Against Online Surveillance? You Must Be 'For' Child Porn, Says Legislator 583
An anonymous reader writes "Following up on yesterday's story about the Canadian government's internet surveillance legislation, one of the bill's proponents is now accusing those who oppose it of standing with child pornographers. Those against the legislation include: Law professor Michael Geist, Open Media, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Council of Canadians and many others. 'Public Safety Minister Vic Toews told a Liberal MP he could either stand with the government or "with the child pornographers" prowling online.' Toews is enjoying his Parliamentary Privilege, which grants him the freedom to say pretty much anything he wants without fear of a slander suit."
Child pornography is not an excuse (Score:5, Insightful)
The stuff is so vanishingly rare it should never be used as a justification for anything as sweeping as a government power-grab like this one.
Ooh! Ooh! I want to try! (Score:5, Insightful)
Alright, gimmie a second...
"Against warrantless entry of your home? You must be abusing a child!"
"Against public cameras tracking your every move? You must be planning to abduct a child!"
"Against drug prohibition? You must want to give drugs to children!"
"Against warrantless wire-tapping? You must be talking about internet surveillance legislation!"
Wait, that last one needs work.
Re:Child pornography is not an excuse (Score:5, Insightful)
The correct response is to ask Vic Toews to give the public access to all his Internet and credit card usage.
After all, he's not doing anything wrong...he's got nothing to hide.
Curtains on your windows? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just think what heinous acts of child abuse could go on behind those curtains. Perhaps the honourable member would leave his curtains open at all times or stand with those who commit child rape behind them.
Judging from our experience with politicians (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone who says something like that is probably diddling children in his spare time.
What's he so afraid of (Score:5, Insightful)
that he's having to hide behind Parliamentary Privilege?
Works both ways, does it not?
Re:Sent to the PM and related MPs (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, some politicians will read your letter and think: "He said that criminals use anonymizers and encryption (whatever those things are), so we should ban those next!"
Re:Come on! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry, Parliamentary Privilege renders the Minister immune to logical fallacy. Or maybe to logic. It's hard to tell.
What Parliamentary Privilege doesn't immunize The Honorable Mr. Toews from is much-deserved mockery. So let's make sure he gets a full dose of that.
Barking up the wrong tree (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't try to rationalize it. Call it out for what it is: a money grab. It's all about money.
They want you to keep focused on their justification (child safety) and their method (oppression of innocents). That's how they win: by keeping you focused on their carefully-prepared "syllabus". So forget all that. Instead, follow the money, and bring it to the forefront. The money is what this is all about, same as any expansion of government.
Power is merely a stepping stone to riches.
Parliamentary privelige (Score:5, Insightful)
In the UK this only applies to things said within the house of commons. I have seen people challenge MPs to repeat such allegations on programmes like Question Time & Newsnight - basically "I fucking totally dare you". The usual response is "no comment" or similar obfuscation.
Does Canada's work the same way? Perhaps someone should ask Vic Toews to step outside.
Which is worse? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ooh! Ooh! I want to try! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In that case... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's crazy talk. It's talk like that which would take us back to that horrific era when kids didn't have to be put in a full suit of armor just to ride their bikes.
Vic Toews browsing history? (Score:3, Insightful)
Being an upstanding citizen and a person to lead by example, I look forward to Vic Toews releasing his web browsing history to the public.
Re:Child pornography is not an excuse (Score:5, Insightful)
I just sent him an email telling him that we need to ban curtains because obviously only people that murder other people in their living rooms have any use for curtains. So if you support having curtains, you are supporting mass-murderers.
Now I'm worried that this analogy is too complex for him to grasp.
Re:Curtains on your windows? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't there something about the loudest proponent being closet cases? Perhaps someone, should check out his surfing habbits? Obviously, he wont mind since he is so into surveillance...
Re:Come on! (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck Yeah! (Score:5, Insightful)
So yes, at some point we should all be speaking out, even if we don't belong with the group targeted at that point.
Re:They doth protest too much (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who strongly wants to control other people is someone whose personal behavior should be watched very very carefully.
Never allow your children to be near anyone who walks around proclaiming that the world is full of child rapists.
Re:Clearly We Are Terrorists (Score:5, Insightful)
See, the thing is, he did "get it". "It" of course, being a large infusion of cash from the industry benefiting from the DMCA.
Re:How to explain the law to a non-techie (Score:5, Insightful)
what burns me is (Score:5, Insightful)
how they define CP is so broad now a days that a Father video taping his own daughter Ballet dancing could be considered CP
I would think that unless it includes
1 full nudity
2 Intercourse (or related activities)
3 some other crime
4 is otherwise devoid of artistic/diagnostic merit
it should not be legally considered CP
and i would rather see a thousand "modeling" sites than have anything on the books that can be used to censor/track EVERYTHING AND ANYTHING
The problem is (Score:3, Insightful)
Reasonable thought out arguments don't get as much airtime, those that do are generally not "simple" enough for the general populace to grasp, so it's easier to say "if you aren't this then you're this" and in the US our media excels at this type of reporting, dumb down and free of depth or rational thought.
A sample of headlines:
"POLL: Catholics turn on Obama..."
"MURDOCH HIT BY FEUD OVER SUN"
"Obama justice continues investigation...Witch hunt"
"OUTLAW COUNTRY: Naked Texas cowgirl, 18, arrested after police chase..."
*sigh*
Re:100 years!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Be nice. I think he's mentally ill.
He is right, it is absolutely true (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not a great fan of crypto nerds because I know just how idiotic the idea of a darknet is in a dictatorship. A darknet lights up light a christmas tree at your ISP if they can be bothered and in places in the world, they can be bothered. So what if it is encrypted? That never stopped the goons.
So... what do we need a free internet for? To AVOID getting that far. It would be nice if humanity always veered towards doing what was right for the greater good, if all journalists always could be counted on to ask the hard questions. That politicians don't look away because they think it helps their cause in the long term.
A free internet is a new tool to share information outside the main stream, it is as revolutionary as the printing press and the post office (For women's lib, the post office suddenly allowed them to communicate with anyone without needing permission) before. But the printing press was used to reproduce child porn and the post office was used to distribute it. Not so long ago (70's) child porn (and I am not talking David Hamilton style stuff) was produced fairly openly and sold. But this was done through tech that allowed Martin Luther to take the bible out of the church and into the domain of the common people AND to spread his anti-semitism that would on day lead to the holocaust.
Tech isn't good or bad but banning tech because there are not so nice uses for it, that is silly and dangerous. Silly because you can't put the cat back in the bag. People have tried it. The printing press, mechanical harvesters, cars. They all been attacked and are now a part of our lives. The internet allows anyone to communicate with anyone else at a near neg-liable cost. But this also means spammers and scammers can reach an audience in the past even Hollywood could not dream off. 911 from Nigeria might have negative overtones but it also means that people from what is not one of the most developed nations in the world can deal as equals with those developed nations. Ever tried calling Africa on the phone? Sent a wire? A letter? Sure, a percentage uses that connection for scams but how much information is being shared for the good of both sides as well?
And you can't have one without the other. Either you allow everyone to communicate or you don't. The makers of Freenet faced this, the simple fact is that the only real use for Freenet in the west at the moment is to share files that you can't share anywhere else and for a LOOOOOOONG time, that only was child porn. If you ever use Tor you can see just what it contains, hate (nazi wannabe's), a tiny bit of drugs for those who think the police has nothing better to do and under aged porn.
You can say you want to get rid of that part of Freenet but you can't. Either you have free communication or your don't. Child porn is even nastier then terrorism, I can say I am willing to take the risk of being blown up but I can't accept that risk on behalf of someone elses child.
Child porn is real and it is big, torrents are pretty clean and usenet can be realtively easy administred but as said, Tor and Freenet are full of it and so are other P2P programs. You can combat it easily, just restrict all traffic to non-encrypted, known content that is filtered and block any unknown traffic. Hiding data in data? Can't be done if the data is known, just make the Internet the Internet Microsoft and Apple dream off, all content pre-approved.
Do you think that is impossible? HA! IT IS ALREADY HERE. The movies you watch, the TV you watch, the music you listen to, the articles you read. ALL have been screened to make sure it is "safe" for you to consume. Hell, we don't even need the state for it, we do it ourselves right here on Slashdot all the time.
That is how tempting it is. If you are for a free internet, browse slashdot at -11.
It is tempting to want to get rid of child porn and you can do it, you just have to sacrifice everyones freedom and make it just a bit easier for a wannabe dictator to one day get away with it. But how do you def
Re:In that case... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Come on! (Score:1, Insightful)
*extra text to allow me to yell*
Yet another prime example of Slashdot's lameness filter doing its job and properly labeling posts. Sadly, human stupidity came by and was determined to force that... "addition" to the discussion to occur.
Really added a lot there, buddy. The capital letters totally helped me hear you better. Listen to the filters sometime, they'll make you look less lame.
Re:Child pornography is not an excuse (Score:5, Insightful)
no, it's a false dichotomy and you should not accept its premises, or you're legitimating it.
Schneier provided a much better answer to the problem with surveillance:
The most common retort against privacy advocates -- by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale surveillance measures -- is this line: "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"
Some clever answers: "If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me." "Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition." "Because you might do something wrong with my information." My problem with quips like these -- as right as they are -- is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.
Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? ("Who watches the watchers?") and "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." Watch someone long enough, and you'll find something to arrest -- or just blackmail -- with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time.
Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
Re:Hypocrisy and Blunt Force Law Making (Score:5, Insightful)
They can pass all the laws they want. It doesn't make them legal.
How long did it take for a judge to say, "No, these mandatory sentences are not acceptable!" [torontosun.com]? Not too long.
Canada has a Charter of Rights and a Constitution. No law can be passed that violates those. The Constitution itself says that it is the supreme law of the land. This proposed law clearly violates Section 8 and simply can't stand. They'll pass it anyway because they're authoritarians that want to find out any little detail that can be used against you if you ever want to run for office. Look at what they tried to do to Jack Layton last election: "HE GOT A MASSAGE!".
But this law will be struck down hard and fast by the first judge that sees a case where this evidence is used.
Rights are not inherent. Ever. (Score:4, Insightful)
That is utter nonsense. There are no "inherent human rights." The only way you get "rights" is (a) someone has to define them, either specifically or in general, (b) someone has to have the power to defend them, (c) and then they actually have to be defended.
As long as people confuse the real situation with this "inherent" meme, they'll fail at actually solving the problem. For instance, in the USA, (c) above is where we fail. We've defined them specifically (those mentioned in the bill of rights and a few others), we've defined them generally (the 9th amendment), the government certainly has the power to defend them... but it rarely does -- in fact, it is much more likely to be the very party abusing them. This happens specifically because rights are not inherent -- they are simply grants supported by power. When power is focused on other issues, rights often mean nothing at all, other than you're proceeding under a set of incorrect assumptions.
Re:Child pornography is not an excuse (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, they're going to get away with a hell of a lot of damage before their term runs out, because the people were stupid enough to give them a majority.
Either that, or somebody's going to take up arms. I'm not particularly in favour of that option, but I know people who are taking a long hard look at the oath they took on joining the military... you know, the one to protect this country from threats both domestic and foreign?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)