“He can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.”

This was the counterattack from Public Safety Minister Vic Toews to a question in the House of Commons regarding concerns about letting the police access private citizens information without a warrant.

Apparently this is our choice: a big brother state or child pornography.

This is, of course, ridiculous. Not to mention frightening. But this is the world Canadians will be entering in a few short weeks once the new Conservative crime bill passes. The provisions that require a warrant, are interesting: the bill forces Internet service providers to have the capacity to record their customers’ Internet activity, such as the websites they visit and emails they send.

Let’s be clear: This is akin to requiring Canada Post to scan every letter that Canadians send to one another — just in case any of them have child pornography.

This costly infrastructure will not only raise the cost of Internet access but it now means that Bell, Rogers or anyone else that provides you with Internet on your phone or at your home will be able to record every website you visit. Disturbed about that invasion of privacy? It gets worse.

Most disconcerting is that police would be allowed to obtain your email address, your IP addresses (which often identifies you on the Internet — your home, for example, likely has an IP address), your mobile phone number and other information without a warrant. As legal expert Michael Giest points out: “Law enforcement could use this tool to capture information of all cellphones in a given area — say at a G20 protest, visiting Parliament Hill, or at a community event — and then require Canada’s telecom companies to disclose the corresponding names and addresses. All without court oversight.” If you own a mobile phone, the government can find out where you go and where you’ve been — again without a warrant.

It isn’t just opposition members who are concerned. The federal privacy commissioner and provincial counterparts are deeply concerned. They understand what this means. As Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart wrote to Toews:

“I am also concerned about the adoption of lower thresholds for obtaining personal information from commercial enterprises. The new powers envisaged are not limited to specific, serious offences or urgent or exceptional situations. In the case of access to subscriber data, there is not even a requirement for the commission of a crime to justify access to personal information — real names, home address, unlisted numbers, email addresses, IP addresses and much more — without a warrant.”

In a few short weeks, this will be our reality: we will live in a country where the government can gain access to information that enables it to monitor citizens online without a warrant. Obviously, the opportunities for abuse are astounding. If you are a non-profit advocacy group that disagrees with the government, you’re probably doubly concerned. Of course, if you are a regular citizen I hope you haven’t written any anonymous comments on a newspaper website in opposition to the Gateway pipeline or attended a meeting about poverty, as this legislation, combined with the government’s new focus on eco-terrorists and anti-capitalist groups (they are as much a threat as neo-Nazi groups apparently), could make you a “vulnerable individual” and so an obvious target for surveillance.

The sad irony is that while the government seeks to increase its powers to monitor Canadians online, it has used the opposite argument — the fear of government intrusion into citizens lives — to end less intrusive programs, such as the mandatory long-form census and the long-gun registry. Indeed, barely a week has gone by since Conservative Larry Miller (Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound) was expressing his concern about how the gun registry would foster a police state.

Before I discuss the bill I would like to review how we arrived at where we are today. I would like to share with the House a quote from former Liberal justice minister Allan Rock: “I came to Ottawa last year, with a firm belief that the only people in Canada who should have firearms are police officers and the military.”

Does that sound familiar? Adolf Hitler, 1939.

You know what really reminds me of Adolf Hitler, 1939? A government that seeks to monitor the actions of all its citizens, to spy on them in their homes and their places of work, to ask companies to record who they communicate with and when. As a father, I agree we need to fight child pornography, but I’m not willing to sign away my — or my children’s — civil rights and online privacy.

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I suspect most Canadians, as they learn more about this online surveillance bill, will feel the same way. They don’t want any government, Conservative, Liberal or NDP, forcing companies to record what they do, or accessing information about them without a warrant from an independent judiciary.

David Eaves is a Vancouver-based public policy entrepreneur and adviser on open government and open data. He blogs at eaves.ca.

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