Most of the national media outlets have covered what I watched on CPAC today. Rob Nicholson (Attorney General and Min. Justice) and Peter Van Loan (Min. Public Safety) tabled legislation which is allegedly meant to empower police with greater capacity to fight cyber-crime.
It’s hard not to feel fatalistic about this kind of legislation - it seems this kind of curtailing of Court oversight in law-enforcement is a pernicious ideology that pervades the Conservatives, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.
While I’m obviously not opposed to enabling law-enforcement bodies do their job of apprehending criminals - I am suspicious of any law that might provide them with increased autonomy. The RCMP has an astonishing degree of latitude afforded it already and increasing their freedom at the expense of citizen rights subverts the very purpose of the police.
Of course the conventional boogey-men of the internet are trotted out again to provide a pretext for what amounts to systematic constraints on our, that is Canadian’s, right to privacy and presumption of innocence. Child molestation, fraud and identity theft - this apparent torrential storm of cyber-crime is difficult control under the existing framework, at least that’s what the RCMP lobbyists would have you believe.
There is little explanation as to how this legislation will manifestly improve the capacity of police to catch cyber-criminals. The kind of data they would gather can, in no way, positively associate a crime with a given person. Server logs, access records of IP addresses etc. are at the very best, circumstantial, at worst ambiguous and muddying rather than implicative.
I suspect that this legislation is met with enthusiasm by media companies - particularly Rogers and Bell-Globemedia. Buttressed with seemingly inevitable copyright restrictions mirroring the American Digital Millenium Copyright Act, this act actually provides subsidy for these corporations to develop the infrastructure required to investigate and prosecute alleged copyright infringers on a grand scale.