“That continuous accountability, continuously being in the public eye, and that having to be infallible … it puts a lot of pressure on our police officers, and contributes to their mental health.”
Did he mean “poor mental health”?
Imagine being watched all of the time. What kind of stress would that cause?
The bottom half of this page is all about CSE.
Canada’s had a recent track record that’s bad. PONY EXPRESS ring a bell? So what is our watchdog really doing? Not much, judging by recent news reports.
The RCMP have displayed Climate Change Denial symptoms. This is bad for Canada, because if the police tasked with interfering in climate change related activism do not understand the science that drives the determined actions of peaceful activists, then they’re more likely to act against protesters without a measure of human sympathy.
Remember that RCMP bombed an oil installation just ~15 years ago.
Their lawyer produced evidence that the RCMP bombed a wellsite and that they did it with the full support of the energy company that owned it. The Crown admits the allegations are true.
The Royal Canadian Motorized Police will be seeing you.
ADDED: Some response to the RCMP.
—
Meanwhile, the NSA continues to break everything, and spy on everyone.
The U.S. National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other top manufacturers, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on the majority of the world’s computers, according to cyber researchers and former operatives.
That long-sought and closely guarded ability was part of a cluster of spying programs discovered by Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based security software maker that has exposed a series of Western cyberespionage operations.
And yet our creepy Prime Minister wants this law:
Despite this being a possibility, i.e. the system makes a grave mistake:
ADDED:
When CSIS has a file on Manning, it’s no better than the FBI monitoring everyone for possible Communist tendencies.
Here’s an interesting bit of the process the NSA and partners are going about tracking your online activities so they can link everything you do that isn’t encrypted and disassociated from your IP address and social profiles online, to you personally. LEVITATION has been watching you, most certainly.
ADDED:
A little late for the holiday season, we’ve just learned that Canadian spy agency CSE is making a list… but they’re not checking it twice.
In fact, they’re not checking it at all. Leaked documents reveal a secret program that is spying on the use of our favourite downloading sites. This means the bulk collection of Canadians’ private information, regardless of whether they’ve been naughty or nice.1
Tell Prime Minister Stephen Harper to put an end to warrantless online spying. Today.
The sensitive data being collected about you can be used to tell everything from your sexual orientation, to your religious and political beliefs, to your medical history.
And the government’s mishandling of this data has meant innocent Canadians have lost their jobs and even been banned from entering the U.S.2
You could even end up on a government watch-list for simply clicking a link.
What’s more, Stephen Harper’s Defence Minister explicitly told us last year that CSE doesn’t spy on Canadians.3
So which is it, Harper?
This government needs to know that we don’t support their secretive, expensive, and out-of-control spying program. Send a message now.
Not only are innocent Canadians being spied on, but their sensitive information is being shared with the spy agencies of several other countries4 – and who knows what happens from there. All of this without our knowledge or consent.
Of the 10-15 million downloads CSE processes every day, they admit that only 0.00001% of them are “interesting.”5 Does that sound like effective use of a multi-billion dollar program to you?
We need to rein in CSE, and put an immediate stop to indiscriminate warrantless online spying. Tell Stephen Harper to stop spying on Canadians and wasting our tax dollars.
This could be our best chance to end out-of-control spying, but it will only work if thousands of Canadians speak out. Let’s end this now.
–David, on behalf of the OpenMedia team
P.S. The bottom line is this: ending up as a target for invasive government surveillance should never be as easy as clicking a link on a popular service, or storing a file online. Please let Ottawa decision-makers know exactly where you stand right now.
Footnotes
*CSE, formerly known as CSEC, is Canada’s spy agency
[1], [5] Canada Casts Global Surveillance Dragnet Over File Downloads. Source: The Intercept.
[2] Here’s what I told key MPs about their Online Spying Bill C-13. Source.
[3] Tories deny Canadian spy agencies are targeting Canadians. Source: Toronto Star.
[4] A look at how Canada tracked one person. Source: CBC News
I think people who say they are too ordinary, law abiding, and boring for police to violate them, are more wishing that were true than stating a fact.
Will the police keep the phone as it keeps generating evidence? For how long? Can you refuse to provide your password or will the police IT department bypass it?
In Gary Shteyngart’s 2010 novelSuper Sad True Love Story of a terrible future, everyone walks around with an “apparati,” a data-collection rating device on their chest. It’s like wearing an open cellphone. This court ruling takes us one step closer to this.
And it is very easy to be arrested. It just happened to a friend’s teenage son, the victim of two 30-year-old men following him around filming him and harassing him. The boy, wrongly accused of aggression, was strip-searched. He’s too young to have any secrets on his cell, but I thought he was too gentle a kid to be arrested in the first place. I was wrong.
He was vulnerable to lazily vicious cops. You think it cannot happen to you. Maybe it will.
Critics of Snowden tried to claim that no one would ever be hurt by metadata collection willy-nilly. We can hopefully all put that canard to bed.
The NSA had claimed that Ed Snowden hadn’t contacted superiors with concerns about their illegal activity. They released an email attempting to discredit his claim that he had raised concerns, and the email proves Snowden was telling the truth.
The Washington Post has published a response from Snowden to NSA’s release of this email. He says, “Today’s strangely tailored and incomplete leak only shows the NSA feels it has something to hide,” and, “I’m glad they’ve shown they have access to records they claimed just a few months ago did not exist, and I hope we’ll see the rest of them very soon.”
More specifically, “Today’s release is incomplete, and does not include my correspondence with the Signals Intelligence Directorate’s Office of Compliance, which believed that a classified executive order could take precedence over an act of Congress, contradicting what was just published. It also did not include concerns about how indefensible collection activities – such as breaking into the back-haul communications of major US internet companies – are sometimes concealed under E.O. 12333 to avoid Congressional reporting requirements and regulations.”
“Now that they have finally begun producing emails, I am confident that truth will become clear rather sooner than later.”
An interesting ethical debate is taking place. FirstLook Media, the controversial and adversarial media outlet owned by PayPal’s inventor, has withheld the name of the 5th country the NSA collects recordings of all phone calls from. SOMALGET and MYSTIC are Top Secret programs revealed by the Snowden leaks from the NSA. Following on the earth shaking revelations of last year starting with the “metadata” gathering in the US called PRISM, MYSTIC is again changing Americans’ views of what their spy agencies are actually working toward.
I think WikiLeaks should reveal this information, and not because it’s likely to cause deaths, but because a Top Secret American program having a country name revealed more than a year after it was known to be compromised, is not a reason to redact it any longer. WikiLeaks is right, and the citizens of the violated nation have a human right to know the United States government was able to record every phone call. It wouldn’t be the first time a Top Secret American program has led to people dying, either.
People can then place the blame where it belongs for any deaths, at the feet of the NSA, and Bush/Obama, not simplistically on the WikiLeaks scapegoat.
Kinsella is right that Obama has broken hearts.
The precise moment at which Barack Obama broke many progressive hearts, however, is just as easy to ascertain: it came in June of last year, when it was revealed that the U.S. government – aided and abetted by the “Five Eyes,” the governments of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom – were literally spying on millions of their own citizens.
So, will my former champion, Barack Obama, read this column, and its earnest plea for our constitutions to be worth the paper they are written on?No need. The NSA likely tracked my keystrokes, intercepted my email to editors, and provided the president’s staff with a copy long before this morning’s paper hit the streets.
Welcome to the new era, where our “freedom” is gutted in the name of, you know, “freedom.”
Snowden, meanwhile, has been winning hearts ever since he eluded unjust capture last year.
Assange has also been an inspiration, in the face of American duplicity.
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