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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

The canada trucker protests are not a great pro-privacy example. Given the weapons that were found at the border protest, and the subsequent prosecutions for those possessing them (conspiracy to murder cops), any data requests seem to have served a legitimate purpose.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/coutts-protest-charge...

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If the potential for a few felony prosecutions for a few attempted crimes is your standard for abridging privacy, it was always a very low standard. People you aren't watching are always committing crimes, even more than people who are being watched. If the potential for any sort or level of crime creates a legitimate purpose, there's a legitimate purpose in surveilling everyone, at all times.

That won't happen, though, it will be governments and corporations surveilling everyone else while remaining completely opaque themselves.

A few felony convictions? This isn't stealing a car or passing a bad check. These guys are charged with conspiring to kill police officers. They were found bringing guns and tactical items to a remote protest location while chatting about using those guns to kill people. Even if the cops were violating people's rights, this is not the best situation to be arguing for civil liberties. There are anti-logging and anti-pipeline protests where canada's cops have used similar surveillance. Those are the better situations for winning civil liberties debates. The trucker protests are very much an uphill arguement.

If you can't defend your rights in the worst case situation, then you will lose them.

something something essential liberty for immediate security...

> something something essential liberty for immediate security...

Something something quote taken out of context and repeated mindlessly

Cops signed up for the job knowing they might get shot at. Avoiding a bad day at work isn't grounds for violating people's rights.

>These guys are charged with conspiring to kill police officers. They were found bringing guns and tactical items to a remote protest location while chatting about using those guns to kill people.

Could you define and point to evidence of exactly how many of "these guys" there were doing this? Can the government with its penchant for mendacity? There were many thousands and thousands of protestors. It's not hard to find a few casually discussing illegal activity and using that as a justification for painting the rest black.

>Even if the cops were violating people's rights, this is not the best situation to be arguing for civil liberties.

No, this is exactly the best situation for arguing in favor of not blatantly violating civil liberties, because it should especially be argued for groups that aren't part of the social mainstream. That's the real test of how seriously a country takes such rules about civil liberties. Any asshole can argue for civil liberties in favor of widely popular, media-favored protests against logging and pipelines.

Amongst the _thousands_ of peaceful, multi-racial, protesters they found 7 guys who simply possessed guns and one guy _uttered_ a threat.

And that is the criteria you would use to silence all of them?

That is a very low bar for censorship and doing away with privacy.

The same standard is not being applied to the “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” that we saw just a year prior.

It wouldn’t be a first to purposefully send agitators to these protests to provide an excuse for police overstepping their boundaries.

I think parent was referring to the large trucker protest in Ottawa where several privacy violations occurred (e.g. freezing bank accounts) despite the protests being mostly peaceful.

> despite the protests being mostly peaceful

https://pressprogress.ca/it-was-violent-peoples-commission-r...

Looks like it was as peaceful as other protests described as mostly peaceful that have happened over the last few years.

Highly doubtful. It's a "citizens commission" which means a bunch of people decide whose reports to republish. Nothing even attempting to be truthful or bipartisan.

The reports switch between describing attempted murder - trucks accelerating at pedestrians, etc - and crazy harassment like asking an asian man to do "a dragon dance" and then beating him with "blunt objects" when he refused, which didn't do any damage such that the police refused his report.

> "The pastor recalled convoy supporters, some of whom routinely urinated on his church, even taking issue with a sign indicating the church was broadcasting its masses online due to provincial public health restrictions: “One of them pointed a fist towards me shouting ‘you should obey God instead of F-ing Trudeau’.”"

Pointed a fist(?) and yelled a rude message about a politician. Oh, the harm! No photos of the urinators though - which supposedly kept happening.

The only likely crime (likely a crime and likely happened) I spotted in their report was someone pushing a photographer's camera away. Annoying, and criminal, but totally unpunished at all rallies and protests. The police literally don't react to anything less than theft of a camera or punching the photographer.

Criminals try to bring weapons accross the border all the time.

Nothing in the article states that they were protesters or did what they did because of the protest except being at the border during the protests.

Clearly you have never heard of an agent provocateur

If I show up to your event carrying a weapon without your knowledge, is it your fault or mine? If we treat it as your fault, haven't we found a perfect way to keep you from ever holding events?

> any data requests seem to have served a legitimate purpose

Any and all?

Yes. If the cops submitted a thousand data requests and 999 of them came back with nothing, but one of them prevented someone from gunning down people, then they are were justifiable requests. Anyone wanting to argue about cops overreaching and breaking rules should point to a situation where the cops didn't find anything horrible.

> Anyone wanting to argue about cops overreaching and breaking rules should point to a situation where the cops didn't find anything horrible.

You just gave a hypothetical where 999 times out of 1000 that is the case.

I remember a plot to blow up a bunch of buildings and behead the Canadian PM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Ontario_terrorism_plot

How carefully in your view should the muslim community in Canada be monitored?

Edit: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

I don't think an 0.1% success rate is at all valid, though I recognize it was a verbal flourish rather than a statistical claim. I am distinctly unsympathetic to the Canada trucker protest, but you're applying the logic of prison surveillance to regular society and that is a sure recipe for a bad outcome. If safety is this important to you, then you might be happier in an authoritarian country like Singapore or Saudi Arabia.

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