do much, and statistics are managed in western Europe. If you get an opportunity to travel to China, do see for yourself how safe the cities feel, and how advanced (and safe) the public transport systems are.
gib444
There is also plenty of social media and politicians telling you that because of some statistic that the knife wielding gang you yourself saw in the shopping centre in east London in fact does not exist
modo_mario
>If society believes that crimes is utterly rampant despite it collapsing over the past few decades
After having to push for a crime to be actually registered and for others to even report small crimes because police has been so useless in Brussels I lost complete faith in this.
It also doesn't track with prisons overflowing more and more and damn near half of prisoners not having the nationality. It's safer now! But more and more people have experiences so keep your wallet in your front pocket. Watch out as a woman after dark. Avoid certain areas that your grandma described as posh and the trainstation you went to every day in your youth has stabbings now.
It feels like one of a bunch of fronts where we get some kind of hypernormalisation.
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b112
Getting a warrant for each person is not "mass surveillance". Why do you think a warrant is not required? It is.
hsyehbeidhh
[dead]
everdrive
We're in a very low trust and illiberal era. Everyone is convinced that the other side is evil and cannot be trusted, and they are building to laws and infrastructure to contain the perceived threat. And no one imagines that infrastructure will be used against them.
someguyiguess
> "Everyone is convinced that the other side is evil and cannot be trusted..."
And the scary part is that they're both apparently correct.
rkagerer
Canadian here.
I'm frustrated our governments keep trying to foist essentially the same garbage upon us that has already been rejected over and over before.
Why do we need what amounts to a massive, state-level surveillance apparatus, steeped in legislated secrecy, plugged directly into the backbone of every internet provider?
Would you be OK if police officers followed you around everywhere you go, recording who you talk to, and when and where you interacted - not because there's any suspicion upon you, but simply to collect and preserve all the metadata they might need to find that person up to a year later - "just in case" - to question them about your conversations? Because that's more or less what's being proposed here. The only difference is it happens opaquely within the technical systems of ISP's and service providers where it isn't as apparent to the general public.
It gets even worse if you presume the information will be stored by private contractors, who will inevitably be victims of data breaches, and will be sitting on a vast new trove of records subject to civil discovery, etc.
> The SAAIA ... establishes new requirements for communications providers to actively work with law enforcement on their surveillance and monitoring capabilities .... The bill introduces a new term – “electronic service provider” – that is presumably designed to extend beyond telecom and Internet providers by scoping in Internet platforms (Google, Meta, etc.).
As the article points out, jurisprudence from the Supreme Court of Canada has taken a dim view of warrantless disclosure of personal information. What precisely is insufficient in regard to existing investigative powers of law enforcement and their prerogative to pursue conventional warrants? Why do they need to deputize the platforms who you've (in many people's cases) entrusted with your most personal data?
To be frank, this is the sort of network I would expect in an authoritarian country, not here. The potential for abuse is too high, the civil protections too flimsy, and the benefits purported don't even come close to outweighing the risks introduced to our maintaining a healthy, functioning democracy.
YZF
Maybe there need to be some adjustments but we also have to acknowledge that the world has evolved and there have to be some response to that.
In the "old days" when all we had is telephone law enforcement could wiretap your phone with a warrant. As I understand it with an order from a judge your phone could be tapped or your mail could be read. You wouldn't (obviously) be served that warrant or even be aware of it. This was part of a few existing laws/acts. I.e. that's the status quo. If we were a surveillance state back then, we'll be that again.
The other difference from the "old days" is that some of the communication companies are global and not Canadian. I.e. your encrypted conversations go perhaps [to] a Meta data-center in California.
If we remove the ability of law enforcement to monitor and access evidence of criminal activity with a warrant from a judge we are increasing the ability of criminal organizations to operate and coordinate. That is the balance here.
It is true there are other important differences. E.g. the amount of information, its persistence, the ability of hackers and other actors to potentially access it. This isn't easy. But doing nothing is also not great?
I'm also Canadian and I have to admit I haven't been following the details here. It's hard to separate signal from noise and it seems everyone cries wolf all the time over everything. I will read it in more detail and try to form an opinion.
akomtu
I think it's a preparation for wildly unpopular measures in the next ~10 years. There will be dissent, and they need a way to catch dissidents at scale.
himata4113
I believe that this is actually a good thing because when the government is infringing on the rights it is what brings resistance to life.
If you really think about it, if the government can collect the data that means some entity is ALREADY collecting that data which more often than not goes to advertisers.
Another benefit is that it creates real use-cases for things such as I2P, (god forbid) crypto currency and matrix. I know crypto can be a hot topic and lacking in terms of true decoupling from the government these days, but coins like TRX have been great at this especially in china where yuan is an extremely controlled currency. Although it seems that most of the usage is in illegal activities rather than liberty or/and activist reasons.
And lastly, if the government can't get their hands on the data neither can the hackers and state sponsored entities.
thfuran
You’re saying that it’s a good thing that the government is infringing on people’s rights because it might motivate activists to convince them to stop doing so?
himata4113
It's more accurate to say that it gives legitimacy to using things that government has limited to no control over.
anonym29
The people proposing these kinds of infringements on civil liberties need to start being criminally tried for treason. Not just in this case, or this country, or this hemisphere.
agreetodisagree
From browsing through the linked text of the bill, this sounds reasonable and in line with the lawful access to records granted to the security services in other western democracies, so that they can fulfil their duties.
Without diving into hyperbole and far-fetched dystopic speculation, what exactly is the problem?
layla5alive
Government overreach isn't far-fetched dystopic speculation and privacy is important to freedom.
bethekidyouwant
But did you read the bill? The meat of it is the police want to be able to ask a carrier if they have any information on you at all and the carrier has to answer a yes or no and if it’s a yes, then the police can go to a judge and ask for a warrant.. right now the carrier doesn’t have to answer at all so it’s difficult for the police to do their job at all because they have to get the judge to sign off for every carrier just to find out if that carrier even has any information.
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https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/bill/C-22/first-r...