What’s the Justification for Warrantless Access to Customer Information?
November 7, 2011
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Law Bytes
Episode 275: David Loukidelis on Why Stripping Privacy Enforcement from Canada’s Privacy Commissioner in Bill C-36 is Unnecessarily Risky Policy
byMichael Geist

June 22, 2026
Michael Geist
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That’s because their justification is misleading.
This has been going around for a long time now. This isn’t going to add anything more to stopping any physical crimes or stopping these terrorist attacks that don’t exist which we’ve apparently been getting hit by. The thing I don’t like the most is that they just don’t come out and say it – they want to closely monitor everyone to put into force the new copyright bills.
It looks pretty obvious. The information stored is personal information about the internet account holder. Any criminals would most likely take note of these laws and do what they can to avoid them or shield themselves, if they really wanted it enough.
They spot someone doing something they don’t like, demand the personal information, slap a fine down. (Un)Lawful Access in a nutshell.
@Robert E.
I couldn’t agreed more. They NEED this in order to give C-11 teeth since anyone can see by itself C-11 in unenforceable. Together they form some of the best IP enforcement legislation American big media money can buy. Will it do them any good? I wager it’ll be even less effective than the DMCA.
Offshore servers, VPN connections and IP obfuscation networks such as TOR and i2p will become very popular. These days, I do very little which might be considered illegal, but hell will freeze over before I’ll make it easy for them to spy on me.