I don’t usually blog about the hideous farce that is American politics, but this is too good to pass up:

When Cheney was told during the ABC News interview that public opinion polls show an overwhelming opposition to the war in Iraq, Cheney’s response was: “So?”

And when the interviewer pressed him asking, “So — you don’t care what the American people think?” he responded, “No,” and explained, “I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.”

Americans also roundly reject the position put forward by White House spokeswoman Dana Perino in an effort to explain Cheney’s comments. Asked whether the public should have “input,” she replied, “You had your input. The American people have input every four years, and that’s the way our system is set up.”

I guess those right-wingers really mean it when they say, “The US is a republic, not a democracy.”

Foreign Policy in Focus has posted a great article called Globalization: What Is To Be Done? It’s an overview and critique of American free trade policy since World War II, emphasizing how corporations have benefited while workers’ rights have suffered. It neglects the issue of democratic control, but there’s only so much you can cover in 6000 words. And despite the far-left pedigree of the title, there’s no overwrought anti-imperialist rhetoric to distract from the plain facts. If, like me, you don’t know as much about globalization as you should, I’d strongly recommend checking it out.

(Updated. See below.)

The Canadian government has begun another consultation process on lawful access. This one focuses specifically on access to basic telco customer information — names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and IP addresses.

What’s interesting is that they’re doing it quietly, and trying to keep civil society groups out of the loop. From the same CBC article:

Michael Geist, chair of internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, said the process is not being conducted publicly as two previous consultations have been, in 2002 and in 2005.

The consultation has not been published in the Canada Gazette, where such documents are normally publicized, or on the agencies’ websites.

Interested parties have been given until Sept. 27 to submit their comments, which is a short consultation time, Geist said. Several organizations and individuals contacted by CBCNews.ca only received their documents this week.

On his blog, Geist adds that he “was asked not to post [the consultation documents] online.”

Back to the CBC article:

More pointedly, a number of parties that took part in the previous consultations, including privacy and civil liberty advocates — and even some telecommunication service providers — have not been made aware of the discussion, he said.

“It’s really disturbing particularly in light of the fact that they’ve had two prior consultations on lawful access in the past, so it’s not as if they don’t know the parties that are engaged on this issue,” Geist said.

Officials with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association were not aware of the consultation.

To those of us who have been following the lawful access issue, this is not surprising. The first round of lawful access consultations in 2002 faced heavy objections from privacy and civil liberties advocates (not to mention telcos who felt lawful access was an excessive burden on their operations). A second round of consultations took place in 2005, but as I have mentioned before, “civil society groups got one meeting in which the proposals were outlined for them, and then a laughably short two-week window in which to submit their comments.”

Also, keep in mind that the basic customer information being discussed in the current consultation is just the first phase of lawful access. The original consultation also looked at far more frightening possibilities like data retention and access to information related to the actual content of your activities online (e.g., what sites you visit and what’s in the emails you send). In 2005, when the Liberal government introduced its so-called Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act, it only included less serious first-phase proposals like the ones under discussion in the current consultation. (They tried the same thing with a private member’s bill last March.)

So, to recap:

• Canada’s cops and spies want more power to spy on you online.
• The Conservative government is helping them by sidelining civil society’s objections, while working closely with the telco industry (and the cops and spies).
• The Liberals did the same thing when they were in power.
• If our cops and spies get access to basic subscriber information — and they probably will, since both the Liberals and the Conservatives support the idea — they will be coming back to ask for expanded and more intrusive powers.

UPDATE, September 13: CTV has posted the consultation document (PDF) on their website.

UPDATE, September 19: That peculiar noise you heard late last week was the sound of the Conservative government backpedaling furiously:

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said the government would not introduce legislation forcing internet service providers to give customer information without a warrant.

“We have not and we will not be proposing legislation to grant police the power to get information from internet companies without a warrant. That’s never been a proposal,” Day told the Ottawa Citizen late Thursday.

“It may make some investigations more difficult, but our expectation is rights to our privacy are such that we do not plan, nor will we have in place, something that would allow the police to get that information.”

I’m glad to hear it. Let’s make sure they stick to this promise.

As for that leaked consultation document:

Day told the Citizen that the original document sent to a select group of stakeholders “never would have gone out if I had seen it” and that it “somehow went out without my approval.”

In other words, either our Public Safety Minister is incompetent, or significant erosions of due process don’t merit his attention.

The new deadline for public comment is October 12.

Joy Smith, a Conservative MP, has introduced a private member’s bill called the Clean Internet Act (Bill C-427). It’s a private member’s bill and therefore unlikely to pass, but still, it’s a scary piece of work. Here are the highlights:

• All ISPs would have to be licensed. Since the bill defines an ISP as “a person who provides a service that facilitates access to the Internet, whether or not the service is provided free or for a charge,” that would apparently include libraries that offer free public Internet access, not to mention Internet cafes, your workplace, and possibly you yourself if you let other people use your Internet connection. More generally, as Russell McOrmond notes, “ISPs should not need to be licensed any more than owners of photocopiers or computers should be licensed” — they’re access providers, not content providers.
• ISPs would be required to block access to hate speech, material that incites violence against women, or child porn. It would also be an offense, not only to post such material, but to possess any of this material if you got it off the Internet — even though we already have laws governing hate speech and child porn.
• ISPs would be required to deny service to anyone who “has used the Internet within the previous seven years for a purpose that would be an offence under this Act.”
• The executives of any ISP that violates this law would be subject to a fine or jail time. In addition, as Ars Technica points out, the bill would allow the government to revoke an ISP’s license — thus presumably cutting off Internet access for all of that ISP’s customers — if one of the ISP’s executive officers is convicted of committing violence against women, inciting hatred, or possessing child pornography. No, seriously — it’s section 4(3) of the bill.

An expert quoted in CBC’s article on the bill put it best: “The sentiment’s right, but the practicality is out to lunch.”

Incidentally, when she introduced this bill in Parliament, Joy Smith said, “We must all keep in mind that we need to stop the human trafficking that is happening in our country now and this bill makes a strong statement about that part of the Internet.” Needless to say, the bill doesn’t have anything to do with anything you or I would understand as human trafficking.

The Conservatives have commissioned a poll and a series of focus groups to examine the issue of electoral reform. Trouble is, the pollster they’ve hired is a raving right-wing lunatic, and the think tank that’s managing the focus groups thinks proportional representation is a bad idea. So far, the results are about what you’d expect. Idealistic Pragmatist has the details here and here.

That the Conservatives aren’t too keen on proportional representation isn’t surprising. Under proportional representation, the Conservatives — who can only claim about a third of the vote — would never be able to get the majority government they so desperately want. They’d have to form a coalition with other parties instead — something they seem to regard as unthinkable, even though it works quite well in other democratic countries. That’s why the Tories’ idea of electoral reform stops with elections and term limits for senators: real democratic reform, in the form of proportional representation, would sabotage their ambitions for a Parliamentary majority.

(Incidentally, the aforementioned Idealistic Pragmatist is a great source for information on electoral reform. IP’s Proportional representation FAQ and Six reasons to support proportional representation are excellent starting points if you want to learn more about the subject.)

I’ll be posting more about Passenger Protect, Canada’s nascent no-fly list, in the near future, but for now, here’s a CBC article suggesting that the cost of the system — estimated at $250 million — could keep it from being implemented. (The article is in French only, alas. Here’s a reasonably coherent English-language version, courtesy of Babelfish.)

From the Canadian Press:

Ottawa is exploring the possibility of allowing the private sector to finance and operate a new border crossing at Canada’s busiest point of entry to the United States, Trade and Infrastructure Minister Lawrence Cannon said Monday.

The clear signal that the federal government is entertaining private involvement in a second bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ont., comes amid new polling data that suggests nearly two-thirds of Canadians support the idea of public-private partnerships.

The poll in question was commissioned by the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships, and you can read it for yourself, if you like. It’s quite the piece of work. Apparently these are the questions they asked:

1. Governments are having trouble keeping pace with demands for new or improved public infrastructure and services. Do you agree or disagree?
2. It is time to allow the private sector to deliver these types of services in partnership with governments. Do you agree or disagree?
3. If your access to services remained the same, if the quality of services was the same or better and if the cost to you was no more than if the government was providing the service, would you support or oppose private sector involvement in the following areas: [and a bunch of service sectors are listed].

Aren’t access, quality of services, and cost three of the key issues surrounding privatization? (They also left out accountability, which to my mind would be the fourth.) How can you trust a poll that dodges those issues? And yet the Canadian Press story pretty much ignores the evident bias here. Sure, it quotes a union boss saying that the survey is “very short on questions that relate to access, cost and quality concerns,” but the reporter doesn’t follow that up — instead, the poll results are discussed as if they were reliable.

Also worth noting:

Security at the border crossing would continue to be the domain of Canadian and American border agencies, said David McFadden, chairman of communications for The Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships.

“What the private sector does is maintain the infrastructure, make sure it’s properly paved, cleaned, things of that nature,” McFadden said.

Let’s hope they stick to that. I’m not holding my breath, though: the article goes on to point out that Cannon “did say that a private-sector partner could ‘operate’ the crossing.” It would be nice if they could at least get their stories straight.

Last night, in the middle of a story on real estate fraud, CTV News inexplicably threw its support behind a national identity card. The segment claimed that such a card would ameliorate the risks of fraud and identity theft.

It’s not true. When it comes to real estate fraud, a national ID card offers no advantages over other identification documents. In fact, from a security standpoint, national ID cards are a singularly bad idea. Here’s why (and I’m getting this stuff from Bruce Schneier, so you can take his word for it):

• ID cards can be forged, no matter how “unforgeable” they’re designed to be.
• In order to get a real, official, government-issued ID card, you have to present other pieces of identification, which can be forged.
• ID cards have to be checked — usually by human beings, who are error-prone and often poorly trained.
• Finally, and most importantly, a national ID card would have to be backed up by a national ID database containing identifying information on everyone in the country. This database would need to be “widely and instantaneously accessible from airline check-in stations, police cars, schools, and so on.” It would contain data pulled together from all over the place, which means the data will be weird, inconsistent, and probably unreliable. Such a database would be a massive procedural and technological challenge (and that’s putting it mildly; Charlie Stross has convincingly argued that the UK’s plans for such a database could never work). It would also be a massive security risk: imagine what could happen if malicious hackers broke into the system and started messing with people’s records!

Schneier concludes, “That’s why, when someone asks me to rate the security of a national ID card on a scale of one to 10, I can’t give an answer. It doesn’t even belong on a scale.”

And yet the idea has been floating around in Canadian politics for a while now. It’s been on the table in national security discussions pretty much since September 11. Last February, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said that such a card is inevitable. I’d like to think the Canadian government will pay attention to security gurus like Bruce Schneier, learn from the debacle that Britain’s ID card scheme has become, and drop whatever plans it has to implement an ID card system of its own. But governments like to be seen to be doing something — especially when it comes to national security, which is the usual context for ID card proposals — and with major media outlets are talking favorably and uncritically about the idea, I suspect Ottawa will be pushing ahead with an ID card scheme. So maybe it’s time to start thinking about how to oppose such a plan.