The weird thing about surveillance is it's targets. If you want an orderly society and to enforce the law, there are easy ways to do so w/ no additional resources or powers. You can just start by enforcing the law. Open air illegal drug use, retail theft and illegal encampments are issues that plague many big cities. Addressing them would greatly improve the lives of nearly everyone, but for whatever reason there is just no political will. You can even just start keeping these repeat criminals in prisons longer.
I imagine these surveillance powers won't be used to address any of these issues, like cracking the network of retail theft. Rather they'll be used to arrest people for mean tweets. Canada is not as bad as UK at the moment, but consider the scope of what's tolerable these days in a Western society. For instance UK police reportedly made ~12,000 arrests, or about 30 per day, in one year over online communications offenses.
Those offences also include, as well as ‘hurty words’, threats to kill, bomb hoaxes and harassment matters.
The legislation covers all types of communications including phone calls and letters, and because the authors haven’t bothered to drill down into the stats it is impossible to pick out the ‘hurty word’ offences from (for example) someone threatening to rape and murder an MP on X, or engaging in a campaign of harassment against their ex-partner.
Wage theft by employers in Canada outpaces retail theft, costing Canadian workers an estimated $15 billion annually. In contrast, organized retail shrink and shoplifting cost the retail sector roughly $9 billion per year.
The problems you cited are merely symptoms of structural societal problems. Treating the symptoms is pretty much the only approach we’ve tried because trying to address the systemic problems is woke communist tyranny. The US, for example, has the 5th (and also 6th if you include Guam) highest incarceration rate in the world, and also owns 10% of the top 50 cities for homicides. Making it illegal to be addicted to drugs or too poor or mentally ill to provide yourself with housing does not cure the addicts of addiction, the mentally ill of mental illness, or the poor of their poverty. There’s a reason we eliminated debtors prisons.
Any problem can have a simple solution if you ignore enough about it. If this was entirely about personal responsibility or entirely about providing government services we’d have had these problems licked decades ago.
Open air illegal drug use, retail theft and illegal encampments are not their own root cause, and "keeping these repeat criminals in prisons longer" will only worsen the socioeconomic conditions which compel others to engage in this activities.
Discussions about the surveillance state are too abstract for most people. I think it's important to point out the obvious; the surveillance state is not all it's cracked up to be.
As I've said before, the implicit lie Hollywood has sold is that these weapons will be used with the gravity and seriousness they deserve by consummate professionals.
NSA employees have used multi-billion dollar American surveillance assets to spy on women they're infatuated with. It's called "LOVEINT."
In another instance, a foreign woman who was employed by the U.S. government suspected that her lover, an NSA civilian employee, was listening to her phone calls. She shared her suspicion with another government employee, who reported it. An investigation found the man abused NSA databases from 1998 to 2003 to snoop on nine phone numbers of foreign women and twice collected communications of an American, according to the inspector general's report.
And it's going to get stupider. Pettier. Meaner. Dubai and the richer gulf states have been arresting people for photos sent in private Whatsapp chats,
They've arrested hundreds of ordinary people for messages that they've sent privately to their friends and family, including Americans,
According to official figures released alongside the announcement, the 109 arrests form part of a broader enforcement campaign that has seen 189 individuals detained since the beginning of the conflict on February 28. Of those arrested, 67 are UAE nationals, while 122 are foreign residents or visitors representing 23 different nationalities. The largest groups among the foreign detainees include Indian nationals (31), Pakistani nationals (22), Filipino nationals (18), Egyptian nationals (14), and British nationals (9). The remaining 28 detainees come from a mix of other nationalities including Americans, Canadians, Australians, and various European and Asian passport holders.
I think this is the first example of mass persecution by Large Language Model. Gulf states have admitted to having access to Whatsapp messaging data, https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/insight/dubai-police-use-what... – and there are just too many ordinary people talking to too different sets of friends and families in private DMs and groups for it to be logistically anything but a multi-modal model searching through the data and flagging photos and conversations.
They're doing it for these photos today. Sooner or later one of these states will expand this to lèse majesté laws and then eventually defamation in the west; when it (inevitably) gets imported back home.
> Only you, and the person you're talking to, hold the key. Not the app. Not the company. Not the government.
I feel like this was fundamentally disproven during the US/Canada response to India's Sikh assassinations. The US and Canada both very clearly used lawful intercept to break secure messaging systems and track the killers to their handlers.
Multiple threat vectors. One pattern.
A "threat vector" is the path a surveillance harm takes to reach you. They look unrelated on the surface. The shape underneath is the same.
With Bill C-22, the government would hold the copy. The lock you trust would no longer be a lock only you can open. It would be a lock the locksmith was ordered to duplicate.
The copy is so incredibly bad. Everything is a blend of movie trailer / business proposal / headline / whitepaper / tweet.
Not only that, but when you can just generate everything, pacing goes out the window. Fifteen hundred word blog posts. The food is terrible but hey, at least the portions are large!
too many words and the design is all over the place - you want people to listen, try shortening the length by about 80% and stop with the font changes, block text and then you have text boxes, dumb little AI headers... jesus christ
i get the message and agree this sounds awful but holy shit.
I feel like most of those AI generated websites follow the same pattern of repeating the same comparison (today vs after it passes, now vs future)
What's Signal's planned response to this? Or what about older tools like GnuPG or OMEMO for XMPP?
Signal has said they'd "pull out of Canada" which I guess means delisting on the app store?
In combination with Google stance on what people call "sideloading", this is a serious concern for privacy.
I can keep my privacy just as well without Signal if I can't talk to anyone.
Just like TSA keyhole in every suitcase and every older suitcase without it gets incidentally gutted!
And the wealthy can just avoid the violation of privacy by flying private.
The weird thing about surveillance is it's targets. If you want an orderly society and to enforce the law, there are easy ways to do so w/ no additional resources or powers. You can just start by enforcing the law. Open air illegal drug use, retail theft and illegal encampments are issues that plague many big cities. Addressing them would greatly improve the lives of nearly everyone, but for whatever reason there is just no political will. You can even just start keeping these repeat criminals in prisons longer.
I imagine these surveillance powers won't be used to address any of these issues, like cracking the network of retail theft. Rather they'll be used to arrest people for mean tweets. Canada is not as bad as UK at the moment, but consider the scope of what's tolerable these days in a Western society. For instance UK police reportedly made ~12,000 arrests, or about 30 per day, in one year over online communications offenses.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-make-30-arrests-a-...
Those offences also include, as well as ‘hurty words’, threats to kill, bomb hoaxes and harassment matters.
The legislation covers all types of communications including phone calls and letters, and because the authors haven’t bothered to drill down into the stats it is impossible to pick out the ‘hurty word’ offences from (for example) someone threatening to rape and murder an MP on X, or engaging in a campaign of harassment against their ex-partner.
Wage theft by employers in Canada outpaces retail theft, costing Canadian workers an estimated $15 billion annually. In contrast, organized retail shrink and shoplifting cost the retail sector roughly $9 billion per year.
I think we have a lot of evidence that police have no clue how to address retail theft.
Encampments and drug use should just be legal.
The problems you cited are merely symptoms of structural societal problems. Treating the symptoms is pretty much the only approach we’ve tried because trying to address the systemic problems is woke communist tyranny. The US, for example, has the 5th (and also 6th if you include Guam) highest incarceration rate in the world, and also owns 10% of the top 50 cities for homicides. Making it illegal to be addicted to drugs or too poor or mentally ill to provide yourself with housing does not cure the addicts of addiction, the mentally ill of mental illness, or the poor of their poverty. There’s a reason we eliminated debtors prisons.
Any problem can have a simple solution if you ignore enough about it. If this was entirely about personal responsibility or entirely about providing government services we’d have had these problems licked decades ago.
It's just another style of anarcho-tyrrany.
Open air illegal drug use, retail theft and illegal encampments are not their own root cause, and "keeping these repeat criminals in prisons longer" will only worsen the socioeconomic conditions which compel others to engage in this activities.
Related:
Canada’s Bill C-22 Is a Repackaged Version of Last Year’s Surveillance Nightmare
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111531
Discussions about the surveillance state are too abstract for most people. I think it's important to point out the obvious; the surveillance state is not all it's cracked up to be.
As I've said before, the implicit lie Hollywood has sold is that these weapons will be used with the gravity and seriousness they deserve by consummate professionals.
NSA employees have used multi-billion dollar American surveillance assets to spy on women they're infatuated with. It's called "LOVEINT."
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/loveint-nsa-letter-disclo...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nsa-staff-used-spy-tools-spouses-...
And it's going to get stupider. Pettier. Meaner. Dubai and the richer gulf states have been arresting people for photos sent in private Whatsapp chats,https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/03/31/expats-fle...
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15693741/Paranoid-Dub...
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15739739/airline-work...
They've arrested hundreds of ordinary people for messages that they've sent privately to their friends and family, including Americans,
I think this is the first example of mass persecution by Large Language Model. Gulf states have admitted to having access to Whatsapp messaging data, https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/insight/dubai-police-use-what... – and there are just too many ordinary people talking to too different sets of friends and families in private DMs and groups for it to be logistically anything but a multi-modal model searching through the data and flagging photos and conversations.They're doing it for these photos today. Sooner or later one of these states will expand this to lèse majesté laws and then eventually defamation in the west; when it (inevitably) gets imported back home.
We all get to have the Stasi in our pockets now.
Sloppy McSlopface.
"Only you, and the person you're talking to, hold the key. Not the app. Not the company. Not the government. You probably don't think about it. "
vibecoded website :( em-dashes in its CSS
> Only you, and the person you're talking to, hold the key. Not the app. Not the company. Not the government.
I feel like this was fundamentally disproven during the US/Canada response to India's Sikh assassinations. The US and Canada both very clearly used lawful intercept to break secure messaging systems and track the killers to their handlers.
Not only that, but when you can just generate everything, pacing goes out the window. Fifteen hundred word blog posts. The food is terrible but hey, at least the portions are large!
That's Claude for you :(
too many words and the design is all over the place - you want people to listen, try shortening the length by about 80% and stop with the font changes, block text and then you have text boxes, dumb little AI headers... jesus christ
i get the message and agree this sounds awful but holy shit.