OTTAWA (NEWS1130) – The Conservative government says it is scrapping its controversial Internet surveillance bill in favour of modest changes to Canada’s warrantless wiretap law.
Justice Minister Rob Nicholson says Bill C-30, the so-called Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, will not go ahead.
The law was sought by police who said they needed it to go after child pornography, but the legislation ran into strong resistance from privacy and civil liberties advocates.
It would have forced Internet service providers to maintain systems that allowed police to intercept and track online communications.
Public Safety Minister Vic Toews set off a public firestorm when he told parliamentarians they could either stand with the government on Bill C-30 or stand with child pornographers.
Nicholson says the government will instead take a small part of the legislation and create a new law that addresses Supreme Court concerns over emergency use of police wiretaps without a warrant.
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I too agree..I have nothing to hide.
I should have nothing to hide.
Truth be told everything we do and
say and think is already monitored.
Only that accountability happens at
the end of this life.
If my keeping my space open for scrutiny helps
to keep the world a safer place for many,
then so be it.
Certainly the good thing was this legislation
would have made it easier to find bullies,
murderers and others not just child porn.
AND if I am illegally downloading movies and movies,
why should I be able to hide this.
Yes, the guilty are protected. sad…
all because of squeaky wheels
A good portion of child porn is known to various law enforcement agencies. They use it as bait to track the data to an IP address. They obtain a warrant, present it to the ISP who then divulges the users account information. This stupid law was more in the interest of various lobbyists who represent the recording, motion picture and software industries. If you can find child porn, download some and wait to see how soon your name is in the papers. Do the same for a pirated movie and not much will result from it. Vic is an idiot who deserves this public humiliation for leveraging off these sick crimes against children in order to push his buddies law through.
Didn’r we just have a story about conspiracy theories. This one was for real; it would have given our police the right to see everything you ever do on your computer. The FBI has a legal virus that antivirus programs aren’t allowed to detect. Of course they’re only allowed to use it on criminals, but they’d like to be able to use it on anyone they want. So far, Canadian police can’t use it, but they’d sure like to be able to use it, only on criminals of course, and supects, and relatives of suspects, and associates of suspects, etc. I’m pretty sure child porn is already illegal and investigated. It’s only the boogeyman they tried to use to scare us into saying, “Yes.”
Constitution 1 – Orwell 0
Freedom wins.
no one else would be concerned about it
Only Criminals like freedom, and not having the government monitor their free speech?
I could care less if someone listens to my “free speech”. I’m not doing anything wrong and I’m not clueless enough to think the government has time to listen to 30 million people talk about boring day to day stuff.
Like someone said before, only criminals and the paranoid care.
It impresses me that people don’t care about their personal liberties at all. There aren’t “people” at the end of the listening tube; there are computers with sophisticated algorithms. What if someone used your identity, whether it be something as simple as your IP address, that the government was interested in? Go ahead and explain yourself. See how much fun that would be. This new policy is a ruse for a fishing expedition which hopefully leads to more powerful trips. You may be cavalier with your rights, but many others would like to keep theirs.
Too bad. The paranoid and the criminals win again.
Plenty of non-criminals get surveiled by the state, boot lickers excluded of course.
The police would be hard pressed to give one example of a child pornographer “escaping” because of the difficulty in obtaining a warrant. What the police wanted was cart blanch access to all internet user information. Criticize the police online? Two keystrokes and they know who you are. We should be incredibly grateful this act of Nazism did not pass in the form the police wanted.