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It looks like the video we created with your support about the online spying bill C-13 has really been turning heads. Check out this piece about how Peter MacKay’s bill would grant immunity to telecoms who hand over your private information without a warrant. read more How did CSEC officials describe their two-hour long conversation with the Globe and Mail? “Uncomfortable.” Colin Freeze takes a look into Canada’s ultra-secretive spy agency CSEC. Article by Colin Freeze for the Globe and Mail No cellphones, no recording devices, no computers. No names. The seven officials at the boardroom table insist that their identities cannot be published – the risk, one explains, is that they would become targets of a “hostile foreign intelligence service.” read more Canadian Internet Service Providers are eerily silent when it comes to information about whether or not they have assisted ultra-secretive spy agency CSEC with their surveillance of law-abiding Canadians. Jon Penney discusses what Canadian companies can do to help fight surveillance. Article by Jon Penney for The Citizen Lab The Communications Security Establishment’s surveillance practices raise significant privacy concerns but full answers, transparency, or substantive reforms ensuring democratic oversight from either CSEC, or the Canadian Government, are not likely forthcoming. Canadians should also care about what to do in the meantime. Professor Michael Geist has recently posted about what average (Read more…) Mr Jean-Pierre Plouffe, CSEC watchdog, has determined that CSEC is off the hook,it did not direct any activity at Canadians or persons in Canada. He’s hanging his hat on the distinction between “collecting metadata” and “tracking Canadians”. I guess if CSEC activity isn’t “directed” at Canadians, then CSEC bears no responsibility if it just happens to capture data from Canadians by spying on…um…somebody in Canadian airports. Ron Deibert, a cyber expert who wrote the book (literally) on cyber snooping says the ruling “makes a mockery of public accountability and oversight.” Ms Cavoukian Ontario’s privacy commissioner, the inimitable (Read more…) Highlight Image: Highlight Link: https://openmedia.ca/stand Saturday’s headline in Canada’s “newspaper of record”, The Globe and Mail, was not “Harper government caught spying on Canadians” but “Rob Ford admits jaywalking ticket in Vancouver”. Are you kidding me??? Let’s review the week, shall we? Angry Birds It started with Edward Snowden revealing that American and British spy agencies target smartphone applications like Angry Birds to capture the user’s personal information including his age, gender, location and sexual orientation. This information combined with the real time geo-tracking function made “leaky apps” irresistible to spy agencies. Do terrorists play Angry Birds? Aren’t they mucking around (Read more…) Inspired by this headline: CSEC used airport Wi-Fi to track Canadian travellers: Edward Snowden documents This and that for your Sunday reading. - Leo Panitch reminds us that the term “reform” was once understood to represent efforts to bolster the public interest against unbridled market forces – and suggests it’s well past time to take the word back from the business interests who have turned it into just the opposite. - Paul Krugman comments on the twin myths of the undeserving poor and the deserving rich. And Sam Polk writes from experience about the mindset that drives money addicts to demand that others’ basic needs give way to their desire to accumulate: I’d always (Read more…) This hard-hitting piece by Professor Michael Geist argues for a full, independent investigation into CSEC’s spying activities. As Parliament is set to resume shortly, the time has come for MPs to take a far greater interest in what our security services are doing in our name. Will 2014 be the year when our out-of-control spy agency is finally reined in? Call for an end to all illegal spying on Canadians at https://OpenMedia.ca/CSEC Article by Michael Geist for the Toronto Star Months of surveillance-related leaks from U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden have fuelled an international debate over privacy, spying, and (Read more…) Miscellaneous material to start your week. - Michael Katz looks back at how the U.S. abandoned its poor – and how that choice continues to affect people across the income spectrum today. And Michael Valpy discusses how Canada can and should avoid travelling any further down the same path – with his “Big Four” ideas focusing on mandatory voting, proportional representation, a guaranteed basic income and protections for vulnerable workers. - Jeffrey Simpson describes the Cons’ narrow focus on about 10 per cent of the Canadian electorate in the lead up to the next federal election, while Andrew Jackson (Read more…) The evolution of the decay of Facebook privacy. The late, great Neil Postman once wrote that we’d more likely voluntarily embrace the fascism of Huxley’s Brave New World than Orwell’s 1984. The corporate version of this is the crack-like addiction a billion people have to the Facebook. But it’s worse than you thought, in terms of how they’re snooping on you. Years ago, I wrote about how people left AOL, Compuserve and other full service “internet” portals when they learned that there was this huge real Internet thing out beyond their gated community. One of the ideas was that they (Read more…) Check out this great video by The Ryan and Amy Show. Do you always feel like somebody’s watching you too? You can learn more about Canada’s largest pro-privacy coalition at https://OurPrivacy.ca read more This is what ShitHarperDid activists had to say Wednesday during a peaceful protest against Harper’s $1.2B CSEC complex in Ottawa: “I SPY A WASTE OF MONEY” The post Harper’s new $1.2B CSEC spy complex “a waste of money”: ShitHarperDid appeared first on The Canadian Progressive. Canada’s privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart says the Harper government’s new cyberbullying Bill C-13 lacks “accountability and reporting mechanisms to shed light on new investigative powers”. The post Canada’s privacy czar questions Harper’s cyberbullying Bill C-13 appeared first on The Canadian Progressive. ShitHarperDid to execute a “creative action” at the site of the $1.2 billion “spy castle” Harper is building for the secretive spy agency CSEC in Ottawa. The post ShitHarperDid to execute “creative action” against Harper’s $1.2B CSEC spy castle appeared first on The Canadian Progressive. Here, on what Saskatchewan can learn from some significant developments in privacy law in Manitoba and Alberta. For further reading…- Paul Broad and Daniel Michaluk introduce Manitoba’s new private-sector legislation.- Alberta’s similar legislation is here, while the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision striking it down is here. In particular, see paragraphs 37-38: PIPA imposes restrictions on a union’s ability to communicate and persuade the public of its cause, impairing its ability to use one of its most effective bargaining strategies in the course of a lawful strike. In our view, this infringement of the right (Read more…) Until recently, I had never heard of FATCA, in fact it was a program on CBC that brought it to my attention. FATCA is seriously troubling for Canadians. In theory, it should only affect people who have American citizenship. But, the law itself has enormous implications for countries outside of the United States. FATCA is so intrusive it often needs to be somehow incorporated into foreign countries’ legislation in order for the banks to be able to comply with it without breaking domestic laws (such as the ones that govern the release of confidential information). It isn’t clear yet (Read more…) Like me, you probably share that sinking feeling that privacy is gone for good, dead without so much as a fight. If you want a reasonable degree of privacy any more you have to live self-sustainably in a cabin on a lake deep in the forest and hope you’re not outside when the satellite passes overhead snapping pictures. If, on the other hand, you’re reading this, somewhere that’s being noted and added to everything else that has been noted about you including your utility bills, medical records and that last credit card statement. At times it seems our (Read more…) Protect Our Privacy Position Statement The Protect Our Privacy Coalition has banded together to ensure Canadians get effective legal measures to protect their privacy against government intrusion. The broad-based coalition includes organizations and individuals from a wide range of political perspectives, including citizen-based groups, civil liberties groups, privacy advocates, right-leaning organizations, First Nations groups, labour groups, small businesses and academic experts, all of whom have signed onto the statement: read more Assorted content for your weekend reading. - The CP reports on Suzanne Legault’s much-needed warning about the Cons’ secrecy in government: In a closed-door session with dozens of bureaucrats Thursday, Suzanne Legault cited a series of novel measures she says are damaging an already tottering system. “I am seeing signs of a system in crisis, where departments are unable to fulfil even their most basic obligations under the act,” Legault told the group. As an example, she cited a directive in April this year from the Treasury Board warning bureaucrats to steer clear of ministers’ offices when looking for documents (Read more…) Miscellaneous material to start your week. - Dean Baker discusses the strong relationship between union organization and the elimination of poverty: A simple regression shows that a 10 percentage point increase in the percentage of workers covered by a union contract is associated with a 0.7 percentage point drop in the poverty rate. (This result is significant at a 1.0 percent level.) This means that countries like Sweden, Belgium, and France, where the coverage rate is close to 90 percent, can be expected to have poverty rates that are more than 5.0 percentages points lower than (Read more…) This and that for your weekend reading. - Toby Sanger asks who really bears the risk when governments agree to hand over billions to the private sector through P3 arrangements: While Canada may be one of the leaders in the market for P3s, we’re far from a leader when it comes to transparency, assessment and accounting for P3s. P3s are already a murky business when it comes to financial transparency—and we’re close to the bottom of that pool. The value for money assessments used to justify P3s in Canada are simply not credible for a number of reasons… All the Canadian (Read more…) The band YACHT has gone back to the glory days of Dylan and the like by writing a protest song. The song is about the NSA illegal spying the USA, which should bother pretty much anyone who cares about privacy. Until now, there was no good news to mention about the questionable actions revealed by Edward Snowden so hat tip to YACHT for singing what we all think. “We claim full citizenship in the nation of Internet,” Evans told me over email, by way of explanation. “We wouldn’t be where we are if it weren’t for the existence of (Read more…) The Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada urges the Harper government to reject Verizon’s bid to become Canada’s fourth largest telecoms carrier and, instead, establish a telecommunications Crown Corporation. The post Reject Verizon, Establish Telecommunications Crown Corporation: Union appeared first on The Canadian Progressive. |
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Left Over: Huffington Post: Big Brother is Unstoppable……
I don’t think I’m alone in this..I hate Facebook and the site has morphed into..a crassly capitalist commercial, 24/7…and after telling us that they would use whatever images we had foolishly uploaded for whatever purposes they deemed beneficial to them, and that our privacy was, essentially, at an end, I closed my accounts. That was at least two years ago, and don’t miss it, although I notice that all my ‘friends’ have lost track of my existence since then, despite the fact that there are numerous other ways to keep in touch online…which only reinforces the opinion that (Read more…)