Shots Fired On Parliament Hill

[Keepitsimple]

I think this captures my fears:

Government exploits attacks on military to push security agenda, Greenwald says

Unless citizens rebel and demand transparency and accountability, Greenwald believes one ultimate consequence could be an endless war between the West, Muslim nations, and extremist movements.

Future generations will look back and say that in the wake of 9/11, the U.S. and its allies put themselves in a mindset and a policy approach that guaranteed not only a long war but a war that had no end.

The pattern is clear. We do something (militarily) in that part of the world that generates all sorts of rage and fury, rightly or wrongly. That rage and fury causes a tiny percentage of the people in that world to want to bring violence back to us.

When the violence is brought back to us, we immediately demand that our government further erode civil liberties and we need even more militarism, which in turn inflames that part of the world more and causes more violence to be brought back to us in a never-ending spiral.

Greenwald is a US reporter who is clearly - and rightly ashamed of his own government's (Bush/Obama) tactics. To have someone like this clown come up to Ottawa and insult our government - to rail against our PM before any actions have actually been taken - they should throw him in the Ottawa river. We're NOT the US - we're Canadians - dull and pragmatic

Edited October 27, 2014 by Keepitsimple

[GostHacked]

Greenwald is a US reporter who is clearly - and rightly ashamed of his own government's (Bush/Obama) tactics. To have someone like this clown come up to Ottawa and insult our government - to rail against our PM before any actions have actually been taken - they should throw him in the Ottawa river. We're NOT the US - we're Canadians - dull and pragmatic

You are right, we are not the US, but Greenwald's concerns are shared by many Canadians. This kind of thing has not only been implemented in the USA, but you can also include the UK, Australia, NZ, Japan and others. We live in a 'western civil society' and yet the government looks to encroach on our rights. Imagine what happens in non democratic countries.

People have a right to complain with items like the PATRIOT ACT and the NDAA south of the border. The Canadian government is constantly trying to get something similar enacted here in Canada. With the SCC smacking them down each time.

[Argus]

So you didnt even read my post before you replied then?

You clearly didn't read mine.

And you didn't answer the question.

Edited October 27, 2014 by Argus

[Argus]

Tell me this... if a government staffed by civil servants and temporary contracts goes up against the private sector component of an entire industry made up of all the biggest companies and best and brightest minds in the field.... Who would you expect to win? And if you think the government is better at IT than the private sector then why not just nationalize it?

If you're talking about something like the intelligence services of a major country, not only are they specificaly working on systems to crack and hack into other people's systems, but they've already got people inside those private IT companies you speak of and know everything they're doing before they do it.

You think Google and the like don't have employees who consider their primary loyalty to their country and not Google? Of course they do.

[Argus]

And cryptography isnt the only issue. All kinds of anonymization services are popping up like TOR. A NSA slide from presentation called "TOR STINKS" was leaked where they admited they would never be able to de-anonymize any significant ammount of TOR users.

So already your beloved security services are completely in the dark in terms of content belonging to anyone with half a brain.

Yes, I understand they're even working on ways pedophiles can pay for their child porn through bitcoins so the government can't trace them, and people can send anonymized threats of rape and murder without fearing prosecution. Good on them! They must be proud they're making life easier for the mafia and triads! They must be delighted that terrorists everywhere will switch to their systems in hopes they are safe from eavesdropping!

All so paranoids hiding in their basements with tinfoil hats on can surf the internet for porn without fearing the CIA is watching them...

Why are you so frightened, Dre? What are you doing you think the government is going to be coming through your door for?

[Argus]

You are right, we are not the US, but Greenwald's concerns are shared by many Canadians. This kind of thing has not only been implemented in the USA, but you can also include the UK, Australia, NZ, Japan and others. We live in a 'western civil society' and yet the government looks to encroach on our rights. Imagine what happens in non democratic countries.

Maybe all such people should move to Russia where they're safe.

[Mighty AC]

In response to the soldiers killed on our soil I keep hearing politicians and media types saying "I hope Canadians do not change because of the attacks."

I hope we change a little. Some of the same politicians that hid in closets and barricaded themselves in offices clapped and cheered when the vote passed to send more Canadians off to war.

Sometimes war is necessary and I respect the hell out of anyone who is willing to risk their lives to stand up for our interests. However, war is ugly and brutal and causes death and suffering for many soldiers, innocent civilians, families and friends. It’s something that should never be cheered about…especially by old, rich men that don’t have to take part.

I feel sympathy for the families of soldiers lost in Ottawa and Quebec, but I am a little glad some politicians were scared. I hope this is a wake up call that war isn’t some abstract concept that takes place far overseas. Soldiers dying on our soil are new to us, but it’s a daily occurrence in the places we are sending soldiers to fight.

Edited October 27, 2014 by Mighty AC

[jbg]

I hope this is a wake up call that war isn’t some abstract concept that takes place far overseas. Soldiers dying on our soil are new to us, but it’s a daily occurrence in the places we are sending soldiers to fight.

Why should we suffer casualties here. We don't fight sectarian wars among ourselves. They do.

[GostHacked]

Maybe all such people should move to Russia where they're safe.

If we don't stand up for our rights, we can slip into something that looks a lot like Russia. The lawmakers and politicians should offer up themselves and their own family for service overseas first before they send anyone else to die for this country.

But in the face of danger with a lone gunman all the politicians ran for cover. Cowards. Imagine if they were met with a real threat how cowardly they would act. All while using the crisis to scare us to further their agenda.

[jacee]

- to rail against our PM before any actions have actually been taken - they should throw him in the Ottawa river. We're NOT the US - we're Canadians - dull and pragmatic

I didn't want to over-quote, but since you mentioned it ...

On Thursday, the day after ... Harper told the Commons new laws giving police more powers to surveil, detain and arrest suspected extremists are, already underway and will be expedited.

The legislation would give the Canadian Security Intelligence Service more power to track terror suspects abroad and provide blanket identity protection for the agencys human sources. Conservatives now are hinting that even more powers are required to make pre-emptive arrests.

... we definitely do need to be concerned about erosion of our rights, imo.

.

[jacee]

If we don't stand up for our rights, we can slip into something that looks a lot like Russia. The lawmakers and politicians should offer up themselves and their own family for service overseas first before they send anyone else to die for this country.

I agree.

But in the face of danger with a lone gunman all the politicians ran for cover. Cowards. Imagine if they were met with a real threat how cowardly they would act.

Anyone who is unarmed should take cover from an armed intruder.

All while using the crisis to scare us to further their agenda.

I agree.

.

[Keepitsimple]

I didn't want to over-quote, but since you mentioned it ...

On Thursday, the day after ... Harper told the Commons new laws giving police more powers to surveil, detain and arrest suspected extremists are, already underway and will be expedited.

The legislation would give the Canadian Security Intelligence Service more power to track terror suspects abroad and provide blanket identity protection for the agencys human sources. Conservatives now are hinting that even more powers are required to make pre-emptive arrests.

... we definitely do need to be concerned about erosion of our rights, imo.

.

You mis-understand - or was it intentional? Even before the latest attacks, surveillance legislation had been in the works for months if not years - that's what Harper is alluding to.

[hitops]

In Canada!? Thousands of people are dying in the middle east over political struggles from the vacuum left in Saddam Hussein's wake. And not to mention the thousands of innocent people who have died at the hands of the West in the War on Terror.

That exactly makes my point though doesn't it? In Canada, a nation of people who are largely, if religious, Christian or Jewish, or who are non-religious, we don't have many religions-inspired attacks. And despite being a small minority, the few attacks we have are disproportionately (relative to their population) associated with Muslims.

You've mentioned the war on terror. This is irrelevant to the point of whether 'all religions do it'. We all agree that nations of all sorts do bad things for the usual reasons of self-interest. Those are secular aims. We are talking about religious-motivated violence. In history, the biggest killers (by kill count) by a huge margin were non-religious and or anti-religion (Stalin, Mao). But they aren't here today, and we're talking about religious violence today.

Worldwide, Muslims make up a massively disproportionate share of violence and conflict. It's so disproportionate, that in relative terms, no other religion is really on the radar. It's arguably a much larger share even than non-religious violence (done for the usual power, land, resources reasons).

There is no comparison. 'All religions' aren't doing it. It's pretty much just Muslims. Have you read the Koran or Hadiths (record of Mohammed's life). If not, do so. It will quickly become very unsurprising why that theology is quickly adopted into violent movements compared to others. When the founder of the religion lived and operated like ISIS, no wonder whey ISIS has appeal. All they have to say is 'we are following what Mohammed said'. And they are! That's the problem. The peaceful ones you and I know, have absolutely nothing in common with the prophet Mohammed, thankfully.

Edited October 27, 2014 by hitops

[jbg]

Conservatives now are hinting that even more powers are required to make pre-emptive arrests.[/i]

... we definitely do need to be concerned about erosion of our rights, imo.

I have felt for a long time, in the context of mental health, that we need better ability to pre-emptively force treatment on people who cannot function in society. In extreme cases we get what we saw last week where his delusions led him to believe, apparently, that he was doing ISIS's bidding. I don't think his attack was coordinated with Islamist radicals. I do think that his ability to cope with real life was badly compromised and he snapped. We should not have to wait until people die before reaching out to help.

In a New York City winter you see homeless people who are non-violent but equally unable to cope sleeping on sidewalk steam grates for warmth. I really think there are people who need help before we get to the point of shooting at them, or their freezing to death.

[jacee]

You mis-understand - or was it intentional? Even before the latest attacks, surveillance legislation had been in the works for months if not years - that's what Harper is alluding to.

Does "expedited" mean curtailing debate?

Did you miss this?

Conservatives now are hinting that even more powers are required to make pre-emptive arrests.

[Smallc]

I hope we change a little. Some of the same politicians that hid in closets and barricaded themselves in offices clapped and cheered when the vote passed to send more Canadians off to war.

The Prime Minister did not hide in a closet, his aides put him there to get him as far from harm as possible. He's far more valuable alive than dead. No one should be asking Harper to be a hero given his position.

[cybercoma]

That exactly makes my point though doesn't it? In Canada, a nation of people who are largely, if religious, Christian or Jewish, or who are non-religious, we don't have many religions-inspired attacks. And despite being a small minority, the few attacks we have are disproportionately (relative to their population) associated with Muslims.

They certainly haven't. Most of the horrific violence in Canada is committed by non-Muslims. That's the problem. You create a definition that provides self-fulfilling prophecy. The majority of attacks by Muslim extremists is committed by Muslim extremists. You don't look at violence others commit. It's tautological myopia.

[Big Guy]

This idea of initiating an action and using the excuse that it was "pre-emptive" has no validity. It seems to be a recent concept to initiate war and conflict. It is as silly as those "defensive invasions" that the USA has initiated.

Like Pearl Harbour. The Japanese "had no choice but to attack" because the USA was about to join the war and invade Japan.

Canadian planes are in the Middle East bombing a bunch of guys dressed in black on Toyotas, guys who cannot even take down a helicopter, from invading North America.

Who else should we attack just in case they go after us at some time down the line?

[bush_cheney2004]

This idea of initiating an action and using the excuse that it was "pre-emptive" has no validity. It seems to be a recent concept to initiate war and conflict. It is as silly as those "defensive invasions" that the USA has initiated.

No....Canada readily engaged both World Wars without invasion. Was that "silly" ?

[eyeball]

You mis-understand - or was it intentional? Even before the latest attacks, surveillance legislation had been in the works for months if not years - that's what Harper is alluding to.

Harper explicitly said he would redouble his efforts.

That implies surveillance legislation that is twice as odious and penetrating as before.

[dre]

Yes, I understand they're even working on ways pedophiles can pay for their child porn through bitcoins so the government can't trace them, and people can send anonymized threats of rape and murder without fearing prosecution. Good on them! They must be proud they're making life easier for the mafia and triads! They must be delighted that terrorists everywhere will switch to their systems in hopes they are safe from eavesdropping!

All so paranoids hiding in their basements with tinfoil hats on can surf the internet for porn without fearing the CIA is watching them...

Why are you so frightened, Dre? What are you doing you think the government is going to be coming through your door for?

Amazing that you would post something that ridiculous.

Like I said... we arent talking about paranoids, or pedophiles. These concerns are global, and shared by almost everybody.

Why are you so frightened, Dre? What are you doing you think the government is going to be coming through your door for?

More blatant stupidity. Iv answered this already as well. I dont even HAVE any sensitive personal data. A person doesnt have to have any secrets what-so-ever to understand that bulk electronic surveillance is a dangerous and technically flawed idea... just a little bit of common sense.

Edited October 27, 2014 by dre

[dre]

If you're talking about something like the intelligence services of a major country, not only are they specificaly working on systems to crack and hack into other people's systems, but they've already got people inside those private IT companies you speak of and know everything they're doing before they do it.

Maybe in hollywood movies. In the real world though theres both practical and theoretical limits on what can be done. Once you have a sound implementation of an encryption algorithm, then youre left with brute force... you need massive computing power which is what the NSA has put together... Huge data centers with massive arrays of GPU's etc. The problem is that as the length of the keys increases the ammount of computing power needed to crack them increases exponentially. Even if you could harness every computer on earth it would take many years to crack encyption beyond 256 bit.

And the problem of course is that once all these communications are E2EE encrypted you would need to crack 180 billion of these messages per day in order to have a complete corpus to data-mine, and thats just email alone. The best they will ever be able to do is crack a very small percentage of encrypted communications, by exploiting bugs in the implementation, or de-anonymize a very small percentage of users in a service like TOR.

The whole MITM / Mining concept is pretty much obsolete already.

Thats why....

The NSA is racing to build a quantum computer capable of cracking even the strongest encryption

But even if they can do that... and be able to claim they can break the strongest encryption out there, the datamining concept is still done for because theres no way they are going decrypt all of the communications out there.

It would take a super computer 1 BILLION BILLION years to crack even a 128 Bit AES key.

In terms of a massive distributed attack... If every single person on earth had 10 computers capable of testing 1 billion keys per second, it would take the human race 77,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to crack a single message.

So yes... Datamining could work with encrypted communications!!! The NSA will have todays 180 billion messages encrypted, indexed, and ready for mining in about 138,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. Then they can start on working tomorrows mail.

Put quite simply its pure fantasy to suggest that the US government or any other government has the ability to crack all encryption algorithms at all strengths. They can crack weak ones, and they can some find flaws in the implementation but thats about it.

The truth is governments are scared shitless of this stuff. The US has designated cryptographic products as "munitions" since world war two, and countries like the US, Russia, and France have put bans on the import and exports of products that use keys beyond certain lengths. The problem is most of the new stuff is open source and can be implemented at the software level.

Anyways... The gig is up. Somebody should have thought this through better.

Edited October 27, 2014 by dre

[Keepitsimple]

Interesting how the media say things like the National Post did today:

"The federal government said it would introduce a bill Monday afternoon to boost the ability of the country’s spy agency to monitor Canadians."

Given that, one would think CSIS agents would be lurking in the background of all Canadians. Yet the proposed legislation is targeted only at Canadians who are suspected of engaging in some element of terrorism - and that's precisely what Canadians want. When law enforcement has good reasons to suspect someone - give them the tools and resources to stop these guys before they commit their heinous acts. The rights of law-abiding citizens - privacy and otherwise - are not in jeopardy. The government has been clear in its intent - the media is doing the fear mongering.

The government originally planned to put the bill forward last Wednesday, before a gunman stormed Parliament Hill, sending MPs and Hill employees into an extended lockdown and abruptly ending the day’s business.

At the time, the government said the legislation would include:
•Allowing CSIS to obtain information on Canadians fighting abroad with terror groups through the “Five Eyes” spy network, which includes Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.
•Letting CSIS more easily track Canadians engaging in terrorist activities abroad, and similarly helping a Five Eyes country track its nationals working with terror groups in Canada.
•Giving CSIS informants the same anonymity accorded to police sources.

The government has also said it will bring forward other legislation in coming weeks aimed at stopping and preventing terrorism.

Link: http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/10/27/tories-set-to-introduce-bill-to-beef-up-csiss-ability-to-monitor-canadians/

Edited October 27, 2014 by Keepitsimple

[dre]

Interesting how the media say things like the National Post did today:

"The federal government said it would introduce a bill Monday afternoon to boost the ability of the country’s spy agency to monitor Canadians."

Given that, one would think CSIS agents would be lurking in the background of all Canadians. Yet the proposed legislation is targeted only at Canadians who are suspected of engaging in some element of terrorism - and that's precisely what Canadians want. When law enforcement has good reasons to suspect someone - give them the tools and resources to stop these guys before they commit their heinous acts. The rights of law-abiding citizens - privacy and otherwise - are not in jeopardy. The government has been clear in its intent - the media is doing the fear mongering.

Link: http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/10/27/tories-set-to-introduce-bill-to-beef-up-csiss-ability-to-monitor-canadians/

Its not really fear mongering because the Government has tried to sneak through the same type of legislation a few times. First under the guize of pedophiles, then under the guize of cyber bullying and now under the guize of terrorism.

Its not the media thats fearmongering, its the people that say the trumped up threat of terrorism justifies new police powers when they cant even use the tools they already have properly. They already could have obtained a warrant to execute a full range of surveillance on these people.

It remains to be seen exactly what this knee-jerk legislation will have in it, but if its the same warrantless wiretapping that was in c-13 then both Canadians and the courts will tell them to stuff it up their asses like they did the last few times.

Edited October 27, 2014 by dre

[On Guard for Thee]

I fear Harper/Blaney may try to sneak something through that will resemble the UK system where you could find yourself in court based on testimony from an anonymous source. Let's hope not but I fear Harper will do anything he thinks will get him some votes heading into the election cycle.