Our conservative government has tabled legislation that is aimed at stopping child pornography. Part of this law would require ISPs to cache information that could later be called upon by police (in some cases without a warrant) to track online activity with the intent of stopping child pornography.
This raised some issues with privacy. In defending the bill Vic Toews (Safety Minister) told a liberal MP that you are either with the government or with child pornographers.
My friends we have officially become the United States. One may remember after 9/11 that any attempt to question whether the new regime was a good thing was met with the refrain - "your either with us or with the terrorists". Now I think that child pornographers are probably more reviled than terrorists by most people so maybe Canada is in fact now worse than the United States.
I want to take a moment to think about what is going on here for a minute. We are going to ask Internet Service Providers to cache all of our online activity (including financial information, bill payments, private communications) so that if necessary the police can view it. Am I the only one who sees a big glaring problem with that? Rogers can't get my cable bill right two months in a row - but they are going to keep my information secure? What about hackers? Seems like a little problem to me.
Also, what about just respecting my privacy. All I hear from people defending this is that child pornography is bad and if I don;t have anything to fear why would I object to the information being kept. This is the stupidest argument I have ever heard. Guess who else makes that argument - police states. The point is not that I have to justify why I deserve privacy. The norm is privacy. In order to get a warrant there is a requirement on the police to justify why they need to disrupt this norm. To put it another way - why have any requirements for warrants, or due process or even curtains. You have nothing to hide right?
Have we forgotten the G20?
By making it a binary choice between giving up right to privacy and "siding with the child pornographers" the conservative government has made it so that law abiding citizens have to take sides in a fictional debate.
Itis exactly what George Bush did during his term.
So true.
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