Internet surveillance debate falls victim to rhetoric

When the Liberal government of Paul Martin introduced the Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act in November of 2005, it received comparatively little attention. As the columnist Thomas Walkom described it in the Toronto Star, the bill would require Internet and telephone companies “to install equipment that would allow the state to monitor all of their customers … (It) would give police … the power to demand, without the need for court warrants, any information that (these) companies keep on their customers — including addresses, passwords and credit card information.” The public safety minister at the time, Anne Mclellan, was quoted to the effect that the police needed the new powers to go after terrorists and child pornographers.

In other words, more or less the same legislation, supported by more or less the same arguments, as Bill C-30, whose purported horrors have convulsed the nation this past week. Yet it caused nothing like the same fuss. For that matter, neither did an earlier version of the current bill, C-52, introduced in the last Parliament — concern, yes, but not the all-consuming fireball that C-30 detonated.

None of this is to defend the legislation. Privacy advocates make a convincing case that it gives too many people too much personal information with too little justification. Neither am I arguing the Liberals are necessarily hypocrites to oppose it (though that’s certainly possible), or that their own sins cancel those of the bill: that other parties, and other countries — similar legislation is already on the books elsewhere — may have been willing to erode their citizens’ liberties in this way is not an argument for doing so in the present case, nor does the long list of surveillance powers to which Canadians are already subject make the case for adding another.

I’m just interested in the discrepancy. Why has this bill, this invasion of privacy, aroused such heated opposition, where others haven’t? When did we all become such civil libertarians?

One possibility is that this bill is more invasive than its predecessors.

Yet this is plainly not the case. The Liberals’ bill would have granted police warrantless access to subscribers’ names, addresses and “any other identifiers.”

Bill C-52 translated that openended list into 11 specific bits of subscriber information, half of them aimed at identifying specific devices like a cellphone.

The latest bill shortens that to six, the most controversial of which is the subscriber’s IP address, marking the point on the Internet where access was gained.

Another possibility is that the public has simply become more alert to the dangers of granting police excessive surveillance powers.

If so, all to the good. As much as the Internet might present new threats in the form of child pornographers and other predators, the potential for private information to be improperly collected and distributed, whether by private or public agencies, is also deeply worrying. But why would we have awo- ken to this only in the last week?

I think a large part of the escalation in rhetoric has to do with the general climate of hysteria in which politics is conducted these days — on all sides. Recent days have seen a Conservative MP refer to gun registry advocates in the same breath as Hitler, and a Liberal MP declare that the government’s values were so abhorrent as to cause him to contemplate separation. Most notorious, of course, was the invitation from the Public Safety Minister, Vic Toews, to a critic of Bill-c30 to stand with the government or “stand with the child pornographers.”

But even that doesn’t explain it. What has added fuel to many recent controversies, particularly those involving Internet access and digital rights, is the arrival of the online community as a political force. This is often celebrated as a democratic breakthrough, and in many respects it is. But it is not unalloyedly so.

Hyper-informed as they can be on these issues, they are also prone to a peculiarly over-the-top, take-no-prisoners style of rhetoric, encouraged by the individual anonymity and reinforced by the armies of the like-minded that are the hallmarks of social media. As a means of asserting the superiority of the speaker over other life forms, this is quite effective; as a means of persuading the unenlightened, not so much.

Hence, a week that began with the threat to privacy represented by Bill C-30 ended with the wholesale publication via Twitter of the details of the minister’s years-old, and very messy, divorce case. Rather than debate how much those in power should know about the public, we instead debated how much the public should know about those in power. The relevance of such information to the issue at hand, the fairness of publishing it without offering the minister the chance to respond, the morality of attacking another person’s reputation without putting your own name on the line — all these were dismissed as distractions, the concerns expressed by working journalists, who deal with these questions for a living, waved away as no more than the dismay of the “gatekeepers” at the loss of their traditional role.

Perhaps it is. Perhaps that does not make it entirely wrong.