Ottawa wants the power to create secret backdoors in networks for surveillance

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-ottawa-wants-the-power-to-create-secret-backdoors-in-our-networks-to/

by walterbell • 2 years ago

364 226 2 years ago

theglobeandmail.com

mikerg87• 2 years ago

What could possible go wrong with this asinine idea.

h2odragon• 2 years ago

Can't they just ask the NSA for their backdoors? What are allies for, after all?

rolph• 2 years ago

lets flip the coin over, suppose the NSA, has been nattering at canada to get up to date, and resume fulfilment of obligations to a current standard.

Scoundreller• 2 years ago

Is that why my Canadian ISP used to route so much local traffic through USA?

(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).

poochipie6• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/y6d41

poochipie6• 2 years ago

How else will $GOVERNING_PARTY find out which of their political opponents' bank accounts they should freeze?

canadiantim3• 2 years ago

Rest assured, they already have their The Liberalist database for that. For those who don't know, that's the Liberal party's voter outreach database... also used for picking judges! It's a great system we have where $CANADAS_NATURAL_GOVERNING_PARTY picks and chooses judges based on their loyalty score in the party database.

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.

nvy2• 2 years ago

All parties appoint partisan judges. If you think your party of choice doesn't then you need to give your head a shake.

markus_zhang• 2 years ago

All in the name of security. Sure, go ahead, let the curtain fall.

blackeyeblitzar• 2 years ago

I hate this but isn’t this what the US is secretly doing anyways? How did outrage in America die down?

seanw4443• 2 years ago

The spying is too far removed from the average person's life that people don't care enough. One person sitting in your house watching everything you do would be really spooky, and everyone would be upset. Countless unidentified people watching everything you do, anywhere, from anywhere, is of course not nearly as spooky (/s).

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.

pc863• 2 years ago

What rights did someone have in 1790 that they didn't have in 1890?

waynenilsen• 2 years ago

Our Encryption is still theoretically sound. There was an attempt made to do something very similar called the Clipper Chip back in 1993 but it failed. Snowden revealed massive warrantless data collection of metadata which is also very valuable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

londons_explore2• 2 years ago

All the big providers seem to have this odd model of "We use E2E encryption, but we do unencrypted backups by default".

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...

esafak2• 2 years ago

There's always the next thing to be outraged about. This morning I heard about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

seanw4443• 2 years ago

Canada being totalitarian? I'm shocked.

tomComb• 2 years ago

I know that opponents of the current gov are enjoying this line recently, but our government is so far from totalitarianism that this seems silly to me.

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.

johnny99k• 2 years ago

Have we forgotten Covid so quickly? People involved in a legal protest had their bank accounts seized.

nightowl_games• 2 years ago

Freezing the bank accounts of the trucker protest and deploying the emergency powers _was_ a bit wild. Even our top court ruled the emergency powers weren't necessary. Opening the windsor bridge, yeah, lets arrest everyone immediately, but clearing the people out of ottawa? That ones not so clear. But no matter how you slice it, the bank account freezing was a precedent that probably shouldn't have been made.

poochipie6• 2 years ago

"The government should solve every problem" is a totalizing idea the Liberals have implemented though.

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.

rustcleaner12• 2 years ago

Governments have figured out they can affect their populations like a rancher affects cattle. Elections are no longer solemn rituals but instead are processes for manufacturing consent to be governed. Only through the magick of the social contract can your neighbors collectively eat you while individually they are prevented.

marcosdumay5• 2 years ago

The government puts most of its effort into protecting friendly companies and industries from competition and even funneling taxpayer money to them.

Somehow, the people rushing to use that "faccism" label tend to ignore this one property of the original ones.

larater• 2 years ago

As an American that has gone up to Canada thousands of times in my life, you have to be completely delusional to say this.

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.

Longhanks• 2 years ago

No need to worry, the EU tries the same every few weeks.

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/let-yourself-be-monitored-e...

chongli• 2 years ago

Authoritarian. Totalitarianism requires a large mobilization of the population under a single ideology.

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.

lynx23• 2 years ago

Totalitarianism requires a large mobilization of the population under a single ideology.

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.

markhahn2• 2 years ago

This is pointless and ill-informed cynicism.

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.

tavavex• 2 years ago

People online are insanely cynical about Canada without having ever stepped one foot in the country. A ton of discourse regarding Canada happens in between non-Canadians, and I'm not sure if it's intentional at this point. Every scandal or disagreement gets blown up to an international stage, people eager to take party talking points as unquestionable truth.

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.

mardifoufs6• 2 years ago

I mean, Canada is the only country in the west that has used emergency powers not once but twice in 50 years. Either our country is unstable (it's not) or the federal government clearly doesn't give a shit about precedent and due process.

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.

verandaguy5• 2 years ago

This is an awful take.

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.

kevinprince• 2 years ago

This keeps coming up in most countries every few years. Everyone seems to forget in nearly every country telecoms are licensed industries and providing legal intercept is a legal obligation of those licenses.

seanw4443• 2 years ago

Ah okay, the law says so, so it must be acceptable.

londons_explore2• 2 years ago

I just want everyone to be aware of this. Every call or chat conversation that is intercepted should have an audible/text message saying "beep. beep. Sergeant Tom smith has joined this conversation as allowed by wiretapping regulations for your safety and security".

Followed by "This conversation is now being recorded by Sergeant Tom Smith".

worewood• 2 years ago

While they have the power to backdoor telecom networks for surveillance, what they actually want is a way of doing this without legal oversight or recourse to traditional legal gatekeeping like warrants.

So we should not shrug this off just because "they already can do it".

tamimio• 2 years ago

Pretty much, as right now with proper legal justification the government can access any communication, or at least get the meta data associated with.

sandworm1012• 2 years ago

We have seen these a thousand times. I say bring it on. The pendulum has swung solidly into the hands of users. We have so many privacy tools to counter state surveillance these days. Any country openly conducting mass surveillance will soon see the target population wrap itself in VPNs and encrypted services. Remember when ISPs began throttling torrents? Everyone then flicked the switch and torrent traffic become encrypted. Remember the London riots, what happened to RIM shortly afterwards? Remember Lavabit? Go ahead and tap my SMS or whatsapp text messages. That's the push I need to switch the last of my friends over to Signal.

poochipie6• 2 years ago

Accelerationism[0] FTW.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism

RegnisGnaw• 2 years ago

See China, most people are totally okay with it and VPNs are rare.

kredd2• 2 years ago

The reality is super majority of user base don’t care about data privacy or what government can see as long as it doesn’t affect their day to day lives. There was a big outrage when WhatsApp changed their privacy policy, everyone is still using it. Supermajority of people who live in China are not using any of the western social media. Or how nobody cares when there’s a breach of personal data, and it gets leaked online. Again, unless it affects them directly, it really doesn’t matter. We (people in tech and tech-adjacent fields) are in an extremely fringe bubble. And I can’t really blame them, after all who has time to think about all the second order effects of different policy changes.

rustcleaner12• 2 years ago

Again, unless it affects them directly, it really doesn’t matter.

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!

burningChrome2• 2 years ago

> We have so many privacy tools to counter state surveillance these days.

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.

tharmas4• 2 years ago

Good post. But I believe it was his brother that recognized the hand writing. Otherwise, they probably wouldn't have got him.

sandworm1012• 2 years ago

But we are not all unibombers. Any security/privacy discussion starts with the level of threat. The average person doesn't want to hide their every detail, nor do they have to. The average person probably wants something like "I don't want my government to passively scan what I read online". That's an easy hurdle. Or, "my brother is addicted to cocaine and I want to talk to him about it without AT&T reporting our conversation the police." Again, this is easy. But if you say "I'm a defense contractor currently under investigation for treason and want to I pass money/information to my handler in North Korea undetected." THAT would be a challenge. It is probably still doable, but we should not abandon the basic needs of most people simply because we cannot promise total privacy to the most difficult cases too.

(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.)

rustcleaner12• 2 years ago

Most of the cases you hear and read about, the gov never had to break any encryption protocols to catch people doing bad things.

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.

rustcleaner12• 2 years ago

CISA can analyze flow on backbones and (I presume) the various branches of partner domestic ISP networks. It's one way they track down botnet C2 nodes. What does this mean? It means the fact you accessing a hidden service is no longer hidden from the state. While the content may be encrypted, CISA could tap on the pipe with a wrench at a known HS node and see what pipeline in the mix rings on the other end (my cute way of describing adding delays and interrupts to a stream so those show up as recognizable fingerprints to scan for elsewhere, like a cable finder/tester). Combine in some techniques on analyzing payload sizes and order, and some decent guesses of the content can be formulated.

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.

johnnyAghands• 2 years ago

Its almost as if these policy makers don't know anything about anything.

MathMonkeyMan• 2 years ago

I've met people who believe that there are good guys and bad guys, that they are the good guys, and that there should be no protections for the bad guys.

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.

lupusreal2• 2 years ago

Their crystal ball for telling the future has proven that they are on "the right side of history [which hasn't yet occurred]."

piltdownman• 2 years ago

Canada has the power to backdoor telecom networks for surveillance. All host nations do for their infrastructure as part of the RAN Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception

What Canada seems to actually want is a way of doing this without legal oversight or recourse to traditional legal gatekeeping like warrants.

mrandish• 2 years ago

Given the rapidly declining state of individual privacy, when discussing these extensions it helps to be specific about the authorized agency and context. For example, these days, it's pretty much a given that NSA-type spy agencies are already getting all of whatever electronic communications they want with little friction. In the US there are certain supposed safeguards against surveilling US citizens domestically but we've already seen how quickly and easily these have been circumvented by using partner 'five eyes' agencies and commercial data brokers.

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.

jonny_eh• 2 years ago

Good insight. The difference between the NSA and local cops is that the NSA won't be looking for some bullshit to use as an excuse to arrest or harass you.

esafak2• 2 years ago

What's RAN? It's not in the link.

kevin_nisbet2• 2 years ago

Radio Access Network - basically think the cell phone towers and the equipment for those towers.

kevin_nisbet2• 2 years ago

I was going to add the same thing, this isn't only something the telecom providers do, the equipment providers include lawful intercept features as part of the equipment, the telecom just has to setup access. I don't have a chance to check right now, but I think this is even part of the published standards.

thsksbd11• 2 years ago

Furthermore, Canada doesn't have a (real) constitution since the TP they have since 1982 has a "not withstanding" clause, meaning parliament can just ignore their equivalent of the Bill of Rights

SECProto3• 2 years ago

Note that the notwithstanding clause has never been used by the federal government (the "parliament" you referenced).

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").

peeters3• 2 years ago

I know you know this, because you mentioned the Bill of Rights, but just to be more precise, we have a constitution, but our charter of rights is overridable in certain circumstances. The constitution is more than an enumeration of rights in both the US and Canada, it also defines the structure of representation, government, and democracy, none of which is subject to the notwithstanding clause (obviously, because the notwithstanding clause itself is part of the Constitution).

stackedinserter• 2 years ago

Canada does have The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but even basic things like property rights or self defence are not even mentioned there, and those that are, described vaguely, so it renders the whole charter not worth the ink that it's printed with.

incomingpain• 2 years ago

Canada already has lawful intercept.

This is totally their goal.

torginus• 2 years ago

How? Doesn't HTTPS offer E2E interception?

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?

dietr1ch• 2 years ago

Can you have true E2E encryption without knowing your peer's public key in advance? They could cheat by sending you to talk to someone else in a "private" manner.

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.

frabbit7• 2 years ago

Doesn't HTTPS offer E2E _interception_?

A slip of keyboard I assume?

protocolture• 2 years ago

Usually the difference is where the interception occurs.

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.

BA_and_bored• 2 years ago

Are we supposed to believe that 5 eyes aren't doing it already?

tharmas4• 2 years ago

Yes, but they can't use it in court. This, presumably, would enable the info to be used in court.

achrono• 2 years ago

If Snowden and Assange have taught us one thing, it is that state-sponsored surveillance is not a topic you want to have a very high evidence threshold for. The available evidence is always going to lag the actuality and even what we previously thought of as exaggerations/outliers in terms of suspicions of surveillance (e.g. "NSA knows I hate broccoli") have turned out to be not so unwarranted after all.

somenameforme6• 2 years ago

The NSA was literally spying in World of Warcraft. [1] About the time you have spooks running around in video games as Elves 'for national defense', you know we live in the dumb (but endlessly entertaining) timeline.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/09/nsa-spies-onli...

mschuster91• 2 years ago

Online games have historically been quite a way for people to organize beyond the wide Internet. Steam and Discord in particular gained notoriety in recent years [1], but I distinctly remember UT2004 being flooded with Nazi trolls all the time even around 2010.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/far-right-took-over-steam-discor...

marcosdumay5• 2 years ago

Spying by participating there is normal and expected.

cbsmith4• 2 years ago

There have been intelligence leaks through games before, and chat groups... you just have to assume anything you aren't surveilling will be used.

therockspush• 2 years ago

Four Lions puffin party. Parody of incompetent jihadis using a kids game to communicate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fd4yjFto0A

lupusreal2• 2 years ago

For some reason, Canada wants us to believe they don't already have this.

jmclnx• 2 years ago

Well with GNU pg, you can have all the backdoors in networks all you want, but it will do Canada no good.

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.

bluefirebrand3• 2 years ago

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

rvba• 2 years ago

Tons of people use teams/zoom/other to make calls on their PCs. Also emails and chats..

markhahn2• 2 years ago

no one uses a PC for communication? why even would you apparently equate that silly msft with desktop use?

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.

croes• 2 years ago

I think this is the new part additional to existing surveillance

This could include requiring telcos to alter the 5G encryption standards that protect mobile communications to facilitate government surveillance.

moose44• 2 years ago

I don’t understand the point of attempting to pass a bill and draw attention to the subject if they already do this?

Context: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadas-public-health-a...

rustcleaner12• 2 years ago

Call me paranoid (I'll fess up to it), but I think client-side scanners like Recall are expressly for defeating E2EE without breaking the math or hardware.

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.

maxglute• 2 years ago

Only matter of time before OS/recall operators realize they're sitting on stockpile of "accidentally" captured critical info and get into the information brokers game.

rolandog• 2 years ago

"Microsoft: best Linux salesperson!"

davikr• 2 years ago

It won't be long until Microsoft offers "backing up" your Recall data into OneDrive, where LEO will be able to easily subpoena it.

For instance, WhatsApp strongly suggests backing up your data to Drive, where it's easy to obtain a copy if you're a cop.

heavyset_go• 2 years ago

They won't even need to subpoena it, companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc regularly just hand over data when asked nicely by law enforcement. Some of them even have portals to automate the process.

rustcleaner12• 2 years ago

I wish I could find some old talks by John Quaid (actor Dennis Quaid's father). I remember one entitled "I don't need no stinking drivers license" or something. This headline really brings those to mind.

HeatrayEnjoyer• 2 years ago

Is he as much of an insane clown as his kid?

mysterypie• 2 years ago

In 2017, the CBC demonstrated how hackers only needed a Canadian MP’s cell number to intercept his movements, text messages and phone calls.
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?

martincmartin• 2 years ago

The Economist had an article about this last week:

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/05/17/...

(Accompanying editorial: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/05/23/hacking-phones-...)

cbsmith4• 2 years ago

Yeah, SS7 was not really designed for the scenarios it now finds itself in (hell, I remember my dad talking to me about it back in the 80's). It's amazing how well it works, but that's exactly the context where one expects to find security vulnerabilities in spades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7

nsxwolf• 2 years ago

I read this first as "China".

sqeaky2• 2 years ago

That is what we were told as kids, but at least some of that was deflection for crimes of our fellow citizens.

foresto• 2 years ago

I wonder if it's time for democracies to constitutionally enshrine encryption into our systems of due process (or whatever the correct legal term is).

It would seem to align well with the concept of checks and balances, at least.

motohagiography• 2 years ago

The problem with these efforts is they aren't for responding to actual crime or safety concerns, but for securing party rule and controlling dissent.

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.

helloooooooo• 2 years ago

lol cope

TriangleEdge• 2 years ago

I have some knowledge of the LI (lawful intercept) space. Some USA/Canada agencies/companies uses tools by JSI Telecom to do this. They do deep packet inspection and phone call recording with retention policies set by whatever law the host country has. For calls that are recorded, you cant record chats to lawyers, so a human has to listen to the call and mute it. Some countries don't allow recording, so a human has to listen in on the call live. Blah blah blah.

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.

gchokov• 2 years ago

Canada used to be a great country not that far in the past.

kennywinker• 2 years ago

When? The last residential school closed in 1996, so anything before that is out.

nativeit• 2 years ago

…while government MPs maintained that their intent is not to expand surveillance capabilities,

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!

imchillyb• 2 years ago

Every government on earth wants this, and they'll have it. The backdoors may not occur today, nor tomorrow. They may take another couple of years to implement, but they'll be there. The data-collective desires it. The backdoors are too useful to deny.

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.

banku_brougham• 2 years ago

My summation of what I've learned in this comment thread:

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.

0xbadc0de5• 2 years ago

When a government fears its citizens, it is a democracy. When the citizens fear the government, it is a tyranny.

Stop building the chains that will be used to enslave you.

gloosx• 2 years ago

This could include requiring telcos to alter the 5G encryption standards that protect mobile communications to facilitate government surveillance.

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.

Ottawa wants the power to create secret backdoors in networks for surveillance

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