moiraj @ 2013-05-13T15:31:00

I don't know if I've mentioned it here before, but Canada has a disgusting loser of a politician (aside from Harper) named Vic Toews. He pushed hard for a bill called Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act. This bill would grant police agencies expanded powers, mandate that internet service providers (ISPs) provide subscriber information without a warrant and compel providers to reveal information transmitted over their networks with a warrant.

People freaked, critics called the bill the "Spy on Canadians whenever you want bill" - not pithy, I know - and pointed out that the only place in which the words "children" and "predators" appeared was in the title of the bill. I guess Toews and his band of thugs thought everyone would hear the title and think the bill was a good idea and that no one would actually bother reading the bill itself. After all, that's what a lot of politicians do.

Still, most people weren't aware of the bill until Toews said people "can either stand with us or with the child pornographers." First, that's an excellent way to stiffen people's spines, because that boils down to a childish sentiment of "I'm not the criminal, you're the criminal (because you won't just go along with my criminal activities.") And it reminds us all of George Bush, and given most Canadians despise Bush and a great many of us think he should be rotting in jail as a murderer and a torturer, that's not a connection a smart Canadian politician wants us to make.

He later denied saying that, despite the fact that it is in the Parliament records and on video. He's one of those old guys that still doesn't get the reality of online behaviour, even while trying to control it.

But he kept pushing until, all of a sudden, Parliament decided to send the bill back to the commission. This was done at an odd step of the proceedings. The fact that this decision coincided with contact from Anonymous, who took the court documents from his very messy divorce and splashed them about on the internet (these court documents are available to the public if you go to the right courthouse, are able to give the right docket number to the staff, and pay the fee) was surely coincidental. Anonymous talked about the fact that the man droned on about Christian family values while sleeping with the former babysitter and then ditching his responsibilities to his first family. None of what Anonymous did was illegal, I see it as a warning shot across the bow, but Anonymous stated that they wouldn't allow a "politician who allows his citizens no secrets to have any secrets of his own," and that they were sure such a hypocrite had a lot of skeletons that they were prepared to dig up.

The bill has been in limbo ever since, though the government is claiming it isn't dead. Critics figure they're either retooling the language under the assumption that none of us understand the concept of synonyms or have a reading level above that of a fifth grader, or going to have it presented by a younger, more handsome person so we'll all be distracted by the shiny.

Toews has since claimed that he wasn't aware of how great the scope the bill gave the cops was. (Ick, bad sentence.) No one believes him and even if we did, his words suggest he was pushing this bill without having learned just how badly it was violating people's rights.

All of this is a very long introduction to my just learning that the RCMP were opening people's mail without judicial oversight as late as the 1970s. I kind of assumed this kind of crap arose out of the invention of the internet, as it would enable the government to spy on people without those people even knowing, but no, this is a sort of tradition with the authorities. And they were much more bald-faced about it. "Give me those letters." "Show me your warrant." "Do you want to spend some time in jail or what? Oh, I'm sorry, my fist slipped. Hope you don't get a black eye."

I don't really like learning more about my country. It's depressing.

Also, while I'm grateful for what Anonymous did this time, they scare the hell out of me, because it seems like they can do whatever they want.

Here's a link to one of their videos to Toews.