No to Bill C-22

The Canadian government is trying to push through yet another intrusive digital mass surveillance law, this time Bill C-22. Here's the letter I wrote to my MP, Evan Solomon, outlining my hostility not just to its contents but to its entire vibe. I CC'd the sponsoring minister, Gary Anandasangaree, and the prime minister.

Evan, Gary, and Mark,

I’m writing to express my opposition to Bill C-22, the so-called “Lawful Access Act.” It’s a bad law, based on bad ideas.

I know that many others, across the political spectrum, have already raised these issues with you. I admit it’s surprising to find myself in political community on this matter with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Meta Inc., and the U.S. House Judiciary committee, but here we are.

You know the facts already, so I’m not going to exhaustively rehearse them. Nevertheless, let’s review the highlights:

  1. There’s no such thing as a secure encryption backdoor. It’s impossible, in both mathematical and practical terms.
  2. Metadata collection is data collection, every bit as sensitive as the contents of that data itself.
  3. Enormous pools of sensitive data are not only going to be used by law enforcement. They are tempting targets for well-resourced criminals and hostile state actors.
  4. The more entities required to store this data, and the longer the storage period, the more likely it is to leak or be stolen.

The solution is simple. Abandon the bill. The acute risks vastly outweigh the already dubious benefits.

As a side note, I want to add that it’s extremely annoying that intrusive and technologically obtuse laws like these keep coming around every couple of years. Successive Conservative and Liberal governments keep pursuing this aim and ordinary citizens keep on having to beat back these attempts, time and time again. Mass surveillance is widely unpopular! No one wants this bill, just as they didn’t want the previous ones! And yet our governments keep on trying, against the repeated express wishes of wide swathes of the electorate. Please establish some real principles on these matters, so we don’t have to have to keep repeating this timesome routine. Just stop. The government’s time and attention is a finite resource. You should spend it more wisely.

I remain deeply annoyed to be writing crank letters to the government. But what else to do when faced with governments like these?