(AFP Photo /
Patrick Kovarik)
Source: Russia Today
http://rt.com/news/canada-police-spy-bill-c-30-455/
Police across Canada are urging Ottawa to resurrect a
controversial Internet surveillance bill that would allow them to monitor
Canadians' digital activities in real-time without a warrant.
The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has made a
plea to on the federal government to pass Bill C-30, also known as the
Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act ahead of a gathering by the
provincial and federal justice ministers next week.
The group is concerned that Parliament will be closed
down before the legislation is passed.
“We have a fear that it will die on the order paper,” said Vancouver
Police Chief Jim Chu, who is also the president of the association. “And if
it does, then our investigators will be constrained and victims will suffer
greater harm because of that,” the Canadian Press reports.
Deputy police chief Warren Lemcke agreed with Chu’s
assessment, saying that “right now there are gangsters out there
communicating about killing someone and we can't intercept that,” as cited
by CBC news.
The legislature, introduced in the Canadian Parliament
last February, demands that the country’s telecommunication industry provide
law enforcement with the “authority to intercept communications and to
require telecommunications service providers to provide subscriber and other
information, without unreasonably impairing the privacy of individuals, the
provision of telecommunications services to Canadians or the competitiveness of
the Canadian telecommunications industry.”
If passed, the law would also give the police the power to
make it a crime to use social media as a tool to injure, alarm or harass
individuals. It would also grant access to the individual’s private data such
as name, address, phone number and email without a warrant.
The law would ask the companies to place tracking bugs in
their programs so that police, if needed, could spy on conversations if they
got the necessary legal approvals.
Until now, C-30 has remained shelved by Parliament, and
has not been debated after receiving mass criticism when it was originally
released.
Critics claimed that the authorities would likely use the
powers to harass peaceful protestors and activists.
A number of social media protests were organized, one of
which circulated personal details from the divorce files of the bill’s sponsor
of the bill-Public Safety Minister’s Vic Toews.
People also marched on the streets, demanding checks to
the would-be unlimited police powers.
A public opinion poll conducted by Angus Reid after the
bill’s introduction concluded that "the idea of surrendering
subscriber data and identifiers without a warrant” is rejected by almost
two thirds of Canadians.
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