Canada: Fast-moving proposal creates filtering, blocking and reporting rules | Hacker News Reader

Canada: Fast-moving proposal creates filtering, blocking and reporting rules

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34 pointscyb_7 comments

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>Protect children

>Prevent hate speech

>Prevent terrorism

The 3 horsemen of bad legislation all gathered here for this occasion.

Some highlights [1]:

- 12 months retention policy if "[provider has] reasonable grounds to believe that their Internet service is being or has been used to commit a child pornography offence" (why is such a long retention policy needed)?

- extrajudicial "requirement to provide information" ("add a requirement for persons who provide an internet service to provide, without a requirement for judicial authorization")

- Creates more bureaucracy for yet another useless bill ("Digital Safety Commissioner of Canada" + 3 boards)

& more which I can't be bothered to list. The "invitation to comment by email" seems bad faith. How can you come with such legislation if you care about what people think?

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/harmful...

Please write to the address listed here if you are Canadian and are concerned https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/harmful...

I notice these laws often only target mass-market social media platforms such as FB/IG/Twitter/TikTok/SnapChat/etc.

If one has valid criticism or journalistic comments & opinions, could one ignore or workaround these laws through use of self-hosted, possibly TOR hosted, federated social media platforms like Mastodon? Original posts could be shared to masses with major difficulty in tracking the source commentator to a real identity.

Why now? It’s such an odd time to create such legislation when there is probably less hate speech and terrorism in Canada than before.

My opinion is that politicians want control of public opinions to better avoid criticisms, flaws and holes in their platform coming to light. If calling a politician a "failure" or "idiot" could cost you or your business & workplace major funds, why would you risk putting that to print?

An election is coming soon, incumbent has no credible opposition and this is both a useful distraction from actual issues and something conservatives will engage with, effectively playing into the hands of liberals who will call them x-ist and act like they are conspiracy nuts for opposing it. Plus create a few choice public service positions to reward patronage.

Terrorist becomes Domestic Terrorist very easily which is code word for dissident. Imagine being a government and being able to suppress all damaging dissent and free speech? The same thing has been happening for years in the US using the tech companies as proxies.

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