A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention

Have you checked the premise? Usually the waves of fake protect-the-children policies are widely decried, support is fairly thin and the politicians pass it anyway then refuse to revisit the issue ever.

It is like the constant aggressive warfare the US is in - the US public clearly loathes it. Every single election they seem to vote for the candidate most vocally promising peace. I don't think it would be fair to say that the people keep accepting it, the dynamic is clearly that the political class refuses to acknowledge the hint.

> For example, continuing to accept anything that remotely passes as protect-the-children politics without understanding that the consequences are worse than the benefits, even for the children themselves.

Passing a censorship/surveillance bill using the pretext of protecting children is the opposite of WYSIWYG. The true motive is building an apparatus to use to enforce other authoritarian policies and protecting children is the Trojan horse.

If people were better informed about second order effects then that wouldn't work because they would see through the consequences when a pretext is being presented for a bad idea, and then the politicians who attempt it would be more often punished than rewarded. The tactic of lying to people would happen less often because it would be selected against when the number of people who see through you is enough to boot you out of office.

The most confident I ever was that I was "obviously correct" was when I was 20.

Absolutely. Bread and circuses isn't a new idea.

>The only possible way to remedy this is to maximize your own ability to exert power, possibly by becoming massively rich, and then hope it doesn't corrupt you enough along the way such that you can still enact good in the end.

Points for the doing good in the end. But it's a rule in hell/serve in heaven issue, if you first need to create hell with your quest for power you have failed the objective of doing good in the end.

Sometimes less information is more information.

Okay, but what's so bad about getting something positive done? It doesn't have to be comprehensive to apply to data brokers to be an improvement. That would bring in the data broker lobby and big tech. This bill would cement protections for Americans from their government.

>It's also going to piss off almost all of society if their data cannot be monetized, because pretty much all notable services will go from free to paid overnight.

Does it ban data brokers and selling data? From the website it seems to be focused on government privacy invasions. Its not a GDPR although we need that too (hopefully a better version).

There were more people willing to stand up for privacy after 9/11 during the “with us or against us” GWOT, which really says something.

This went too far with the whole woke thing, and resulted in 2 non-consecutive terms of trump, handing the right a litany of power they had no idea how to wield, and they hit every stupid branch falling down the failure tree.

Education isn’t the answer, dictating “I know what’s best” isn’t the answer, doge wasn’t the answer, starting random wars isn’t the answer.

Maybe by process of elimination we can find the answers. I am Hopeful that if the left gets a foothold again in the coming midterms they do not repeat their past mistakes.

Hopeful != optimistic. Lot of angry people out for blood.

Multiparty yes, but also first-past-the-post, which favours 2 dominant parties.

An explanation as to why the NDP fail to gain any substantial power could fill an entire book but imho the overarching reason comes down to the demographic distribution of Canada and dominance of the Bloq Quebecois has over Quebec preventing the establishment of any lasting NDP influence in such a densely populated part of the country.

As for the subject at hand, I wish it would be so easy as to just call an elected official, but as I said above, with the Liberal control of parliament for the remainder of their term and their high support in the polls there’s nothing that will Make them backtrack.

And this speaks to what Waterluvian mentioned in another thread. Too often with these kinds of surveillance laws the drive for them doesn’t seem to be originating by from the electorate, and it feels like this kind of stuff has an exogenous source and is meant for a whole different audience or player in the game.

recommend reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(book) there's a netflicks documentary by the same name that is NOT a substitute for the book.

Well, because the issue with vaccine doubt, is misinformation. It's disinformation, spread for either profit (followers on youtube), or foreign actors working to reduce the cohesion of the West's societies.

Russia? China? Iran? None of these countries, even together, stand a chance militarily against the West. But if you cannot beat them militarily, you must weaken them from within. So confusion. Distrust. Pour fuel on the fire of any differences between sectors of a society. If you can weaken your political enemy, they it ceases to become a threat. Even better if you can trick your enemy into fighting itself!

It's no secret that a lot of countries are engaged in disinformation campaigns against the West. If you can cause your competitor to have plagues, when they were preventable? Well, that ties up resources, reduces productivity, and so forth.

I honestly believe that much of ID verification on the Internet is about this. A healthy society can handle outliers, handle internally created disinformation. Not so, if 1 guy in a foreign country seems like 1000 youtube channels. And you can see this everywhere. A video with a TTS voice, which is now progressing to entirely crafted video from scratch. Now anyone from China can look like a US citizen, going on about the woes of vaccination.

But if you can identify every person, and they can be sued for slander, libel, or criminal acts? Then you're back to normal, internal, citizen protest. EG, your normal crazies. And it can't be stated enough, there are a lot of marginals. Those "on the fence". If they hear enough nutty stuff, they move into almond territory too.

In the end, China, Russia, Iran won't be truthful or play ball, or will undermine attempts with fake IDs willfully issued, so they'll just get cut of entirely. The West will likely sign treaties.

So. Identity verification, is actually an answer to the vaccine issue. After all, we didn't have this level of issue until crazy Internet posters caused it. Although, to be fair, Elvis Presley is who helped convince youth to get the original polio vaccinations.

One way to look at it, is like driver's licenses. Before them, there was no way to stop a person from legally driving on the road. Take it away, and now they could be fined, jailed, etc for driving "without a license". A few bad actors were just unrepentant, and suddenly everyone could be carded, ID required, just to get around. This is like that. A bad result, eg ID on the net, but the attempt is likely to solve 100 internet pains.

I think if we have any sense, we'll come up with a best-privacy-laden method to allow this to happen. Because I cannot see how it will go away. If we can steer it, make it palatable. make sure it cannot be used by industry to track us, etc., it would be at least a partial win.

When I brought up the 30 year figure, I was talking about the internet becoming more widely available, but still not mainstream or expected. I'm just trying to convey how long it's been around. Partially to illustrate that the equation hasn't changed in a long while, at least for a decade. Why did past attempts to control the entire internet with a heavy hand fail? They were tried extensively in the 2010s, and the 2000s, a few even before that. And now in 2026 we finally find the one worst thing ever that every government is suddenly in agreement over, moving in complete global lockstep, and everyone more or less knows that it will be forced on us no matter what.

I never disagreed about the probability of it happening, I was just trying to provide some points that probably led you to disagree with these measures, putting them into specifics instead of just a vague dislike that's expected of most tech enthusiasts like us.

> But I have seen courts push back over and over about governmental tracking, about police going too far in their tracking, yet I have seen very little, comparatively, push back about tracking on the corporate side. And we need to be honest here, in both cases private enterprise will manage the infrastructure which handles tracking, it's just who handles the "who is this person" portion. State or corporate.

This feels like you're talking about a specific country. Many nations will roll their own government-controlled identity systems, some already have the groundwork set up for it. The way courts react also depends on the nation, but a big problem for privacy legislation is that it's difficult to compel a foreign megacorporation not to do something, especially if you need their host nation as an ally. Either way, we've already been living under a corporate tracking regime for a while. If the identity system is controlled by the companies, at least it leaves gaps that can be filled by people who think otherwise, and it won't be linked to the data that governments already have on us. Companies also only exercise soft power for now, they can't physically force you to comply, although as we trend towards full monopolism, they sure can make your life hell. Even then, the disorganization still makes me think we should go with the private approach for this specific thing.

> I don't want a tornado to touch down near my house, but I'm not going to close my eyes if it's about to happen.

Does it matter how you react to it if you know it's going to obliterate you and everything you can see? If there's no escape, then that's that. Talking about convincing legislators and average Joes is self-soothing, because no one cares about us. People can't get their governments to do things that are much more popular than this, no one is in control. The best we can hope for is that we'll have some spare droplets of the free web left after all is said and done, because some nations will not care and create gaps in the system, especially if we don't get perfect great firewalls. But when every byte is attributable to you personally for every stranger who thinks to ask, it will truly be over. I've more or less accepted that we're going into a bleak world with very few worthwhile things left.

But I’m quite well travelled and some places have vibe and a lot don’t and for me both Toronto and Montreal have vibe