Canada: Police Do Not Have Power To Wiretap Without Warrant

omega6 sends this excerpt from The Star: "The Supreme Court of Canada struck down Friday warrantless wiretap powers that police have in cases of emergency. ... Ruling in a 2006 British Columbia kidnapping case, the country’s top court said a 1993 provision of the Criminal Code is unconstitutional because there is no accountability or oversight for the warrantless searches, either to the person wiretapped or in reports to Parliament. The unanimous ruling was written by rookie judges Michael Moldaver and Andromache Karakatsanis. The case revolves around police intercepting the calls of the family of Peter Li, the kidnap victim."

Re:Too long

[History's Coming To]

The sensible thing to do would be to allow retrospective permission from a judge within 24 hours. The officers concerned should have to be able to explain to the judge what their very important reasons were, and if the judge doesn't think they were justified then a hefty sum should be payable to the tapee or other punitive actions should apply.

There's plenty of similar applications with other laws - eg here in the UK I can commit a crime, explain to the judge that it was the only way to prevent a greater crime and then walk free if s/he agrees.

Re:Yay Canada

[Beerdood]

Nah, trust me, move as soon as you can, it's not nearly as bad as it seems here. We certainly don't like Harper & the conservative government - but the level of crazy in the conservatives here doesn't even come close to a Bachman / Santorum level.

There have been numerous conservative scandals in the news in the last year or so, but I've still yet to hear a fellow Canuck say "That's it! I'm sick of this country - I'm moving to America!"

Re:Yay Canada

[Walking The Walk]

[offtopic_shameless_plug]My company in also needs some senior developers for our PEI office, mostly for Java client/server work. Don't email me, just click the Careers link on our website [accreon.com].[/offtopic_shameless_plug]

On topic, I'm glad to see at least some of our justices are taking their jobs seriously. Appointed by Stephen Harper, yet curtailing government invasion into private lives. A nice breath of fresh air in a recent gale of anti-privacy legislation. (Thanks Michael Geist [michaelgeist.ca], for keeping us abreast of all the government's IT shenanigans!

Re:Yay Canada

[realityimpaired]

Obviously you haven't lived in a province where then NDP has ran the show before. They have knack for running things into the ground and getting shown the curb rather unceremoniously. The PCs in Alberta going to find out how that feels in a few weeks.

Ontario was the only province where they fucked things up, and that NDP leader was Bob Rae.... guess who he's running with now.

Spending money on education and health care end up costing the economy much less in the long term than cutting them... the cons would rather mortgage the future for a short term gain than actually fix anything.