23 Apr 14 | Canada, Digital Freedom, News and features
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Knowledge, claimed Francis Bacon, is power. It is also money. Which is why Canada’s newly drafted Digital Privacy Act, Bill S-4, is considered by the privacy fraternity to be a demon of some proportions. As Gillian Shaw of the Vancouver Sun (Apr 14) explains, “If you worry Big Brother is reporting everything you do on the Internet, changes introduced to Canada’s privacy legislation last week may prove your worries are not totally unfounded.”
The bill has striking similarities to proposed US legislation that proved so contentious it wound up in the deep freeze of US Congressional contemplation. The US Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) would have granted blanket immunity to companies sharing user content with governments on the pretext of a pressing “cyber threat”. S-4, however, goes further, increasing the sharing of such user information with parties beyond government to private organisations.
The aim of such legislation is twofold: re-enforcing copyright barriers via the umbrella pretext of fighting crime and contractual infringement while eroding privacy protections. The snooping incentive in the case of Bill S-4 is considerable: to monitor those habits of downloading and use of material that just might breach intellectual property laws.
As with laws purportedly targeting digital piracy, it does more. University of Ottawa’s law professor, Michael Geist, has kept his eye on developments in the area of Canadian privacy law for some time. He is far from impressed by the latest measures on the part of the Canadian government. “Unpack the legalese and you find that organizations will be permitted to disclose personal information without consent (and without a court order) to any organization that is investigating a contractual breach or possible violation of any law” (Vancouver Sun, Apr 14).
Other effects follow on from S-4, read along with C-13 (the “cyber-bullying bill). Immunity to organisations disclosing subscriber or customer information to law enforcement authorities, or copyright trolls, will be granted. The mere fact that an investigation is taking place, be it into contractual breach, actual or potential, can trigger the need to disclose the confidential data of users of the service. Those users will not be informed of such disclosure, and organisations engaging in such acts will be under no obligation to do so.
One of the amending provisions states, for instance, that “an organization may collect personal information without the knowledge or consent of the individual only if it is reasonable to expect that the collection with the knowledge or consent of the individual would compromise the availability or the accuracy of the information and the collection is reasonable for purposes related to investigating a breach of an agreement or a contravention of the laws of Canada or a province.”
Geist makes various important points, noting how judicial management has been indispensable in keeping the information trawlers at bay. He cites the file sharing case of Voltage Pictures, a U.S. company which sought an order asking the internet service provider TekSavvy to disclose the names and addresses of thousands of users it claimed had infringed copyright. TekSavvy requested the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic to intervene for the purposes of informing the court over privacy and copyright trolling concerns.
The disclosure was granted by the federal court, but the move came with various safeguards with the intention of discouraging copyright trolling lawsuits. The point was considered fundamental by the court – compelling ISPs to reveal the private details of their subscribers would create a monumental strain on the court system. Many infringements would be of a non-commercial nature, and taking these to court would see a needless use of judicial resources. Even more significant, the cap of $5000 on liability for such non-commercial infringements “may be miniscule compared to the cost, time and effort in pursuing a claim against the subscriber.”
The court found Voltage’s conduct in seeking such disclosure potentially improper, though not sufficient to refuse the motion. Instead, the company was asked to guarantee that any subscriber information obtained would remain confidential, not be used for any other purposes, not be made public and not be disclosed to third parties. The fees for TekSavvy behind the disclosure would also be covered by Voltage.
The decision suggests heavy judicial oversight over the grants of such disclosure motions. Important safeguards include court involvement over the contents of the “demand letter” sent to subscribers. As Geist notes, the letter must include the message that “no Court has yet made a determination that such subscriber has infringed or is liable in any way for payment of damages.”
S-4 would make such protections redundant, stifling court scrutiny and enabling a ready disclosure of private user information between companies. In Geist’s words, “If Bill S-4 were the law, the court might never become involved in the case. Instead, Voltage could simply ask TekSavvy for the subscriber information, which could be legally disclosed (including details that go far beyond just name and address) without any court order and without informing their affected customer.”
The legislative moves on the part of the Canadian government reveal the addictive nature of such copyright legislation. Privacy is a subsidiary concern to the use of material provided by an ISP, while broadening the policing function against illegal use of information is paramount. The current Digital Privacy Act seems a less than distant echo of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), Bill C-29. The government has evidently been there, but hasn’t yet done that.
Warrantless disclosure of private information is the holy grail of government regulation. The sacrificial lamb is always the privacy of citizens. This, goes the official drum roll, is necessary to protect the public. In truth, it is designed to protect corporate legal interests and pull down the walls of data protection.
This article was posted on 23 April 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
06 Dec 13 | Canada, News and features, Politics and Society
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Canadian journalists will face fines for commenting on the striking action of trade unionists under new legislation passed in the province of Alberta. As reported by Index on Censorship earlier this week Bill 45 and Bill 46 will see heavy sanctions placed on those who partake in illegal picketing or comment publicly on those doing so. Both bills passed through their third and final readings on Wednesday 4 December, in front of a full gallery of concerned members of the public
Journalists now face fines of $500 a day for any comments made regarding support for union strikes. Alongside this, Bill 45 also limits the discussion of striking action or threats to strike by civil servants, fining unions $1 million a day unless they are able to convince a court they were not responsible for or encouraging of the striking talk.
Don Braid said in the Calgary Herald this week: “It’s hard to imagine a more blatant violation of free speech, a right that always implies a certain social anarchy to function usefully. People are not allowed to break laws, but they are permitted, except in obvious cases of threatening harm, to talk about challenging, testing, pushing or even breaking them. The offence is in the breaking, not the talking. But not for Alberta’s public unions. Talking is now pretty much illegal.”
An earlier version of this article referred to Alberta as a state. It is a province.
This article was originally posted on 6 Dec 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
03 Dec 13 | Canada, Politics and Society
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Journalists in the Canadian province of Alberta could see their right to free speech stifled as new legislation, aimed at suppressing the illegal striking of union members, will impose heavy fines on those who comment publically in favour of those picketing.
For members of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE) it has been illegal to strike since 1977. The new legislation, introduced by Alison Redford’s Progressive Conservative government, will abolish the action of arbitration, as well as freezing wages and imposing fines, both for those who take part any form of “illegal” striking and those who comment on it.
According to Bob Barnetson, the director of the Human Resources and Labour Relations programme at Athabasca University, Bill 45 would see newspaper columnists who write opinion pieces about the plight of workers, or those who merely comment “the only option they have is to strike” handed a hefty penalty for their work. Making such comment would be a violation of section 4.4 of the bill.
“So what happens to the editor or academic?” Barnetson wrote on his blog last week. “Well, s.18.1 says that if you violate s.4.4 you are guilty of an offence. Under s.18.1(d), the editor or academic would be liable for a fine of $500 a day per day of the contravention. Section 20(a) says that prosecution may occur within 1 year of the last day the offense occurred”.
David Climenhaga, a well-known labour blogger in Alberta, believes the imposed fines would stretch as far as catching-out members of the public who showed up at an “illegal” picket line or members of other unions, not subjected to the legislation, who joined a picket out of solidarity: “So, while the bill is mostly careful to restrict penalties to union members and officers, on the always dangerous question of free speech, it extends its attack to “any person” who says the wrong thing to a civil servant.”
Bill 46, which will run alongside Bill 45, will see the 21,642 members of the AUPE forced back to the bargaining table in January or accept a 0% wage increase for the next two years.
An earlier version of this article referred to Alberta as a state. It is a province.
08 Oct 13 | News and features, Politics and Society, The climate crisis, United Kingdom, United States
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The continuing advance of climate science, as reflected in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recently released Fifth Assessment Report, points ever more strongly to the need for an expedited phase-out of carbon emissions from fossil fuels. Only a fundamental transformation of the current energy system during the coming decades may make it possible to avert disastrous impacts of global climatic disruption.
Carrying out such a transformation would be a political, economic, and technological challenge under the best of circumstances. But it is made especially difficult by corporate and ideologically driven opposition — most notably, by pressure from fossil fuel production interests to protect their strategic position and set the terms for government policymaking.
The United States and Canada exemplify the power of the dominant energy interests. The governments of both countries strongly support the expansion of domestic fossil energy extraction, production, and export. But the collision between climate science and energy politics, and threats to freedom of communication, are playing out differently in the two countries.
With the Harper government in Canada, for years we have witnessed an ongoing repression of climate and environmental science communication by government scientists, along with systematic cutbacks of environmental research and data collection. “Harper’s attack on science: No science, no evidence, no truth, no democracy“, an excellent review and discussion in the May 2013 issue of the Canadian journal Academic Matters, itemized a series of moves by the Harper government to control or prevent the free flow of scientific information across Canada, particularly when that information highlights the undesirable consequences of industrial development. The free flow of information is controlled in two ways: through the muzzling of scientists who might communicate scientific information, and through the elimination of research programs that might participate in the creation of scientific information or evidence.
It appears that the issues on which government scientists are subjected to the tightest political control of communications include climate change, the Alberta tar sands, the oil and gas industry, and Arctic wildlife. In other words, issues on which free communication of scientific evidence could pose problems for corporate energy development interests.
The situation in Canada has driven government scientists to hold public protest rallies twice in the last year. In September, rallies in major city centers and on university campuses were held across the country.
“It isn’t the way science is supposed to be. It’s not the way science used to be, the way I remember it in the federal government,” IPCC vice-chair and retired Environment Canada scientist John Stone told The Guardian.
So the Harper government can be said to be following in the footsteps — even surpassing — the record of the former Bush-Cheney administration in the U.S., whose alignment with energy industry interests led them to misrepresent climate science intelligence and impede forthright communication by federal climate scientists.
In the U.S., the Obama administration presents a complex picture that differs from Canada in significant ways, but also suggests the problematic nature of government support for expanded fossil energy extraction and production. The administration appears susceptible to industry pressure aimed at playing down the environmental and societal consequences of fossil energy resource extraction and use.
After several years of near-silence on climate change at the highest levels of U.S. political leadership, in June President Obama finally gave a major public address on climate change (the first by an American president) and laid out a multifaceted Climate Action Plan. The plan focuses on actions that can be taken by the White House and Executive Branch in the absence of action by a Congress that is tied in knots, largely subservient to corporate energy interests, and with much of the Republican Party aligned with the global warming denial machine.
Under Obama, we see a more straightforward acknowledgement of climate science and assessments by the most credible experts, and more straightforward communication on climate by federal research agencies. The forthcoming National Climate Assessment, scheduled for release next spring, will address the implications of climatic disruption for the U.S., across geographical regions and socioeconomic and resource sectors (public health, water resources, food production, coastal zones, and so forth). The importance of national assessments for public discourse was underscored when the Bush administration, in collusion with nongovernmental global warming denialists, suppressed official use of and references to the first National Climate Assessment, which had been completed in 2000.
Yet, despite the numerous constructive action items in Obama’s Climate Action Plan, there appears to be a contradiction at the heart of Obama’s policy, as indicated by the administration’s adoption of what they call an ‘all of the above’ approach to energy development. Obama points to increased U.S. fossil energy extraction as a major accomplishment. U.S. energy development includes ‘mountaintop removal’ coal mining in Appalachia, large-scale coal strip-mining on public lands in the West, and increased coal exports; deepwater drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, even in the wake of the BP oil blowout disaster in 2010, and quite possibly drilling in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Alaska; and a dramatic increase during the past five years in natural gas production using directional drilling technology and hydraulic fracturing of shale deposits that cover a number of large areas across the country.
Natural gas from ‘fracking’ appears to be an essential component of the administration’s climate policy, i.e., relying on the ongoing trend of substitution of natural gas for coal in power plants in order to meet a 2020 goal for reducing U.S. carbon emissions. The Department of the Interior has proposed to open 600 million acres of public land to fracking. But fracking is controversial, raising concerns about contamination of drinking water in affected areas by chemicals used in fracking, large-scale use of water in drilling, air pollution, leaking methane greenhouse gas emissions, and industrial degradation of rural landscapes. Environmental groups have protested at the White House, calling for a moratorium on fracking on public lands.
There are sIgns that the administration may be allowing political pressure from the natural gas industry to compromise investigations by the Environmental Protection Agency into fracking contamination incidents. The EPA has pulled back from several high-profile investigations in a manner that raises questions about whether this indicates a pattern of failure to act on scientific evidence. When the EPA’s scientists found evidence that fracking was contaminating water supplies, the EPA stopped or slowed down their work in in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wyoming.
“Not only does this pattern of behavior leave impacted residents in the lurch, but it raises important questions as to whether the agency is caving to pressure from industry, antagonistic members of Congress and/or other outside sources,” Kate Sinding at the Natural Resources Defense Council notes. “This trend also calls into serious question the agency’s commitment to conducting an impartial, comprehensive assessment of the risks fracking presents to drinking water—a first-of-its-kind study that is now in its fourth year, with initial results now promised in 2014.” The EPA recently announced that it has delayed the expected final date of this study until 2016 — Obama’s eighth and final year in office. Meanwhile, industry continues to create a fait accompli of radically expanded fracking operations.
Obama has adopted a forward-looking position on climate change. But his ‘all of the above’ energy policy, and particularly his full-speed-ahead support for shale gas fracking, raises the question of whether politics is impeding freedom of communication by government experts — and whether the EPA is thereby being impeded in doing its job of protecting the public against the environmental dangers of fossil fuel development.
This article was originally published on 8 Oct 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
