Where you've been on Net not private

[Tony]

Not entirely a new concept, but this one is closer to home and now with less warrants.

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1283120

Quote:

An Ontario Superior Court ruling could open the door to police routinely using Internet Protocol addresses to find out the names of people online, without any need for a search warrant.

Justice Lynne Leitch found that there is "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in subscriber information kept by Internet service providers (ISPs), in a decision issued earlier this week.

Quote:

Judge Leitch accepted the arguments of Crown attorney Elizabeth Maguire that the information is similar to what is in a phone book.

[Dan]

Sigh, but with phones there is an option not be listed in the phone book.....

Also phone company's have the choice of weather or not to publish one.

I hate am starting to relay hate judges, why are they given so much power to deiced things like this if they are not elected.

[DemonWasp]

The problem I see isn't that they're not elected (because in all honest, our elected officials make some incredibly poor decisions too, often with less review and more FUD).

The problem that I see is that these individuals are trained in law, but not in the field that the legislation covers. Of course it's unreasonable to expect that they be proficient in multiple fields, particularly when they're so varied, but there must be some way of having computer experts and privacy experts confer with the legal experts (judges) and come to a reasonable conclusion. As it stands, you have people forming rules about things they don't understand - it'd be like me writing rules for international relations when I haven't the foggiest how said relations are conducted - it's a mess, it's unfair and uneven.

Hopefully a higher (and more informed) court will step in and reverse the decision.

[Dan]

The problem with them not being elected is they are accountable to no one. They basically are politetions that no one elects and can make rules with out any accountability.

You don't need to be an expert in computer technology to tell this ruling was based on poor logic. If something is like a phone book you don't need a warent to get it/read it? If you fallow that logic the cops should be able to demand any listing of people that ties in to a number with out a warent including health records, university transcripts, club and organization membership lists, and so on.

I find it hard to believe that any judge not being manipulated by some specal intrest group, lobbiest or policitcal party could come up with what you do online having "no reasonable expectation of privacy" or the phone book logic.

[btiffin]

We're Canadians (well many of us here are); Project Echelon has been monitoring our traffic since the very first day of the Internet. S'okay.

Better to know about being spied on than thinking it's private imho.

Cheers

[DemonWasp]

Dan, the issue I see is that nobody's holding the elected officials responsible for their actions either. If a politician does a lousy job, nobody really cares. A lot of people continue to vote for them blindly; Bush wasn't even impeached, when in reality he should have been tried in the courts at Hague (along with most of his administration).

At best, we pay lip service to the accountability of elected representatives. At least having said positions controlled by strict rules (if not a vote) allows us to ensure that the people in those positions understand the gravity of what they're doing.

And while I agree with your conclusion, you have to remember that this may not have been how the information was presented to the judge in question. It may have been presented as the "telephone book" argument and just not opposed well.

[Dan]

Echelon does not have IP -> name capability from my understanding of it and it's aimed more at capturing transmitted signals (radio waves) then Internet packets. It mostly spys on satellites transmissions witch can included Internet packets and phone calls.

There has been lite confirmed evidence that it is taped directly in to any Internet hubs but even if it was they would be limited to the hubs in the USA. All current reports on it say it is limmited to satellite comunications.

Most imporntaly tho anything got threw echelon can't be used as evidecen agisnted you in canada as it was obtained with out a warrent.

Also echenlon is not limited to just Canada or the USA it spys on salite comuncations for the whole world :p.

[Dan]

DemonWasp @ 13th February 2009, 2:39 pm wrote:

And while I agree with your conclusion, you have to remember that this may not have been how the information was presented to the judge in question. It may have been presented as the "telephone book" argument and just not opposed well.

Witch brings up more issues about comon law justice system. Who gets to pick who defeneds somthing this big? Should all of ontario suffer just becues one laywer is not good at his job?.

[DemonWasp]

Dan @ Fri Feb 13, 2009 2:47 pm wrote:

Who gets to pick who defeneds somthing this big? Should all of ontario suffer just becues one laywer is not good at his job?.

I was under the assumption that it would be lawyers from interested parties; for example, we might have a lawyer from the RIAA, MPAA, or another such organisation seeking such a ruling and funding lawyers to argue it. To counter that, we would probably be looking at lawyers being funded by freedom-advocacy groups. Admittedly, those groups also have lesser resources (sigh capitalism) and you'd tend to get the better-financed concerns weighed more heavily than what's "right".

Still, better than the nonsense pulled in public elections. Look at the referendum on MMP: it's not a terribly difficult concept, it's obviously beneficial to the system and it wouldn't be hard to implement. However, people voted quite strongly against it. The reason was because the party in power (Conservatives) had no interest in adopting MMP (they would lose around a dozen seats, if I recall correctly, mostly to the Green party at the opposite end of the spectrum on many issues), and they therefore "mismanaged" the information campaign intended to inform voters on the issue. If you think for a second that the situation would be any better with more complicated issues like technology, privacy and freedom, you're going to get even more heavily biased results, often ones that don't reflect the actual desires of the population.