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Comment by MichaelGG | Hacker News Reader

This bill is idiotic. Some insane idiot goes and shoots up a building? Yeah, anti-terrorism laws will stop that! Harper is a disgrace to Canadians, and the immediate attention whoring he did after that little episode was embarrassing.

No laws, short of banning cars and inspecting everyone, everywhere, all the time, is gonna stop people from driving cars into things or sneaking in a gun and shooting people.

The only real antidote is to not have an abusive foreign policy like the US, and to educate people in rationality and stop treating mystical beliefs as something sacred. And even then, that isn't gonna really stop the really disconnected-from-reality folks.

As a Canadian, I'm once again saddened by how far this government is falling.

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IIRC, much like the PATRIOT Act, Bill C-51 was around before the attack itself. The attack is just used as an excuse to muster the political backing to push it through.

So far the recently passed Australian mass surveillance law was the most shameless/obvious power grab. But this Canadian one comes pretty close.

It's pretty clear it's a coordinated effort between not just the 5 Eyes, but the 14 Eyes and even beyond that. Many countries are trying to push for such laws now to "normalize" mass surveillance and make it a defacto "right" of governments around the world.

When you take a step back and think about it, it's even worse than having elected "governments" come up with this and try to push it. It's actually the non-elected secret spy agencies who are pushing for this in a very undemocratic way, as swiftly as possible, with no debate. Or if there has to be one they call something like this as the "balance" between privacy and (national) security. Taking away the rights you've already enjoyed for decades and have allowed the society to thrive in a democracy = balance.

Admittedly, given the technology those secret spy agencies have, the people making policy decisions in each country are in kind of a weird place: every country but their own has a thorough picture of what their citizens are doing, and can use that information strategically against them.

It seems like the only two real Nash equilibria here are the unilateral ban of foreign surveillance, or the unilateral grant of domestic surveillance. Otherwise we're in an "only the criminals have guns" situation that's the worst of both.

To be fair it is not specific to Canada, USA and Australia does the same, also at some extent New Zealand started to walk to the wrong direction. I suspect some influence from US friends.

"friends"

Apparently no country is responsible for its own actions, everything is the fault of the Americans. That attitude reinforces US power.

Of course a country is responsible for its own actions, but no country flouts American pressure lightly. Aligning a countries interest to America's is often the lesser of all calculated evils.

That may be true but absolving officials of responsibility only invites further transgressions.

US Power is the best interest of all of the above nations.

100% agreed.

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