National Post: Even officials from Public Safety Canada take issue with online spying

By Jesse Kline for the National Post: For years, small-c conservatives have been arguing that the gun registry is a giant waste of money — not only because it went way over budget, but due to the fact that it serves to make criminals out of law abiding firearms owners. Meanwhile, those intent on committing crimes easily escape its grip. To their credit, the federal Tories are in the process of scrapping the registry. But while the government restores some of our freedoms with one hand, it simultaneously takes them away with the other. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has placed the Conservatives’ so-called “lawful access” legislation — which they’ve been trying to pass since 2009 — on the House of Commons Order Paper. If it becomes law, the bill will give the government unprecedented access to Canadians’ online activities, by allowing police to collect the personal information of Internet users — including names, addresses and phone numbers — without having to go through the cumbersome process of obtaining a warrant beforehand.

In order to gain access to these intimate details, the government will force Internet service providers to install costly monitoring equipment on their networks. Taxpayers will likely be forced to foot part of the bill, but the rest of the cost will be borne by private industry. Smaller providers could be driven out of what is already an uncompetitive market. The law would also make it much easier for police to force telecommunication companies to retain information on their customers and to enable tracking devices on mobile phones.

This type of legislation brings us one step closer to George Orwell’s dystopian vision of a totalitarian state that keeps its citizens under constant surveillance. Yet there is no evidence the new law will achieve its public policy objectives.

Law enforcement agencies have been unable to come up with a single investigation that has been hampered by the limits of the laws currently on the books. Even the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police could not find a “sufficient quantity of credible examples” to support the additional powers the lawful access legislation would grant them, according to a series of internal e-mails obtained by the Vancouver-based group Open Media. Postmedia News has also obtained government documents, in which officials from within Public Safety Canada object to some of the key arguments the Minister has used to justify the bill. Read more »

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