The Globe and Mail: 'Snoop and spy' bill could be costly overreach

Image by Paulo Barcellos Jr on Flickr.

By Omar El Akkad for The Globe and Mail

Vic Toews, Canada’s Public Safety Minister, has framed any debate of the Conservative government's new lawful access bill in the simplest terms: Canadians can either stand with the government, or with child pornographers.

Of course, the dichotomy is false. It is possible to oppose this bill without supporting child pornography. The federal and provincial privacy commissioners who have already spoken out against the proposed law didn't do so because they've fallen under the lobbying spell of Big Paedophilia.

For the record, the new bill (dubbed The Protecting Children From Internet Predators Act) would give police the ability to demand personal customer information, such as names, phone numbers, IP addresses and other data, from Internet Service Providers without a warrant. It would also force those ISPs to install surveillance capability on their networks. With a warrant, police could monitor and collect detailed information on a user's online activity.

Proponents of similarly sweeping new Internet laws, including such heavily criticized pieces of legislation as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the United States, have long sought to portray critics of those proposed laws as insidious – the kind of people who don't want any law to impede their ability to do something immoral or illegal online. If you don't download copyrighted material, why oppose a strong new copyright law? If you don't download child pornography, why oppose a strong new lawful access bill? If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

Ignore for a moment that travelling down that rhetorical road eventually leads to a police state, or that many of Canada's top privacy experts are opposed to the new lawful access bill for entirely legitimate reasons. There's another reason ordinary Canadians should be wary of this bill: It will likely cost them lots of money. Read more »

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