Whispering, after all, works only if you have the ear of the intended recipient. Sending a letter has long been fraught with danger - too many people can steam open the envelope in the process of delivery, finding out your private thoughts. Heaven forfend that they be seditious - the RCMP or CSIS will find out. The same applies to telephone calls - wire-taps need not be identified in cases where the law-makers feel that there is grave concerns about the wrong info being transferred.
And now, consider what Canada’s “law-makers” are proposing with regards to electronic mail. Sure, you could write an e-letter in code, (or in Estonian), but somebody in the employ of the Government might still be able to crack your encrypted messages, or even know Estonian.
This is not Big Brother - the Orwellian fear of someone having access to what used to be private communication. Post 9-11, the threats apparently posed by salsuginous sentiment transfer are truly dangerous. Thus government agencies everywhere are applying for, and surprisingly, expecting to receive permission for the right to monitor electronic mail. In Europe, most notably in Spain, ISP’s are reeling under local government decisions that demand monitoring of what can only be considered as private messages.
Canada is being alert as well to the potential threat posed by sending bad jokes, pictures of J. Lo’s callypigian virtue, smileys and birthday greetings from computer to computer. New legislative proposals announced last month would enable Canadian cops to have access to e-mails - in fact allow the Mounties and CSIS to routinely intercept e-mail messages - because cyberspace is public, not private.
Consider for a second, if you will, that privacy proponents have long fought for unlisted telephone numbers, postal boxes, the like, just for one reason - that personal information does not get compromised by someone, who has no right to know that Aunt Edna has cancer. Or that cousin Bob is considering employment with a rival company. That is up to Edna or Bob to reveal, publicly, is it not?
When one plunks 48 cents worth of gummed paper onto an envelope, one is paying for transmission of the contents of the envelope. When one spends a Borden a month - that’d be our easily counterfeited c-note, a yard for our American neighbours, $100 for all others - (average cost, apparently, according to the industry) for Internet, cell-phone and land-line rental - that transmission of information should be as safe and private as that which is protected by Canada Post’s privacy laws.
Think again. The federal government (Oxymoron alert - this paper was created by the Justice Department) is planning on requiring all “communication service providers”, including phone companies, wireless firms (pager and cell) and ISPs to provide (at own cost, natch) assurances that there are no technical barriers to police and security agencies seeking access to conversations and messages.
It’s easy to say that this initiative is part of a new global “war” against terrorists, who have found ways to circumvent traditional eavesdropping methods - using modern devices such as pagers, cellphones and e-mail to shield their dealings.
Proposed, but not yet accepted are new rules that would require a company involved in the technical end of information transfer to produce identifiers of users- such as an unlisted telephone name and address, within a certain time frame. Currently, cellphone subscribers are very difficult to trace - there are no White Cell Pages, there is no secure way to identify who made a call on what phone. The spooks want, as well, a national database - unclear, but probably one that would list your home land-line, cellphone number, e-mail address, as well as access to records of Internet usage, activity.
Ask a cop: what is “private communication”? In cyberspace, the state of the law is very unclear. Even in the USA, the right to have access to private information transfer in cyberspace was never seriously threatened post 9 11. Why, then, should Canada allow interception of Edna’s e-mails?
The Justice Department is suggesting a new Criminal Code amendment, specific to how “e-mail be acquired”, and outlining (as an afterthought?) potential safeguards needed to protect “all Canadians”. Behind this claim is the fact that Canada could then ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Cyber-Crime - the very one that has hamstrung Spain’s ISP’s at the moment. While this international treaty laudably demands criminalization of “computer perpetrated rights violations”, it is nevertheless a fuzzy paper created by faceless, nameless bureaucrats who want ultimate power without respecting individual liberties. It is another way for government - and those that know how to access, hack into gov’t data bases - to infringe on the rights of Joe Q.
Paranoid? Nope. Crooks already know how to steal identities, credit card numbers, the like. To allow elected crooks access to personal, private information is tantamount to allowing communism, authoritarianism to rule.
Do we really want a return to whispering, coded communication, invisible ink? The Justice Department is sure pushing Canadians in that direction. Remember - the only country today that protects its citizens from incriminating themselves, allows genuine freedom of speech, provides “accused criminals” with real rights (even though many object) is one that had a revolution in 1776, to overcome precisely that type of Big Brother control imposed by a government on its loyal, most often harmless, tax paying and law-abiding, respectful subjects.