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Comment by romaniv | Hacker News Reader

> The government’s action is troubling enough, but what should really disturb us is the ease and invisibility with which it is being done.

This is such a great point. I'm not sure why it needs to be made over and over again, but it seems that's the only way it doesn't get buried.

Let's play a game. I will be the institution, you will be the person. You will get ability to record me with your cellphone and post stuff online to complain about various issues. I will get the ability to see all your financial transactions, listen to all your communications, track your location, arrest you when I don't like you recording me, smear you online and pressure companies to ban you from literally any service imaginable, including banking.

Both of us will be bound by the legal framework, but when I don't like it, I will have the ability declare the state of emergency and scrap all the rules. Also, I will have sovereign immunity when I break the rules. Also, many of my actions will be secret because of national security.

Oh, and I will be doing all the things described above using your money.

Sounds fair?

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This is literally not what happened in Canada.

The Emergencies Act does not allow the government to violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It must also be agreed to by the provinces. It's use has a fixed duration and scope of action. It was designed to prevent executive over-reach while still allowing the government, at the federal level, to respond to unprecedented situations that require it.

Everyone who was arrested at the illegal occupation is being given the same rights and freedoms everyone gets in this country. The accounts and crypto wallets being frozen and seized are those that belong to people organizing and funding the occupation. Everyone arrested is getting their day in court.

I've been involved in many peaceful protests and am not afraid that the Canadian government is suddenly going to arresting people without giving them a court hearing and freezing the assets of dissidents. That would be in violation of our laws and I suspect our democracy is strong enough that anyone trying to get away with that... wouldn't be able to.

> It's use has a fixed duration and scope of action.

Sounds like "15 days to flatten the curve".

> Everyone who was arrested at the illegal occupation is being given the same rights and freedoms everyone gets in this country. The accounts and crypto wallets being frozen and seized are those that belong to people organizing and funding the occupation.

"occupation" is an interesting word choice. Others might describe it as a protest against an unwarranted violation of their rights and freedoms. The "occupation" was a response to new (rash) government policies, undertaken to make them reverse those rash policies. This is what healthy democracies do.

> Others might describe it as a protest against an unwarranted violation of their rights and freedoms.

They can call it what they want. The courts will decide whether they were peacefully demonstrating as you suggest.

Section 2(c) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is what gives Canadians the right to free and peaceful assembly... within certain limits. It doesn't give the right to riot, hate speech, or blockade lawful activities; nor does it give us the right to impede the authorities from managing a demonstration.

It has only been tried a handful of times. If you push the limits or break the rules you can face arrest. But you'll get your day in court and plead your case. We'll have to wait and see what comes of these trials.

I feel like we're overrun by troll and bot farms. Compelling content directly out of the tinfoil hat "freedom convoy" bible.

Canadians are happy to have their cities back. Most of them (90%+), and most truckers (90%+), realize we're all in this together and don't try to hold their fellow citizens hostage.

You need to recognize the sources on these are the same who've been saying that requiring someone to not infect other people when going to public places is the same as being a Nazi.

90% of people disagree. The nazis are the ones imposing their views on everyone else.

Totally agree with your comment. I wonder what will they come up with now as the Emergencies Act order has been lifted: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-event-feb23-1.63618...

I literally laughed out loud when I read your username, thank you for that.

I'm all for putting more transparency and reasonable bounds on the process formally, but I think you're missing two points:

1. While having formal bounds would be great, in this case, it hasn't been shown yet that they applied force unreasonably and beyond what those bounds should be. Some people want to believe they froze assets of innocent bystanders or small local donors, but that's just conjecture right now.

2. In your example, am I also blocking the biggest commercial boarder crossing between Canada and US? If so, I'm surprised you've not yet thrown tear gas at me, put me in handcuffs and physically forced me to move. And that instead you chose to simply freeze my bank accounts until I move.

I say that, because again, while I do like what the article points out, yes freezing assets is a big deal, and yes having bounds and guards and protections from abuse is important, I'm all for that. But my impression in this case is actually the government is trying to limit the blast radius and choose the lesser of two evils in order to force the convoys to stop blocking the boarder and major roads.

Instead of tear gas and physical force, which often impact a ton of innocent protesters that are legally and peacefully protesting, they went for a more targeted approach, where by blocking bank accounts you can be more specific exactly who you target, and it is also a more civil way to force you to move.

The border crossing was unblocked without much fuss, and without the use of wild emergency powers. Several arrests were made. No "tear gas", wtf.

A Canadian MP has claimed that a small-donor constituent had their bank account frozen. In any case it sounds like despite their rhetoric (calling protestors and their supporters white supremacists and lawbreakers), the government wasn't going ham and using these broad powers on all of them. Good for them. Regardless, it's not encouraging -- the powers granted were very broad, weren't needed when granted, and obviously aren't needed now even though the government won't give them up.

And I'm not sure about how targeted the response has been. Aside from the rhetoric, peaceful protestors have been met with violence. Funds donated to support them have been blocked.

It should be noted that they did use physical force against the protesters to clear them from the street. That included teargas, pepper spray, batons, kneeing while prostrate on the ground with multiple officers present and no resistance from the protester, horses ridden through a peaceful crowd with at least two people knocked down and possibly injured including a women who appeared to be in her late 60s or 70s who required the use of a walker. There is video evidence of all of this if you care to look.

The response has been somewhat restrained compared to the antics that US police get up to but I would not call it a "civil way to force you to move".

> kneeing while prostrate on the ground with multiple officers present

Going to need some pretty good evidence of that, sounds to me like a great lawsuit waiting to happen.

There are multiple videos, you can google it

"The sovereign is he who decides on the exception" -Carl Schmitt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_exception

Sounds fair as long as you are representing my views. When the coin flips I will get the unfairness of it. This is what current supporters of the regime (I guess we can now call it that) don't understand yet.

You're talking to one right now. So let's discuss.

My view is that everyone has the right to protest whenever and whatever. And you can also as part of your protest show a little bit of civil disobedience, like break a few windows, burn a fire can, chant loudly through the night keeping everyone awake, or block some roads. Something to really get people to pay attention and really listen to what you have to protest about and see how serious you take the matter.

But after people did notice you, and did listen, and after they've asked you to please stop your civil disobedience now and continue your protest within the laws, if you still continue with civil disobedience, well it is normal for the government to then follow up with threats of consequences, like tear gas, handcuffs, jail time, fines, account freezes, etc. And if you still refuse after the treats, then it's normal for the government to follow through with it after all that, and force you to now obey the civil laws.

This I feel is true of all protests, may I agree or not with the protesters.

You can continue to protest, but you can't be breaking the laws forever. We can't have people block the biggest commercial boarder between Canada and US all year long because they're protesting. Once the message has been heard, if people didn't care, it means you don't have support, and you kind of have to accept that. You can keep protesting normally hoping to slowly build more and more support, but you can't keep civil disobedience going on until you get support, because that's starting to get closer to coercion.

You made a lot of hidden assumptions in both of your replies so it’s a bit hard to response. But let me try one: if I claim that they can’t use physical force because they (the government) didn’t have the popular support and risk facing overwhelming violence escalation, what is your response to that? (I’m not saying that it is the case, more to question some of your assumptions in this situation)

> if you still continue with civil disobedience, well it is normal for the government to then follow up with threats of consequences, like tear gas, handcuffs, jail time, fines, account freezes, etc.

More to the point, the government are free to follow up the threat in a court case in front of a judge, and the fact that they didn’t is the problem

> if I claim that they can’t use physical force because they (the government) didn’t have the popular support and risk facing overwhelming violence escalation, what is your response to that?

I'm not sure I'm following 100% your question, but I think you mean what if the government is so unpopular that the country is close to a revolution from its citizens?

This doesn't really makes sense to me in a liberal democracy like Canada. Every few years, the citizen get to replace the government with another if they're unhappy with the current one. The opposition are able to have a vote to cast out the current prime minister if they want. The governor general, at any point, if it senses the people are no longer favorable to the government can kick off a new election as well. On top of that, the government is using force within the established limits of the laws and Charter of Rights of the country that are already pre-agreed upon, and the force it is using is itself in order to enforce the laws of the country from being broken, which is kind of its job as a government.

> More to the point, the government are free to follow up the threat in a court case in front of a judge, and the fact that they didn’t is the problem

I'm not really following your point? The government is also allowed to enforce laws, and they can later be trialed. Police does this all the time, they will intervene and perform an arrest, and the trial in front of the court happens after. They are also free to enact the Emergency Act in the case of an Emergency as they did.

The funds from bank accounts are frozen, not taken. What will happen next is they will either be released, or a court case can start and decide what to do with the funds.

> I'm not sure I'm following 100% your question, but I think you mean what if the government is so unpopular that the country is close to a revolution from its citizens?

I meant that they didn’t have the popular support to shut down the protest (I was not talking about the general popular support to the government as a whole, but just this specific issue). In the previous post, you were assuming that the protest does not have popular support and I wonder if that assumption is correct.

The specific methods used to shutdown the protest matter a lot. The police are free to arrest them or impound their vehicles. Freezing the bank account is not a standard course of actions, which you seems to think are similar to arresting. Even in the case of arresting, the police can’t even hold you for more than a few days unless they can find a prosecutor to file some charges against you.

They were free to use a plethora of methods to stop the protests, the complaint a lot of people have is they didn’t use other methods, and choose something that a lot of people consider immense overreach.

> you were assuming that the protest does not have popular support and I wonder if that assumption is correct.

Seems to be a valid assumption.

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/two-thirds-of-canadia...

You are missing a key element of context in all of this. This protest took place "online" as much as in person. This was a giant photo op designed to generate propaganda to drum up support for a burgeoning handful of trumpist/brexit style political movements that largely propagate through social media platforms.

Exercising traditional forms of enforcement (as seen in almost every other protest in Canada in the past 20 years) would have resulted in the generation of sensationalist content that would have stoked a wildfire in the social media support for these movements. (Look at how much the network nodes of the movement pushed the single instance of violence - a horse that got spooked and trampled a protestor.) This is the reason why force was not used, and non violent/commercial methods were used instead.

> you were assuming that the protest does not have popular support and I wonder if that assumption is correct

The was a poll and it showed that the majority did not support the protest, by a landslide. IIRC, 72% of responses selected "Protestors have made their point, it's time they went home" (paraphrasing), a minority supported continuation.

> You can continue to protest, but you can't be breaking the laws forever.

One of the reasons the right to protest is a fundamental one is because laws are made by people, for people, in the service of the public good and well-being of the citizens.

If the people protest against the laws then that's their right, the people and their will is above the law, the law is not above the people's will as a whole.

This is almost universally true, and you cannot make the argument of 'shutting down the right to protest' on the pretext of breaking a law, because protests are ultimately motivated on laws or policies being changed.Nobody protests forever.

> If the people protest against the laws then that's their right, the people and their will is above the law, the law is not above the people's will as a whole.

It's not the people's will as a whole though. It's a tiny minority of people that are protesting.

That's arguably true, though I'm also skeptical of any official numbers. The protests are not homogeneous at all: on one hand you have seemingly long convoys that are made up of small number of people, there are also very dense on-foot protests, it's somewhat hard to make an accurate estimation.

Still, making a statement doesn't require a majority.Usually if 0.5%-1% or more of the population starts protesting, the governing body responds, (or at least it should imo, having potentially more than 2-3% of the population actively involved in a political manner it's not a good sign: politicians don't want people too closely involved). This however vastly depends on the country, the culture, the people.Protests are also not accurate representations of the electorate.

I am not the person you were originally responding to, but I believe that this protest has been handled in a particularly poor way.

The commercial border crossings were all opened in nonviolent fashion by the police before the emergencies act was passed. The only remaining protest, which seemed to honestly be the most effective group, was the one in Ottawa.

By many accounts, they did not get anyone in government to actually listen to them: Trudeau's government refused to speak with the protesters, and instead went into hiding until they could figure out how to use force to get these people to leave. If Trudeau had eaten crow and published his plan for lifting mandates, they may well have dispersed. What seemed to occur instead was that the LPC (in conjunction with the NDP and the CBC) used disinformation to circle the wagons and make excuses for a dramatic escalation in force, while refusing to publish a plan for the lifting of mandates. Contrast that with the BLM protests recently, where you saw a lot of dialogue between the government and the protesters and a relatively peaceful dispersal of the protest.

Make no mistake, "account freezes" are not a normal consequence of protest, even of violent riots. The Canadian government is also talking about similar things like revoking licenses, removing insurance, killing peoples' pets, and selling peoples' trucks and keeping the excess beyond what they need to cover fines. For all of these discussions, the Trudeau government is rightly being panned as tyrannical and dictatorial.

The "win condition" of civil disobedience is usually to get some imagery of the police or the government doing something really brutal in response to your protest. Trampling a Native American elder with a horse (and then lying about nobody being hurt and then lying about someone throwing a bike) and freezing normal peoples' bank accounts are pretty solid win conditions for this particular protest. By that standard, the Canadian truckers have been heard loud and clear around the world, and they don't need to keep it up, but they did need to stay until the government responded with violence.

> killing peoples' pets

Citation needed.

Here you go: https://twitter.com/OttawaBylaw/status/1494306645274509316?r...

That's not what "relinquished" means.

You can combine that with the fact that the shelter in question has limited capacity and euthanized 20% of animals in the last year. Roll a 6 sided die, and on a 6 your pet dies. That is absolutely a threat to kill pets.

EDIT: I don't like politifact as a source because it has a lot of bias (despite the name), but here's a citation on the shelter's (Ottawa Humane Society) kill rate: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/feb/22/facebook-p...

Read to the bottom, where they specify that they have rated this as "false" because "The city did not threaten to kill any pets 'as punishment.'" The city merely said that they would give your pets to a shelter that kills 1/5 of the animals it takes in - a shelter that kills pets for "extreme fear" which could include separation anxiety from the pet's owner. They don't explicitly say that they are doing this to punish people because they don't say why they are doing it.

Also, make no mistake, nobody is going to outright say "I will kill your pets if you don't leave," but they are going to make threats like this that provide them with some plausible deniability to say "we didn't actually threaten to kill your pet, the shelter was just overwhelmed and couldn't take it."

I see no reference to any particular shelter in that tweet, nor do I see a citation to support a 20% kill rate.

EDIT:

Based on that source, the Humane Society had a kill rate of 20.6% in that year. Of those 10% were due to "due to serious behavioral issues such as aggression and/or extreme fear". So, a kill rate of 2.6% excluding health and/or owner request. That's not really a coin toss -- that's the Humane Society making a judgement call on whether a pet can be rehabilitated. I have no insight into the Humane Society's decision making here, but this number is clearly in the minority.

I don't think the government is being unreasonable here or threatening the wholesale slaughter of animals. They're asking people who have brought their pets to a protest to be responsible pet owners and find a safe place for their pets before the police move in, which is the same thing they wanted responsible parents to do with their children.

Let's assume we're talking about dogs here, unless people are bringing their really extraordinary cats to the protest. Anecdotally, in the GTA it can really hard to adopt a dog. One shelter I tried a couple of years ago didn't have a single dog. As a pet owner I would see the greater threat here that my dog would be taken from me and adopted out to a new family. In Ontario, euthanasia wouldn't be my first concern if I were to lose a dog.

Account freezes aren't a normal consequence of protest largely because multinational political fundraising isn't a normal part of protest. To the extent it becomes a normal part of protest, I would expect authorities to lean on the powers they have to freeze funds more often. Over the last 30-ish years there have been pretty aggressive moves to stop the flow of funds to wide categories of criminal organizations (some easier to define and more agreeable, others more diffuse and hard to pin down) and in Canada at least there has been broad support across the political spectrum for laws initiated by the Conservative Party to clamp down on political donations more generally. I would expect further laws for parapolitical interest groups engaging in political activity in the future.

None of this is something you have to accept -- and indeed people have been protesting against laws that freeze funds that go to charities that the state argues are connected to e.g. Islamic terrorism for decades now -- but I struggle severely with what I have to assume is feigned ignorance as to why freezing funds is a part of this protest and not others.

You describe protests as is they were an election campaign, with a well defined resolution mechanic and oriented to the public. they are not

the target audience of a protest is the people in power, they build on public opinion and wield it as a show against those in power.

also this can happen in many way, it could be a parent chaining themselves in front of town hall or an orderly march.

also a blockade does not sound like civil disobedience, in the face of these restriction civil disobedience would be not following the restrictions and opening anyway. (in civil disobedience you generally break only the laws you are protesting against)

Great summary of the rules removed of all the semantic mitigations that the political class and statists love to spread on their rethoric.

You forgot the part that as an individual I am practically invisible to the institution, and it would take a mob of mes to attract Sauron's eye.

In a digital world, the Eye of Sauron is multi-threaded.

(your statement isn't true when it comes to virtual + automated surveillance)

My dagger is multi threaded too.

It’s also smaller than a gnat’s tooth in terms of practical power against them.

Yes, the error in the metaphor is that the eye of sauron was one eye.

Automated surveillance is millions of eyes that track, record, and calculate a billion times faster than the human eye.

And it saves all observations forever for future review and analysis.

You think that, until one day you wake up to the pounding of the FBI (or CSIS...) on your door at 6am. I thought I was a no one, I literally used the same Lotr metaphor as you, but in 2009/2010 during the occupy and wikileaks protests the US government must have decided I was enough (despite never going to a protest and commiting no crimes) and they raided me and ruined my life. I was never charged with a crime. Never even indicted. Their action was simply to ruin my life and scare me.

It can happen to you too. Even if you think you're a no one.

You don’t have to have committed a crime to be suspected of one. Investigation alone can be damaging enough depending on circumstances.

And how did you attract their attention?

Do you mean to suggest that if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear?

No, what I am suggesting is that as an "individual contributor" you're unlikely to merit an outlay of resources to do anything about your antics until your actions are somehow significant.

Unlikely implies non zero risk.

Additionally, you’re making the fair strong assumption that the state has to expend more than a nominal amount of resources to crush you, when is it becoming easier and easier to do so without significant effort.

This is a great representation of the situation.

Not taking anything from it, I’m curious why it bother you so much now, when it has always been that way, in particular for a non negligeable portion of the population (minorities, poors etc.)

And what takes do you see succeeding to improve the situation compared to what these minorities tried up until now (to anchor the conversation, I don’t think “going back” is realistic, the cat is out of the bag)

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