If You Value Your Privacy

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UPDATED:Are We Feeling Any Outrage Yet?

If we care a scintilla about privacy or any measure of aversion to government snooping into our private business, we damn well should be. As I wrote in yesterday's post, the Harper regime and its complicit agencies, intoxicated with power, have been requesting (sans warrants) and receiving data on us from the major telecoms and social media sites.

Now word comes that these Judases are being paid for their obsequious compliance by our tax dollars:

The Toronto Star reports the following:

Canadian taxpayers are footing the bill for government agencies to buy their private data from telecom companies without their knowledge.

According to parliamentary documents, government agencies pay between $1 and $3 for access to user data from telecom, Internet and social media companies.

Figures released Tuesday by Canada’s privacy watchdog indicate authorities requested that access from nine companies more than 1.19 million times a year, meaning authorities spend in excess of hundreds of thousands of dollars to quietly access Canadians’ personal data.

Read that again. The telecoms et al. are not only betraying us, but they are also being paid through our taxes for that betrayal.

Compounding that sell-out is the fact that these companies are refusing the Privacy Commissioner's request for more information about this foul practice, which Thomas Mulcair yesterday described as an abomination:

Mirko Bibic, Bell Canada’s vice-president of regulatory affairs, told reporters Wednesday evening that companies are unsure how to comply with the federal privacy commissioner’s request that telecoms publicly report how often they co-operate with law enforcement and government agencies.

But Bibic refused to say how common that co-operation is, or how often information is handed over to authorities without judicial oversight.

Such truculent arrogance surely indicates the abject contempt in which they hold us, their customers.

Exactly what could the government do with the data these companies are so blithely turning over?

According to a report from the privacy commissioner, “basic subscriber information” can be used to paint a picture of online activities, including browsing history, membership with organizations, physical locations visited, online services used by the subscriber.

“This information can be sensitive in nature in that it can be used to determine a person’s leanings, with whom they associate, and where they travel, among other things,” the report reads. “What’s more, each of these pieces of information can be used to uncover further information about an individual.”

Of course, defenders of such state intrusion will doubtlessly rely on that old saw, "If you have nothing to hide, why would you worry?

Without question, the time for such innocent and naive proclamations is long past.

UPDATE: Click here if you want to see how the regime and its enablers are 'spinning' this scandal.

In Case Anyone Cares Anymore

Rob Ford has embarrassed both himself and the city he was elected to serve yet again and again.

Is It Irony, Or Is It Hypocrisy?

It may be both. The Harper regime's penchant for withholding information from the public that should be accessible is well-known and well-documented.

As pointed out in this Star article, we are persistently denied access to the information about the dangerous side effects of drugs, how much Canada Post spent on overtime to end last year's backlog, nor how Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, the company implicated in the Lac-Mégantic train disaster, assured Transport Canada it could operate a one-man crew safely.

All of that, as the article makes clear, is merely the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

Unfortunately, the regime's penchant for keeping information concealed does not extend to Canadian citizens' right to privacy; here it is becoming increasing apparent that government wants to know far more about us than is either seemly or proper in a putatively democratic country.

As also reported in The Star,

Government agencies are asking telecoms and social media companies to turn over Canadians’ user data at “jaw-dropping” rates, with nearly 1.2 million requests in 2011 alone.

Which government and law enforcement agencies are requesting the data from the companies remains shrouded in secrecy. And the companies themselves are refusing to disclose further details, according to Canada’s privacy watchdog.

And the most worrisome aspect of this invasion is that most of these are requests, i.e., unaccompanied by warrants. Compounding the matter is that when data is turned over, the telecoms do not inform their customers:

The companies [Bell Rogers, Telus et al] say they don’t inform their customers when their information is turned over to authorities, meaning the vast majority of those customers would have no knowledge of the transaction.

Beyond that, they will not comment further, refusing requests from the Privacy Commissioner to tell her how many times they have handed over private data to the government without a warrant.

That same cone of silence seems to be enveloping the government:

The Department of Public Safety declined an interview request by the Star. Industry Minister James Moore, whose department is responsible for the telecom sector, refused to comment on the story when asked by reporters in the House of Commons.

Unfortunately, there is much worse to come:

Michael Geist, one of Canada’s leading Internet privacy experts .... warns that legislation currently before Parliament will actually expand the number of organizations that can ask telecoms and social media companies to voluntarily hand over their customers’ information, and protect those companies from civil or criminal lawsuits.

“It is a structure that allows for the massive disclosure of personal information with no court oversight whatsoever,” Geist said.

Anyone who is not disturbed by these revelations clearly places far too little value on their privacy and accords far too much faith in the benevolence of a government that has consistently proven itself inimical to the best interests of those it 'serves.'

A Failed Puppet Master?

In a withering assessment of Stephen Harper, that is the conclusion Andrew Coyne seems to draw in his National Post column:

We are so heavily invested, we media types, in the notion of Harper as master strategist, able to see around corners and think seven moves ahead and what not, that we tend not to notice how many times he has been screwing up of late. The sudden and more or less complete rewriting, on the same day as the Supreme Court decision, of the colossally misjudged Fair Elections Act, after weeks of waving off any and all criticism as self-interested or partisan or both? Merely a prudent bid to cut their losses. The unusual public goading of Barack Obama (“a no brainer … won’t take no for an answer… etc”) into making a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline project, six years after it was first proposed? Either a play to the base or a wink to the Republicans or a deliberate raising of the diplomatic stakes, anything but what it looks like: a catastrophic fumbling of a key file.

Indeed, perhaps this is all evidence of a very tired government, running only on the fumes of the hatred, dissension, and division it has sewn since 2006:

Observes Coyne:

It is reckless, not in the style of governments that overread their mandate, but in an aimless, scattershot way. It is partisan, but for no purpose other than stubbornness and tribalism. It will take every fight to the limit, pick fights if none present themselves, with no thought to the consequences of either victory or defeat but seemingly out of sheer bloodlust. Like the proverbial dog chasing the car, it has no idea what it will do when it catches it.

All but the most inveterate ideologues would likely agree that it is well past time for a change.

A Reading Recommendation.

I have a deep respect for Alex Himelfarb, the director of the Glendon School of International and Public Affairs and tireless proponent of responsible, progressive taxation. The latter, as one can well-imagine, likely makes him persona non grata in many circles, but those are likely the same circles that close out responsible thought or discussion on any topics that might threaten to puncture the artificial and insular world they encase themselves in.

It is, of course, easy to take the expedient route, as have politicians like Stephen Harper, Justin Trudeau, and Thomas Mulcair at the federal level, and, here in Ontario, Tim Hudak and Andrea Horwath, all essentially proclaiming the evils of taxation, some more stridently than others, as they promise no tax increases. Clearly, in taking such positions, they are playing to our basest impulses.

Alex Himelfarb refuses to play that game. In his latest reminder of things our political leaders would rather we not contemplate, Without a tax debate, we risk sleepwalking into the future, Alex and his son Jordan present this thesis:

Canadians have a right to know what they’re giving up before celebrating the next round of tax cuts.

The article makes reference to the Himelfarbs' book, Tax Is Not a Four-Letter Word, a collection of essays that explores the tax question; its central purpose is perhaps best expressed here:

In the book we do try to counter the view that taxes are simply a burden from which people must be relieved. Simply, they are the way we pay for things we have decided to do together because we cannot do them at all or as well alone. Our approach has yielded reactions both positive and negative.

And this is the crux of today's Star article as they argue that we cannot have an honest discussion about taxation because we do not have a clear understanding of the relationship between taxes and what they buy:

Two successive parliamentary budget officers, whose job it is to know, admit they cannot get the information they need to determine the costs and consequences of tax and spending cuts. So how are we expected to know? And without information about the trade-offs, how do we make informed democratic decisions?

They argue that without this basic knowledge, we as a society cannot make an informed decision on what constitutes proper taxation:

Whether we’re taxed too much or too little is a perennial debate that now needs rebalancing. It’s all well and good to say that many Canadians want smaller government but that means nothing unless it’s based on some understanding of how this will affect our ability to pursue our shared goals. We ought to know what we’re giving up before we celebrate the next round of tax cuts.

That seems to me to be the crux of the problem we face today as a society. The Harper government would have us believe that the only thing we are giving up when tax rates go down is an unwarranted intrusion of government into our lives. The Himelfarbs argue that if we look beyond the self-serving rhetoric of our political overseers, what we lose in embracing that mentality is something much different and ultimately much more costly to all of us.

This Has Gotta Hurt

Expect the Harper attack machine to ramp up its game: