Dear Editor:
Recently, our federal government has brought forward new legislation regarding Internet safety. Despite being very outspoken on the question of crime, Prime Minister Stephen Harper seems far from eager to discuss the legislation he’s promised to pass within 100 days of taking office — legislation that will allow online spying of Canadian citizens without a warrant.
I’m also appalled by Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’ comments in the House of Commons, when he accused all Canadians who oppose the government’s invasive and warrantless online spying scheme, Bill C-30, of siding with child pornographers. This is rhetoric of the most outrageous kind.
Though I oppose Bill C-30, I do not stand with criminals. I stand with the majority of Canadians who oppose expensive warrantless surveillance of electronic activity. I stand with Canada’s Privacy Commissioners and Ombudspersons who have all spoken out publicly against the bill. I would also like to point out that there are some serious technical flaws deem this bill quite useless as a way to “protect children”.
In the Mar 2 issue of Drumheller’s Insider newspaper, I was interviewed regarding bill C30 along with RCMP Staff Sergeant Art Hopkins, as well; excerpts from a previous interview with Kevin Sorensen, Crowfoot MP were added. While I fully support the local RCMP and the hard work they do, after reading the comments of Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Sorensen, I was left wondering if either of them had in fact actually read bill C-30? Mr. Sorensen assured the Drumheller readers on Feb 29 issue of the Drumheller Mail that the bill would only target child predators, and investigators would in fact require a warrant. In my opinion, both of these statements seem to be something of a lie meant to downplay the strength of the proposed bill.
Starting with the title, “Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act” this is extremely misleading. The purpose of the act, as identified in section 3 is to ensure national security and law enforcement can intercept communications, and makes no specific claim to children or internet predators. In fact throughout the entire bill, aside from the misleading title, there is nothing specifically targeting internet predators. A much more accurate title would be the “Government Spying Bill”, or perhaps the “Orwellian Society Bill”? Without digressing too much, I should add that the current title of bill C-30 was changed to its current name after previously being called the “Lawful Access” bill.
As for the effectiveness of this bill, or anything like it, let’s get all technical for a moment or two. Internet access generally requires access to a series of networks based on the TCP/IP communications protocol. This means that each device connected to the Internet is assigned some type of IP address (which our government wants to trace) however, as far back as the 1980’s, network engineers could see that we would easily deplete the ~4.3 billion IP addresses available in the IPv4 standard. Therefore, they invented new ways to more efficiently route traffic throughout the Internet and delay the inevitable depletion of IPv4 addresses. One of those standards is called NAT or network address translation. Using NAT a router can mask one or more internal IP addresses and use only one public or routable IP address, essentially making the address that our government wants to track somewhat invisible (there are still ways to trace the originating IP, but the bill does not address this at all). Furthermore smaller ISPs, and large mobile carriers use this same technology on a much larger scale, and to complicate matters even further, NAT technology can be used many, many times over the course of even just one Internet communication session.
Further to this, readily available and free products that use the power of peer to peer (P2P) communications (such as the TOR project for one), allow for 100% anonymous, completely untraceable communication on the Internet. And, a skilled user can go one step further and encrypt all his/hers communication using virtually impossible to break algorithms, all encapsulated inside a P2P session such as TOR, all behind an ISP that uses NAT to begin with.
I guess what I am saying is that if you are a criminal or child predator, being pursued by federal or even local authorities, you could spend a few hours reading Wikipedia, and become completely anonymous online. So, much like the failed gun registry which only targets law abiding citizens (seeing as most criminals likely don’t register their guns), this bill was out of date and useless before it was ever put to ink.
What I find most offensive however is the slow removal of our freedoms in the pursuit of complete safety. Do we really need to have the government looking at our emails, phone calls, text messages, and Internet browsing history? As concerned parents, isn’t it our own responsibility as adults to monitor our own children’s Internet usage, and not the governments?
As a general Internet user, I am sure you probably do not encrypt your communications, or use anonymous browsing systems such as TOR. So, you and I are likely the only targets that the government can use this bill to target because the real criminals will definitely be using these techniques. And what would your Internet usage be useful for you wonder? Perhaps the current political party wants to see what the current social trends are so they can market themselves directly towards that end. Maybe they just want to know what you had for breakfast, or what you did last Friday night. Maybe it makes sense to track an up and coming political official now, so they have some dirt on him/her later one when they need a favour? Or, perhaps you have written a letter to the editor voicing your concern over the ridiculous surveillance bill that the government is proposing
Mr. Hopkins explains in the interview that what we do not realize is that getting a warrant takes a lot of time and investigative work to do. My question is, isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t that what we want as law abiding citizens? Yes, there is a small element of society that gets out of line, and that is what we have the RCMP and other enforcement agencies for. They have a very tough job to do, and I believe they do it very well already.
The loosely written bill C-30, if passed, would allow the government very loose interpretation to do whatever they want, without a warrant, and that is what scares me the most. I agree with Mr. Hopkins and I bet at times it is very frustrating to have to go through all the legal hoops to get a warrant, but that is exactly the difference between criminals and law enforcement. The good guys have many, many checks and balances to ensure that they remain “the good guys”, and I for one do not want to see that changed.
John Shoff