by Kelsey Mowatt – OpenMedia.ca
While the Conservative government may have shelved its Internet surveillance legislation for the time-being – thanks in no small part to the 75,000 folks who have signed OpenMedia.ca’s
Stop
Online
Spying
petition – it’s important for Canadians to stay on top of this issue. The legislation
received
little to no democratic feedback or committee oversight to begin with, and Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has gone on record stating that the “legislation will come.” In other dramatic and often stated words, the battle has been won, but the war has just begun….
Despite repeated claims from the government that their proposed “Lawful Access” legislation does not infringe on the privacy rights of Canadians, all of Canada’s Privacy Commissioners, including Federal Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, oppose the agenda. In October, Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian wrote an open letter to Toews himself, and compared the government’s legislation to “enacting a highly intrusive surveillance regime.”
The Conservative government’s online spying agenda would grant authorities warrantless access to Canadians’ personal information, including address, phone number, e-mail address, Internet protocol address, and device identification numbers.
While on the surface this may seem innocent enough, many privacy and surveillance experts have warned that authorities could use this information to compile an extensive and invasive record of anyone’s online activities without judicial oversight. In addition, this aggregated data would reflect any and all Internet activity that is tied to these numbers and addresses, meaning the privacy invasion may extend to people who authorities don’t even seek to watch.
Now if you, your friend, or co-worker, isn’t worried about things like online privacy, the security of your personal and or financial information, then you might be asking, “what’s really the big deal?” After all, if you have “nothing to hide”, then what’s the problem right?
Well, aside from the issue of your civil liberties, there is the problem of what the government’s proposed Internet surveillance will cost you the consumer.
Several Internet experts and civil rights advocates, like the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, have publicly acknowledged that the implementation of such legislation will likely cost millions of dollars. Will the cost of enacting and purchasing this online spying technology fall on the public purse? Or will it be passed on to ISPs themselves, which in turn, will be shifted on to you to take yet another bite out of your bank account? And all this during less-than-certain economic times…
What will be the financial impact of government-mandated Internet surveillance on smaller ISPs? These are additional costs that, as Tom Copeland, head of chair of the Canadian Association of Internet Providers (CAIP) has gone on record saying, could potentially put some smaller ISPs out of business. Canadian consumers need more competition for Big Telecom, not less.
While the Conservative government has put its online spying agenda on the back burner for now, OpenMedia.ca needs your continued support to make sure this legislation doesn’t rear its invasive and costly head again.
Kelsey Mowatt is a researcher with OpenMedia.ca
Comments
