cshen.ca

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Benjamin Franklin

How does a government eradicate civil liberties? By creating an evil and then pretending to solve it, if only people could give up a little of their freedom. Little by little, one imaginary evil after another, we suddenly find ourselves devoid of the freedoms we once enjoyed, and we have – each and every one of us – become the evil that the government targets.

The strawmen of today are internet criminals: scammers, identity thieves, child pornographers. With the permeance of the internet, they have become the dark, mysterious, scary monsters of our time: a readily available excuse for the government to curtail its population’s freedoms.

I have received emails from the BC Liberals for a while now, every time I get one, I mark it as spam. Why? Because every single email the BC Liberals has ever sent me, is spam. Most of the emails I mark as spam without reading, but from the ones with titles ambiguous enough that I’d click on it, it’s evident that my email was added to some mailing list for BC Liberals propaganda. All form letters, many of which designed to get their supporters do to something.

I have never signed up to any BC Liberals spam list, in fact I have never given them my email address by any means. Their frequent emails are wholly unsolicited and unwanted. How did my address end up on their spam list? My best guess is that a Liberal supporter/organizer who shall remain unnamed took some unrequested liberty with use of my email address. I gave him my email to continue a conversation about some BCYL event I was marginally interested in, nothing was mentioned about being added to a spam list. I decided that the event wouldn’t have worked out with my schedule, and that should have been it, but soon I started receiving BC Liberal spam. Correlated much?

The fight against Turnitin.com is certainly easier if more students are aware of the issues and support the cause, this is why I wrote a 2000 word Peak article detailing the copyright and privacy issues as I know it. Wonder how many people will actually read it.

The Peak removed all the references from the article, so quotes are not properly attributed, or even attributed at all. Considering these were in-text references as opposed to footnotes (which I was told they won’t print), I’m kind of disappointed that they were not printed.

The article: The Peak | Original referenced draft

We all know that Facebook has not had the best track record in the privacy department, with employees viewing profiles for fun, showing your profile to an employer, and having reserved the right to use your information at will. But apparently a new feature goes beyond all that, and actually collects information about your activity on other websites.

The new feature is the Facebook Beacon, you may have noticed it on your feed, something of the form “Jane Doe has played Pacman at Retroarcade”. If you have played a game at any website that uses the Beacon, you would have seen a Facebook-style pop-up at the bottom right corner of the screen, telling you that it is sending the information [of what your playing] to your Facebook profile. As with most Facebook features, there is, of course, a privacy option on it.

But that, apparently, isn’t enough.

As reported by Forbes, a part of the USA PATRIOT Act have just been struck down.

A federal judge struck down parts of the revised USA Patriot Act on Thursday, saying investigators must have a court’s approval before they can order Internet providers to turn over records without telling customers.

This is good news, if only a small small step. It does show that at least someone is still concerned about the privacy of individual citizens, and that the executive branch will not be allowed free reign in domestic and international surveillance.

Which brings us to the question, how does it affect Canadians? Well it doesn’t yet, since there is still a lot of powers for any 3 letter agency to spy on international communication, but any change for the better should be welcomed, considering that Canada rips so much of its policies off the States.