Item — HN Reader

Regarding warrantless searches and access ... reading the text of the bill (OP link) warrants seem to be required. Simple, right?

Well, no, this is a recently inserted block of text in the bill (confirm at the link above):

    Exception
    (2. 7)(b) However, a copy of the warrant is not required to be given
    to a person under subsection (2. 6) if the judge or justice who issues
    the warrant sets aside the requirement in respect of the person, on
    being satisfied that doing so is justified in the circumstances.

That's a pretty big, subjective loophole to bypass civil liberties IMO.

13 comments

Are you suggesting that when investigating members of a criminal organization, they should be notified? It seems pretty reasonable for there to be cases where making a target aware of investigation would be detrimental to proving the illegal activity they are currently engaged in but would likely discontinue if literally told “we are monitoring you specifically now”.

This is an interesting perspective, because from my point of view, the criminals ceasing their illegal activity would be a "win". Whereas, the alternative is the government knowingly allowing illegal activity to continue as they build their case with the goal of a "big bust" and larger jail sentences.

If their co-conspirators were also to cease, I would agree. But if that were realistically the case, arresting a single person would stop all crime.

What ever happened to hanging around, being a nuisance, and asking them questions? The real problem is cops are scared to cop. A detective used to show up around a place and just make their presence known. That was enough to notify you of investigation prematurely. Now, in the digital surveillance age, they can just sit in the basement eating Cheetos and phone in a SWAT.

What happened? We collectively over the course of time decided that the individual right not to be “harassed”, valid or not, overrides the ability to behave in such a manner. That happened because other officers proved they could not be trusted to exercise such power responsibly. “Being a nuisance” is a toe-length away from “harassing an ordinary citizen” when you don’t actually have proof. So, harassing a citizen to gain proof in order to prove it wasn’t harassment has an obvious problem.

So we're worried about cops violating civil liberties by not getting a warrant, but we'd rather they go harass random (potentially innocent) civilians to do investigations?

Yes, but the warrant should be revealed eventually. Worst case, if you can't prove or disprove someone committed a crime after X time, you should alert them to discourage future crime (they may have already done more crimes during X time; besides public interest, it also forces you to cut your losses when the alternative would be to dig a deeper hole).

Do these warrants have a fixed maximum duration of secrecy?

“warrant should be revealed eventually. Worst case, if you can't prove or disprove someone committed a crime after X time”

This is the normal thinking, normal brained, route. It’s what we should all strive towards. Anyone who doesn’t agree needs therapy. There should be a window of discovery. 30 days, 90 maybe. But if you don’t have enough to justify notification of investigation, that’s it. No more resources spent. This is how normal precincts work. If they suspect, enough times, to build a large enough case file, to connect the dots and prove you are guilty, they issue a warrant.

Normal, brained, behavior.

This isn't about criminal organizations. One person somewhere can decide to target you, monitor you for 30 years with all the government's resources, and never need to tell you or anyone about it. I don't like that personally.

the problem is that in democracies anybody can be dubbed 'criminal organization'. Today you're pro-life? criminal organization. Tomorrow you're pro-choice? 'criminal organization'. You're making protests in your big trucks? Criminal...

Are you suggesting that police should not be allowed to investigate anyone?

Consider: you don’t give a warrant to a wiretap subject. That itself is not that big a loophole. And therefore is unlikely to provoke change.

I don't even understand the concern here. Perhaps the parent thought this meant "a warrant is not required", which is absolutely untrue. Instead, the judge still creates the warrant, and any trial/arrest/action must have a warrant.

(Finding out what ISP a user belongs to, isn't really that private. If you look at the US comparatively, Homeland has a list of every single credit card transaction ever. The US doesn't need to ask an ISP if someone is a customer. What this does is simply confirm, and then the judge can create a warrant specific for that ISP.)

Such as compelling the ISP, or what not, to take action. The ISP is not the subject here. And obviously hiding the warrant from the ISP makes zero sense, as they're going to know who the person is anyhow.

This is stuff that goes back to phone taps. Nothing new here.

Does a warrant ever expire? How long can they monitor you once the warrant is issued? Do they ever have to notify you or anyone else that you were being monitored and they found no criminal conduct? Don't you see the potential for abuse here?

I don't really see an issue with this section. A judge still needs to issue a warrant, they can also additionally waive the requirement that the cop gives you a copy right away, in special circumstances.

Like are you envisioning a "I totally have a warrant but I don't have to give it to you" type situation? I think it's fairly unlikely, and you would likely be able to get the search ruled inadmissible if a cop tried it.

Are you familiar with parallel construction? That's what this is for. If they have a warrant and show it to you, it says what they can search and why. If they don't tell you what they're searching for and why, they can look for anything, and then construct a separate scenario which just happens to expose the thing they knew would be there from the first fishing expedition. They then use this (usually circumstantial) evidence to accuse you of a crime, and they can win, even if you didn't commit a crime, but it looks like you did. And now they can do it with digital information, automatically, behind the scenes, without your knowledge. (or they can take your laptop and phone and do it then)

But the warrant still has to originally exist with, presumably, a timestamp that shows it existed prior to the search. And modification of the timestamp or lack of such a feature would be a good way to get the evidence thrown out?

I don't see the problem with this. It's inadvisable to try to stop the police from doing whatever they want to do if they assert that they have the right to do it. You then get the lawyers involved and sort it out afterwards. Comparing the timestamp on the warrant to the time of the police action should hopefully determine whether parallel construction is taking place.

i know this is an american thing, but does it actually happen in Caanda?

It’s a huge problem. The warrant is the document the absence of which lets the public know something wrong is being done to them. A warrant is not just a term for judicial approval.

The public must have the ability to easily verify police conduct is appropriate, and it must match the cadence of the police work.

> The warrant is the document the absence of which lets the public know

Er, the warrant is still there to be examined later, no? It's just not necessarily shown to the subject at the time of investigation.

Unless I'm mistaken, it doesn't define what such special situations are. It leaves the determination of providing the warrant to the suspect entirely to a judgement call of the court.

There may well be reasonable scenarios a majority of people would agree that providing a warrant isn't feasible, but that needs to be codified in law in more detail than whenever the judge deems it so.

If the statute doesn't lay out exactly where exceptions can be made, it can be abused.

And everyone should be skeptical enough of government power that they mentally switch out "can" with "will".

why even allow for the possibility of misuse? what is the utility of this little addendum?

Why... would you think this is unlikely? Have... you seen videos of ICE agents claiming to have warrants when they don't?

I'm not Canadian, but it seems similarly written to how laws in the US have been exploited to be used to spy on Americans. And despite not being Canadian, as an American I have a horse in this race, as the OP notes...

  | many of these rules appear geared toward global information sharing

I see a lot of people arguing that these bounds are reasonable so I want to make an argument from a different perspective:

  Investigative work *should* be difficult.

There is a strong imbalance of power between the government and the people. My little understanding of Canadian Law suggests that Canada, like the US, was influenced by Blackstone[0]. You may have heard his ratio (or the many variations of it)

  | It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

What Blackstone was arguing was about the legal variant of "failure modes" in engineering. Or you can view it as the impact of Type I (False Positive) and Type II (False Negative) errors. Most of us here are programmers so this should be natural thinking: when your program fails how do you want it to fail? Or think of it like with a locked door. Do you want the lock to fail open or closed? In a bank you probably want your safe to fail closed: the safe requires breaking into to access again. But in a public building you probably want it to fail open (so people can escape from a fire or some other emergency that is likely the reason for failure).

This frame of thinking is critical with laws too! When the law fails how do you want it to fail? So you need to think about that when evaluating this (or any other) law. When it is abused, how does it fail? Are you okay with that failure mode? How easy is it to be abused? Even if you believe your current government is unlikely to abuse it do you believe a future government might? (If you don't believe a future government might... look south...)

A lot of us strongly push against these types of measures not because we have anything to hide nor because we are on the side of the criminals. We generally have this philosophy because it is needed to keep a government in check. It doesn't matter if everyone involved has good intentions. We're programmers, this should be natural too! It doesn't matter if we have good intentions when designing a login page, you still have to think adversarially and about failure modes because good intentions are not enough to defend against those who wish to exploit it. Even if the number of exploiters is small the damage is usually large, right?

This framework of thinking is just as beneficial when thinking about laws as it is in the design of your programs. You can be in favor of the intent (spirit of the law), but you do have to question if the letter of the law is sufficient.

I wanted to explain this because I think it'll help facilitate these types of discussions. I think they often break down because people are interpreting from very different mental frameworks. Disagree with me if you want, but I hope making the mental framework explicit can at least improve your arguments :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio

> A lot of us strongly push against these types of measures not because we have anything to hide nor because we are on the side of the criminals.

I had this view as well until I realized it’s predicated on living in a high trust society. At some point you reach a critical mass of crime that is so rampant, and the rule of law has so broken down that it’s basically Mad Max out there, and then these idealistic philosophies start to fall apart.

You can look to parts of SE Asia or the Middle East to see some examples where that happened, and where it was eventually reigned in with extreme measures (Usually broad and indiscriminate capital punishment).

I know your comment is about fixing failure modes in the legal system, and I’m not defending government surveillance, or the idea of considering someone innocent until proven guilty, but what happens when the entire system fails due to misplaced idealism? Much worse things are waiting on the other end of the spectrum when people don’t feel like the government is adequately protecting them.

People are let go off all the time. Not because of the law but because who needs the work of chasing and punishing every law breaker in the land. In your own workplace,family and friend circle, count how many times you have seen some one do something dumb(forget illegal) that has caused a loss or pain to some one else. And then count how many times you have done something about it.

I use the speed chime in my Model 3 car to alert me if I'm more than 2 km/h over the posted speed limit, which it infers from its database with the autopilot camera providing overrides.

If I'm over that when passing a speed camera in Victoria, AUS, I'll be pinged with a decent fine to arrive shortly.

Imagine if instead of a chime I got fined every single time, everywhere? All this new monitoring makes it a bit like that, at an extreme. I don't want to live in such a society.

Canada does not have a concept of civil liberties in the way USA (supposedly) does. There is no illusion that the government has complete control to monitor, track, and even arrest anyone they want. They do this all the time, even physically tracking and boxing in protesters to beat them.

This is obviously a bot comment. Is there really no room for automoderation of new accounts on HN?

I think warrantless access, deanonymising the internet, etc, are things that go together. If you want auto-governance (technocracy), to micro-manage every citizen, these are the foundations you need. As it is already determined that this is what will be happening, no amount of discussion will make a material change - the legislation is going in whether people want it or not. The individual justifications for each legal step in the construction are either going to be done with low visibility, or a trope like ('for the children/terrorists') will be wheeled out. Works every time, so why change?

There is no warrantless access to data here though. None. It's merely showing the warrant to the person being 'searched'. As mentioned elsewhere, the same has been true for decades with someone's phone being tapped.

The ISP can see the warrant. The judge creates a warrant. The court sees the warrant.

Is Canada (greatly) defunct? Many canucks around the world that I met seem to be of this opinion, but I've never been there and only know Canadians as hard workers.

I imagine you met the people who got tired of all the slobs.

Look at the recent report on CRA service inquiries and their accuracy. An amazing 17%. It's not hard work that got us there.

edit: Just one of many examples. People rarely even hold doors anymore, we're a far way from our prime.

Meeting expats from any nation will hold a bias untoward the place they're from, so you're asking a poisoned well how thirsty it is.

This makes police indistinguishable from thugs.

Without reading the bill, this sentennce seems to refer to the requirement to _give the person a copy of the warrant_, not the requirement for the government to obtain a warrant from a judge or justice

Would the legislation become worse if any "redeeming" quotes were simply removed in the future?

The thing about laws is they can be made, and changed.

How would a wiretap work if you sent the person notice you're listening to their phone?

Clearly some criminal investigations require not notifying the suspect.

Even so, the exceptions don't nullify the rule: find a better way to investigate, citizen rights > all else.

Countries AND the government exist for and at the pleasure of their respective citizens.

Clearly, list the specific cases instead of letting the judge feel what is appropriate is the way to go. Also helps the judge doing the right thing.

> warrants seem to be required

Applies in the text you quoted, unlike true warrantless surveillance NSA-style?

You still have to get the warrant past a judge, and convince the judge of the higher bar for keeping the warrant secret.

I presume the distinction here could be between a search warrant, which you have to show the subject before entering their house, and a surveillance/wiretap warrant which you for obvious reason's don't.

(Meanwhile, FIVE EYES carries on as usual.)

It's not bad. Judges are not crazy and they'll require a reason for this. It could mean 'fraying at the edges' of the law but this is not bad at all.

You can tell where things will land with this generally it's not bad.

If it were Texas or the South where the justice dept. leans a different way it could be a problem.

Canada is a bit like Europe where they have statist mentality, kind of hints of lawful, bureaucratic authoritarianism - not arbitrary or political or regime driven, but kind of an inherent orientation towards 'rules' etc. where the system can tilt wayward, but that's completely different than regime, or 'deep institutional' issues and state actors that do wild things.

While this might be true and we'll and good (for now) isn't it still a worry and a threat that the law is written as such?

That is to say, though the "vibe" may be as you say, the law now permits, if not now, at some future instance people with different perspectives or vibes can use the law as written, to other ends.

In short, yeah it may not be Texas now, but a "Texas-like" vibe could germinate and use the laws in the books later.

> Canada is a bit like Europe where they have statist mentality

If the last decade and a half has taught us anything, it's that you can't rely on the state and arms of the state to remain consistent permanently.

In the absence of a free media, as in the US where it's controlled by a handful of billionaires, the people can be manipulated to vote in a government that will run roughshod over precedent and norms.