The Conservative government has introduced an Online Surveillance Bill that could violate your Charter right to privacy — unless you act now to stop them.
This bill would force internet service providers to track, preserve and hand over your personal subscriber information, including your email and IP addresses, upon request without a warrant.
Forget creeping your Facebook. Stephen Harper’s people would now have the legal right to monitor your emails and track your every move online without any kind of judicial oversight.
Liberals are standing up for your privacy rights in Parliament – but we need your help.
The government is on the defensive following a public outcry. They will be sending the bill to committee and have said they’ll consider opposition amendments. But with a majority government they can oppose any fair, sensible amendments we propose unless we demonstrate an overwhelming show of public support. That’s where you come in.
The Liberal Party’s Public Safety Critic Francis Scarpaleggia has studied the work of experts like Privacy Commissioner of Canada Jennifer Stoddart and Canada Research Chair Michael Geist to craft amendments that strike a proper balance between privacy rights and public safety.
With your support we can force the government to hold open, televised committee hearings and stop them from using procedural tactics to limit debate and ram the bill through Parliament to avoid further scrutiny.
Then please forward this email to friends and share the petition on Facebook and Twitter as widely as possible before the committee meets.
Thank you.
Bob Rae
As of right now the “Calgary Herald” is holding a live chat on this very issue and so far 97% are against this bill. Its pretty obvious what the 99% really want.
Let’s pretend that there are no electronic communications. There would still be pedophiles and all sorts of criminals which the police and government wish to ensnare. Then what would be the “analogue equivalent” of Bill C-30?
Bill C-30 would require that the postal service open all letters, and make a copy — manually transcribed because this is before we had photocopy machines — to be filed away with meta data documenting personal details of the sender and recipient. The police would have unfettered access to the meta data along with a brief summary of contents. Can you imagine how useful this would be for corrupt officials? Indeed, it would induce corruption!
I’d like to think that this surveillance never happened because governments and police respected an individual’s freedoms and privacy. But the very existence of Bill C-30 suggests that this may not have been the case.
More likely, this never happened before the electronic era because it simply couldn’t be done. Like many things, it would be just too labour intensive, without electronic machines.
I signed the petition, but with grave reservations. Fundamentally, Bill C-30 is shooting a scatter-gun at the wrong target.
Bill C-30 purports to be about “Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act”. But it doesn’t address that issue! Pedophilia is a poorly understood disorder — Bill C-30 replaces thoughtful action with knee-jerk vigilantism. And it will be the innocent that get kicked!