Quotulatiousness

July 10, 2026

EU “Chat Control” passes through parliamentary chicanery

Filed under: Europe, Government, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

As mentioned yesterday, the EU introduced “Chat Control” which allows the authorities to examine any and all private communications by EU residents “to protect the children”. As eugyppius reports, it got through and was passed into EU-wide law on Thursday:

If anybody cares, what actually happened is that an extension of the European Union’s mass surveillance regulation known as Chat Control 1.0 failed to make it out of the European Parliament twice in March. Unable to summon a clear parliamentary majority, advocates (mostly in the centre-right European People’s Party [EPP]) turned to the European Council, which adopted the failed Chat Control 1.0 renewal on 2 July. The Council’s position hardens automatically into law unless the European Parliament can summon an absolute majority to stop it. To forestall any such majority from forming, the EPP on Tuesday moved with member state backing for urgent procedure, angling to force their scheme through in the last days before the summer holiday, after many MEP’s had already left. The parliament narrowly approved the urgent procedure, and in consequence there were not enough votes to stop Chat Control 1.0 when it came for a vote today. Hours ago, a majority of 314 MEPs voted to stop Chat Control against the wishes of the Council, while a minority of 276 voted to let it happen. Because 314 is less than the absolute majority of 361, Chat Control 1.0 passed even though most MEPs present didn’t want it to.

It was a sleazy vote, not least because it’s far from clear this procedural manoeuvre was even appropriate in this case. Also, electronic surveillance is bad, but if we are honest with ourselves this battle was already lost.

Chat Control 1.0 was first instated in 2021 as a temporary exemption to the ePrivacy Directive of the EU, allowing messaging services and online platforms to scan chats and other electronic communications for child sexual abuse material. The exemption expired in April, but various platforms have continued their surveillance with no legal basis in the intervening months. Now their formal permission to scan our private communications has been restored and extended through April 2028. We are, in other words, merely returning to the prior regime.

Chat Control 1.0 is a temporary stopgap while the European Parliament, the Commission and the Council try to negotiate their Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, or Chat Control 2.0. As envisioned by the Commission, this permanent law would not merely allow platforms to scan private communications for child sex abuse material, but require them to do so; require additional AI-assisted automated scanning not only for known child pornography but also for such vaguely defined activities as “grooming”; and extend scanning to end-to-end encrypted services like Signal via mandatory monitoring on the client side. This insane proposal has been watered down over the years, in large part because of parliamentary opposition, but it’s coming in some form. We’re getting Chat Control 2.0 before Chat Control 1.0 expires, and Chat Control 2.0 will be at least somewhat worse.

July 9, 2026

A new proposal for limiting “unreasonable searches and seizures”

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Reason, Jacob Sullum outlines Justice Gorsuch’s proposed new test for limiting government abilities to surveil and monitor private actions:

Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy swears in Justice Neil M. Gorsuch on Monday, April 10, 2017, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C.
White House photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The Court’s 1967 decision in Katz v. United States, which held that the Constitution’s prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures” applies when people have a “reasonable expectation of privacy”, continues to shape Fourth Amendment rulings six decades later. That was clear on June 29, when the Court decided Chatrie v. United States, holding that a government-ordered analysis of cellphone location data qualifies as a “search” under the Fourth Amendment.

“An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information”, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in an opinion joined by four of her colleagues. Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed with the result but not the rationale. The Katz test, he complained, “has no basis in the Constitution’s text or history”. He added that it has proven unworkable in practice because it has never been clear how courts should determine whether an expectation of privacy is “reasonable”.

Gorsuch is surely right that the Katz test has produced inconsistent and puzzling results. In cases addressing intrusions such as trash searches, demands for bank and telephone records, surveillance by low-flying aircraft, and police trespassing on private property, the Supreme Court has perceived no expectations of privacy it was prepared to recognize as reasonable. Applying the same test, it has repeatedly ruled that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to information that people voluntarily share with third parties. Yet the Court has repeatedly rebelled at the disturbing implications of that principle without explicitly renouncing it.

That is what happened in Chatrie, which involved a Virginia bank robbery investigation. Police used a “geofence” warrant to identify the perpetrator by requiring Google to search customer data collected by its Location History feature, which tracks the whereabouts of cellphone users. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the Court declined to apply the third-party doctrine, instead reverting to the original, unmodified Katz test.

A better approach, Gorsuch argued, would be to treat Location History records as “effects” covered by the Fourth Amendment — as a form of personal property, in other words. While it is not clear exactly how that property-rights approach would work in other contexts, it does seem less malleable than the Katz test, which gives courts wide discretion in discerning expectations and deciding whether they are reasonable. Gorsuch aptly likened the Court’s understanding of that test to its definition of obscenity in the 1960s: “We know a ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ (and an exception to the third party doctrine) when we see it”.

They call it “Chat Control”

Filed under: Europe, Government, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam talks about what the EU is calling “Chat Control”:

We need to talk about Chat Control, because it’s all happening this week and almost no one understands what it’s about.

In plain terms: the EU wants to authorize the scanning of your private messages. Your WhatsApp conversations, your emails, your DMs. Not those of a suspect. Those of everyone, all the time, by default.

The pretext is airtight, and that’s the trap: “protecting children”. No one can be against that. That’s exactly why it’s the perfect tool. They’ll never get you to swallow mass surveillance in the name of mass surveillance. They’ll get you to swallow it in the name of children, terrorism, disinformation. Always some cause you won’t dare challenge.

Understand the two-step mechanism well.

Today it’s the “soft” version: platforms have the right to scan, on a voluntary basis, unencrypted messages. Harmless on the surface. It’s the foot in the door.

Then comes the real version, the one under negotiation: mandatory scanning, including of your encrypted messages, analyzed directly on your phone before they’re even sent. Over 500 cryptographers have signed a letter saying it’s technically unfeasible without creating security vulnerabilities that any hacker or hostile state could exploit. You’re breaking encryption for everyone, including the criminals you claim to be targeting.

And the worst part isn’t even that.

The real danger isn’t that Brussels technocrats will be watching you tomorrow. They’re probably too spineless for that. The danger is that they’re building the infrastructure. Once scanning everyone’s messages becomes normal, legal, operational — the track is laid. And on that track will roll everything that comes next. The day a crisis brings ruthless people to power, they won’t have to invent anything. The machine will already be there, ready to go.

No surveillance infrastructure has ever stayed limited to its original purpose. None. It’s a law of administrative nature: a tool built for X always ends up serving Y.

What makes this text dangerous isn’t what it does today. It’s what it makes possible forever.

The decisive vote is Thursday. The last lock.

Auto-translated from the original French by X.

The good folks at Windscribe weigh in:

The EU is not a democracy.

They’re closer to a guy who keeps pressuring a girl to sleep with him despite her saying no.

5 times now.

But he won’t stop.

We’re at the stage where he’s giving her alcohol and making her drunk so she struggles to say no.

Over the last 3 years, Chat Control and similar scanning measures have been defeated or blocked 5 times.

The citizens of the EU and members of EU Parliament have made it abundantly clear — they don’t want Chat Control.

This latest attempt by the EU is the slimiest one yet. Revive dead legislation that was already defeated, flip the passing criteria so that majority don’t need to SUPPORT it, majority need to DEFEAT it, and as the cherry on top, hold that vote on the very last day before Parliament members go on summer break so that many don’t show up. Oh and if they don’t show up, it counts as a vote to pass Chat Control.

You can dress it up in as many legal technicalities and loopholes as you want, what the EU is doing here is fundamentally undemocratic.

No means no.

And if you ever saw a guy pressuring a girl into sleeping with him with disgusting tactics after she said no THIS many times, you would consider him to be a rapist.

So congrats to the EU on adopting rapist strategies to your governance.

June 20, 2026

Bill C-22 passes the Commons “as MPs raced for home for the summer”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Canadian Members of Parliament care more for their summer vacations than they do for the rights of Canadian citizens. While this isn’t really news, it’s just the latest proof that our elected representatives are … well, I was about to describe their moral failings in great detail, but that could get me arrested and jailed if-and-when the many authoritarian measures the Liberals want to enact become law. Instead, here’s Michael Geist‘s summary of the way Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Bill, got sent to the Senate on Thursday night:

Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, passed the House of Commons yesterday with the government invoking a single motion to approve several bills without further debate or individual votes as MPs raced for home for the summer. Bill C-22 will now head to the Senate, where it can expect a rougher ride when study begins in the fall. Rather than use the final days of the House session to answer the privacy, security, and oversight concerns raised by the Privacy Commissioner, academics, technology companies, and civil society groups, the government spent the time ensuring it would not have to, rushing the bill through committee, cutting off debate, and maligning critics with tactics that they once decried when in opposition.

The final days of Bill C-22 in the House marked a genuine abrogation of democratic norms. The government moved a motion to shut down the clause-by-clause study in the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, preventing the committee from adjourning until the bill had been pushed through. That led to a session that stretched past midnight, as MPs were barred from introducing new amendments and were left to vote on amendment after amendment without any discussion, debate, or even public disclosure of their contents. By the end of the committee session, no one could have known the contents of the bill that MPs had duly approved and sent back to the House for final approval. As noted, once back in the House, there was no further debate, discussion or even a vote. Just a motion that said the deal was done.

If the process was troubling, the rhetoric was embarrassing. I wrote earlier this week about Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree’s Vic Toews moment, as he said it was time for opposition parties to “choose” whether to stand with law enforcement and victims of crime (a refrain that sounded a lot like Toews’ 2012 comment to Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia, who is now the Speaker of the House, that he could “either stand with us or with the child pornographers”). Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon pushed that posture further on Thursday by dismissing the bill’s critics as wearing “tinfoil hats” engaged in “paranoia.” The charge fits a broader pattern in which this government treats independent privacy scrutiny as an obstacle rather than a safeguard, seen most clearly in the Bill C-36 approach to strip the Privacy Commissioner of authority over private-sector privacy law altogether.

The committee did approve some government amendments to the bill that improve aspects of the lawful access plan but they are still likely to leave companies, security experts, and privacy advocates concerned. For example, the maximum metadata retention period the government can impose drops from one year to six months, and a category of metadata can now be mandated only where the Minister is satisfied that the category and all of its elements are essential to investigations. That is better, but still not good enough as it is not tied to any actual evidence about why six months is needed and both the costs and risks associated with metadata retention, which is not a requirement in the U.S., are largely unchanged.

As The Reclamare explains, this bill is yet another likely irritant in US/Canadian affairs, as it will expose US citizens’ data to Canadian government oversight:

– A USA person creates/maintains a social media account — lets call it “XXX”

– Using its new C22 law, Canadian RCMP develops a “reasonable grounds to suspect” of “XXX” to a CDN investigation (a low investigative hunch standard under C-22).

– RCMP obtains a Canadian judicial authorization (an “Order”) and sends the Social Media company an International Production Request, which is not a USA warrant, not a §2703(d) order, and not routed through full MLAT (Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty) review.

– The social media company is bound by US law (SCA/ECPA), treats the request as a formal foreign inquiry.

– The social media company discloses limited metadata: summary of login IP ranges, account country setting, and other classification signals to prove USA origin

– This disclosure happens at Canada’s “reasonable suspicion” threshold, which is lower and less scrutinized than the US domestic requirement of “specific and articulable facts showing relevance and materiality” under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d) for the exact same type of data.

– The USA user’s metadata, which would normally enjoy stronger 4th Amendment derived judicial protections, if sought directly by US authorities, is handed to a foreign government on weaker foreign grounds, without the same level of US court filtering or notice that a purely domestic US request would trigger.

– The 4th Amendment protection is effectively diluted because the platform’s good faith compliance with the foreign lower bar creates a new, easier pathway around domestic US constitutional safeguards for accounts that platforms classify as American

Canada’s Liberal government continues to chip away at our “Charter of Rights”, under the guise of “Protecting Citizens” and we are moving towards authoritarianism

While I loathe to create friction, I also hope your Rights can help slow Canada’s devolvement

It impacts you too

June 19, 2026

Nobody voted for this kind of dystopian nightmare, Mr. Carney!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Liberal Party, having engineered themselves a majority in the House of Commons, are on a speed-run to the kind of dystopian police state we used to read about in science fiction novels:

Millions of Canadians are beginning to see the similarities between communist regimes and the direction of current government policy.

The pattern is always the same.

It begins with noble promises: safety, equality, compassion, protection, the greater good.

It ends with censorship, coercion, surveillance, prisons, ruined lives, and a police state.

Always.

It comes wrapped in slogans, experts, committees, emergency powers, censorship, enemies of the people, and the belief that the state has the right to crush the individual for the greater good.

Consider…

C-2 – Strong Borders Act
C-22 – Lawful Access Act
C-34 – Safe Social Media Act
C-36 – Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act
C-9 – Combatting Hate Act
C-25 – Strong and Free Elections Act
S-209 – Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act

All seven are live in the 45th Parliament right now. None has received royal assent yet.

Consider that good, law-abiding Canadians are being gradually and systematically disarmed.

This is not a warning about some distant future.

In 2022 the federal government invoked emergency powers it did not have, froze the bank accounts of citizens over their political views, and banned Canadians from funding a protest. Two levels of court have since ruled it unconstitutional — a violation of the very Charter rights every one of these bills now circles.

That was the trial run. It needed an emergency as the excuse.

The seven bills above are the permanent version — the same reach, made routine — so that next time, no emergency need be declared at all.

A free country is not lost in a single day. It is legislated away in pieces, each one introduced with a reassuring name and defended as necessary, while good people keep assuring themselves it could never happen here.

It already did. The only question is whether enough Canadians notice before it becomes permanent.

Read every bill. Watch every one of them. Because this is the stage where it can still be stopped … and perhaps our last chance.

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms is trying to get Canadians to pay attention to what just one of these bills will do:

Bill C-34 will affect every Canadian. Age verification. AI regulation. A new Digital Safety Commission. Most Canadians have never heard of it. Here’s what it will do.

Michael Geist posts a Substack Note about bill C-22:

Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, has been reported back from committee and is headed toward passage. There are some amendments, but many concerns remain. The updated bill with changes is at

parl.ca/Content/Bills/4…

There are two changes to metadata retention. First, the maximum retention period the government can impose drops from 1 year to 6 months. Second, it can now mandate a category of metadata only if satisfied the category and all its elements are essential to investigations.

The committee rewrote the definition of systemic vulnerability. A “substantial risk” becomes a “credible risk, based on recognized international technical standards”. But it also added a carve-out: a flaw exposing only a target’s data is not “systemic”.

Added a new section on decryption that says nothing in the Act can be read to compel a provider to decrypt user-encrypted data, unless the provider supplied the encryption and holds the key. Borrowed from US law, but doesn’t fit the same way.

Compliance with ministerial orders is now expressly subject to the systemic vulnerability exception. That addresses a contradiction in the original text, where the duty to comply appeared to be unconditional.

The original bill set no maximum duration on these ministerial orders. This now changes to a two-year cap without the open-ended review-and-extend mechanism.

The amendments will rightly leave many still concerned. Companies considering exiting Canada due to Bill C-22 are unlikely to conclude that it fully addresses their issues. Yet the government is likely to push it through the House today.

June 10, 2026

To protect under-16s from harmful content, everyone will now need to show their ID online

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Australia’s attempt to ban under-16s from accessing social media and other online sites blew up rather quickly. Britain and Canada, seeing what happened down under, chorused “Hold our beers!“:

“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The government is expected to table the Digital Safety Act on Wednesday with reports that it will include a ban on social media for those under 16, framed as a “temporary” measure that platforms can exit once a new digital regulator certifies their safety standards. I have been writing about these issues, from the original Online Harms Act to mandated age verification and website blocking and now the kids’ ban, for several years. This FAQ gathers the analysis in one place, with links throughout to the longer pieces for anyone who wants to go deeper. The key takeaway is that a kids’ social media ban is an ineffective and harmful policy that raises privacy concerns for tens of millions of Canadians through mandated age verification requirements. The policy fails to address the underlying concerns with social media and the prospect of a “temporary” ban makes little sense since the requirement might be reversible, but the data collection and regulatory infrastructure are permanent.

What is the government reportedly about to introduce?

According to the Globe and Mail, the forthcoming bill would bar anyone under 16 from social media. The government will indicate that this is a temporary safeguard with an opt-back-in once a regulator certifies safety standards. The government will frame this as “temporary” measure, but I argue that once established, there is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube given that the policy will require a regulator and proof of age from everyone.

Didn’t this start with Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act? What happened to it?

Bill C-63 was the government’s 2024 online harms bill, and from my first-day take I described it as effectively three bills in one: a defensible set of provisions focused on platforms that featured a duty to act responsibly, more contentious Criminal Code and Canada Human Rights Act provisions, and a powerful new Digital Safety Commission modelled on the CRTC to be funded by the tech companies. My view was that the Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions should have been dropped or incorporated into a separate piece of legislation. Bill C-63 itself died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued ahead of the 2025 election, but the duty-to-act-responsibly model is likely to survive as part of the forthcoming bill.

Why is a kids’ social media ban bad policy?

I set out at least six reasons in this post on the issue. The most important is the first: the harms people associate with social media, such as algorithmic manipulation, addictive engagement design, weak content moderation, inconsistent enforcement, inadequate transparency, and privacy risks, affect users of every age. Treating them as a children’s problem misidentifies both the source of the harm and the right target of regulation. By focusing legislative attention on who is permitted to use social media rather than on how the platforms operate, an age-based ban lets legislators and the companies off the hook from more effective broad-based regulation. The other reasons identified in the post include the absence of evidence that bans work, the privacy harms they create, and the constitutional rights of the children they claim to protect.

Does the ban actually work?

The evidence to date says no. Australia’s under-16 ban took effect in December 2025, and the eSafety Commissioner’s first compliance report found that roughly 70 per cent of children who had accounts before the ban retained access to at least one platform three months later, with no discernible reduction in cyberbullying or image-based abuse complaints from under-16 users. Children route around age gates through VPNs, borrowed accounts, and false birthdates, and the most at-risk users are the most likely to circumvent them. Professor Lisa Given laid out much of this on a Law Bytes episode before most of the data was even in. Canadian politicians now citing the Australian approach with approval are pointing to a model whose own regulator’s data suggests has thus far proven ineffective. At a recent Canada 2020 event in Ottawa, Australian professor Amanda Third confirmed that kids are actively circumventing the ban and indicated that parents are concerned that their children are now less safe.

Doesn’t polling show overwhelming public support for a ban?

The headline number is real but misleading. The March 2026 Angus Reid Institute survey found that three-quarters of respondents support a full ban on social media for those under 16, and politicians have cited it repeatedly. But as McGill’s Sara Grimes documented on this Law Bytes podcast episode, the less-quoted numbers in the same survey complicate the picture: 72 per cent said parents, not governments, should be primarily responsible for regulating teens’ social media use, only 32 per cent picked 16 as the right threshold, and the survey did not ask respondents anything about the mechanism any ban would actually require. Simply put, public support for “protect kids from harm” is not the same as public support for “every Canadian must submit ID to a third-party provider in order to use the internet”.

Hasn’t social media been proven harmful to kids?

The data on social media harms to kids is far more mixed than is often portrayed in the media and in Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation book that has fuelled much of the legislative panic. Grimes has produced a very accessible explainer on the issue that walks through the science. As she notes in Panic First, Evidence Later, “there is a serious problem. Researchers who have spent their entire careers studying adolescent mental health, children’s digital media, developmental science, and media psychology – the people who actually built the evidence base Haidt draws on – have raised sustained, substantive objections to his core claims.”

Read all of Michael Geist’s FAQ here.

June 5, 2026

QotD: Modern men and the need for male spaces

Filed under: Health, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Many internet men have pointed out the dwindling of male spaces, while internet women cheer for their disappearance.

Internet men believe that some kind of man-space is essential. A place for men to be men, mentor other men, and tell younger men the secret wisdom to get their lives on track. That if only we had these spaces, everything would be great for men because we’d all know the secret wisdom that doesn’t actually exist.

Internet women believe that male spaces are dens of misogyny. Places where trollish men want to gather, away from the eyes and ears of right-thinking people, so they can poison other men with hate and bigotry.

Which is silly. Men don’t hate women because other men told them to. They see women being women, and that does the trick just fine. In fact, if a man is getting hourly blowjobs from every woman whose path he crosses, then some group of troll men try to tell him women suck, he’d be confused at how uninformed these men are when women are clearly awesome.

Women’s behavior is the number-one driver of misogyny. Not men telling other men women suck.

And that’s the point of male spaces. Not secret manly-man wisdom, not chattering about woman-hate. A space where men can just be. Without women there.

Women are … a certain way.

This is especially true of middle-class and richer women, and even a little more true of white women than other kinds. But true of all women to some extent.

Women have this way about them — everything they do, say, everything about how they behave — that just subtly communicates that they do not have a lot of experience with consequences. That they are just not that used to considering consequences seriously before doing something.

I’m usually hesitant to use political buzz-words in a non-ironic way, but I think the term “privileged” is pretty perfect for this situation.

A woman’s reality — her experience — is a world where consequences just aren’t quite as big of a deal for her as they are for others. She’s never really had to consider consequences with quite the same intensity.

It’s important to note that this isn’t some kind of overt, intentional flaunting as women stride around, consequence-free, thumbing their noses at us. Women don’t even know this is a thing. They’ll deny it fiercely if you tell them. They don’t feel privileged, and their feelings are always real. They’ll even tell you that you’re the privileged one, not them. Because that feels right to them.

It’s not something they do on purpose, and it’s not even that frontal and pronounced. It’s very subtle. Just this subtle way that women are. When they talk, act, make decisions.

This makes them very irritating. Even women find each other irritating.

Archwinger, “Male spaces are because women are irritating”, Archwinger’s Substack, 2026-02-25.

May 29, 2026

Debunking the “it’s just phone book information” claim for Bill C-22

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Michael Geist explains why the “it’s just phone book information” hand-waving by politicians and government officials is worse than misleading: it’s deliberate mendacity.

en telefonbog (a Danish telephone directory)
Photo by Tomasz Sienicki via Wikimedia Commons

If this sounds familiar, it is because the same tired claims have been used for years. In September 2011, then-Public Safety Minister Vic Toews defended the Harper government’s lawful access proposals by claiming “linking an internet address to subscriber information is on par with the phone book linking phone numbers to an address”. Christopher Parsons, then a researcher at the Citizen Lab, responded with a detailed anatomy of what a lawful access “phone record” actually contained, showing that the three-field directory entry the government was invoking was being used to describe an eleven-field record including IP addresses, IMEI and IMSI numbers, SIM serials, device identifiers, and account information from multiple providers, any one of which could be cross-referenced to build a comprehensive profile of a person’s online life.

The Supreme Court of Canada put the issue to rest in the Spencer decision, holding unanimously in 2014 that there is a reasonable expectation of privacy in subscriber information precisely because the disclosure of such information “will often amount to the identification of a user with intimate or sensitive activities being carried out online, usually on the understanding that these activities would be anonymous”. It returned to the same terrain in Bykovets in 2024, extending Charter protection to IP addresses on the reasoning that an IP address is the “first digital breadcrumb that can lead the state on the trail of an individual’s Internet activity”.

Bill C-22’s new subscriber information production order applies a low evidentiary standard but covers name, pseudonym, address, telephone number, email address, account identifiers, types of services provided to the subscriber, the period during which they were provided, and information that identifies the devices, equipment, or things used by the subscriber in relation to those services. In short, a modern subscriber record is not a phone book entry but rather an index of a person’s digital life and the government is proposing to reduce the standard needed to gain access to that information.

Moreover, the same phony framing is now being stretched beyond subscriber data to mandatory metadata retention. As Conservative MP Andrew Lawton noted to Fraser at committee, the government and its officials have been telling Canadians that requiring electronic service providers to retain metadata for up to a year is “no different than just having a copy of the phone book that someone could leaf through”. That is a laughable comparison, given that metadata includes the date, time, duration, and type of a communication, the identifiers of the devices involved, and information identifying the location of the device. It is as if the phone book would include the details of every call made including location, call recipient, and device. And given retention for up to a year, the plan poses a disproportionate privacy risk that is likely to be struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, should it survive in its current form.

And in a follow-up post, he writes:

On encryption, Anandasangaree said the bill “was never meant to breach encryption” and promised to “clarify it in the Bill”. Language clarification is welcome but structural problems remain. The safeguards in Bill C-22 at ss. 5(5) and 7(5), which state that a provider is not required to comply if compliance would create a systemic vulnerability, are incompatible with s. 12, which unconditionally requires compliance with orders, and with s. 13, which specifies that orders prevail over regulations when inconsistencies arise. The term “systemic vulnerability” is not defined in the statute, and the Governor in Council has the power to make regulations “respecting the meaning of any term or expression for the purposes of this Act”. None of this is fixed by promising clearer language. It is fixed by the kind of amendment the Privacy Commissioner proposed this week, namely adopting Australia’s definition, which expressly covers actions that render encryption less effective, together with an explicit prohibition on regulations or orders that require the introduction of, or prevent the rectification of, a systemic vulnerability.

Moreover, Anandasangaree’s defence of the bill’s privacy implications was a deflection rather than an answer, as he tried to turn the attention to the privacy practices in the private sector, stating, “I drive a vehicle where every single point that I drive to is tracked. And that data is not with me.” Commercial data practices are indeed a real concern and Canada needs stronger laws to address them. However, the bill’s surveillance map of every Canadian is not justified by pointing to the absence of meaningful constraints on data collection and to the failure of his own government to address long-overdue private-sector privacy reform.

That brings the press conference back to the Privacy Commissioner. Asked directly whether he would accept Commissioner Philippe Dufresne’s amendments, the Minister said he would “be looking at” them and “looking to see what he has to offer”. Dufresne tabled eight concrete amendments at committee on Tuesday: narrowing subscriber information to a closed list (name, address, telephone number, IP address), restricting who can be compelled to telecommunications service providers, defining “publicly available information” to exclude information in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy, an overarching requirement that SAAIA obligations be necessary and proportionate, an Australian-style amendment to “systemic vulnerability”, an explicit prohibition on orders requiring vulnerability introduction or preventing rectification, an exemption to the SAAIA’s confidentiality rules to allow disclosure to regulatory bodies such as the OPC, and allowing his office to investigate if data breaches result from application of the new powers. Anandasangaree’s comments, coming a day after the Dufresne’s committee appearance, noted that “we have until like five o’clock today” for amendments. That window does not leave room to seriously consider the Commissioner’s recommendations. The “I will be looking at” claim, delivered hours before the deadline, amounted to a rejection of the recommendations.

November 16, 2025

3D printing and firearms

Filed under: Liberty, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR discusses a recent user notification from one of the 3D printer companies to their users:

I’m told that 3D printed gun parts are far more sophisticated than this Liberator from 2013, but I’m sure nobody would actually do that, right? It would draw the attention of various government agencies for sure.

The recent flap about FlashForge attempting to forbid its customers from printing gun parts means it’s time for another reminder about technological risk.

Their weasel-worded climb-down carefully avoids stating that they never collect data on what you print. They only say they don’t collect data during your prints. The wording is so careful that I think we can conclude they do in fact ship telemetry on your print jobs when g-code arrives at the printer, immediately before printing.

So I repeat a warning I’ve given previously: never buy a 3D printer that requires an internet connection to function. And, always assume that if the printer’s firmware isn’t open-source, it is written to spy on you and could at any time prevent you from printing disapproved objects.

Oh, and never trust FlashForge again or buy their products, no matter how much groveling they do. After this, it’s safest to assume that anything they say about respecting the privacy and autonomy of their customers will be a lie. Hear that, @ff3dprinters
?

We need to make a public example of FlashForge. Other vendors need to hear that shit like this will not be tolerated, that attempting to constrain what their customers print will do them permanent and irreversible damage.

It’s possible that this was merely a blunder on FlashForge’s court, and the attempts they’ve made so far to recover are compounding blunders, but they have sincerely repented of trying to control their customers. That’s too bad; in order to create the right incentives bearing on the future behavior of other vendors, we must show no mercy. We must make them hurt – ideally, to the point of being driven out of business.

And really these warnings apply to all “smart” devices, not just 3D printers. Unless you can audit the source code, the only safe assumption to make is that the firmware is spyware, controlware, and malware.

Device vendors need to know that we do not forgive, and will not forget.

In response, Hopalong Ginsberg posted this helpful item:

October 3, 2025

Adding digital ID to the pocket moloch … what could possibly go wrong?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On Substack, Andrew Doyle explains why it’s a terrible idea to trust the government — any government — in forcing digital ID on everyone:

An illustration of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison.
Drawing by Willey Reveley, 1791.

During a trip to Russia in 1785, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham sketched an outline for a new prison design. The cells were arranged around the circular perimeter and, at the centre, he placed his “panopticon”: a watchtower which afforded a view of any of the cells at all times. The prisoners might not always be being observed, but they could never be sure that they weren’t.

Bentham’s design was never directly used, but the idea took hold as a symbol of state overreach and control, most famously in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975). Foucault was alert to the political ramifications of such a concept, and how surveillance might become an internalised experience. With Keir Starmer now pledging to introduce a digital ID system as a mandatory condition for the right to work, are we seeing the first step towards the realisation of Bentham’s vision?

I suppose we are already there. I have seen friends switch off their phones before discussing politically sensitive issues, genuinely convinced that digital eavesdropping is the norm. Many people are mistrustful of the “Alexa” voice assistant, which they are persuaded is recording their every word. While this all seems terribly conspiratorial, I’m sure most of us remember those reports a few years ago about the Pegasus spyware which had been covertly installed on the phones of journalists and government figures, turning the devices into pocket spies.

[…]

Few will be surprised to hear that public trust in political institutions has plummeted. The increasingly authoritarian tendencies of successive governments, our two-tier policing system, public manipulation as embodied in the “nudge unit”, and the corrupt prioritisation of the interests of the political class over the people they serve – perhaps best demonstrated by parliament’s flagrant efforts to overturn the Brexit vote – have all contributed to this climate of mistrust. The bizarre overreach of police during the lockdowns – in which dog walkers were publicly shamed with drone footage, and shopping trolleys were probed for “non-essential items” – has hardly helped matters.

To many of us, it is baffling that anyone at all would support the prospect of the government keeping track of our movements and holding our private details in a database. Starmer claims that the scheme will curb illegal immigration, but we are talking about criminals who already work outside the system and will doubtless continue to do so. Besides, identity cards have been a reality on the continent for years, and have done precisely nothing to resolve the problem. Employers in the UK are already legally obliged to insist on proof of immigration status from workers.

Labour’s digital ID scheme seems more about control than anything else. The possibility of fraud is also a major concern. It’s not as though the government has an unblemished track record of preventing data breaches. We all recall the massive leak of official MOD data regarding Afghans who had worked with the British government during the UK’s military campaigns. And who could forget the senior civil servant who, in 2008, left top-secret documents concerning al-Qaeda and Iraq’s security forces on a train from London Waterloo? Are we really to suppose that the creation of an all-encompassing centralised database will not leave the public open to risk from hackers and hostile foreign powers?

Tim Worstall adds that “they c’n fuck off ‘n’ all”:

So we’ve that wet dream of Tony Blair raising its ugly head again. There should be a national ID system. Actually, it’s not just Blair, T — the bureaucracy has been right pissed at the erasure of the wartime system since the 50s when it was abolished.

For there are two ways of looking at, thinking about, the whole governance thing. One is — the Blair, bureaucrats’, version — that the population are cattle, kine, to be managed. For the benefit of the bureaucracy of course — or at very least to be forced into doing what the bureaucracy thinks they — we — should be doing.

Then there’s that stout Englishman, the Anglo Saxon, version, which is that government are just the slaves we communally hire to make sure the bins get emptied. Well, OK, maybe raise a bit of tax for a Royal Navy to sink the Frenchies. But even then, not too much of that — the Civil War was, after all, triggered by Ship Money. Did the people who would not be slaughtered by the first wave of invading Frenchies — because they had the silly excuse of living 25 miles inland — have to pay the tax to run the Royal Navy to keep the Frenchies at bay or not? The King said yes — the King was right — and not for the first nor last time in British political history the guy who was right had his head cut off for being so.

Digital ID, so which version should we have? That one beloved of Froggie-type bureaucrats who view La Profonde as kine to be corralled? Or the Anglo Saxon version where we just devolve the scut work to a few slaves?

[…]

The reason this never will be proposed is that it doesn’t fit the reasons why our rulers wish to have an ID system. They’re insistent that we be their kine rather than they our. So, the Hell w’ ’em.

But it could be done. Government simply publishes an interface — an API — which says that proof of identity needs to be presented in this format. We’re done as far as whose kine is whose.

Update 4 October: From Samizdata, another illustration of just how toxic Two Tier Keir has become to British voters:

The Guardian reports:

    “Reverse Midas touch”: Starmer plan prompts collapse in support for digital IDs

    Public support for digital IDs has collapsed after Keir Starmer announced plans for their introduction, in what has been described as a symptom of the prime minister’s “reverse Midas touch”.

    Net support for digital ID cards fell from 35% in the early summer to -14% at the weekend after Starmer’s announcement, according to polling by More in Common.

    The findings suggest that the proposal has suffered considerably from its association with an unpopular government. In June, 53% of voters surveyed said they were in favour of digital ID cards for all Britons, while 19% were opposed.

July 31, 2025

The intent of Britain’s Online Safety Act … and the actual implementation

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Conservative Woman, Dr. Frederick Attenborough discusses the gap between what the Online Safety Act was intended to do and how it’s actually being enforced now that it’s the law of the land:

X posts like this may not be visible to uses in the UK under the age verification rules of the Online Safety Act.

At the heart of the regime is a requirement to implement “highly effective” age checks. If a platform cannot establish with high confidence that a user is over 18, it must restrict access to a wide category of “sensitive” content, even when that content is entirely lawful. This has major implications for platforms where news footage and political commentary appear in real time.

Ofcom’s guidance makes clear that simple box-ticking exercises, such as declaring your age or agreeing to terms of service, will no longer suffice. Instead, platforms are expected to use tools such as facial age estimation, ID scans, open banking credentials and digital identity wallets.

The Act also pushes companies to filter harmful material before it appears in users’ feeds. Ofcom’s broader regulatory guidance warns that recommender systems can steer young users toward material they didn’t ask for. In response, platforms may now be expected to reconfigure their algorithms to filter out entire categories of lawful expression before it reaches underage or unverified users.

One platform already moving in this direction is X. Its approach offers a revealing – and potentially sobering – glimpse of where things may be heading. The company uses internal signals, including when an account was created, any prior verification, and behavioural data, to estimate a user’s age. If that process fails to confirm the user is over 18, he or she is automatically placed into a sensitive content filtering mode. As the platform’s Help Center explains: “Until we are able to determine if a user is 18 or over, they may be defaulted into sensitive media settings, and may not be able to access sensitive media”.

This system runs without user opt-in and applies at scale. Depending on how X classifies it, filtered material may include adult humour, graphic imagery, political commentary or footage of violence. Already there are signs that lawful content is quietly being screened out.

One example came on July 25, the day the Act’s age-verification duties took effect, during a protest outside the Britannia Hotel in Seacroft, Leeds, where asylum seekers are being housed. A video showing police officers restraining and arresting a protester was posted on X, but quickly became inaccessible to many UK-based users. Instead, viewers saw the message: “Due to local laws, we are temporarily restricting access to this content until X estimates your age”.

West Yorkshire Police denied any involvement in blocking the footage. X declined to comment, but its AI chatbot, Grok, indicated that the clip had been restricted under the Online Safety Act due to violent content. Though lawful and clearly newsworthy, the footage was likely flagged by automated systems intended to shield children from real-world violence.

In The Critic, Christopher Snowdon explains the breakdown of trust between the British public and their government that the implementation of the Online Safety Act only exacerbates:

People are right to be concerned about this slippery slope and yet it cannot be denied that it is pornography enthusiasts who have been hardest hit by the Online Safety Act in the short term. They must now verify themselves in one of three ways, each less appealing than the last. They can submit their credit card details, they can scan in proof of ID, such as a passport, or they can take a photo of their face and allow AI to judge how old they are. If they want to maximise their chances of being the victim of blackmail and identity theft, they could do all three.

While we might not think twice about submitting our credit card details to Amazon or posting our photos on Instagram, there is an understandable reluctance to hand over private data in order to access dubious websites for the purposes of sordid acts of self-pollution. The government assures us that the data will be kept confidential but it is only two weeks since we learned about a data breach that led to the names of 19,000 Afghans who wanted to flee the Taliban being given to the Taliban and it is less than two months since the names and addresses of 6.5 million Co-op customers were stolen in a cyber-attack. Rightly or wrongly, millions of British plank-spankers and rug-tuggers do not wish to identify themselves to anybody.

The result is a surge in interest in Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) which allow internet users to access websites as if they were in a less censorious country. Half of the top ten free apps in Apple’s app download charts yesterday were for VPNs. Google Trends data show that searches for “VPN” have gone through the roof since Friday. Readers can draw their own conclusions from the fact that these searches have been peaking between midnight and 2am.

Downloading random VPNs comes with risks of its own and opens up a whole new world of illicit online activity from free Premier League football to the Dark Web. But there is a deeper reason to feel uneasy about this unintended, albeit predictable, consequence of paternalistic regulation. By driving another wedge between the state and the individual, it further normalises rule-breaking in a country where casual lawlessness is becoming part of daily life. A law-abiding society cannot long endure if the median citizen thinks that the law is an ass.

The breakdown of trust can be seen most clearly when the ordinary man or woman does not share the moral certainties of the governing class. Among smokers, a collapse in tax morale — the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes — has led to a huge rise in the consumption of illegal tobacco in recent years. Smokers no longer feel any obligation to pay taxes that are designed to impoverish them to a government that vilifies them. Cannabis smokers learn from an early age to be suspicious of a police force that they might otherwise respect. Motorists who are faced with 20mph speed limits that were introduced by people who hate private transport have no scruples about flouting the law.

July 22, 2025

Age verification schemes are just another attempt to control everyone’s internet usage

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Marian Halcombe is specifically discussing the British age verification provisions of their Online Safety Act, but similar schemes are popping up all over the west, and they’re only pretending to be about protecting young people from online content:

“Privacy” by g4ll4is is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

The British State, in its infinite filth and hypocrisy, would like you to believe that it is deeply concerned about what you do with your penis. Or more precisely, what you look at while your hand is on it. The latest wheeze — part of the Online Safety Act — is mandatory age verification for all pornographic websites. We’re told it’s to stop children from seeing naughty videos. In reality, it’s a spyware regime disguised as child protection, devised by a ruling class that snorts coke with one hand while signing surveillance warrants with the other.

Let’s start with the pretence. No one in Westminster cares what children watch online. These are the same people who presided over the industrial-scale rape of working-class girls in Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, and elsewhere — refusing to intervene for fear of “racism”. The idea that they now lie awake worrying about a Year Eight boy glimpsing a MILF thumbnail on Pornhub is an insult to the intelligence. They don’t care about children. They care about you.

The age-verification scheme isn’t just about proving you’re eighteen. It’s about linking your name and your age, and your IP address to your viewing habits. Whether it’s ID upload or facial recognition or some third-party database, the outcome is the same: a digital file that knows what you watch and when you watch it.

In a normal country, this would be recognised as deeply perverse. In ours, it’s dressed up as safety. The State that can’t fix the trains, that can’t keep the hospitals clean, now wants the power to log whether you’re big-enders or little-enders. And all under the banner of protecting the kiddies.

Yes, of course it’s technically possible to anonymise verification. But only if you believe that governments, regulators, and their corporate collaborators are incapable of abuse. That’s a belief I do not share. This is the same British government that let GCHQ harvest your webcam feeds and your phone calls under the TEMPORA programme. You didn’t vote for that. You weren’t told about it. You found out because Edward Snowden blew the whistle.

Do you really think the same regime won’t take an interest in which adult videos you watch? Anyone with an ounce of memory knows how this goes. Every intrusive policy begins with “think of the children”. The Video Recordings Act. The Dangerous Dogs Act. The Terrorism Act. And now the Online Safety Act. Once the infrastructure is in place, it never stays limited to its original purpose.

The definition of “harmful content” is vague for a reason. It can grow. It can stretch. Today it’s Pornhub. Tomorrow it’s Twitter. Then it’s dissident blogs, pro-life websites, or even a dodgy meme about immigration statistics. In the end, the target isn’t porn — it’s dissent.

July 10, 2025

Mandatory online age verification

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Michael Geist discusses the rush of the Canadian and other governments in the west to try to impose one-size-fits-all age verification schemes on the internet:

The Day I Knew I Was Old 😉 by artistmac CC BY-SA 2.0

When the intersection of law and technology presents seemingly intractable new challenges, policy makers often bet on technology itself to solve the problem. Whether countering copyright infringement with digital locks, limiting access to unregulated services with website blocking, or deploying artificial intelligence to facilitate content moderation, there is a recurring hope the answer to the policy dilemma lies in better technology. While technology frequently does play a role, experience suggests that the reality is far more complicated as new technologies also create new risks and bring unforeseen consequences. So too with the emphasis on age verification technologies as a magical solution to limiting under-age access to adult content online. These technologies offer some promise, but the significant privacy and accuracy risks that could inhibit freedom of expression are too great to ignore.

The Hub runs a debate today on the mandated use of age verification technologies. I argue against it in a slightly shorter version of this post. Daniel Zekveld of the Association for Reformed Political Action (ARPA) Canada makes the case for it in this post.

The Canadian debate over age verification technologies – which has now expanded to include both age verification and age estimation systems – requires an assessment of both the proposed legislative frameworks and the technologies themselves. The last Parliament featured debate over several contentious Internet-related bills, notably streaming and news laws (Bills C-11 and C-18), online harms (Bill C-63) and Internet age verification and website blocking (Bill S-210). Bill S-210 fell below the radar screen for many months as it started in the Senate and received only cursory review in the House of Commons. The bill faced only a final vote in the House but it died with the election call. Once Parliament resumed, the bill’s sponsor, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, wasted no time in bringing it back as Bill S-209.

The bill would create an offence for any organization making available pornographic material to anyone under the age of 18 for commercial purposes. The penalty for doing so is $250,000 for the first offence and up to $500,000 for any subsequent offences. Organizations can rely on three potential defences:

  1. The organization instituted a government-approved “prescribed age-verification or age estimation method” to limit access. There is a major global business of vendors that sell these technologies and who are vocal proponents of this kind of legislation.
  2. The organization can make the case that there is “legitimate purpose related to science, medicine, education or the arts”.
  3. The organization took steps required to limit access after having received a notification from the enforcement agency (likely the CRTC).

Note that Bill S-209 has expanded the scope of available technologies for implementation: while S-210 only included age verification, S-209 adds age estimation technologies. Age estimation may benefit from limiting the amount of data that needs to be collected from an individual, but it also suffers from inaccuracies. For example, using estimation to distinguish between a 17 and 18 year old is difficult for both humans and computers, yet the law depends upon it. Given the standard for highly effective technologies, age estimation technologies may not receive government approvals, leaving only age verification in place.

June 5, 2025

The Liberals believe this time they’ll keep kids away from internet porn

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sometimes it’s hard to get a grip on what Liberals actually believe, as on the one hand they’re actively resisting pulling literal pornography out of school libraries (because it’s “LGBT friendly”) and on the other hand, they’re all gung-ho for yet another attempt to pass legislation that will try to prevent kids from seeing porn on the internet:

How does a website automatically, “responsibly” prove someone’s age down the end of an internet connection, without actually verifying their ID? Answer: It doesn’t. Obviously

There is another legislative effort afoot to keep Canadian children away from pornography. It’s well-intentioned effort, I suppose, but such efforts didn’t work very well when pornography was printed on glossy paper and distributed on VHS tapes and pay-per-view, so it seems particularly improbable in the internet age.

Bill S-209 is Independent (Liberal-appointed) Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne’s second attempt at a private member’s bill on the topic. It is predicated on the notion that it’s easier to verify age automatically than it used to be: “Online age-verification and age-estimation technology is increasingly sophisticated and can now effectively ascertain the age of users without breaching their privacy rights”, the bill’s preamble avers.

It is absolute rubbish, to the extent that even the Liberals under former prime minister Justin Trudeau seemed to realize it the first time it was tried. We can only hope Mark Carney’s Liberals are of similar mind. Early signs are not positive. The reappointment of Steven Guilbeault as heritage minister (now called Canadian identity and culture minister, for some reason) doesn’t bode well. He seems genuinely to dislike the online world on principle.

Or, maybe it does bode well. Guilbeault did a singularly terrible job trying to sell the Liberals’ anti-internet agenda in English Canada. I’m not sure he could give away ice cream in a Calgary heatwave. So if you think laws targeting “online harms” are doomed to fail at best — and could lead to dystopian outcomes — then maybe Guilbeault is exactly the fellow you want in charge.

When it came to online porn, the Trudeau Liberals seemed to have some sense of the Sisyphean proposition before them. Miville-Dechêne’s first attempt at a bill received support from MPs of all parties in the House of Commons last year, but the Liberal leadership cited privacy concerns in refusing to get behind it.

In large part that might just have been because Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre supported the idea and, to Liberals, anything Poilievre supports must obviously be a serious threat to humanity’s survival. But still, Trudeau was pretty unequivocal in rejecting the idea.

May 30, 2025

Senate to once again try to pass internet age verification and website blocking

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Some ideas are so horrible that they never, ever die. The Canadian Senate nearly got an age verification and website blocking ban into law during the last Parliament, and as Michael Geist discusses, they’re not giving up now:

“In the east wing of the Centre Block is the Senate chamber, in which are the thrones for the Canadian monarch and consort, or for the federal viceroy and his or her consort, and from which either the sovereign or the governor general gives the Speech from the Throne and grants Royal Assent to bills passed by parliament. The senators themselves sit in the chamber, arranged so that those belonging to the governing party are to the right of the Speaker of the Senate and the opposition to the speaker’s left. The overall colour in the Senate chamber is red, seen in the upholstery, carpeting, and draperies, and reflecting the colour scheme of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom; red was a more royal colour, associated with the Crown and hereditary peers. Capping the room is a gilt ceiling with deep octagonal coffers, each filled with heraldic symbols, including maple leafs, fleur-de-lis, lions rampant, clàrsach, Welsh Dragons, and lions passant. On the east and west walls of the chamber are eight murals depicting scenes from the First World War; painted in between 1916 and 1920.”
Photo and description by Saffron Blaze via Wikimedia Commons.

The last Parliament featured debate over several contentious Internet-related bills, notably streaming and news laws (Bills C-11 and C-18), online harms (Bill C-63) and Internet age verification and website blocking (Bill S-210). Bill S-210 fell below the radar screen for many months as it started in the Senate and received only cursory review in the House. The bill faced only a final vote in the House but it died with the election call. This week, the bill’s sponsor, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, wasted no time in bringing it back. Now Bill S-209, the bill starts from scratch in the Senate with the same basic framework but with some notable changes that address at least some of the concerns raised by the prior bill (a fulsome review of those concerns can be heard in a Law Bytes podcast I conducted with Senator Miville-Dechêne).

Bill S-209 creates an offence for any organization making available pornographic material to anyone under the age of 18 for commercial purposes. The penalty for doing so is $250,000 for the first offence and up to $500,000 for any subsequent offences. The previous bill used the term “sexually explicit material”, borrowing from the Criminal Code provision. This raised concerns as the definition in the Criminal Code is used in conjunction with other sexual crimes. The bill now features its own definition for pornographic material, which is defined as

    any photographic, film, video or other visual representation, whether or not it was made by electronic or mechanical means, the dominant characteristic of which is the depiction, for a sexual purpose, of a person’s genital organs or anal region or, if the person is female, her breasts, but does not include child pornography as defined in subsection 163.1(1) of the Criminal Code.

Organizations can rely on three potential defences:

  1. The organization instituted a government-approved “prescribed age-verification or age estimation method” to limit access. There is a major global business of vendors that sell these technologies and who are vocal proponents of this kind of legislation.
  2. The organization can make the case that there is “legitimate purpose related to science, medicine, education or the arts”.
  3. The organization took steps required to limit access after having received a notification from the enforcement agency (likely the CRTC).

Note that Bill S-209 has expanded the scope of available technologies for implementation: while S-210 only included age verification, S-209 adds age estimation technologies. Age estimation may benefit from limiting the amount of data that needs to be collected from an individual, but it also suffers from inaccuracies. For example, using estimation to distinguish between a 17 and 18 year old is difficult for both humans and computers, yet the law depends upon it. Given the standard for highly effective technologies, age estimation technologies may not receive government approvals, leaving only age verification in place.

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