Home » Posts tagged 'anti-terror legislation'
Tag Archives: anti-terror legislation
“Recipe for Disaster”: Canadian Government to Expand State Surveillance Powers (Again)
“Recipe for Disaster”: Canadian Government to Expand State Surveillance Powers (Again)
The “spillover effects” of overbroad anti-terror legislation.
We’ve long been lamenting the enormous and still utterly murky – despite the Snowden revelations – spy apparatus in the US that, in collaboration with Corporate America, stretches from many federal agencies to state and local agencies. It’s all there, seamless, borderless, perfect: collecting license-plate data with photos that show who went where with whom to do what, checking out our “secure” data in the Cloud, collecting phone “metadata” that is not supposed to reveal personal details….
“We kill people based on metadata,” explained helpfully Gen. Michael Hayden, former head of the NSA. To make us Americans feel better, he added, “But that’s not what we do with this metadata.”
On the corporate side, consumer surveillance technologies and methods, dressed up in appealing terms like Ad Tech, are being perfected, and an entire startup bubble has sprung up to compete with the Big Ones that already master this.
For years, and at every level, laws have been passed in the US to give Big Brother more and more tools to track us in everything we do. Despite these efforts, Big Brother is just slowly limping behind fleet-footed Corporate America.
The article below reveals how the Canadian government is marching in the same direction, perhaps at a different pace, but with equally disturbing undertones.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
New Anti Terror Laws Coming After Attack On Charlie Hebdo
New Anti Terror Laws Coming After Attack On Charlie Hebdo
Stephen Harper announced that an “international Jihadist Movement Has Declared War On The World”, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack in France. He also stated that new anti terrorism legislation would be introduced shortly after the House of Commons winter break.
The Canadian government responded to the fall attacks in Ottawa and Quebec, in the same fashion. Intoducing Bill C-44. You can read the full version of Bill C-44 HERE.
Critics of Bill C-44 cite concerns such as:
“Our government is already in the midst of giving spies more power through the passage of Bill C-13 (better known as the Cyberbullying Bill), which makes it easier for law enforcement agencies to surveil Canadians and allows Internet Service Providers to voluntarily turn your information over to the government without consequence, and without notifying you. The bill is so broad that even Carol Todd – mother of Amanda Todd, whose heartbreaking death helped inspire C-13 – has spoken out against its surveillance provisions.
And now, following last week’s attacks, the government wants to expand its spying powers even further through C-44. The bill has a lot of problems, but I want to concentrate on just one. C-44 would cut judicial oversight out of the admission of information from confidential informants at trial, automatically preserving the anonymity of those informants. In other words, Canadians would lose the right to confront their accusers in court; in essence, it’s the loss of our right to due process.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
