(* from Canada’s national anthem. No irony intended, I assume).
Just revealed by The Intercept: Canada Casts Global Surveillance Dragnet Over File Downloads
This marks a new low in Canada’s data hoovering as a junior partner in the US-run War on Terror TM.
More detail here, at CBC News.
According to OpenMedia.ca, “The data they’re collecting can identify everything from your sexual orientation, religious and political beliefs, to your medical history. This sensitive information is being shared with the spy agencies of several other countries, without our knowledge or consent.”
If you oppose secretive, ever-expanding, high-cost, out-of-control spying on all of us, say so now.
This week, the Harper regime introduced dangerous new anti-terrorism legislation that will give spy agencies even more powers.
Michael Vonn, Policy Director, BC Civil Liberties Association: “Canada has utterly failed to respond to the urgent need for national security oversight and instead, proposes an unprecedented expansion of powers that will harm innocent Canadians and not increase our public safety.”
Tell the Harper regime: Cease and desist, back off, quit spying on us.
For more on the steady advance of the national security state in Canada, see Bold Scientists. Scroll down to chapter 6, The cloud.
For further details and resources, check out Transparent Lives: Surveillance in Canada.
(Photo: http://www.pxleyes.com)
“Tremendously hopeful and profoundly disturbing.”
Great minds don’t think alike. They think differently. Here.
How did they manage to turn Google into a verb? Here’s a clue:
A longish (10 – 15 minute read), eerily fascinating fragment from Julian Assange’s new book, When Google Met Wikileaks. In this excerpt Assange documents his bizarre encounter with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, one of the most powerful managers of information – our information – on the planet.
Eric Schmidt, Google CEO. Photo: Business Insider.
From the excerpt:
“I began to think of Schmidt as a brilliant but politically hapless Californian tech billionaire who had been exploited by the very U.S. foreign-policy types he had collected to act as translators between himself and official Washington.
“I was wrong.”
How wrong Julian Assange was, and how tightly enmeshed Google is in the US national security apparatus, he documents in meticulous, chilling detail. Here. Or here.
But all is not lost. There are alternatives to Googlism, created by people who value freedom – the real thing, not the flags-and-guns kind – over profit and power.
For common sense on options, check out the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s Surveillance Self Defence Index.
For deeper insight into the global shroud of state/corporate surveillance that’s tightening over us even as it seduces us into complicity, meet David Lyon, a world authority on surveillance and population control, in The Cloud, chapter 6 in Bold Scientists, here. (Scroll down to The Cloud.)
“An ultra-secretive government agency is collecting hugely revealing information on thousands of law-abiding Canadians.”
Communications Security Establishment Canada. We pay for it, they spy on us. That’s the deal. They spy on all our communications, all the time: phone, email and internet, contacts, conversations, relationships, religious and political affiliations, medical records, financial transactions….
OpenMedia.ca is on the case. But they can’t do it alone. The Canadian government needs to hear a very loud NO from everyone of us who cares.
David Lyon, world authority on surveillance and social control: “Indifference is appropriate only for those who think that efficiency, convenience and speed qualify as values to be placed over openness, fairness, and the accountability of those whose task it is to process personal data.”
Add your voice here: https://openmedia.ca/CSECisWatching?src=156782.
More on David Lyon, our very Transparent Lives and ‘social sorting’ in Bold Scientists. Read an excerpt here.
And pass it on, far and wide.
Michael Riordon 