Canadians who are interested in the conditions under which it’s legal for private information and documents to be shared might want to take a good long look at Bill C-29. I’ll quote a bit from the legislative summary below, but in essence one of the things this bill says is that any documents/information the police (or anything that meets the… Read more →
Tag: police powers
Must Also Be Seen To Be Done
I had thought that three of the things that were important ideas in Canadian jurisprudence were: 1) That citizens had a right to free speech, 2) that the government in all its forms has a prescribed amount of power, with well delineated limits on where that power stops, and 3) that it was very important for the justice system to… Read more →
Aside
Over the last decade I’ve become increasingly cynical about, and frankly afraid of Americans. Not all of them–I know they’re not all the same, and there are lots of them I love–but Americans in the aggregate. I had some hope that things were changing there last year, but when I read statistics like 58% of US voters favour the use of torture in gathering information–specifically in a case where there is no ticking bomb–I am more scared than ever. Factor in that the rate is even higher for younger people and I’m left wondering if there will be anyone left who understands that this isn’t how things should be. Those numbers about how many people think the US legal system is too worried about individual rights make me despair for humanity, and for the American voting public’s ability to read.
You can learn something new every day
I followed a stay Twitter link today that lead to this short discussion of how to deal with someone acting racist: I found that interesting enough that I spent some time looking at other vlogs from the same dude, which lead me to this one, East Coast Cats and Christopher Street Boys, which I particularly liked: I’m pretty New York… Read more →
Peter Watts on Daily Kos, and Just Worlds
Nice to see the Watts story get some coverage on one of the larger political blogs. I quite like this bit: It’s ironic, though, that the same day I was arrested one Mary Callahan, chief privacy officer for Homeland Security, was up here in Canada reassuring us that the border isn’t so bad a place after all, and the US… Read more →
When The Black Wind Blows
I’ve been very busy the last few days, with a combination of post-moving stuff (hey, look, we’re close to family now, and it’s the holidays), and with some important changes at work (on which I shall write a very journal-y entry shortly). Which explains why I haven’t already written about an utterly unacceptable, and miserably predictable, incident. Quite a bit’s… Read more →
It’s actually not a joke, although it’s easy to come up with a punchline
I’ve been quick to criticize American history for HUAC, and CoIntelPro, and the general internal espionage of the early FBI, as well not recognizing the lessons of history when they swing around again, so I should probably also point out that we do a lot of the same stuff. As you can see in the story that broke this week… Read more →
Organizational Pathology
Did you see the ACLU press release today about how the American terrorist watch list now has more than one million people on it? “America’s new million record watch list is a perfect symbol for what’s wrong with this administration’s approach to security: it’s unfair, out-of-control, a waste of resources, treats the rights of the innocent as an afterthought, and… Read more →
Putting My Own House In Order
Or rather, bitching about my own country’s politicians for a change. It seems like I can’t turn around lately without seeing another story that just embarrasses me as a Canadian. The classic example, which I’ve talked about here before, is the Tories’ continuing attempt to force a DCMA-style law down our throats. After getting his ass more or less handed… Read more →
Can Not Process Data
You know those hoary old SF stories where the hero defeats the robot/intelligent energy matrix/computer/whatever by giving it information that can not be logically processed–isn’t “Is the following statement true? ‘This statement is false.’” the classic one?–and thus causing the super-powerful processing of the robot/intelligent energy matrix/computer/whatever to burn out, usually accompanied by a nice visual of electrical explosions? Well,… Read more →
Even More Things I Did Not Know
Science has brought us a permanent, but easily-removable, tattooing ink. Does this change the metatext of tattooing? I mean, the pain is still there, but if the permanence isn’t part of the subtext anymore, what does that mean for the story? Is it to obvious to predict the rise of a serial-tattooing culture, or a rift between the permanents and… Read more →
