OpenNet Initiative Country Report – Thailand
June 17, 2009
http://opennet.net/research/regions/asia
In Thailand, ongoing political turmoil between “red-shirt” and “yellow-shirt” factions, organized around their support of or opposition to former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and the constituencies he championed, led Thai prime minister Samak Sundaravej to declare a state of emergency on September 2, 2008. Upon his declaration, the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology ordered ISPs to immediately shut down around 400 Web sites and block 1,200 more, all alleged to disturb social order or endanger national security.35 Although these Web sites were reportedly detected between March and August 2008, the blocking order and simultaneous requests for court orders required by law were instituted as the Thai government faced challenges by protesters occupying government buildings and accusations that it committed electoral fraud by buying votes in the December 2007 election.36
Providing an indication of the types of activities that will be targeted under the Computer Crimes Act, in March 2009 police arrested the director and moderator of the political news site Prachathai.com for reportedly allowing a comment referencing the royal family to remain on the site for twenty days.37 Chiranuch Premchaiporn was arrested under Section 15 of the Computer Crimes Act, which extends the liability for illegal activities to service providers that intentionally support or consent to them.38 Illegal activities defined in the framework for regulating Internet content include inputting obscene data, forged or false data likely to cause injury to another person, the public or national security; and data which constitutes a criminal offense relating to national security or terrorism.39 Individuals who either input these illegal data, which includes online messages and information, into computer systems or publish or forward it with the knowledge of these offenses, are subject to a maximum sentence of five years imprisonment and a 100,000 baht fine.40
In the race to curb the “harmful” effects of social media, user generated content, and the unabated growth of online commentary, Asian governments have enacted cybercrimes laws that purport to deter acts of online defamation and vigilantism, but could also potentially be applied to stifle citizen journalism. The Thai cybercrimes law creates civil and criminal liability for individuals who publicly post photographs of others that are “likely to” impair their reputation or expose them to shame, public hatred or contempt.41 In Pakistan, a cybercrimes ordinance taking effect September 2008 made “cyber stalking”–which requires “intent to coerce, intimidate, or harass any person” using computers or networks — a crime punishable by up to seven years’ imprisonment.42
…
As the proliferation of borderless social media reduces the effectiveness of the blacklist-and-block model, governments are increasingly looking to technology companies to act as gatekeepers for facilitating transnational public-private filtering.121 In Asia, Thailand may present an example of an alternative to the approaches taken by China and Singapore. Thailand also blocked YouTube in April 2007 for hosting a number of videos that insulted King Bhumibol Adulyadej or his family, which constitutes a crime of lèse majesté, punishable under Thai law by up to fifteen years’ imprisonment.122 By May 2007, YouTube agreed to remove a number of the specified videos for violating its terms of service, and the block on the YouTube domain was lifted in August 2007 upon Google’s creation of a program of geolocational filtering for blocking access to specified videos for users in Thailand.123 In 2008, investigations by a project of the MIT Free Culture group appeared to have uncovered the code for a technical mechanism that YouTube uses to allow certain videos to be seen everywhere except in those locations specified in a media restriction tag.124 Although Thailand’s filtering of the Internet has been ramped up in recent years, Thai law also requires court authorization to block a Web site. Thus, Thailand has secured the cooperation of the world’s dominant video aggregator site in implementing selective geolocational filtering on its behalf, without having to resort to a formal or transparent legal process. Its experience could also signal further public-private transnational cooperation between governments and private technology companies that result in selective filtering: a Vietnamese information ministry official stated in 2008 that the government would ask transnational gatekeepers such as Google and Yahoo to help regulate the Vietnamese blogosphere.125
Secret Thai ivory trade-WWF
20-06-09
Elephant-size loopholes sustain Thai ivory trade
World Wildlife Fund: June 19th, 2009
http://www.physorg.com/news164594748.html
Legal loopholes and insufficient law enforcement mean that Thailand continues to harbour the largest illegal ivory market in Asia, says a new report from the wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC.
The report also raises concerns that legal provisions governing trade in domesticated elephants are providing cover for illegal trade in wild-caught, highly-endangered Asian elephants from both Thailand and neighbouring Myanmar.
TRAFFIC’s survey documented over 26,000 worked ivory products for sale in local markets, with many more retail outlets dealing in ivory products than were observed during market surveys carried out in 2001.
Market surveys found 50 more retail outlets offering ivory items in Bangkok and Chiang Mai in 2008 than the previous year. However, overall there was less worked ivory openly on sale than in 2001.
“Thailand has consistently been identified as one of the world’s top five countries most heavily implicated in the illicit ivory trade, but shows little sign of addressing outstanding issues,” said Tom Milliken, of TRAFFIC, which oversees a global monitoring programme, the Elephant Trade Information System (ETIS), for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).
“Thailand needs to reassess its policy for controlling its local ivory markets as currently it is not implementing international requirements to the ongoing detriment of both African and Asian Elephant populations,” said Milliken.
“Since 2004, the Thai government has only reported two ivory seizure cases totaling 1.2 tonnes of raw ivory.”
Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, a major tourist destination, has emerged as the main hub for illegal ivory activities, accounting for over 70 percent of the retail outlets in Thailand offering ivory items for sale.
The report includes new information on ivory workshops—eight in Uthai Thani, one each in Chai Nat and Payuha Kiri, and three in Bangkok—between them employing dozens of carvers in the production of ivory jewelry, belt buckles and knife-handles. Much of the ivory being worked is illegally imported from Africa.
Some workshop owners boasted close ties with European knife makers, while others reported sending ivory, steel and silver items to the US for sale in gun shops.
“The Thai Government needs to crack down on this serious illegal activity and stop allowing people to abuse the law,” said Dr Colman O’Criodain, WWF International’s analyst on wildlife trade issues.
“A good first step would be to put in place a comprehensive registration system for all ivory in trade and for live elephants”.
The study also uncovered reports of traders buying wild-caught elephant calves for use in Bangkok as “beggars” on the streets in major tourist centres, or selling them to elephant camps and entertainment parks.
Hundreds of live elephants are known to have been illegally imported from Myanmar in recent years, to be sold to elephant trekking companies catering to adventure tourism in Thailand. The capture of wild elephants has been banned in Thailand since the 1970s, but such trade usually goes undetected because domesticated elephants do not have to be registered legally until they are eight years of age.
The study also found that over a quarter of all live elephant exports from Thailand between 1980 and 2005 could have been illegal due to incomplete and inaccurate declarations made on the documentation required under CITES.
“There must be greater scrutiny of the live elephant trade if enforcement efforts are to have any impact at all,” said Chris R. Shepherd, TRAFFIC Southeast Asia’s Acting Director.
“Thailand and Myanmar should work together, and with urgency, to address cross-border trade problems,” he added.
Source: World Wildlife Fund
To censor the Internet is now the goal for all the real terrorists of the world
Chris Herz
VHeadline: June 19, 2009
http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=80949
What do Iranian and Saudi religious police, Australian censors, Chinese Internet firewalls, British surveillance cameras and American data mining and “Homeland Security” have in common? They reflect the emergence of a new Fascism.
The old Fascism of Mussolini and his followers Hitler and Franco was the product of the Great War and the Great Depression: The results of the suicide of old Europe in the bloodbath of World War I and the destruction of so much national wealth in the trenches … to deal with the challenge of national bankruptcies, massive economic and social disorder, business and social elites chose authoritarianism.
The economic and political consequences of the Iraq War have caused the collapse of the Pax Americana and the economic ruin of the Republic which stood in the center of this world order, in turn the successor to the European powers destroyed after 1945.
The symptoms of this are all about us. Complicating the mess is the ecological devastation now becoming so apparent worldwide. Likewise the fact that we have reached peak oil production, and are sliding downhill on the Hubbert curve. If the various governments remain the property of monied elites some new world war is certain.
- These guys do not like to hear they cannot do just as they wish … or that they cannot make the kind of money they feel they deserve.
For certain the cost of all this change is already costly and as time goes on will be more expensive yet. For them the solution has hitherto always been war abroad, repression in the homeland.
Why should we expect differently here and now?
No place shows more sharply the problem than the struggle in Iran and no place shows better how people are learning to deal with it … Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube and all the other mechanisms of the Internet are inflicting grievous damage on a state founded by Fascistic religious despots (financially corrupt too!) armed with secret police, brutal and thuggish auxiliaries, cruel prison torturers and all the other disgusting powers of the modern pervert-state.
Whatever happens, that theocratic state has lost all legitimacy.
Real governments, those unencumbered with an elitist agenda and a sycophantic and corrupt bureaucracy should now begin to see the Internet and all its tools not as some sort of adversary but as the most powerful ally of social justice and democracy that it really is … and that suggestion is aimed exactly at our friends in Cuba, whose leaders have made mistakes for sure, but none more terrible than leaving the Internet there the property of an handful of reactionaries and Miami-based exiles.
- The millions of supporters of the Revolution have an honorable and proud story to tell the world and should be free to do so whenever they will. But the vacuum created by their absence allows a few to pretend to speak for their nation.
But I digress … the fact is that corrupt power has long understood how to buy the print and broadcast media … the freedom and lack of censorship on the Internet is for corruption a fatal problem. For those wishing to build a decent state the Internet may be an occasional challenge, but is always an eternal friend.
To suppress the bloggers and censor the Internet is now the goal for all the real terrorists of the world: Those who own government.
Us cuts off student’s ‘net-CMLP
20-06-09
[FACT comments: Unfettered Internet access is our fundamental human right.]
Bring Me his Head and Hands: Unconstitutional Internet Proscription
Andrew Moshirnia
Citizen Media Law Project: June 16th, 2009
Dear friends, let’s begin with a little story about the death of liberty at Rome. When Mark Antony had the chance, he proscribed (read: murdered) the orator Cicero. To emphasize the effective silencing of his largest critic, the triumvir had Cicero’s head and hands put on public display. If you think we have progressed from mutilations and ostentatious displays of State power, note the case of Alex D. Phillips. Now this young man is no Cicero. But the twenty-year old is just as dead, as far as the Internet is concerned.
When Phillips was 17, he posted (probably with malice in his heart) two nude photos of his 16 year-old ex-girlfriend on his MySpace page. The Furies of Wisconsin descended, arresting Phillips and charging him with sexual exploitation of a minor, possession of child pornography, defamation, and causing mental harm to a child.
The crafty DA created a giant gift for Phillips, a huge wooden horse called Plea Bargain. The State would drop the kiddie porn, exploitation, and defamation charges, if Phillips would plead to causing mental harm to a child. Phillips accepted this gift. The court sentenced Phillips to a three-year probation and 100 hours of community service. He surely considered himself lucky not to be on a sex offenders’ list. But dear friends, Phillips’ name is on a list after all, an execution order hidden inside the proffered gift.
For the duration of his probation, Phillips is “not to own, operate or possess a computer, software, modem, cell phone or any gaming system that has internet access capabilities including [F]acebook and [M]y[S]pace.” Phillips is, for all intents and purposes, digitally dead.
Again, Phillips is no Cicero: the thriving world of American Rhetoric will survive his absence. But while this order does not directly impact your reading and listening habits, it should scare the shit out of you. Just for fun, let’s tick off a few of the ways Phillips is screwed:
- Education: If college was on the horizon before this sentence, it certainly isn’t now. Even if Phillips were to find a university with a paper application and willing to accept a convicted felon, he could not complete electronic registration or course assignments. Maybe he lives near a library with a good card catalogue.
- Employment: A job that does not require any internet access…hmmm…maybe a welding job advertised in the local paper. No Monster.com for him. And I’m fairly sure most service jobs entail the use of an internet connected register.
- Entertainment: Atari 2600 all the way.
- Legal: No pro se representation if he reoffends, since he can’t file electronically.
So, the sentence will give us an undereducated, underemployed, and bored felon. Brilliant. Why don’t we cut out his tongue and give him a flamethrower while we’re at it?
Now the real question is, could this happen to you? This was a plea deal; a product of the notorious legal underbelly where shady things go unchallenged so as not to scuttle the bargain. But as part of a conviction, could you lose your access to the Internet and any technology that is capable of accessing it? Can the court effectively end your power of speech?
The French wouldn’t agree, as they seem to think that access to the Internet is a fundamental right for some strange reason. The Conseil Constitutionnel, in gutting the HADOPI Création et Internet law, held that “fundamental rights . . . and values apply to online information and communication services as much as they do to the offline world.” Internet bans threaten the “liberty of expression” which is a “fundamental right[] that only a judge can rule on.”
But thankfully, our nation is able to resist the corrupting influences of foreign courts (see the congressional temper tantrum following a shout-out to foreign law in Lawrence vs. Texas). Besides, a judge had to sign off on this sentence. So if we can’t rely on the foreign precedent, let’s just run this sort of sentence through the old balancing test of Griswold (valid interest, reasonable, balancing):
- Are there conflicting interests? Sure – “protecting the children” vs. “freedom of speech/ interest in employment/ not hanging oneself out of shame and boredom.”
- Is the State’s action a reasonable way to satisfy it’s interest? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say no. We can safely stop here and avoid any true balancing, because there are many ways to “protect the children” short of digital execution.
Let’s pray that the State never intends to enforce the sentence in this case. Maybe this was just a method to dissuade Phillips from future ventures in online pornography. I certainly hope that this type of sentence won’t become widespread. I become homicidal when my connection is slow. I shudder to think what would happen to society if whole castes were denied access to the font of wisdom.*
*(South Park had a decent guess)
(Andrew Moshirnia is a rising second-year law student at Harvard Law School and a CMLP legal intern.)
Jonathan Zittrain
The Future of the Internet: June 18th, 2009
http://futureoftheinternet.org/why-the-pc-matters
One less examined piece of what’s going on in Iran this week goes beyond the use of Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms — beyond what people can do with a basic browser. And that’s the role of the humble PC — the personal computer, whether Windows, Mac, or GNU/Linux. What makes the PC so crucial is that it’s a “generative” technology, i.e. one that can be repurposed by its user at any time by simply installing new software.
Without it, those in Iran wanting to get to blocked information would be mostly restricted to visiting Web sites that aren’t blocked and hoping that they can connect to those that are — the way that Twitterfall can be used to tweet even if twitter.com is blocked, or visiting an anonymizer like anonymizer.com.
Of course, those can be blocked too, and often are. Twitter’s ancillary sites are working — to the extent they still are — only because the censors have their hands full at the moment. But the PC changes the equation on both sides: within and outside of Iran.
Inside Iran, people can load new software on their PCs to try to get around blocks. Find a copy of something like the xB browser online, or modify your current browser to work with software like Tor, and you can try directing all your Web access through intermediaries that aren’t blocked. If you find one that works, all your surfing can end up unblocked. If people were using today’s mobile phones for Internet access instead of PCs, this wouldn’t be possible, because most mobile phones, even if they can hook up to a wireless Internet access point, won’t run outside code, or only run outside code approved by the vendor. (The jury’s still out on how easily one can install outside code on a phone running Google’s Android OS.)
Even more important than the options available to someone inside Iran are the options for those everywhere else. Many people have been eager to show support for those in Iran who want to evade the government clampdown on news, both in and out. Thanks to the PC they can do more than color their personal avatars green. If you have a PC and want to help, you can find instructions on how to download software that will turn your PC into a way station between Iranian citizens and the rest of the Net. Two minutes ago you were playing Quake, and now you’re donating bandwidth and computing cycles to the free movement of bits — and you can even go back to playing Quake again. And discussions are under way to reconfigure the just-released free Opera browser so it can serve as a proxy. [Update: Al Billings at Mozilla is thinking through the same questions for Firefox.]
That’s extraordinary. The computing machines we buy are descendants of the old hobbyist machines of the 1980’s, which assumed people would get them so they could tinker with them, and those vestiges turn out to be crucial at a time like this. We’re lucky to still have so many home PCs out there. Our work ones are often locked down — your neighborhood IT department would have a heart attack if it found you running a proxy server, since it would worry about the security of the corporate intranet.
Most schools don’t allow their students to run new code in a computer cluster, and libraries are locked down, too. (Indeed, all three of these places typically have their own content filters installed!) Thanks to the PC, people can help forge new civic technologies — ones that succeed to the extent that people are willing to participate in them.
Perhaps soon we’ll see even more profound ways to transform access to the information grid. Researchers have been puzzling through “wireless ad hoc mesh networking,” which allows devices to connect to each other without needing an Internet Service Provider to run interference. If anyone is connected to the larger Internet, everyone else nearby — and everyone near everyone else nearby, etc. — can connect. This is the method used by the One Laptop Per Child project to allow the PCs they are sending to kids in developing countries to share data with one another even if there’s no Internet drop point available. Imagine that technology redeployed to this situation — and it can be, if someone writes or adapts the right software. Our PCs have radios in them that can talk to one another, not just to an “official” access point; you may even recall seeing others’ computers in your wi-fi access list when trying to find a way to get online while on the road. A little tweak here and there and it can start working — for school kids in Brazil, for hurricane refugees running laptops on battery power, and for citizens in Iran facing otherwise-limited Net access.
A green avatar is just the beginning — so long as we maintain our somewhat accidental ubiquitous infrastructure of generative, reprogrammable boxes, a legion of hackers ready to reprogram them to social ends, and a citizenry ready to donate some bandwidth and cycles to a good cause.
Internet surveillance laws in Canada and around the world
CBC News: June 19, 2009
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/06/19/f-internet-cellphone-wiretap-surveillance-law.html
The Canadian government has been trying to modernize its surveillance and wiretapping laws for years now, to take into account the growth of cellphone and internet communications. Canada’s current telephone wiretap laws are more than 30 years old. Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan said in June 2009 that the current legal framework was designed “in the era of the rotary telephone.”
In November 2005, the Liberal government at the time introduced legislation to that end. The Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act would have required internet companies to give the police confidential information on their subscribers, including name, address and phone numbers. The bill would also have required cellphone and internet companies to add surveillance hardware and software to their networks.
That bill was introduced about a week before a vote of no confidence and the dissolution of Parliament, and it died when the Liberals lost the election in January 2006.
In 2007, a document obtained by CBC News suggested that government agencies were seeking consultation on how law enforcement and national security agencies could gain lawful access to customers’ information without a court order. Days later, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said that warrants would be required to gain customer information under any new surveillance law.
“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 said.
Another law — the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Document Act, or PIPEDA — was passed in 2004 and intended to protect the private information that consumers give to companies in the course of doing business. PIPEDA already allows for internet service providers and other private companies to disclose personal information to law enforcement officials to comply with subpoenas or warrants, or in emergency situations where an individual’s life, health or security is potentially threatened.
In June 2009, Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan announced the latest bills intended to modernize the Criminal Code.
“We must ensure that law enforcement has the necessary tools to catch up to the bad guys and ultimately bring them to justice. Twenty-first century technology calls for 21st-century tools,” Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said when the bills were announced.
In a reversal from Day’s position in 2007, one of the new bills would require internet service providers and cellphone companies to provide police with “timely access” to personal information about subscribers — including names, address and internet addresses — without the need for a warrant.
The government news release announcing these bills said, “Other countries, such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Sweden, already have similar legislation in place.” Here’s the legal situation in those countries.
United Kingdom
The Regulation of Investigatory Power Act of 2000, also called RIPA, is a comprehensive surveillance law that covers everything from the use of closed-circuit TV cameras to the use of moles in criminal investigations. RIPA includes provisions that require ISPs to install systems to aid investigators in tracking electronic communications.
United States
The USA Patriot Act, enacted following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, made several changes to U.S. law intended to combat terrorism. It expanded the ability of law enforcement agencies to search communications, medical and financial records. It also extended the use of wiretaps to include internet connections.
Also, the Bush administration authorized the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless domestic wiretaps in 2001, possibly earlier. This was first revealed in the media in The New York Times in December 2005.
Two subsequent laws, the Protect America Act of 2007 and FISA Amendments Act of 2008, extended the NSA’s authority on domestic wiretaps.
In February 2009, a federal Appeals Court in San Francisco rejected the Obama administration’s request to stop a lawsuit challenging the government’s warrantless wiretapping program on the grounds that it is a potential threat to national security.
Australia
The Surveillance Devices Bill of 2004 allows Australian Federal Police to obtain warrants for the use of data, optical, listening and tracking surveillance devices. The Intelligence Services Act of 2001 covers the use of surveillance devices by the country’s security agencies.
New Zealand
The Search and Surveillance Powers Bill was introduced in September 2008 to update the surveillance powers and procedures New Zealand’s law enforcement agencies.
Germany
In 2006, the western German state of North-Rhine Westphalia adopted a law that gave intelligence agencies broad powers to spy on and hack into the computers of terror suspects, including infecting them with spyware viruses. Germany’s highest court overturned that law in 2008, saying: “The law violates the right to privacy and is null and void.”
However, the Constitutional Court also ruled that the government is allowed to conduct surveillance on internet communications in cases where it could prevent loss of life or an attack on the country. The court said agencies must get permission from a judge before they can secretly upload spyware to a suspect’s computer.
Sweden
Sweden’s parliament approved new laws in June 2008 to allow the country’s intelligence bureau to track sensitive words in international phone calls, faxes and emails without a court order. The law took effect in January 2009. Opposition critics and civil liberties organizations have called the law the most far-reaching electronic surveillance law in Europe
Canadian human rights commission wants to ban hate speech but finds no harm-Chronicle Herald
20-06-09
The threat of censorship in Nova Scotia
Mark Mercer
Chronicle Herald: June 20, 2009
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Opinion/1128196.html
In its recent report to Parliament, the Canadian Human Rights Commission defended censorship as a means to deal with hate on the Internet. Its central argument is that extreme and ardent expressions of hate cause harm to members of groups the CHRC is mandated to protect.
The CHRC neglected, though, to provide evidence that extreme and ardent hate expressed in the relative obscurity of blogs and niche websites puts Canadians at risk of harm. And it’s certainly hard to see how such expressions could put Canadians at greater risk of harm than do, say, talk-radio comments about immigrants ruining the country or Maclean’s articles contending that Muslims are set to win a demographic war. These latter — true or false, well-intended or obnoxious — do not express hate and, thereby, fall beyond the purview of the CHRC and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, as the CHRC itself is at pains to insist.
The CHRC failed also to explain how the tribunal manages to prevent or mitigate harm when the extreme words it has ordered removed from one site get reproduced by journalists or bloggers on another. (A good sampling of the sort of thing the CHRC would like removed from the web can be found in its report, on its website.)
The point is that far from being a noble and effective weapon in the fight for equality and social justice — a weapon that, regrettably, occasionally inflicts minor collateral damage — censorship is both ignoble and ineffective. It violates freedom of expression and chills candour and openness, and it doesn’t help anyone with anything.
What about the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, then? Does it also pose a threat to candour, openness, and the peaceful expression of opinion and emotion?
Yes, it does, and that’s surprising, because really the NSHRC has no statutory mandate to meddle in free expression. Nothing in Nova Scotia’s current Human Rights Act, which came into force in 1989, gives our commission or its associated tribunal any power over what we can express publicly in our province.
It is true that Section 7 (1) of the provincial act forbids us from publishing, displaying, or broadcasting anything “indicating discrimination or an intention to discriminate against” people belonging to one of the groups named in the act. And so our restaurants may not post signs saying “Homosexuals not served” and our factories may not advertise “Coloureds need not apply.” Given the clear meanings of the words, though, that’s all Section 7 forbids. There’s nothing in it forbidding our expressing our ugly opinions or our vile emotions.
Nonetheless, the NSHRC, in both word and deed, has asserted powers of censorship. The NSHRC has at least twice investigated matters of expression. One case, in the 1990s, ended with an order against a grotesque image on a shirt. A second case ended not long ago with a complaint against a cartoon in The Herald dismissed. Now one has to admit that, as far as deed goes, the NSHRC is much better behaved than some other provincial and territorial commissions. In Alberta, remember, a man’s letter to the editor resulted in fines and a gag order.
Better behaved, though, does not mean well behaved — and, anyway, there’s the matter of word. Both Krista Daley, the current director of the NSHRC, and Michael Noonan, a former (acting) director, have said the NSHRC is authorized under Section 7 to investigate complaints of hate speech. Ms. Daley explained at King’s College last November that while Section 7 preserves a quaint idiom from the early days of human rights legislation, contemporary commissioners and, more importantly, judges understand that the section prohibits hate speech and, thereby, that it gives the provincial tribunal the power to suppress expression it deems hateful.
Ms. Daley might be right that judges would agree with her. That’s what makes it important that our new provincial government examine Section 7 with an eye to deleting it. Our government should, at least, affirm publicly that the section says nothing in addition to what it says. Legislators would do well to delete the section now, before precedent and the courts firmly impose on it an interpretation according to which we say what we want only at the pleasure of the NSHRC.
Mark Mercer is in the department of philosophy, Saint Mary’s University.
Easier Internet access is a tool police don’t need
Montreal Gazette: June 20, 2009
When the Conservative government introduced a bill this week that would let police collect any information they want about Internet users – without a warrant – Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan said that at stake was nothing less than the safety of exploited children.
The thought that police cannot come to the rescue of an abused child because Internet privacy laws stand in their way is horrifying. But there is also little to suggest this is true.
Under current laws, police must seek a court warrant before asking Internet service providers to produce personal information, such as a name and street address.
Asking for someone’s name and street address might seem an inconsequential matter, but removing judicial oversight over police access to personal information would open the door to unchecked invasion of personal privacy.
Police across the country have been lobbying for more power to force service providers to search for and provide personal subscriber information. Yet they have not made the case that the absence of such powers is hindering their work.
As Canwest News Service reported two years ago, police forces and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service can already request authority to wiretap private communications – in any form – through Criminal Code and CSIS Act provisions.
Two years ago, the Conservative government was at pains to differentiate its version of “lawful access” legislation from previous Liberal versions that died on the order paper. Then public safety minister Stockwell Day told CBC in 2007, “We are not, in any way, shape or form, wanting extra powers to police to pursue items without a warrant. That is not what our purported legislation is going to be doing. That is previous Liberal legislation and that’s not the path we’re walking down at all.”
Yet pursuing information without a warrant is exactly what the latest proposed legislation allows. The new act will require service providers to install capabilities that would allow police to intercept information being transmitted, as well as giving them access to personal data.
As though those provisions weren’t bad enough, they apply only to large Internet service providers, leaving small providers untouched. You don’t have to be much of a criminal mastermind to figure out you should switch to a small ISP.
These laws would remove, for no good reason, people’s legitimate expectation of being able to conduct their affairs privately. These proposed measures should be withdrawn. Police should continue to have to show cause before being allowed access to someone’s private transactions.
[FACT comments: Although this article fails to mention it, this seems a likely excuse for VOIP surveillance. Next heart attack, I’ll forgo using Skype!]
Race to pinpoint VoIP callers in emergencies
999 system developed to locate net phones
The Register: June 19, 2009
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/15/voip_999/
The vast majority of calls to 999 are currently made via traditional landlines and mobile phones. BT has seen a tenfold increase in the volume of VoIP calls to its emergency contact centres in the last 18 months, however.
The ability to locate emergency calls is vital as callers may be under duress, too ill to speak or may simply not know where they are. While traditional landlines can be found by what amounts to a reverse directory lookup, using the line identity number and mobile phone coordinates approximated by triangulation, solving VoIP location is a more complex problem.
Typically, VoIP users are allocated a number by their provider and are able to log in and make calls on any broadband connection. They could be at several sites in one day. That means a solution would require cooperation between VoIP providers and ISPs.
The group tasked with developing the system has been working under the auspices of the NICC – a UK network industry interoperabilty body – for about three years and is chaired by John Medland, BT’s policy manager for 999 services. He said: “It has been difficult. We’ve tried to share as much with the industry as possible to get cooperation.”
He said the work was partly motivated by documented international cases where a caller’s use of VoIP caused serious problems for the emergency services. Last year, a toddler died in Canada after paramedics were dispatched to the address the family had given when they signed with their VoIP provider. They had since moved without updating their details, and no system existed for the emergency operator to locate their call in realtime.
Despite the problems of getting competing companies and sectors to work together, Medland’s group aims to publish its suggested solution next month, based on work by the Internet Engineering Task Force, an international standards body.
At first glance the solution is simple. When a VoIP user makes a 999 call, their provider knows the IP address they are calling from.
So to trace the call, the VoIP firm could forward the IP address to a central 999 authority, which would look up which ISP serves that range. The central authority would then contact that ISP for a line identity number, which would allow a reverse directory lookup to retrieve the address of the caller, as with a traditional call. All this would happen automatically in a matter of milliseconds.
The major stumbling block is that many ISPs frontend systems are not connected to their backend database, so they cannot quickly match an IP address to a line identity. Under the forthcoming NICC proposals, ISPs would be asked to install a “Location Information Server” in their network to bridge the gap and serve the 999 authorities’ data requests.
Equipment and maintenance costs mean some ISPs are likely to be resistant to the proposals, however. But Ofcom, which regulates 999 services, has indicated to ISPs that even if they are not the VoIP provider, they are bound by law to make location data available to emergency services. The watchdog was taking an “active interest” in the NICC work, Medland said.
At a recent meeting of UK networking experts, Nominet researcher Ray Bellis, who also sits on the NICC working group, suggested some ISPs might want to sell on VoIP location data to marketeers to recoup their costs. Medland said the group is completely focused on emergency applications. “I’d really like to see the it [deployed] this time next year,” he said.
Feds to give cops Internet-snooping powers
Janice Tibbetts
Canwest News Service: June 17, 2009
http://www.canada.com/Technology/Feds+give+cops+Internet+snooping+powers/1706191/story.html
Police will be given new powers to eavesdrop on Internet-based communications as part of a contentious government bill, to be announced Thursday, which Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan has said is needed to modernize surveillance laws crafted during “the era of the rotary phone.”
The proposed legislation would force Internet service providers to allow law enforcement to tap into their systems to obtain information about users and their digital conversations.
Police have lobbied for a new law for almost 10 years, saying that they need to access “Internet safe havens” for gangsters, sexual predators and terrorists.
“This is really not about the warrantless tracking of Canadians’ Internet use,” said Clayton Pecknold, of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police.
Privacy advocates and civil libertarians, however, have vocally opposed the prospect of giving police “lawful access” to the digital conversations of Canadians by being able to access such things as their text messages, e-mails, web surfing habits and Internet phone lines.
“It is an issue that has proven to be very, very controversial,” said Michael Geist, a law professor at University of Ottawa and public commentator on Internet legal issues.
“The consistent criticism and concern that has been expressed is that there has to be some evidence that there is a real problem here and in the past we haven’t seen that,” he said.
“Why is the status quo not good enough? What investigations have been impeded?”
Federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddard recently warned that forcing ISPs to surrender information “is a serious step forward toward mass surveillance” that violates the rights of Canadians.
Van Loan’s bill has been posted on a notice paper of pending government legislation and it is expected to be tabled in the House of Commons before MPs break for their summer recess on Friday. He has scheduled a news conference for Thursday with Justice Minister Rob Nicholson.
Earlier this year, Van Loan publicly stated his intentions to pursue legislation, which had been promised for years but relegated to a back burner by his predecessor, Stockwell Day.
When he was public safety minister, Day also promised that any federal initiative would require police to obtain a warrant to access personal information of users, such as names and addresses.
Pecknold said it is “an ongoing frequent occurrence” that police want to act to stop a crime, but they are blocked at the technological door at a time when criminals have shifted increasingly to online communications.
“Terrorist groups, pornographers and pedophile networks, illegal traffickers in weapons, drugs and human beings, money launderers and cyber criminals, Internet and telemarketing fraudsters all use technology to develop activities, perpetrate crimes and avoid detection,” the police chiefs said in a November 2008 position paper supporting a new law.
Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service already have the power to wiretap private communications, provided they have judicial authorization, but the law does not require ISPs to grant them access.
Tom Copeland, chairman of the Canadian Association of Internet Providers, said it will be a hardship for some of the country’s smaller providers to upgrade their systems to facilitate interception.
“There’s a very real and significant cost,” he said.
Copeland said a previous bill on Internet-based interception, introduced by the former Liberal government just before it fell in November 2005, contained an exemption for small ISPs.
Pecknold said it makes no sense to make exceptions because criminals will flock to the smaller providers.
