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Toews Draws False Link Between Magnotta Investigation and Lawful Access

As the search for Luka Magnotta continues, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has used the case as an opportunity to claim that Bill C-30 would have helped with the investigation. According to Toews, the Internet surveillance legislation would be helpful – “Certainly, that’s what the police have told me – that the powers in Bill C-30 are very relevant to this type of investigation in terms of either determining who the individual is, or determining the whereabouts of an individual.”

The Toews comments continue the longstanding trend of unsubstantiated claims by government officials about lawful access. In this case, there is simply no question that law enforcement can obtain the necessary warrant on customer name and address information (if an ISP refused as part of an investigation) and police have presumably obtained warrants for far more detailed information. Moroever, the surveillance capabilities at ISPs mandated by C-30 – which focus on real-time surveillance – appear completely irrelevant given that Magnotta fled to France. In fact, reports indicate that there were early warnings about Magnotta and the video openly available that were dismissed by police.  The Magnotta case does not demonstrate the need for lawful access, but rather shows how officials rely on sensationalist claims as they remain unable to muster convincing evidence of the need for the law.

20 Comments

  1. And the police did nothing either
    And the police did nothing either when contacted, by an American lawyer, about the video of the killing.

    C-30 wouldn’t have suddenly made the police react.

  2. Clearly nobody’s in charge of the mad-house…
    OK, so Toews makes his, “you’re with us, or with the pedophiles” comment.

    Then Randy Hoback channels Joe McCarthy’s spirit on camera, intoning the worst possible sound-bite from that troubling era.

    Now Toews counters with this latest gem.

    How will Hoback meet this challenge…? Or has Toews beat him in their “most ridiculous comment I can make in public and keep a straight face” competition?

    Mulling over the whole laughing/crying decision at the moment,
    Patrick

  3. James Plotkin says:

    Well of course he would say that.

    He might be right too. Fact is he has no idea whether he’s right or wrong…That’s what’s bothers me. He’s like the politician who cried wolf…

  4. ….
    LMAO Well I had a good laugh this morning. Get rid of this guy Toews what a joke!

  5. scaredcanadian says:

    How can this Perp be a Public Safety minister.
    So Toews has had sex with his family baby sitter and had an affair with a staffer? In both cases he was in a position of power over the other individual.

    Am I the only one that thinks that this serial sex offender should be in jail and not a minister of the crown?

    Good God! And this creature is writing laws to monitor us?

    Who are the Goebbles, Goering, and Himmler in this cabinet?

    (I find it ironic that the Captcha for this post contains the word “affair” 🙂

  6. If he was using my sons grizzly death to prop up some rights breaching law I’d spend all the money I could to discredit this fool by using tv ads. Way to ride the 15min of fame on someones murder. Sick fuck…. Remember this guy is OUR employee…

  7. Towes has no clue.
    @Towes “Certainly, that’s what the police have told me…”

    Pop Quiz!

    A) The police are lying (or exaggerating) to Towes for some reason to get powers they don’t really need.
    B) Towes does not understand what the police are telling him.
    C) Towes is lying.
    D) All of the above.

  8. @crockett
    lol.

    D!!

  9. ????
    Can anyone tell me what the hell is going on with C-11, is it going for third reading this week they said it was last week but got delayed for some reason????????????????

  10. Dwight Williams says:

    No, this can’t work.
    Our current lead suspect seems to have left all the evidence needed to convict him where anyone and everyone can find it. No warrant-free surveillance of anyone was needed. And considering that there were people already publicly expressing worry about this guy for a couple of years before the murder…no.

    Toews doesn’t get to use this to support his case for the legislation.

  11. Oldies but Goldies
    Warning for the easily offended: The following clip may contain coarse language, language of a sexual nature or mature subject matter and is intended for adult audiences. Viewer discretion is advised:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQhA5T5GqrI

  12. Crockett says:

    For an even older Oldie …

  13. ..
    The way this Government is going Bill C-30 will pass and won’t be scrapped completely even with all the protest on C-38 and huge coverage they still don’t give two shits about what we say looks like that will pass too, we really need to stop this GOV it’s just getting out of hand.

  14. Rhetorically discredited
    Rhetorically discredited, as in nobody cares what he says because his rhetoric is discredited. His continued representation of Canadians is an international embarrassment.

    If we want to listen to him, he is saying that the bill he sabotaged would have caught the murderer police caught. Great point, but next time try to make a metaphor about Hitler.

  15. Unpopular Laws
    like C-11, C-30

    Don’t forget to ask your (non-CPC) MP what they are going to do *after the next elections*. With the majority, there isn’t much they can do now. It’s important to let them know that you as a constituent do not consider the matter closed just because the 39.9% approved it. You demand reversal as soon as electorally possible.


  16. Dwight said: “Our current lead suspect seems to have left all the evidence needed to convict him where anyone and everyone can find it.”

    I’m not defending the police, but a big part of the problem these days is that “entertainment” has become so extreme that a video like this could easily be overlooked. “Torture pron”, such as Saw, Hostel, Human Centipede, etc is essentially main stream media. There is a market for it, remember, Saw opened the same weekend as Brokeback Mountain and killed it in the box office. Now if you consider…those are mild if one was to look a little deeper in to the indie and underground movie scene. There are those out there making movies that aim to have no real plot, where the whole point is the torture and ultimate death…or worse. They aim to make the production look amateur and gore/violence/death as real looking as possible. If you’re good with effects, you can make it look very real. How violent…how extreme can you imagine? Someone has made a movie that exceeds your expectations.

    I could easily see how someone could mistake a scene cut out of a movie like “Mutilation Mile” for an actual rape/murder. I would imagine the police get many many red-herring report of snuff movies. Perhaps the most infamous of these is the Charlie Sheen report to the FBI for the movie “Guinea Pig: Flowers of Flesh and Blood”. The movie producers were hauled in to Japanese court and forced to prove their movie was fake, this resulted in a making-off documentary. It was all proven to be completely fake and the only thing the movie makers were guilty of was perhaps lacking good taste. However, police in two countries spend an enormous amount of time investigating something that turned out to be a complete fake.

  17. Jack Robinson says:

    Taser Vic’s Stunned Gunsel Mentality
    When I first read and heard about Magnotta’s grisly deeds and their perverse purveyance on-line… I immediately knew that Our Other Canadian Psycho would… with his Sociopath of Sussex avatar’s fervid encouragement… use this ‘a tad too close to their porch swings’ horror show to further spook the Ostrich Herd into buying Bilge C-30 both as a necessary evil… and yet another chunk out of the Charter’s habeas-hobbled corpus.


  18. One for IanME:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxMMOgEJwiQ

    🙂

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