Next time someone tells you that “Canadians enjoy the highest level of free speech in the world” present him or her with this scenario :
On March 26th 2008, Maclean’s magazine reported that the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) investigators were trolling Canadian neighborhoods for unprotected wireless internet connections, to leech onto. Why do you think Canadian public servants would do such things? So they could post racist comments under assumed names on web sites and then charge the site’s owners with publishing hate speech.
That’s right, you’re not dreaming: the CHRC HACKS INTO CONTROVERSIAL BLOGS using what could be YOUR home wireless connection and YOUR home IP address to post racist comments on websites as if it was YOU posting them and then summons YOU to come in their kangaroo court to testify (to justify yourself) about these racist comment they assume YOU’VE made because your Internet Protocol Address corresponding to your home address was used. What do you think of that?
That’s how an innocent Canadian’s name and address got read aloud— in open court, as evidence in one of the CHRC’s most widely publicized cases. That is how CHRC actions could be a breach to your Privacy rights under the Federal Privacy Act. Ironically, this could be a matter of complaint to the Privacy Commissioner. I would like to see the Privacy Commisioner of Canada investigate the Canadian Human Rights Commision for alleged privacy breaches.
Can you imagine the face of your Kitsilano green activist and left-wing friend accused or suspected of being either a right wing extremist, a racist . All of that because a Human Rights Official stole his or her internet connection and IP address to post hate comments on some website with the goal to create evidences to prosecute that particular web site’s owner … and to make himself some work paid by our taxes.
On March 29th, 2008 Nigel Hannaford of the Calgary Herald wrote an article on the subject. Here is a snippet:
“[…]here the federal snivel servants were, logging onto Internet hate sites under assumed names, trying to conceal what they were up to by using the wireless Internet account belonging to a young woman who seems to be completely uninvolved in any of it and, according to Lemire, trying to entrap people who visited his site.
Only the unusual circumstance of these people being publicly cross-examined brought any of this to light.
Boy, did we ever not quite get it. We thought this was a high-minded disagreement over fundamental principles. Instead, we find the CHRC tolerates sleazy behaviours among its investigating officers that have no place in a free society.” [Calgary Herald]
Johnatan Kay of the National Post said in his column titled The CHRC’s entrapment chickens are coming home to roost (or has someone else already used that metaphor?), “Still, the fact that anyone takes that kind of idea seriously shows how thoroughly the CHRC has poisoned its own well with its over-the-top tactics in going after marginal Canadian hatemongers. This is one of the reasons why the recent Lemire hearings were such a disaster for the CHRC: From now on, every time anyone sees hate speech on the Internet — or some hysterical anti-racist claims to have found a Swastika scribbled on a bathroom wall — people are going to wonder who put it there: Was it a hatemonger, or was it someone whose livelihood is based on convincing others that hatemongers are rampant?” [National Post]
Read also Maclean’s Mark Steyn’s article titled Kangaroo Court in Session
… and more on the crushing of dissent in Canada, from Eric Scheie.
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For your information, your ISP does not own the Internet. No one owns the Internet, and no single person or organization controls it. There are, however, organizations that oversee and standardize what’s happening on the Internet and assign Internet Protocol addresses and domain names. The Internet Engineering Task Force, ICANN, InterNIC and the Internet Architecture Board are among these organizations.
