Ottawa wants the power to create secret backdoors in networks for surveillance
theglobeandmail.com
theglobeandmail.com
What Canada seems to actually want is a way of doing this without legal oversight or recourse to traditional legal gatekeeping like warrants.
While this is obviously problematic, to me, it's even worse if domestic law enforcement agencies gain new ways to remove friction like warrant requirements or at least the need to make specific per-instance requests (which are possible to (in theory) be tracked and reviewed to detect over-use and abuse). The idea of domestic law enforcement agencies gaining access to "full take" feeds of everything enabling them to retrospectively build massive connection trees of metadata which can be searched is downright terrifying.
[1] - https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/nude-photos-of-strangers-...
They dragnet surveil to get dirt on the ten thousand or so lawmakers that matter.
And journalists, and people that see something and may want to wristleblow, and people that know commercial secrets (yes, they've been caught doing commercial spying). There are more categories here.
And, of course, there's always the danger that the one random person that you didn't see eye to eye earlier just happens to work there.
The bar is higher for them to wield “some bullshit” against you, but rest assured, they still will.
It’s been more than a decade since Assange has been free.
No, the difference is NSA is much more capable and has much less oversight (not that cops have much oversight or accountability).
It's a shitty clause, and should be removed but it was put in at the behest of certain province(s) as the only way to get the Charter of Rights and Freedoms at all, and has only been used by provincial governments (aka legislatures, though a few provinces do call them "provincial Parliament").
I think everyone would generally agree a constitution would be stronger without it, but even if 'it's only a matter of time', it's played out as a pretty decent compromise to actually get the charter signed ~45 years earlier than potentially no charter at all.
Canada generally relies on trust and good behaviour more than the US system of checks-and-balances - the most obvious difference is that our Prime Minister plays the role of both US president (head of exec) and congress (technically just the House equivalent, but the senate equivalent is much weaker)
(1) https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/notwithstanding-clause-doug...
And since that's usually the main defense for the notwithstanding clause ("using it would lead to too much backlash so self policing is fine!"), then i don't see how it's defensible.
Not that it actually even makes sense anyways. If it won't be used, why have it? If it will be used for issues as trivial as what it has actually been used for up until now, that's super dangerous, so again why even leave it there? And for exceptional situations, we already have a government that's pretty trigger happy with the emergency act that allows for basically anything.
So it leaves us with provincial government using it in non critical situations (which would be handled by the federal government anyways). I guess that's also a "valid" option, and the one we have now, but then it's hard to argue that our constitution isn't completely worthless.
I suspect we will start to see Alberta's provincial government use it more frequently, starting with small items eventually leading up to challenging the equalization act. Saskatchewan may follow suit. This law is likely to become the centerpiece of Canadian politics over the next five years.
And if you think I'm in favor of the CAQ out of all things then there's again been a severe misunderstanding. I can't think of any politician that's as low and repulsive as Legault in Canada.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_33_of_the_Canadian_Cha....
The trucker fiasco ended only when the Ukraine war substituted the COVID madness
1. There is effectively one ruling party in Canada (the Liberals) representing the interest of the Eastern industrialists (the Laurentian elite). The supreme court is appointed from this incestuous group and the government typically wins (exception - truckers)
2. They have the War Measures act which the feds have proven very willing to use.
3. Canadians are extremely conforming. Really they are Scandinavians in their attitude.
Also the beloved and so mourned recently deceased Brian Mulroney, a Conservative, came from.... the same incestuous Laurentian Elite from the YYZ-MTL corridor that all of the PMs except Harper (whom I dislike, but I digress) have hailed from.
In fact, Im old enough to remember Mulroney's government collapsing because of corruption surrounding the same companies, the same industrialists, that discredited Chretien's (whom I liked, for what it's worth), and would have take down Jr's were it not for him firing the justice minister.
As to the not withstanding clause, you're really clinging on to "only separatists and conservatives have used it" without addressing all the reasons the Federal government doesn't need to ever invoke it (power is concentrated in the PM hands in a way unparalleled in the West)?
Look, I've read Trudeau's autobiography. His "memoirs" as he called it. I recall vividly his lament that a flawed constitution is better than none. Flawed? It fails at its most basic task - limiting government power.
You made me laugh here (and I don't even know if you're being sarcastic or not! :-) )
> YYZ-MTL corridor that all of the PMs except Harper (whom I dislike, but I digress) have hailed from
Joe Clark was from Alberta and Kim Campbell was from BC, though their stints as PM were too short to matter I guess. Diefenbaker was born in Ontario, but spent his childhood in and his electoral seats were from Saskatchewan. Robert Borden was from and represented Halifax.
I'm not disputing the presence of the "Laurentian Elite" or its (ill, IMO) influence, but proportionally to population the PMs haven't really been all that off regionally, especially as the population west of Ontario has only really grown in the last 30 years, especially in Alberta and BC.
>power is concentrated in the PM hands in a way unparalleled in the West
The UK would like a word. They've been lamenting the "presidentialisation" of the PM there since Thatcher took power.
The UK ruling party has much more effective control over their PM-> see how many times they ditched their PM since the last election. Otherwise, yes, the UK PM is a (semi) elected autocrat.
Of course, the feds dont really need the clause. In less than 60 years they've invoked the war measures act twice. The last time the government lost the court case on its suitability.
Canada has always been the land of the free to conform.
During COVID 6.2 was violated repeatedly (pursue gaining livelihood in any province) when people were not allowed to cross the border between provinces. I don’t know if that ever made it to the SCC but I’m sure it would be saved by section 1 as well.
I strongly support section 1, and think both of those examples make our society function better, and agree that they are reasonable in our free and democratic society.
One of the things that does worry me about Canadian politics in general is that it seems to be a bit of an arms race where we don't always consider the question "what if the other party did what we just did". As an easy example, whether or not you agree with the Liberals' use of the Emergency Act, they've basically set the precedent that it's ok to use in a situation like what we had. The left generally seemed to praise this action, in large part because it was used to shut down a protest that they didn't agree with.
Next time the Conservatives are in power, though, it could very easily be wielded against left-leaning protests (e.g. the railway blockades) and the people who praised it the first time are going to be making shocked Pikachu face.
Whatever I agree or disagree with doesn't matter, rather I'm just concerned that the way the Charter is put together does leave the door open for the government to do things that seem to be prohibited but can be surprisingly overridden. Sometimes it'll be a government you agree with and sometimes not.
The clause covers, with no real check on power (see Quebec vs high court), the most important part of the constitution - the government's relationship with its people!
This is totally their goal.
Do they have the ability to compromise that, or can they 'merely' ask the owner of the endpoint you are talking to to rat you out?
An offline attack against the host's keys that relies on undisclosed vulnerabilities, or an online one against their infra that abuses recent CVEs and bad security also seem possible.
Because of the same chain of trust, you can just ask the root authority to give you a certificate for peer's identity.
A slip of keyboard I assume?
For instance, most countries have had the ability to intercept signals since there have been signals.
What they want is to root the OS / Application, and transmit home the unencrypted contents of messages before encryption or after decryption.
They cant just walk into a business and order that however, they need the power to compel businesses to implement these changes. Thats why these things end up super vague.
With NPU-powered client-side scanning combined with lexical analysis techniques, even if YOU are knowledgeable enough to have privately ditched Apple/Google/Microsoft permanently: your mentally normie-tier anon fren may be using a Copilot+ with Recall, and so Microsoft gets to read the conversation on his machine and then sus you out.
For instance, WhatsApp strongly suggests backing up your data to Drive, where it's easy to obtain a copy if you're a cop.
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/09/nsa-spies-onli...
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/far-right-took-over-steam-discor...
Even if one pressed play expecting Carre or The Wire, I imagine by the time the main character finds himself slow-motion dog-piled under 5 Brazilian jujitsu experts who are brothers and dress identically (after just such a scenario was lightly foreshadowed several scenes before), viewers might realize they’ve walked into something unexpected (and imo magical).
It’s not about the way things work — it’s about the way life feels.
You're right there are things you cannot or should not do. Surveilling communications where there is no expectation of privacy does not strike me as falling into that category. Surveilling the town square for potential leaks of classified information isn't oppressive. Equating that to surveilling all communications of every single journalist would charitably be described as misleading. Yes, historically nations did not have such elaborate surveillance mechanisms, but historically, communications had significantly more friction, lower velocity, and limited mechanisms for distribution.
I mean we're not not only doing the exact same stuff, but going above and beyond it. The thing about authoritarianism is that people seem to associate with some leader just oppressing the people - helpless to resist, but historically that's not how it works at all. In reality, authoritarianism tends to have an in-group and an out-group. And the in-group often feels neutral to highly positive about the authoritarian government, and feel they're only doing what is necessary to maintain proper peace, order, and value. To this day you can find people with extremely positive views of Stalin - not just for defeating Nazism but for his reign in general. This includes many whose family (and in some instances even themselves - though their numbers are decreasing due to age) lived through this time! This video [1] turned into a meme, but it's genuine and part of a real interview.
I somehow get the impression you're around my age. If I'm correct there then imagine taking yourself back to the early 2000s or maybe even earlier, and describing to your youthful self what America would be like in 20 years. You wouldn't believe yourself - it'd sound like absolute insanity. But because it's all happened inch by inch, it all feels kind of normal. But I think, and hope, that when you describing what we're going through today, to your children or your children's children 20 or 40 years from now, that they'll find it just as unbelievable as the you of 20 years ago might have found it.
I get the concern about authoritarianism, and I share it. Realistically though, intelligence services have been doing exactly that kind of activity since before networks or computers existed. It's the nature of intelligence work that without the proper checks and balances, it can be abused by an authoritarian regime. It's also a reality that the advent of networks and computers has made it far easier to exfiltrate information much more quickly and much more broadly.
> I somehow get the impression you're around my age. If I'm correct there then imagine taking yourself back to the early 2000s or maybe even earlier, and describing to your youthful self what America would be like in 20 years.
I like the idea that I was youthful in the early 2000's. ;-) I guess I wasn't middle aged then, so that counts as youthful, right?
Truth be told, in the early 2000's I was already aware that intelligence services were able to listen in on phone calls, surveil any newsgroups/mailing lists/etc. That was around the time when Skipjack (which absolutely strikes me as authoritarian creep) was having nails put in its coffin. Police could do wire taps on this stuff with a search warrant. This was also an era when intelligence services were deliberately crippling cryptographic protocols so they could compromise them as needed. The "inch-by-inch" change has been the volume of data that is being produced and the volume of data that is being gathered by intelligence services.
The "creep" that I'm worried about is less on the capability side and much more on the legal & political side. The PATRIOT Act is a pretty good example of broad, sweeping powers that we've given to the state, with far fewer restrictions, that is unlike what it has traditionally had. I also worry about the broad erosion of our institutions. That's the kind of "inch by inch" I'm concerned about.
Obviously I'm referencing the giant orange elephant in the room here, but we can take far less divisive issues as well. For instance there's 0 chance the Founding Fathers would have felt that the current systems of mass surveillance ought be allowed under the 4th amendment. Yet here we are. It's not really laws that have been creeping further and further beyond the pale, but actions. And those actions grow only more extreme by the day. This is why, to me, I think we may have already crossed whatever 'border' there is into authoritarianism.
Followed by "This conversation is now being recorded by Sergeant Tom Smith".
So we should not shrug this off just because "they already can do it".
> From the linked article: First, the hackers were able to record a conversation between Dubé in his office on Parliament Hill and our Radio-Canada colleague Brigitte Bureau, who was sitting at a café in Berlin.
So many questions! Does this still work? On any phone using SS7? Including landlines and mobile phones? From anywhere in the world? To anywhere in the world? What are the limitations of the attack? Why isn't this a vastly bigger problem if anyone can listen in on anyone's calls?
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/05/17/...
(Accompanying editorial: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/05/23/hacking-phones-...)
Policy attempts like this indicate that given the pace of tech change vs. managerialism, Canada is basically a write off destined for decades of developing nation status the way former powers like Portugal, Greece, Argentina, and Spain were considered poor countries in the late 20th century because of ruling parties similar to the ones in Canada today. When a government switches from growth to managing dissent and capital flight, the writing is on the wall.
My opinion is that democracy will die in favor of republics where govts do whatever. Seems to me were heading that way anyway. I find the theater of it tiring.
It would seem to align well with the concept of checks and balances, at least.
The real problem is oligopoly, not fascism or anything like that.
The government puts most of its effort into protecting friendly companies and industries from competition and even funneling taxpayer money to them.
In the case of Bell & Rogers this is billions of $ a year.
These two details are important because:
1) no laws were passed and no courts were involved.
2) activities that were perfectly legal at the time, were deemed retroactively illegal and persecuted (not prosecuted - no courts, remember?).
The only regimes in which you see this are tinpot dictatorships and Trudeau's Canada.
Just imagine how powerful those two precedents are for any future radical who seeks to follow on the footsteps of the petite tyrant Trudeau.
In both Canada and the US each "side" loves ratcheting up government power against what they perceive as their political enemies. It's going to end in tears.
That just means the conservatives can never be allowed to win elections...to protect Democracy!
That's what happens when there is change in the world. Conservatives resist change, but change often has a momentum of it's own.
The world has changed a lot recently. TV brought everyone together. Transportation made the world smaller place. The internet and social networks gave everyone a voice. These are all game changers. For better and worse. We can't un-invent all that stuff.
The reason older people tend to be conservative is that they are used to the way things were when they grew up. They don't like the changes. They want the good old days back.
Young people don't have these notions about the good old days, they weren't around. They started off with a different view of things. The Overton Window moves with them. Progress ratchets, as you said.
p.s. None of this implies that I endorse how the protests were handled. I'm all for democracy and 100% against authoritarians - whether they are communists or fascists or whatever else.
Recently we've seen a functional alliance of those on the bottom half of the diagram.
People complain about left-leaning protests taking over a public park - these guys took over multiple public spaces in multiple parts of the city. About a square mile in the middle of the city.
Exactly when did the left leaning protestors have their bank accounts frozen? Exactly when did the left leaning protests get broken up.
All I remember is canadas stupid government supporting the left leaning protests.
In the states I remember fancy Nancy wearing an African shawl kneeling in the capital.
This sort of stuff is too obvious not to see. Good luck.
It was left leaning and Police were quite happy to handle it with all they got. Many hundreds or thounsands of protester everyday (or nights) for over 100 days. 17 years-old students being hit with Baton, pepper spray, , tears gas, rubber bullets, flashbang etc. It was so chaotic that vladimir fucking putin even call canada to sort its shit (!!!). Since then police really has dialed it back in the protest.
I wonder why the ruling class hasn’t opposed social mousetrap identity politics protests.
It really was eye opening in many ways. The media sucking up to the gouverment, the gourverment not giving shit about what end up being a large chuck of the population, forgetting they were in a democracy. Trucker were err. Well see for yourself.
>There must be an urgent, critical and temporary situation that “seriously endangers” the lives, health and safety of Canadians, and it must be so significant as to exceed the capacity or authority of the provinces to address it.
A foreign funded group with heavy vehicles invaded and took over downtown Ottawa and international border crossings. The province wasn't interested in dispersing them.
The Emergencies Act definition wouldn't allow you to halt a coup attempt if Ontario could handle it but chose not to. At a certain point you have to analyze things and say that if the law has a massive loophole then the law was poorly drafted.
“You can’t protest, there’s a government here!” - Ottawa residents
Case in point: look what happened in Israel when the Abraham Accords were signed, Hamas decided to go for the "nuclear" option.
It is 100% inconvenience, and if there’s one thing that can not be tolerated in these times, is any sort of inconvenience.
Well that's kind of the point - protesters don't have the power to change anything based on physical inconvenience. The inconvenience is merely a PR effort because protesters don't have any more effective form of of PR - if people are famous/wealthy/powerful/etc. they have better forms of PR available.
The problem with some styles of protest is that they're asymmetrical in terms of damage. A relatively small number of people who get worked up enough can congregate in one location and indefinitely shut down the operations of a person/group/organization/government. At some point the legitimate governing body needs to enforce the functioning of society, or they'll lose the mandate to govern.
The rail protests had international implications too
So if that wasn't enough to invoke the emergency act then it's hard for me to imagine why the Truckers were
Possibly because the truckers blocked a bridge to the US, and the US didn't like that.
But the emergencies act? Freezing bank accounts?
They didn't blow up the bridge did they?
- the private banks decided to close the accounts, ostensibly acting by themselves (but probably not) and not by government order
Stuff even two years ago is lost to history
There is also a world of difference between an organized protest with a specific purpose drawing awareness to a cause and thousands of people using commercial vehicles to hold a city hostage with no purpose or agenda other than a bunch of angry people unleashing their rage on the cities populous.
- If you worked from an office, you likely spent a good chunk of the first 12-24 months of Covid working from home. After that, it was up to your employer to put into place a policy about that.
- Addendum: if you were in the federal government, you *were* required to get an initial shot plus a booster for most parts of the federal government. Failure to do so was dealt with in a few ways depending on department, but would usually result in your being placed on unpaid leave (PSAC has made it very difficult to fire someone in general, including under these circumstances).
- If you worked in the Forces, I gather you really didn't have much of a say in the matter, but militaries worldwide have strict and extensive vaccine schedules for all enlisted staff (and often officers, too).
The bodily autonomy argument holds some water, sure, to the same extent as you have the choice not to vaccinate your kid as they start going to school (but don't be surprised if they can't go, because we as a society have decided that things like polio don't deserve a repeat performance).
You were at no point prohibited from leaving the country, though you could de facto end up so because other countries likely wouldn't allow you in, at least, not without a Covid test.
If you were a Canadian citizen, you could not be legally denied entry into Canada, though because of the circumstances you may have been, at different points, required to either undergo a test or to go through a quarantine period.
These people were protesting being denied the ability to pick and choose what they do in society while unilaterally picking and choosing how much additional risk they want to introduce to the rest of society.
Frankly, this is probably best showcased by them deciding to just decide to take over the Ottawa baseball stadium (which is in a suburb and next to a highway) and use it and a few other places around downtown to store propane, gas, and other heating fluids since they decided to do this in the winter.
They were, at best, hypocrites, and massively reckless in the face of what was at the time still relatively speaking a medical unknown.
I'll also add, Re: the use of the Emergencies Act: regardless of what I think, a federal court has ruled it unconstitutional; the government has expressed interest in appealing the decision. I don't have a legal background, so I don't have a useful comment to add here.
I will say that it came after several weeks of multiple levels of police (but most notably, OPS) failing to do anything about the protests while tensions escalated, so it didn't come out of nowhere, and it wasn't the first thing the government tried.
Even at the time, despite very strong claims from on high to the contrary, it was becoming more and more clear that the only people who might benefit from the shots were those taking them (and the people selling them of course).
It’s surprising to me to still see people making the "social good" argument in 2024.
Boosters were required as frequently as they were because Covid was developing new variants faster than things we're used to (like the flu, which tends to have about one variant a year with high infection rates among humans). Naturally, many people do get flu "booster" shots annually to try and reduce the spread of what's still a deadly disease to the immunocompromised; we just don't talk about it much because flu death rates have roughly stabilized for long enough that they're not considered excessive deaths (in the actuarial sense).
Yes. Who said otherwise?
> and is an effective way of reducing the spread of viruses at scale, sometimes significantly so.
I don't follow. Doesn't herd immunity mean the herd is immune? As in, there is no transmission and the pathogen either dies or fades to the background?
Either way, eventually almost everyone caught covid (obviously with some exceptions), no matter how many shots you got or didn't get.
The strongest point in favor of the "social good" argument is that the shots reduced severity of infection, thereby reducing hospitalizations and freeing up hospital beds for random accidents. But the overflowing hospitals issue wasnt nearly as bad as it was made out to be as I understand it. And we'll probably never know for sure how many hospitalizations were caused by the shots themselves, because only lunatics think that something with vaccine in the name can harm you.
In a perfect world where everyone gets vaccinated and vaccines are 100% effective in all people against all individuals of a strain, yeah, probably. In reality, not everyone gets vaccinated, and not everyone reacts well to the vaccine, and sometimes individuals from a strain slip by, so no. Some individuals from a strain will survive, some people will catch it and get sick, and of those surviving the sickness, they'll become the breeding ground for a new mutation.
> Either way, eventually almost everyone caught covid (obviously with some exceptions), no matter how many shots you got or didn't get.
Source? The latest data shows that out of ~40 million Canadians, about 4.8 million or about 12% are reported to have tested positive for Covid at any point and been recorded as such. Globally, the figure is about 775 million out of 8 billion[0].
Among vaccinated Canadians, CCDR 2024 Vol. 50 published by the PHAC[1] shows that both despite waning immunity from the vaccines (which is partially attributable to the poor understanding of what would both be safe for humans and long-term effective against Covid) as well as the emergence of new variants both causing spikes in overall case count and associated stats (like hospital admissions and deaths), vaccinated people were measurably less likely to contract the disease and to fall severely ill if they did. This is roughly in line with your comment about vaccines reducing infection severity.
The study is a relatively quick read and I encourage you to give it a look if you have the stomach for medical statistics (which admittedly is pretty dry). The methodology is nothing special, but not problematic IMO, and the sample size and population distribution are good for a study of this scale (though there's an overrepresentation of the unvaccinated relative to the Canadian population; in this case, it likely doesn't represent an issue).
[0] https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/cases?n=c
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/reports-publications/canada-communicable-disease-report-ccdr/monthly-issue/2024-50/issue-1-2-january-february-2024/covid-19-outcome-trends-vaccination-status-canada.html> By the third quarter of 2022, an estimated 96.4% of persons aged ≥16 years in a longitudinal blood donor cohort had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies from previous infection or vaccination, including 22.6% from infection alone and 26.1% from vaccination alone; 47.7% had hybrid immunity.
Doing the math, that estimates ~70% of US blood donors over 16 had contracted actual covid by almost 2 years ago.
(https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7222a3.htm)
Are blood donors representative? I don't know. Reported and recorded positives doesn't seem at all representative of an overall infection count though, since it misses probably most minor cases of covid, which makes up most cases period.
This final cohort was studied based on records generated and collected in four three-month periods between April 2021 and September 2022 which is a good timeline.
This study seems to focus on the efficacy of older (≥65 years) people sticking to a strict vaccination schedule, which is reflected in the numbers; in that age group, vaccination-linked immunity is highest. The counterpoint to that is that younger groups aren't sticking to as strict a vaccination schedule, though best as I can tell, the study stops short of spelling that out, so that's my own conclusion.
Do you have any evidence at all of that? AFAIK, none exist.
What exists is some weak evidence the vaccine severely reduced the transmission of the virus. I've never seen any study strong enough to be proof, but then this is extremely hard to measure (either way it goes).
As regards your world of difference argument. Most of the important protests that have changed anything have involved not simple, passive attemtps to "draw awareness to a cause", but actually causing a good deal of deliberate loss of income, convenience, security and comfort. (see the suffragettes, the stonewall riots, the montgomery alabama lunch counter boycotts, chartists in 1848 etc).
The truckers, whether you agreed with them or not, were peaceful and intent on using that peaceful protest to force a change in their society. They were met with co-ordinated media defamation, the invocation of a power which should only be used in war time and the seizing of their supporters funds. Pretty much standard behavior for a Western democracy getting squeezed and needing to ditch the facade of democracy and revert to good old fashioned authoritarianism. It's never far from the surface.
1. https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/csis-told-government-... 2. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/csis-rcmp-convoy-violence-1...
Then things get super messy when you start to look at how the province deals with indigenous populations, their protests, versus a group of white nationalists attempting to overthrow the Government.
The fact the emergency powers were used, to me, are a symptom of a broken system.
Either way, opposing political powers are jumping all over the opportunity to leverage the situation for their own gain.
I'm so sick of politics. They are all dishonest. No matter what, we lose.
No.
> versus a group of white nationalists attempting to overthrow the Government.
Also no, not white nationalists.
I have a feeling hardly any Canadians at all know what really happened in Ottawa even though there was and is extensive live video evidence streamed and stored on YouTube.
I have friends who live downtown Ottawa. I know exactly what went on. I know what flags were on display.
People need to stop down playing what happened.
Federal government workers generally live in Kanata and Orleans. Some work downtown, but generally it is a lot of private sector.
Do you have any proof of this or are you just being libelous?
> attempting to overthrow the Government.
If honking horns is enough to overthrow a government then the government is way to weak to exist.
Are there any actual examples of people making claims about going deaf due to the protests?
Doctors == generally low information value unless they have training in science or mathematics.
If you have some evidence that it’s safe to listen to sound levels above 90dB for extended periods of time, I’d recommend you publish it.
A woman took legal action against the protestors. In her action she called on an ENT. The ENT make the statements I outlined above under oath.
Search for it if you actually care. Again, I'm not wasting my time because nothing is ever good enough for the people who align ideologically with the convoy. The dismissiveness, what aboutisms, and misdirection that follow are never worth the effort.
Yet you imply that others should do exactly that in order to take seriously your insinuation that actual bodily harm was incurred. If you have proof that someone was physically damaged by the blowing of the truck horns then it will a simple thing for you supply this information of which you have implied you are the possessor.
If you do not have it and have never had it then you could also help by just stating that, so that no one wastes their time.
Just putting this into context:
> Isabelle Jacques, assistant deputy minister of finance, told a committee of MPs that up to 210 bank accounts holding about $7.8 million were frozen under the financial measures contained in the Emergencies Act.
> She also said the fact that more than 200 bank accounts were frozen did not necessarily mean that more than 200 people lost access to their funds. Jacques said that individuals may have held more than one account affected by the measures.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergency-bank-measures-fin...
We see this in the job growth numbers, for example, that show massive federal government hiring and anemic private sector growth. A market solution would have federal incentives create private sector growth to accomplish goals.
And, yes: Canada badly needs some kind of antitrust regime. Perhaps the reward for monopolization of a Canadian market should be nationalization.
Somehow, the people rushing to use that "faccism" label tend to ignore this one property of the original ones.
The change in Canada from 20 years ago is just shocking. If you can't see this, it is because you don't want to see it.
Canadians like you are why I think your country is utterly doomed.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/let-yourself-be-monitored-e...
Putin aspires to be a totalitarian leader but even he has not managed to pull it off. He depends quite heavily on a depoliticized "silent majority" of Russians who are too scared/complacent to challenge his security apparatus. If Russia were a totalitarian state then you'd see that majority rushing to join the military and join the government.
Either you forgot about COVID or you seem to have a case of Stockholm syndrom.e
Those which haven't had an issue with mandates shots seem to totally ignore what a schock the sitaution was for those who didnt approve.
Consider the similar backlash to mask mandates. I didn't like wearing a mask, but it's not a huge imposition. Some people treated it like it was greatest injustice they'd ever experienced though. And then they went on to rationalize this emotional reaction by making up shit about masks cutting off their oxygen supply or causing brain damage, etc. All this despite the fact that wearing a mask (or even a respirator) is necessary for a big chunk of the day in many jobs ranging from construction workers to surgeons.
Canada is not totalitarian. Frankly, I can't imagine claiming so unless you have quite an extreme view of politics (for instance, the appropriateness of blockading downtown Ottawa). There is plenty of MAGA-like conspiratory thinking in Canada, but it's relatively new for Canada, and definitely not widely-accepted.
There's no shortage of Americans who wholeheartedly believe that Canada is an authoritarian regime. Given that the average HN user seems to be an older, conservative-leaning American I'm not really surprised by the sentiment, though I did hope for more level-headed discussions.
It also doesn't help that the same government has admitted to a current genocide without basically doing anything about it. So yes, when you combine those two things criticism will happen.
At no point in the last several decades has any Canadian government come close to being totalitarian, authoritarian, or otherwise. The most recent example in living memory (which I don't intend to downplay) would've been residential schools, which were run by churches with supportive policies coming from the federal (and lower) governments. The last residential school closed in 1997.
Canada is absolutely, beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt, a representative democracy falling under the broad umbrella of "Western (Neo)liberal democracies". There are legitimate criticisms of neoliberalism just as there are of neoconservativism, but totalitarian aspirations are exceptionally rarely a valid accusation.
If anything, the biggest threat to Canadian democracy might be a decline in political literacy. We don't have an election where we vote for PMs, but many people still do. We don't have a two-party system; in practice, we have a multi-party system to the extent that minority governments are possible (we have one now!), but many people vote as though we're in a two-party system with a handful of "joke parties" that amount to wasting your vote. We have a bicameral parliament, but one of our chambers is made up purely of elected members who have so far mostly stayed level-headed through more or less sheer force of good will (which I don't consider a good enough protection in the long term, but that's another topic).
How laws are introduced into parliament and passed is something most Canadians probably couldn't answer off the top of their heads in more detail than saying that there there are a few readings, and most of us aren't following what our MP or MPP is doing for your riding, because in real terms, most of us vote based on a party leader and their at-large actions in office.
You can't convince them that to others, or in the future, they might be seen as the bad guys. Because that just isn't true -- they're the good guys.
So…what’s their official rationale for including it?
>MPs pushed the bill out of committee without this critical amendment last month. In doing so, the government has set itself up to be the sole arbiter of when, and on what conditions, Canadians deserve security for their most confidential communications – personal, business, religious, or otherwise.
Not just the Canadian government! Let’s not forget the criminals and foreign adversaries who compromise their systems!
(I think it has gotten better now, but Bell used to only freely peer in USA, in Canada you had to pay for transit. Most non-big3 Canadian ISPs would route a lot of domestic traffic through Chicago and other peer points).
Context: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadas-public-health-a...
It does affect them directly, doesn't anyone know why they're broke all the time (aside from inflation)? Is it possible all that harmless telemetry for harmless marketing purposes actually isn't so harmless, and Terminator is inducing you to buy products you like but really don't need more than the savings you're splurging with? No, can't be!
If people woke up to how insideously manipulated they are at large... oh man!
No, we are cooked if we do not spread persuit of privacy like a religion! The individual cede to the group, and the group to the regal classes.
I assume you are refering to the automatic music writing machine the proles are fed with? LLMs seem to be capable of that now.
(1984 is a low tech society and have been possible since the 50s, except for that machine.)
Most of the cases you hear and read about, the gov never had to break any encryption protocols to catch people doing bad things. Pedo's on TOR were busted without it. Terrorist rings have been broken up without breaking encryption protocols. There's been rumors the NSA has broken encryption on WhatsApp and Telegram but will never admit it publicly.
If you think simply having good encryption will buffer state surveillance, it won't. If the gov wants to get you they will always have a huge advantage. They never sleep and have unlimited resources. Right now, tracking a smartphone, getting the data from your provider and the profile companies like Verizon, Google and others have on you is pretty easy. They don't need to break encryption when there are so many other vectors to get at you. Just having the GPS data Google has on you is enough to give them a roadmap on your life.
Unless you're willing to be a hermit like Ted Kaczynski was for years, it will be easy for any state to surveil you. And the gov still got Ted, even after all things he did to cover his tracks and living completely off the grid.
(Fyi, I once talked to a defense attorney representing alleged terrorists. His clients lived overseas and the attorney was representing them in the US. That man was one of those hard privacy cases.)
If you had a god's view, but wanted to keep that classified, you'd construct a parallel path to obtaining the same outcome in court without tipping your hand to the god's view. Parallel Construction.
Only way I can think to defeat the analysis is to make a mixnet which asks for a GB/month target and simply transmits either data or padding uniformly in time with all nodes it peered with (a much much smaller subset than the whole network). Padding should be multi-hop so immediate neighbor nodes can't tell what is encrypted traffic and what is encrypted padding.
>This could include requiring telcos to alter the 5G encryption standards that protect mobile communications to facilitate government surveillance.
It's not doom-and-gloom to state this certainty. It's merely a logical progression from yesterday and today.
Make your peace with it. Much like ledgerized ecurrencies backdoors and surveillance isn't decreasing, it's taking over.
People are going to have to learn to talk in person again. Dont express opinions on the internet. Give up on that hope for a better world. Prepare for what you will do when your draft number comes up, because there will be wars and you will be expected to take part. Your food and water will be adulturated endlessly. You will be pushed around by cops.
Knowing influential party members (either/both) will be a necessity.
But I sometimes wonder if the M/S push to Windows 11 w/tpm2 allows for a backdoor on Windows. I also think the move of Apple to the [M1-n] chips may allow the same :) But back to reality, I believe 99% of these backdoor pushes are mainly for Cell Phones. Almost no one uses a PC these days for communication.
Probably quite a lot of the people that governments want to keep a fairly close eye on do still use PCs or laptops though
that silliness aside, there are serious limits to how much access even bios/TPM/SMM compromises can provide. for instance, if I audit my network, your use of SMM to compromise my machine can be mitigated. the picture may be different if you seize my machine, of course, but we all know that most bets are off with physical access.
I laughed so hard at this :D Really funny stuff...
>So it makes no sense that the Canadian government would itself seek the ability to create more holes, rather than patching them.
This almost killed me, ahahahahah, really. Makes no freaking sense....
Here is the reality of it: before 5G, some infrastructure around SS7 was needed to get to the data of any network user. In a 5G network, this is all built-in functionality, so you can see that country or another spending $billions of public money to get a better tool for surveilliance on public while selling it as another slightly better speed limit. Obviously no government gives a shit about privacy when they are so easily covered by national security, so don't be delusioned.
Stop building the chains that will be used to enslave you.
I'm still of the opinion that the US proper ceased to exist after the American Civil War. Makes me sad every time I think about it. And no, I'm not including slavery.
One of those shifts was instead of people saying the "United States are" people started saying the "United States is".
This change caused a shift away from the primacy of the 10th amendment. Instead of the US government just handling the military, foreign affairs, etc it started butting into more and more things happening within the country. Look at Wickard v Filburn for example.
The 14th amendment also started to be reinterpreted to mean the incorporation of the Bill of Rights. Prior to this reinterpretation the thought was that the Bill of Rights applied to the federal government not to the state governments. The federal government was not allowed to establish a state church, for example, but the states could (and did!). The federal government couldn't ban guns but the sates could.
So the states themselves lost a lot of rights and the people did as well (see my example of Wickard v Filburn).
States are centralized democratic governments. They are just smaller than the federal government. If you want to make the argument that having more people under a government is better then do you advocate for a single worldwide government? Why not go all the way?
> This doesnt always work perfectly but it does work more and more if broader sections of the populace spend more time being educated about policy and advocating for things they believe in.
I don't follow how having a centralized government means people are going to be more educated on policies? If the majority of politics happened on a state level why would people be less informed than if it occurred at the federal level. It seems like you are advocating for a more informed populace, which may be beneficial, but it doesn't seem relevant.
>See civil rights as a primary example.
While this may be an example right now, it wasn't always the case.
The federal government (pre civil war) required states that did not have slavery to return runaway slaves back to slave states.
If you want an example of post civil war, look at the Japanese internment camps.
Like I said in my previous post, I don't think it is really possible to determine if rights have actually been expanded since the federal government started getting more involved.
The federal government constantly violates rights.
> In contrast decentralized governments without the failsafes of things like the bill of rights to prevent them from descending into tyranny tend to do just that. Whether its the tyranny of the majority in one region or the tyranny of the rich and powerful, thats a quick route to having human rights trampled, oligarchs put into place and anti-social movements gain power.
I think most, if not all, of the states have a constitution that protects the rights of the residents. Why are you suggesting otherwise?
Maybe they aren't perfect, but the same can be said about the federal constitution.
> This may become less of a risk as education becomes more widespread in a populace and indeed statelessness is an admirable ideal but I dont think we are there yet technologically or ethically and certainly not in the 1790s.
What do you mean by statelessness? Are you advocating for anarchy? That hardly seems like a way to protect rights.
Access to education has been supported by the federal government where individual districts lagged behind more wealthy areas. Without the federal aid poor districts would be much worse off as far as education goes.
Yes the federal government has long violated rights and done terrible things. We could go on listing the atrocities committed by the feds domestically and abroad for days e.g. forced sterilization, internment camps, vietnam, iraq, residential schools and the various iffy things the intelligence community did relating to drugs and black nationalism last century. I am not arguing that federal power is universally good or that increased federal power only resulted in good things but rather that its been a net improvement. You say its impossible to determine if we have more or less rights post civil war than before but I would posit it is very clearly more.
Yeah statelessness is a cool idea in theory. Like I said an ideal to aspire to as a society. The less coercion/threat of violence we have and the more freedom and empathy we have in society the better. Its just an ideal and not something we can achieve now IMO but still something inspiring to think about in conversations about state power or otherwise.
Do you see how these ideas are diametrically opposed? How does farther-removed, more powerful federal governments lead to freedom compared to close, small governments staffed by people who live right next to you?
The reason I think classically liberal economic and political values push us towards greater freedom is because I believe the following two things to be evident: 1. Freedom is related to wealth. 2. In the US we are for the most part more free than any other society in history.
Obviously there are exceptions to these but I think they are generally true. The reason I dont see statelessness and large democratic governments to be opposite ideals is because I see statelessness as an idealized result of freedom and democracy as the means to get ever closer to that ideal. This isnt really a unique perspective save for the fact that I think the idealized form of a free society doesnt have people forcing other people to do things.
Not to pick on you, but I want to point this out: this sort of thinking is a vulnerability which can and does get exploited in politics. It is a fallacy that Progress is inevitable and that The Right Thing always plays out, and that the one holding a perspective on this always was born in the fully legitimate and righteous branch of events. Nature is not just; nature simply is.
iMessage and Whatsapp are both this. Since you only need one participant in a conversation to not enable backup encryption, I would guess that law enforcement has cleartext access to over 99% of messages sent by americans.
The next question is do they only have access to certain messages on request, or do they get a near real time feed. Things like this[1] suggest they had a real time feed of all messages, and I doubt they would be allowed to lose that ability.
[1]: https://blog.encrypt.me/2013/11/05/ssl-added-and-removed-her...
I'd guess less only because Apple is so stingy on iCloud storage. A majority of iOS users I know don't have iMessage backup enabled because they're not willing to pay for additional iCloud storage.
Source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberalist-judicial-appoint... Note: There are no checks and balances regarding whether or not they are still using it. As such, the default assumption must be that they are still using it.
"The Trudeau government has stopped using the Liberal Party's private database to conduct background checks on candidates for judicial appointments, federal sources say."
This is a specific claim about the Liberals that is not refuted by suppositions about other parties, even if the supposition is likely true.