Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Bill C30

I know lots of people are talking about this and putting the fear perspective on this. The fear campaign is happening on both sides, the conservatives are saying you are either for it or for Child Pornography, the other side is saying that if you aren't against this you are okay with the government knowing everything you have on your computer and everything you do on the internet.

The problem is most people have no clue how technology works or how the internet works so they have no clue what this bill actually means or what it will do. I am going to preface this with the fact that I do think the bill goes to far with what it allows but I also think we need a bill to allow police to better make use of technology to catch criminals that are currently getting away with crimes thanks to the police forces lack of abilities tracking things through the internet.

Lets start of with some conservative estimates for you, Canada has around 35 million people, out of that lets for arguments sake say half of those people have a home computer. That is 17 million computers at home surfing the internet during the day. Now if you also have a computer at work and surf which most people do that would probably be another 10-20 million computers surfing every day. Even if each Internet Service Provider hired a team of people to monitor everything going over the internet they would never be able to watch 20-40 million computers 24 hours a day 7 days a week and neither could the police or the government. The amount of traffic and data going across the net is so expansive that even if you took a 5 minute overview from a single ISP you would take weeks to sift through it.

Now for the second fallacy, even if they setup monitoring on the internet, they would not be able to see everything on your computer. It doesn't work like that, you need to have zero security or a virus on your computer to allow anyone from the outside to actually go through your computer's hard drive. Yes with a bit of work it is possible but that is not what Bill C30 or the software they are looking to implement is going to do. Also they are not installing key loggers on your computer so they are not going to see everything you type and they are not going to then have access to your bank records, email or anything else you do on the internet. If they suspect you of a crime all they are going to do is go to the ISP and ask that you me monitored as to what sites you are going to and what files are being uploaded and downloaded to your computer. Yes that is scarey and I would prefer that they get a warrant for that, just like a phone tap requires but I think ISP's also have to be more forth coming when the police track an IP down of a suspected criminal the ISP should give them the address and name of the person that correlates to that address.

My final comment on this is that most of the people that I see up in arms about this invasion of privacy are the same people that supported the gun registry which allowed the police and government to gather private and personal information about any person who has never committed a crime but wanted to own a hunting rifle. Why is it that you were okay with that invasion of privacy but not okay with one that would give the police a tool to catch actual criminals?