The Senate Committee on Justice and Human Rights continues its study later today on Bill C-13, the cyber-bullying/lawful access bill that has already passed the House of Commons and seems certain to clear the Senate shortly. I appeared before the committee last week, but one person who will not appear is Carol Todd, the mother of cyber-bullying victim Amanda Todd. Ms. Todd wrote to me yesterday to express her dismay at the committee process with Conservative Senators mischaracterizing her views and the committee declining to offer her an invitation to appear, likely due to her criticisms of the privacy-related provisions in the bill.
Ms. Todd did appear before the House of Commons committee studying Bill C-13, telling Members of Parliament:
“While I applaud the efforts of all of you in crafting the extortion, revenge, porn, and cyberbullying sections of Bill C-13, I am concerned about some of the other unrelated provisions that have been added to the bill in the name of Amanda, Rehtaeh, and all of the children lost to cyberbullying attacks.
I don’t want to see our children victimized again by losing privacy rights. I am troubled by some of these provisions condoning the sharing of the privacy information of Canadians without proper legal process. We are Canadians with strong civil rights and values. A warrant should be required before any Canadian’s personal information is turned over to anyone, including government authorities. We should also be holding our telecommunication companies and Internet providers responsible for mishandling our private and personal information. We should not have to choose between our privacy and our safety.
We should not have to sacrifice our children’s privacy rights to make them safe from cyberbullying, sextortion and revenge pornography.”
The comments generated considerable media attention as it pointed to the divide even among cyberbullying victims about legislation that the lumps together provisions designed to address cyberbullying with lawful access rules with serious implications for the privacy of Canadians.
Since her testimony, the government has tried to downplay her concerns. Justice Minister Peter MacKay told the committee that he met with Ms. Todd and that “she came away with a much better sense of comfort and confidence in what the government was attempting to do.” When I raised Ms. Todd’s views during my Senate appearance, Senator Denise Batters responded that she had since “clarified her views on the bill.”
Yet the reality is that Ms. Todd is more troubled than ever with the government’s approach. In October, she wrote to me hours after the bill passed the House of Commons:
“I was stunned at how the government is going to push it forward considering the discussion and what was said at the hearings last spring.”
As the Senate hearings continue, she has now expressed surprise and disappointment that she has been excluded from the process, noting that the government does not want her voice to be included and asking “what happened to democracy?”
What happened is that the government no longer wants to hear from one of the country’s most prominent voices on cyberbullying given her concerns that “we should not have to choose between our privacy and our safety.”
“What happened is that the government no longer wants to hear from one of the country’s most prominent voices…”
The U.S. isn’t the only country trashing constitutional laws and international conventions. Our government has been selling us out to the American empirical plan for a while now.
What the Public has to say in either country is unimportant, as they have their own agenda. Whatever attention they pay to the citizenry now has only to do with exercising control of dissent.
Over the past decade, both governments have been ramming countless bills through – all with the supposed purpose of “protecting” us from all sorts of “bogeymen” (such as “terrorists”, “child predators” and “cyber criminals”- all wanting more and more of our rights handed over, in order to enable them.
When are people going to wake up to this deception?
They don’t give a flyin’ fuck about us. Their only interest is in keeping the Public from getting in their way as much as possible.
Carol’s got it completely right.
My heart goes out to her, and I applaud her for her involvement.
We remember the documentary we saw on Amanda Todd. Her mom notified the authorities about her daughter being bullied almost a year before she committed suicide. There is no way they could have not been monitoring her internet stream at the time of her death. We remember when we were being harassed by Canadian intelligence in 2009 just before we were poisoned for the first time in Windsor Ontario. They told us they poisoned us because we pissed them off for blogging about them on Craigslist. They told us that they could kill us at any time and make it look like a suicide and that nobody would ever know it was murder. We contacted Steve Blaney in October about the poisonings and the assassination attempts against me and my family and we sent him our whole case file and we have not heard one word back from him yet. We have contacted hundreds of government officials across Canada so far and the only ones that have ever gotten back to us was our MP Don Davies and Our minister Kristy Clarke but they both told us they can’t help us. I have my suspicions about the Sandy Hook school case also. The more we investigate that the more we realize he was pushed over the edge by forces controlling the internet, considering all the evidence that was classified and that still is. Thanks for reading.
We remember the last time we went to the Legal Aid office to apply for assisstance for a lawyer to sue The Justice Department Of Canada, we had to wait there for a while so they could bring in an agent from outside the office to speak to my family and I. After we told her our story she told us that the police are out to get us and she said that we are under a security certificate. We still have not been told anything from The Justice Department Of Canada. They will no longer answer anymore of our requests for information about anything on us. The last time we applied was about 6 months ago and they will no longer answer us at all. When we told her about our 2 daughters working for Canadian intelligence when they were murdered she told us that we were not very closed to our daughters anyhow and she started to chuckle, which is not true. She knew something but she wouldn’t tell us. I think if a person has a security certificate on them that they would tell them that. She was so rude to us. Thanks for reading.
Do you buy your tinfoil hats on as as-needed basis when they wear out, or do you like to pick them up in bulk instead?
Builds them, Just-In-Time. Can’t trust vendors anymore. Sourcecode or gtfo. 😉
Pingback: Rehtaeh Parsons name to live on through society set to launch Saturday | canada.com
Pingback: Rehtaeh Parsons name to live on through society set to launch Saturday |
Pingback: Canadian Government Shuts Out Carol Todd From Lawful Access Committee
Pingback: Legislating the Web: Cyber-Bullying and Online Privacy Rights | The Public Policy & Governance Review
Pingback: After #JeSuisCharlie, governments are promising more surveillance and censorship | canada.com