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Privacy? Not in Canada!
From: [email protected] (David Buchanan)
Newsgroups: alt.security.pgp,talk.politics.crypto
Subject: Re: If you want privacy, don't come to Canada!
Date: 30 Mar 1997 22:26:41 -0500
Organization: Hamilton-Wentworth FreeNet, Ontario, Canada.
CRIMINALS WON'T BE THE ONLY TARGETS
Criminals won't be the only targets if strong non-escrowed encryption is
outlawed although criminals provide a convenient excuse for governments
seeking to extend their power over their own citizens.
Even in Canada, a nation which can hardly be described as a police state,
there is good reason to fear the security and intelligence apparatus will be
used by the government against its legitimate and law-abiding political
opponents. Let me give you two examples.
1) BUREAUCRAT'S "LET'S GET HIM" MEMO
Within the last couple of weeks, the Canadian public learned from news
reports about a meno written by a top level federal bureaucrat in which he
complained about the activities of a private citizen and suggested that his
fellow government officials should "take a look at this guy."
The private citizen was a law-abiding, former military officer whose freedom
of information requests had exposed mismanagement and corruption in the
government. This memo was particularly chilling because the recipients
included officials of the tax department and the Canadian Security and
Intelligence Service (CISIS) -- two agencies well suited to bringing pressure
to bear on private citizens. Although the bureaucrat was caught in the act
this time, it is quite disturbing that a senior civil servant believes such a
memo to be normal and acceptable.
2) NEO-NAZI PLANTED IN OPPOSITION PARTY
During the last Canadian federal election, the ruling Progressive
Conservative Party (PCs) was losing voters to the Reform Party, a moderate,
small "c" conservative party based in Western Canada. The PC's campaign
strategy was to accuse Reform of being "extremists" or "racists."
About the only evidence of this that the PCs were able to produce was the
founder and leader of a small neo-nazi style group who had attempted to
infiltrate the Reform Party with little success.
Subsequently the public learned that the neo-nazi was actually a paid agent
of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CISIS), an agency
ultimately controlled by the Progressive Conservative government.
There have been the expected denials from CISIS but the most plausible
interpretation of these events is that the Progressive Conservative
government tried to sabotage the electoral chances of the Reform Party by
planting a neo-nazi on its fringes.
CISIS is one of the government agencies that definitely would have access to
all of the material obtained from the proposed key escrow or key recovery
type systems.
WHY HONEST CITIZENS SHOULD BE WORRIED
The increasing use of email and other data telecommunications will greatly
expand the amount of private and personal information on private citizens
that governments can collect, archive, and sift through whenever they need
weapons to use against their legitimate political opponents. This
information can be collected very cheaply and used in ways that are difficult
for the government's victims to counter or even detect.
For example, a simple telephone call to a cooperative bank official just
before the a target attempts to renew a line of credit for his business. The
only effective way to prevent this is with the wide availability and use of
strong non-escrowed, non-key-recovery encryption.
As for those trusting souls out there who still believe they have nothing to
hide, ask yourself this question:
Would you be willing to email carbon copies of all your email messages
and online data transmissions to one of your political opponents?
If secure encryption is banned, this is exactly what you will be doing and
you had better be prepared to agree with everything the government does on
every issue or take the consequences!
DB
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