Slip, Slipping Away
By Ian Scott
“The true criminals will go and use random Wi-Fi nodes where you can get anonymous access,” he said. “You haven’t done anything but increase surveillance of law-abiding citizens.”
~ Jim Harper, Cato Institute, as reported by CNET
What price for loss of freedom and expectation of privacy are you willing to pay? While some suggest that if you’re a law abiding person, you have nothing to fear, others say that is not the point. Do you really want to have records of on-line chats, emails you’ve sent or received, and websites you’ve browsed, available for up to two years and available at the whim of law enforcement officers who claim to require access to such data?
Who else might have access to that data? It has to be stored somewhere, under the control of at least one individual, even if it is encrypted data. What if the individual who has control of it happens to be your nosy neighbour, who also works for the ISP you use? And one night, he’s bored and curious? Even with controls in place, there are plenty of examples of “controls” in other circumstances being circumvented and an individual’s privacy is infringed.
Do you even have a “right” to privacy? As far as inherent rights go, I don’t think so. But I do believe one may have the expectation of privacy, which include communications with others. Naturally, if you tell someone a secret, and ask them to keep your secret “private,” you are risking your trust in that person to keep the communication a secret. If the person tells another your secret, have they actually infringed upon any right of yours?
But this “snooping” as CNET calls it goes much further then trusting someone with a secret you might want to tell – it includes the ability of third parties that never shared in the agreement to keep your secret, secret, having access to some of your secrets.
According to the CNET article, “Federal politicians also are being lobbied by state law enforcement agencies, which say strict data retention laws will help them investigate crimes that have taken place a while ago.”
But will it really help? If you’re a seasoned criminal, and you know that your ISP is recording all the data about your actions on the Internet, are you going to use that ISP for your criminal actions on the Internet? Maybe law enforcement officials are only interested in catching the dumb ones – and surely to catch dumb ones, there are other ways of catching them that don’t involve the possible surveillance of all individuals that use the Internet.
We truly are living in a time whenever any excuse seems good enough to ensure the recording of what an individual does or buys. In Canada, we have the Long Gun registry, which is supposed to offer the advantage to law enforcement folks information as to who owns long guns. In the US, the CPSC is putting forth requirements that would mean many kids won’t own chemistry sets. All in the name of national security.
Are these the types of things that will help deter criminals or help catch criminals? Absolutely not. All these sorts of things do is increase costs to consumers and create more problems that no one ever thought of during implementation. Recently, I read somewhere that some Law Enforcement representatives were hoping that the new Government in Canada did not do away with the Long Gun Registry, because it is apparently a useful tool – law enforcement agents in Canada query this database 5,000 times per day.
Think about that for a minute. The number of times it is queried per day is being used as the justification for its existence! How bizarre is that? Are there 5,000 instances per day of risk to law enforcement agents of lawful owners of rifles in Canada? It is not the number of times a database is accessed, but what useful information is gleaned under any circumstance that makes a database useful. Any police officer worth his salt would be approaching any investigation with his own responsibility for safety, regardless of what some database told him about the registration of guns by the individuals he is investigating. I would bet that the majority of the 5,000 queries to the firearms database are about whether or not someone has registered a firearm. It has nothing to do with public safety, but instead, has become a tool to find ways to prosecute individuals.
If a law enforcement officer is doing his job with an eye to his own or the public’s safety, relying on a database of registered firearms is the silliest thing he could do. Both bad guys and good guys don’t register their firearms, for entirely different reasons.
So how exactly will requiring ISP’s to keep data about an individual’s Internet habits assist law enforcement in legitimage crimes? The fact is, it won’t. It will simply be another tool to snoop on people – while the real bad guys find other ways to get around any requirements. And meanwhile, rights and freedoms are slip, slipping away.
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