The Sixth Estate

And I thought they’d buried the case.

Countdown to the second Conservative election fraud case: 10… 9… 8…

Following hard on the heels of the Prime Minister’s ridiculous endorsement of the crank claim that a long-dead Mohawk woman holds the key to curing flesh-eating disease (but only sometimes), the Globe & Mail has printed a column by Robert Joustra of the Cardus institute, a Christian right think tank, called “Beware the Secular Atheocracy.”

The article is an excellent piece of pretzel logic, and I see no reason to critique it, because I see absolutely no reason whatsoever to bother with an intellectual refutation of a representative of an organization whose statement of purpose contains the following claim:

Drawing on more than 2000 years of Christian social thought, we work to enrich and challenge public debate.

Well, we’re off to a mathematically challenged start there, aren’t we?

We already know that Vic Toews hasn’t. I’d said all I have to say on the subject, or so I thought, and then I came across this blatant fiction — there is no other way to describe it — from National Post columnist Chris Selley:

One of the bright points in the legislation is that it would require disclosure to customers when “Internet providers and telecom companies provide subscriber data without a warrant.”

Um, no. It wouldn’t. I’m going to provide a point-by-point summary of the Harper regime’s Big Brother bill. For those of you who haven’t read it already, this is essential reading, believe me. If you have already, I suppose it’s of less use to you, but it might still help focus your thoughts. If you don’t trust me, you can read it yourself.

Short Title: Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act — To paraphrase Yes, Prime Minister, one should always dispose of the difficult bits in the title: they do less damage there than in the law itself. In this case, the opposite is true. The title refers to child protection, but none of the provisions in this law actually restrict the government to snooping on our computers only when kids are at risk. This would be an easy fix, and the fact that it’s not there tells you all you need to know about their real intentions.

(more…)

Stephen Harper has welcomed the news that a fellow religious extremist turned head of state, Benedict XVI, is officially turning a long-dead Mohawk woman named Katherine Tekakwitha into a saint. This is “a deep honour for our country,” he claims. Apparently the fact that Tekakwitha died in 1680, before there was a Canada, doesn’t alter the “honor” calculus at all. Harper doesn’t honour Aboriginal land claims, but he’s happy to claim their “saints” as Canadian.

More to the point, though, it’s worth pointing out to the Dear Leader that officially one does not become a Catholic saint by being a good person. According to Catholic doctrine, one becomes a saint by performing two miracles. That’s what Harper is endorsing here, not the honouring of an ancient Canadian indigenous woman.

And honouring for what, exactly? Does anyone in the PMO know why she is famous? Are they suggesting we should all swear ourselves to celibacy and walk across beds of hot coals to show our devotion to God? Is abstinance official Cabinet policy now? That’s going to come as one hell of a disappointment to Vic Toews, and to a few other ministers as well.

The two miracles, you’ll be interested to know, are that the smallpox scars on Katherine’s face vanished moments after she died, and a young boy whose life-threatening infection was magically cured several years ago after praying to Katherine to intercede. It was also “magically” cured after he was given a truckload of antibiotics, but I’m sure we all know what really cured him. Right?

This hokey claptrap is not an “honour” to Canada. Incidentally, Benedict XVI also says that God’s chief representatives on Earth are always, and only, men, because God thinks women are just not able to fill such positions of authority. Not a problem for Harper — his church is currently debating whether or not God thinks women can be pastors or not, too. I personally have no truck with such a God, and neither should my country. Take your sainthood and go back to the Vatican, Benedict. You can come out when you promise to share the toys with the other half of the human species.

First, the government asked their pet Speaker to “investigate” who is behind Vikileaks30. Now, they want the police to investigate everyone who is behind the Twitter attacks. (Lest you think that Toews will limit his investigation to people threatening physical violence against him, remember that this regime currently defines groups that are “publicly critical of government policy” as national security threats.)

Now, for the record, I don’t care who was behind Vikileaks30. Maybe it was an NDP staffer (though they wouldn’t have denied it if they thought it might be — much too embarrassing.) Maybe it was Elizabeth May. Maybe it was a Liberal staffer. Maybe it was me. Or you. Or the guy down the street.

I’ll tell you who I think it was, though: a Conservative staffer. Someone who doesn’t like Toews and figured this would be a good chance to ruin his career. Or maybe someone who does like him, and figured this would be a good chance to deflect attention from the Big Brother bill into a wild goose chase for mysterious dissidents, police state-style. Sound unlikely? Maybe, but the opposition parties don’t really have any better motivation for it. The surveillance bill stinks to high heaven without adding in any juicy stories about Toews cheating on his wife, fathering children out of wedlock, and cheating on his election expenses, all of which were already common knowedge among those of us who avidly follow politics in any case.

If I really wanted to dedicate a mysterious anonymous online persona to bringing down the government, I wouldn’t do it by attacking Toews. I’d do it by supporting him. Or, better yet, someone else — Peter MacKay? Jason Kenney? It doesn’t really matter who, as long as it’s plausible. Pick someone, and start building a leadership campaign for them. Allude to support within the caucus, who are afraid to speak up themselves because of Harper’s heavy-handed management style. Spread rumours. Create uncertainty. Suggest, for instance, that a new formation is being established by Stephen Woodworth and Brad Trost to support a palace coup by Jason Kenney, in exchange for a quid pro quo on the abortion issue.

The best part is, there’s probably a kernel of truth in it somewhere. This is still a political party, after all, and Stephen I isn’t going to be around forever. No amount of evidence will convince me that MacKay and Kenney, at the very least, haven’t been arranging for at least a few cautious backroom conversations over the last year.

This is the most paranoid government in Canadian history. The best way to knock it off course is to give it a thousand potential palace coups to worry about.

Unfortunately, unlike the government, I have a strict ethical code which prevents me from deliberately spreading false rumours about political opponents. So Sixth Estate will not be beginning the Jason Kenney for Dear Leader campaign just yet.

Yesterday, I suggested that the Ottawa Citizen was playing into the Conservatives’ hands by trying to turn the new government snooping law into a story about, above all things, NDP propaganda exercises. That ploy continues with the publication of an op-ed by Andrew Mitrovica, which blames the Liberals for giving Big Brother powers to the secret services. Which, he says, they already have.

I respect Mitrovica’s work, and I agree with him that the Chretien government should never have been allowed to get away with authorizing the Communications Security Establishment to freely monitor communications between Canadians and foreigners (which they are). However, what is now being proposed is completely different. CSE is not allowed to spy on Canadians (they can, however, spy on foreigners when they talk to Canadians) and they are not involved in law enforcement.

But what Mitrovica is talking about is a situation in which CSE can, using its own equipment, attempt to spy on Canadians. No one is required to play informant for them, and there are (in theory) restrictions. Again, I don’t like it, and there is no effective way of keeping CSE from becoming a politicized secret service for their boss, Peter MacKay, who took personal control last fall by means of a pair of bizarrely Orwellian secret regulations.

In contrast, the new laws are granting powers to the secret service (CSIS), the national police (the RCMP), and, in the bill’s own terms, “any police officer” who wants to know the name, address, telephone number, Internet address, email address, and online habits of any Canadian, without a warrant. It requires every service provider to install surveillance equipment which can track everything we do online and everywhere we go with our cell phones. It requires every service provider to turn over information without a warrant. It requires them to allow government “telecommunications inspectors” — a new category of bureaucrat — to enter their premises in the company of a CSIS agent, use any computer system, and copy any information, again, without a warrant.

And it makes it a crime for anyone to obstruct such “inspections,” or to tell a customer that they are being subjected to government surveillance. These crimes may be charged in court, or, alternatively, the accused individual can be fined up to $50,000 as an “Administrative Penalty,” in which case the appeal is heard only by Minister Vic Toews or his designate, failure to reply within 30 days is taken as proof of guilt, and “innocent until proven guilty” does not apply.

Now, Mitrovica is right that the Chretien Liberals overstepped the bounds when they passed the Anti-Terrorism Act. But I dare him, or anyone else, to argue in good faith that what we’re talking about here is basically the same thing.

If you doubted the political proclivities of the Postmedia chain, you need look no further for proof than their scurrilous and indefensible coverage of the Vikileaks30 saga. Someone — perhaps an NDP staffer, maybe a Liberal staffer, maybe even (and I favour this explanation) a Conservative one who doesn’t like the convicted cheater-turned-Justice-Minister Vic Toews — started a Twitter account to attack Toews. The Ottawa Citizen, doing its best to mimic the powers of the police state that Toews is doing his best to build, set up an Internet honeytrap for the author. The author turned out to be — apparently — someone who works in the Parliament Buildings.

Now, that is where Postmedia’s story could and should have stopped. Instead, they spun this into “evidence” that the NDP were behind the leaks. The computer in question, we were told, had been used to put a “pro NDP” bias on Wikipedia pages. And to do various other things of a less political nature. In short, Postmedia all but explicitly argued that Vikileaks30 was an NDP front. Not that the NDP would need a front to attack the Toews snoop bill, but whatever. The Conservatives happily jumped on the accusation, and are trying with all their might to deflect attention from their own police state bill and turn this into a scandal about anonymous NDP libellers on Twitter.

Let’s go back to Postmedia for a moment, though. Postmedia is a national news network that theoretically calls itself to a higher fact-checking standard than your average blogger. When they printed this story, they knew, or they  should have known, that only four IP addresses link the Parliamentary network to the outside world. There are thousands of people working in Parliament. It quite literally could have been anybody. All that the Wikipedia business shows is that someone in Parliament also supports the NDP, which I’m sure will be a shock to many of my readers.

In the meantime, Postmedia has made these allegations without bothering to identify the email address they contacted, the website they set the trap at, the IP address they claim was being used by Vikileaks30, or, most importantly, the Wikipedia articles which they claim were edited by our anonymous propagandist.

Postmedia needs to come clean about its own little “research project” here.

I suppose it doesn’t surprise me that the responsibilities of a Cabinet minister in the Harper Regime do not include reading your own bill before introducing it in Parliament.

In fairness to Vic, in between violating election laws and having children with mistresses, there probably isn’t much time left over to read draft bills. Presumably he took the law more seriously back when he was, you know, a lawyer.

One of the problems with putting a man in charge of the law when he has already been convicted of breaking the law is that he may not take the job quite as seriously as he should.

A little while ago, you may recall, the Conservative Party was calling up people in Montreal to deliver the false rumour that Liberal MP Irwin Cotler was about to resign (the implication presumably being that Liberals don’t care about their ridings, but frankly, the whole premise seems bizarre to me). When they were caught, not only did they insist that no apology was necessary, but they insisted that criticizing their antics meant attacking free speech.

Now the shoe is on the other foot, and thanks to Vic Toews and to the fake-libertarian lemmings who populate the government backbenches, very soon now an NDP staffer will be revealed as being behind the Twitter attacks on Toews. Once that happens, the Conservatives and the national media will brook no discussion of free speech rights. There will be much grandstanding from the government, and much sage chin-wagging in the media, about how such pranks devalue the meaning of Canadian democracy. Unlike the Conservatives, who do it in the name of free speech. And do it with lies, rather than truth. Toews doesn’t deny the charges; he just resents the fact that people are talking about them.

Which, ironically, shows us just how insidious and evil the government’s legislation here is. If the bill had already been passed, there wouldn’t need to be a big public investigation. With respect to any online critic, anonymous or otherwise, the government can call up the ISP and get all of the personal information they want, as well as order a list of all the websites that person has visited. The ISP will be legally required to assist them in this, with or without a warrant. They could, for instance, arrange to get the names, addresses, and Internet activities of all the people who’ve jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, enter them into the CIMS database as suspected subversives, and send police officers to harass their employers.

Unless, of course, you trust that no government will ever, ever attempt to use such far-reaching surveillance powers for political purposes, no matter how great the temptation. Real libertarians understand this problem. Hence I am forced to conclude that there are no such individuals in the Conservative ranks anymore. If there ever were.

I don’t pay a great deal of attention to National Post columnist and climate change denialist Lawrence Solomon, who, if you can believe it, is actually dumber than Margaret Wente. But I just couldn’t pass up this one. According to Solomon, “millions… met an untimely death” because of a “Nobel scam” perpetrated by Hermann Muller. Muller had just won the Nobel Prize, and his acceptance speech included a statement that there was “no escape from the conclusion that there is no threshold” at which radiation becomes harmful to humans.

What Muller was referring to was the theory, commonly accepted by all radiation monitoring organizations today, that there is no “safe” level of radiation exposure: there is just radiation levels so low that they pose a vanishingly small risk of harm. The alternative theory, called “radiation hormesis,” is that at some very small level of radiation, radioactive exposure actually benefits the body by stimulating cellular repair mechanisms to go into overdrive. Now, before you dismiss this as a crackpot quack theory, there is apparently some evidence that cells do respond in this way. Of course, whether that has a measurable effect, and whether you want to turn that into a lifetime of low-dosage exposure (which is what Solomon seems to want) is quite another thing.

(more…)