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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. Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. - Glenn Greenwald, David Atkins and Simon Jenkins all discuss the U.K.’s detention of David Miranda – with heavy emphasis on the Cameron government’s apparent belief journalism and terrorism are synonymous. And Ian Welsh points out the need to fight back against a pervasive surveillance state before it’s too late. - Barbara Garson discusses how the U.S.’ recession was used as an excuse to turn stable jobs into precarious ones. And Duncan Cameron takes a look at Stephen Harper’s real economic record since he took power (with an assist (Read more…) In a follow-up to the previous entry I’m posting a Democracy Now interview with Lavabit owner and operator Ladar Levison. Levison made the difficult decision to shut down the encrypted email service, Lavabit, after an apparent bid by the U.S. government to gain access to customer data. As mentioned in the previous post, it’s been reported that Lavabit was a service used by NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden. Also check out a Democracy Now interview with Nicholas Merrill, who operated a New York-based internet service. Merrill was the recipient of a “national security letter” that ordered him to hand over (Read more…)
If New York-based Verizon Communications takes over Canada’s telecommunications, it will pass Canadians’ personal data to US intelligence agencies, says Canadian union. The post Union concerned about Verizon spying on Canadians appeared first on The Canadian Progressive. If you’re Stephen Harper you can assume that what you consider “enemies” would include pretty much the entire membership of organizations such as the Council of Canadians. So why would you waste time amassing enemies lists when you can force these organizations to do it for you? This e-mail I received from the CoC neatly explains the situation: A new federal Not-for-Profit Corporation Act (NFP Act) came into effect in 2009. Every federally incorporated not-for-profit, including the Council and all other social justice and environmental organizations, must amend their by-laws to conform to this Act by 2014. A huge (Read more…) Not surprisingly, the revelation that the Cons have assembled official enemies lists has given rise to some call for those lists to be made public. But I’ll take a quick look at why that process is bound to take at least some time – as well as the considerations involved in figuring out whether the Cons may choose or be required to reveal the names involved. To start with, assuming the lists contain both individual and organization names, the federal Privacy Act actually prohibits the Cons from releasing the former (to anybody other than the subject individual) unless one of (Read more…) Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, Dr. Ann Cavoukian, warns that metadata can be more revealing than accessing the content of our communications. The post “Metadata” can be more revealing than actual content of communications [VIDEO] appeared first on The Canadian Progressive. A second part of Glenn Greenwald‘s interview with Edward Snowden was released this week. The interview took place on 6 June 2013 in a Hong Kong hotel room. Journalist Laura Poitras was responsible for the filming. In the course of this newly released transcript, Snowden touches on his motivations… why he was willing to make such a huge personal sacrifice in order to expose NSA spying. The biggest revelations to emerge from the leaks involve Snowden’s claim that all communications into and out of the U.S. are “monitored, collected and analyzed.” The NSA had previously claimed that (Read more…) Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. - Frances Russell discusses the inevitable collateral damage to our planet from the Cons’ war on science: Over the past 200 years, Canadians built on flood plains because “we thought we had relatively stable climate — the climate we experienced over the past century,” Sandford told his CBC Radio audience. “We thought it would stay the same. We also thought we had a good grasp of how variable we could expect climate conditions to be based on what we’ve experienced in the last century. “And now we’ve discovered that neither assumption was correct. We (Read more…) By: BC Civil Liberties Association | Press Release: BCCLA delivers over 1400 forms filled out by individuals refusing permission to be filmed to CBSA, Shaw TV and show producers BCCLA Staff, Josh Paterson and Stefanie Ratjen, delivering the forms to the Canadian Border Services Agency (Photo: BCCLA) VANCOUVER, June 24, 2013 – In less than a month, over fourteen hundred people have signed forms refusing permission to be filmed at border crossings by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) or its private film crew partners for the reality TV show “Border Security”. This morning, the BC Civil (Read more…) Assorted content for your weekend reading. - Chrystia Freeland writes about the dangers of increased concentration of wealth – particularly when it bears at best a passing relationship to any worthwhile contribution to society at large. And CBC’s report on Peter Sabourin’s investment fraud highlights the fact that the tax havens which have allowed for extreme accumulation of wealth have also facilitated crime against anybody aspiring to join the elite. - Toby Sanger provides a handy list of 12 problems with the Cons’ anti-union legislation. - Pat Atkinson questions the Cons’ complete failure to ensure that Canadians can trust that (Read more…) Some relevant background given the recent publicity of how much our governments pry into our personal lives. Whatever your take on recent revelations about government spying on our phone calls and Internet activity, there’s no denying that Big Brother is bigger and less brotherly than we thought. What’s the resulting cost to our privacy — and more so, our democracy? Lawrence Lessig joins Bill to discuss the implications of our government’s actions. Filed under: Internet, Politics, Technology and Computers Tagged: Bill Moyers, Lawrence Lessig, Privacy Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. - Thomas Walkom, Dan Leger and Michael Harris write about the sketchy surveillance programs in place on both sides of the 49th parallel. But there may be an opportunity to make common cause with the 1% in criticizing constant intrusion on personal privacy, as both the U.S. and the U.K. have been caught using their data interception capability to spy on businesses and international allies. - In any event, one can safely say that this is not the time when a smart government would introduce blanket secrecy for 11 government agencies. (Read more…) Here, on how Canada’s federal privacy law actually prohibits our own federal government from conducting secret surveillance (so long as it’s actually followed) – as well as how little that law means if countries don’t recognize that privacy applies beyond their borders. For further reading…- Michelle Shepard reported here on Canada’s history of surveillance activities. – The federal Privacy Act is here. See in particular section 11′s obligation to public lists of personal information collected by each government institution, as well as the treatment of exempt data banks in section 18. – CSEC allows Canadians to (Read more…) |
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