This is a baseless accusation. Those opposed to the legislation include privacy commissioners, members of Parliament, prominent academics, respected journalists, civil libertarians and decent members of the public. To question the ramifications of a government bill is not to side with sexual exploiters of children.
Equally offensive is a new Twitter campaign smearing Toews by posting intimate marital details from affidavits filed in a bitter divorce case. Really, must we descend to the kind of vile personal slagging that is prevalent in American politics?
At the same time, it deserves note that when you start dismantling privacy protections, this is exactly the kind of odious swill that you invite as personal matters move into the public domain. And anyone who thinks the authorities are not equally capable of leaking their discoveries is living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Associating people opposed to government-proposed encroachment upon civil liberties with some loathsome group is precisely the kind of strategy used by repressive governments. They manufacture enemies which they then cite to justify the erosion of fundamental civil liberties.
Among the most basic of these liberties, one that is emblematic of a free society, is the right to be considered innocent and to be free from unreasonable search by authorities. This is right up there with the right to a fair trial, the right not to be imprisoned without a public judicial process and the right to be sanctioned as the law prescribes, not according to the arbitrary whim of some state authority.
That’s why we have traditionally required authorities who want to search your person, your premises or your filing cabinets or to listen in on your telephone conversations, or to follow you around, to first convince a judge that their need to do so comprises a reasonable infringement upon some of our most cherished civil liberties.
Authorities can right now investigate as they deem necessary but they must demonstrate to an objective third party that the proposed intrusion into an individual’s privacy is justifiable. They require official permission in the form of a search warrant to infringe. This is called oversight.
But the electronic surveillance bill introduced by Toews would dispense with the basic obligation of authorities to obtain that arm’s length judicial warrant. It would grant police unprecedented power to subject individuals to online surveillance.
The new law would force telecommunications companies to turn over to the state intimate details of customers’ online activities without prior judicial oversight. Name, address, phone number, email address, Internet protocol address and device identification numbers would enable police to create an extensive digital profile and to constantly monitor any person’s movement by tracking cellphones.
Ostensibly, according to Toews, this provides the state with tools essential for catching criminals — and he repeatedly cites child pornographers as the justifying example. This is emotive fearmongering.
A report in the National Post points out that 94 per cent of requests by police to Internet service providers for information are already granted – it’s the remaining six per cent that government wants.
For the East German Stasi and the Soviet Union’s NKVD, it was the purported existence of some clandestine fifth column of state enemies that justified opening people’s mail, planting bugs in homes and offices, tapping telephones and cultivating vast networks of informers. In Canada, it’s apparently a global conspiracy of child pornographers and their “supporters” among the government’s perceived foes.
If provincial and federal privacy commissioners, lawyers, scholars specializing in digital technologies and civil liberties experts are all weighing in with serious concerns about expanded police powers and insufficient oversight, government would do well to listen and take the legislation back to the drawing board.
And while it is doing so, to stow that nasty and intemperate rhetoric that’s more appropriate to the culture of paranoia in a Cold War police state.
Original Article
Source: vancouver sun
Author: Stephen Hume
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