Canada: Next Surveillance Nation?
Surveillance powers the future of social credit scores
Canada used to be referred to as the home of the “true north strong and the free”.
Not anymore as we saw the current administration invoke the Emergencies Act to deal with a few trucks parked in the wrong spot and freeze bank accounts of people that bought fuel for those trucks. Adding fuel to the fire they have banned a wide range of guns, including common hunting rifles.
Edward Snowden blew the lid off the United States spying on its own citizens, the UK just passed a law to develop a system to read everyone’s encrypted messages, now in Canada even their Fisheries Department deploys spyware to gather data.
A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) article describes, “13 federal departments using tools capable of extracting personal data from phones”. All 13 agencies ignored federal directive to carry out privacy impact assessments when using the tools, so basically they are doing this, in my opinion, illegally.
The departments are:
Not just law enforcement, but standard government departments that should not be spying on its citizens are collecting all the data they want from who ever they want.
Invasive surveillance is becoming the new normal. There are no boundaries for what the government can collect, how long they can retain it, and who they can share it with.
During the pandemic, the Canadian government requested for all Canadian Telcos to give them “anonymous” location data of every cell phone in Canada so they could monitor compliance during lock downs. They tracked 33 million phones.
Not only did they track Canadian phones during the pandemic but also requested records going back to January 1st, 2019, and tracked phones until May 31st, 2023 with a possible 3 year extension.
In both cases above, the Office of Privacy Commissioner of Canada said they did not have proper basis for the data collection, its usage, or the expiration of the data.
When the government does not follow its own laws, what is that called?
In Closing
So that phone you bought with your own hard earned money for your own personal use turns into a government tracking device, how does that make you feel?
When will be carrying a phone be mandatory especially when cash is gone?