Curb your civil liberties

THE UBYSSEY EDITORIAL BOARD, THE UBYSSEY (UBC)

Better get cracking on downloading the latest season of America’s Next Top Model, because if Stéphane Dion’s Liberal party gets its way, your media-pirating, midget-pr0n-watching, bit-torrenting ass might be watched by more than just your webcam.

On March 23, Liberal MP Marlene Jennings introduced Bill C-416 into Parliament. This bill, otherwise known as the Modernisation of Investigative Techniques Act (MITA), requires that all new telephone and internet infrastructure include interception mechanisms that will assist in wiretapping and monitoring of internet usage. In other words, the government will be able to track what sites you’ve visited, what e-mail you’ve sent, and who you’ve talked to — all without a warrant. If the bill gets passed you can kiss another chunk of your civil liberties goodbye.

For those of you who can recall, this bill was originally created in 2002 but it was kept off the radar for three years until 2005, when it was read in the House of Commons. At the time its name was Bill C-74, also known as the Lawful Access Bill under the Martin government, and was under review until the Liberal government fell in 2006. In the chaos that followed the bill died, and the Conservatives never tried to revive it.

So why reintroduce the bill now? The extreme paranoia that followed the September 2001 attacks and the post-office anthrax scares in the U.S. has died down. Even the Canadian legislature, led by the Liberal opposition, opted not to renew certain provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2002. Hypocrisy alert: this is the same Liberal government that is trying to reintroduce the bill.

The Liberals defend Bill C-416 saying that it’s necessary to fight terrorism and child porn. We see this as a classic slippery slope dilemma. The intent of this legislation may be noble: officials want to combat drug dealing gangsters, homegrown terrorists and deviant child-pornographers.

However this act allows for intelligence agencies to record and analyze data on a whim. Combined with massive databases and advanced data mining algorithms, which sort through immense amounts of information, a huge amount of our daily “private” communications could be intelligibly scanned by government agencies.

It’s not hard to imagine that once agencies like the RCMP have access to this technology — and learn they can use it without warrants and significant oversight — they will use it for far more than originally intended. This could be very easily abused.

If you need to be convinced, look no further than to our neighbors down south. Organizations like the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America are suing individuals for downloading songs and movies. Legislation like Bill C-416 could easily be used by these organizations to track individuals’ Internet usage.

Giving intelligence and law enforcement agencies more access to our personal information may stop the occasional child-pornographer or would-be terrorist, but the cost to our privacy and freedom is unacceptable. Examples such as the case of Maher Arar illustrate not only how poor a job the government can do to protect individual rights, but also how devastating things can be when the government has the ability to violate individual rights.

Our thoughts can be best summed up by our ol’ friend Benji Franklin: “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Parliament resumes Sept. 17.