dennis.ca

In late March, Mohammed Momin Khawaja of Orleans, Ontario (along with nine British men) were arrested and charged with "terrorism". Precious little information is being released, and that got me thinking about how the investigation actually unfolded. I live in Ottawa -- several minutes from Orleans -- and it seems to me that local police aren't nearly daft enough to pull something like this off. Then I read the following in the Globe and Mail:

"The Orleans arrest is considered an operational milestone for this vast electronic eavesdropping network and its operators. But Dave Farber, an Internet pioneer and computer-science professor at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said the circumstances are also notable because it will be the first time that routine U.S. monitoring of e-mail traffic has led to an arrest."

...

"'Foreign traffic that comes through the U.S. is subject to U.S. laws, and the NSA has a perfect right to monitor all Internet traffic,' said Mr. Farber, who has also been a technical adviser to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission."

Magic Lantern, Echelon... Choose a name. They're all a part of the nefarious policy of privacy violations that fall under the Patriot Act, et all. Given that most of the major Internet backbone hubs run through American cities, can we safely deduce that practically all data is open to scrutiny?

I'm all for arresting scoundrels and criminals, but can we not find a way to do so without a strategy of blanket surveillance? Even the European Union has made strong encryption recommendations to counter the Echelon system.

Furthermore, I have nothing to hide, but that does not automatically mean that I concede my communications free for government scrutiny. Everyone should be concerned about their privacy -- and be using strong encryption to maintain whatever semblance of it still exists. Where the hell is the Privacy Commissioner when you need her?