Snoop dogs

By Alison@Creekside

So remember how the Cons withdrew their just-tabled internet surveillance bill, the Lawful Access Act, on Feb 14 and replaced it an hour and 15 minutes later with the identical but renamed Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act , a bill which mentions neither children nor predators?

Coincidentally, the US Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 – sponsored by Texas teabaggin’ Rep Lamar Smith who also sponsored the Stop Online Piracy Act, another internet spying bill – has 39 co-sponsors and is heading off to the US House of Representatives for debate.

Good thing ours has that one-word difference in the title, the better to provide for Canadian independence and sovereignty.

Theirs :

House Panel Votes to Require ISPs to Keep Customer Records

“The Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act would require ISPs to retain all customer IP addresses [for 12 months, amended down from 18] so that law enforcement agents can use the information to investigate online child pornography. Law enforcement agents would gain access to the IP information with subpoenas they issue, not court-ordered warrants.”

Hey, ours does that too!

Michael Geist yesterday :

Toews has not talked about a provision in Bill C-30 that creates a voluntary warrantless system that would allow police to ask for the content of emails or web surfing habits and allow ISPs to comply with the request without fear of liability.

Hey, Section 6 of the theirs does that too! As does SOPA.

So who else is looking to spy on us online?

National Northern Border Counternarcotics Strategy, January 2012, pages 33-34:

“It is imperative that Canada and the United States work together to expedite the sharing of information from electronic communication service providers; and share information necessary to lay the foundation for intercepting internet and voice communications under their respective laws in a timely manner.”

Meanwhile, across the pond, the UK isn’t hiding their internet spying bill behind any malarkey about protecting children. Same basic mo though :

UK government to demand access to all phone and internet user data

“The British government is in the process of developing a scheme whereby all phone companies and broadband internet providers will be required to store customer transaction data for a year and hand it over to security services upon request.”

Doesn’t seem like it much matters who these various government online spying bills are purported to target – pornographers, copyright infringers, drug traffickers, drugbiz mirror sites, terrorists – or who they are supposed to protect – children, Hollywood, the recording industry, drug companies, the public at large. They’ll just keep reframing and renaming those suckers until one of them sticks – a law we can’t access the inner workings of that entrenches their access to our private info while simultaneously throttling the free flow of shared info out here.

In opposing the US pornography bill, Rep. John Conyers said :

“This is not protecting children from internet pornography. It’s creating a database for everybody in this country with a lot of other purposes.”

Democrat Rep. Zoe Lofgren proposed an amendment to rename it the Keep Every Americans’ Digital Data for Submission to the Federal Government Without a Warrant Act but sadly this did not accrue the required votes. Unlikely such a further name change would succeed here either, even with a one-word title change.