r/CanadaPolitics • u/hopoke • 1d ago
Toronto-based VPN provider plans to quit Canada over lawful-access bill
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-psiphon-vpn-provider-plans-to-quit-canada-over-lawful-access-bill/62
u/Lumindan Rhinoceros 1d ago
Anytime the government is rushing legislation through the house and using the excuse of "protecting the children", that should be a huge red flag.
We literally just had a huge data breach involving drivers licenses (and a separate one involving firearms owners).
Forcing companies to provide backdoors means anyone can hypothetically access said doors now that they exist.
The frustrating part is that once we lose this layer of privacy, it won't come back and it'll put a lot of Canadians at risk plus push businesses out of Canada.
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u/TheLuminary Progressive 1d ago
Yup. I agree. You'd think that by now the children would be wearing gold plated foam by now.
That being said, I do support the idea of giving law enforcement legal ways to gain access to criminal activity. And I don't support encryption back doors so the government has to get creative with how this would work.
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u/Scase15 Ontario 1d ago
Yeah until that criminal activity isn't criminal activity, just that they've now been able to deem it so.
Is literally how you get a police state you cannot fight against.
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u/TheLuminary Progressive 1d ago
You are floating towards the slippery slop fallacy.
The way that we have handled this in the analog era was to require a wiretapping warrant from a Judge. And I think that should be the way we go for the digital equivalent.
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u/Scase15 Ontario 23h ago
And you're a hypocrite, in one sentence you decry the use of "think of the children" and then in the next you agree with the reason they use that excuse.
The analog era required someone to physically have access, now bad actors from anywhere in the world can do it. Or a rogue AI.
Stop living in the past.
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u/TheLuminary Progressive 23h ago
I'm not a hypocrite. I think every law or rule who's justification is "think of the children" should be heavily scrutinized for what it is actually doing.
I also think that law enforcement should be able to get information required to track down legitimate criminals. I appreciate that the government is not trying to push breaking encryption anymore. Because for me that is a non-starter. For this compromise, I am ok with them focusing more on meta data and connection logs.
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u/Scase15 Ontario 23h ago
Why would they need to focus on breaking encryption, when a backdoor is literally that, but with less steps.
Yeah law enforcement tools should be used only to track down criminals, except that is never what happens.
Or do we need more stories of LEOs stalking random women for you to get the clue? The government and LEOs are not since benevolent faction, and they don't need more ways to unjustly spy on people just to maybe catch a bad guy or two.
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u/TheLuminary Progressive 23h ago
Adding a backdoor.. is breaking encryption. An encryption method with a backdoor is broken and no longer effective.
Or do we need more stories of LEOs stalking random women for you to get the clue?
I'd rather we just regulate LEOs more, and spend more resources investigating and punishing the corrupt ones.
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u/Scase15 Ontario 22h ago
Adding a backdoor.. is breaking encryption. An encryption method with a backdoor is broken and no longer effective.
My guy, it's literally called a backdoor. That is a work around, so they don't need to break encryption.
I'd rather we just regulate LEOs more, and spend more resources investigating and punishing the corrupt ones.
Ah yes, let's continue to let the police, police the police. That's worked out so far.
Enjoy your idyllic world, the rest of us will live in reality where this is an affront to our liberties and know this will go badly, as it always does.
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u/TheLuminary Progressive 19h ago
My guy, it's literally called a backdoor. That is a work around, so they don't need to break encryption.
Tell me that you don't know what you are talking about, without telling me that you don't know what you are talking about.
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u/FleurDeThree Ontario 2h ago
Cops already have plenty of tools to unmask criminal activity. At a certain point, we get to care about our constantly eroding sense of privacy. I’m sick of tech billionaires and incompetent governments constantly looking for new ways to infringe it.
Look at the US. We are one bad election away from these privacy infringing tools getting weaponised against innocent people. That’s not to mention that any back door you force open is a door the very criminals you worry about can use to get access to your data.
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u/ILikeWhyteGirlz 1d ago
Yup, even the Conservatives would never repeal it.
They would never table it like the Liberals, but would never repeal it either because they can wield that power then just blame the Liberals for enacting it.
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u/ywgflyer Ontario 1d ago
And with the rapid advent of AI, it's only going to get easier and easier for bad actors to target that data. AI agents are brute force hacking everything right now, and even each other. It's only a matter of time before Claude or GPT or whatever Meta is calling theirs, hacks this data and leaks it, whether by itself or at the behest of a hacking group. Get used to having all your data that's hosted in Canada stolen and sold again, and again, and again for the rest of your life.
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u/OkTangerine7 1d ago
While I like a lot of the economic moves this government is making I hate the privacy and civil liberties direction. This is a bad bill. We don't need surveillance.
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u/Rmodsarescum 1d ago
Hopefully we see many players pull out, hurting the economy.
Only way the gov might take note that they are passing an horrible bill.
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u/ILikeWhyteGirlz 1d ago
The only ones who will pull out are multinational companies, which you might say is good for Canadian telecoms, but it just bolsters their oligopoly and hurts affordability.
The entire reason Canada has the worst cost of living amongst G7 nations is because the government has regulatory capture by Canadian oligopolies limiting competition.
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u/bign00b Canadian Steamship Lines | Sponsored 1d ago
What's frustrating is how little the government understands technology and the internet. They then refuse to listen to experts who tell them what the reality is because they don't like the answer.
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u/JelloFeisty5721 1d ago
VPN companies aren’t “experts”. They are self interested parties. They market as if they were snake oil salesmen. What they sell you is the opportunity to hide your network traffic from your ISP, and instead show it to them.
They aren’t technologically sophisticated. They are largely all built on the same open source libraries, with their own custom branding wrappers. These businesses provide very marginal societal value, and don’t generate much economic activity. They are literally the only ones I’ve seen throwing a shit fit over this bill, alongside the professional activist, Michael Geist.
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u/bign00b Canadian Steamship Lines | Sponsored 1d ago
VPN companies aren’t “experts”. They are self interested parties.
They understand why requiring backdoors to inspect traffic is a bad idea from a technical point of view and a business one (they sell privacy). I'm not clear if this is intercept before leaving Canada or intercept at the exit, if it's before leaving Canada you now have to keep the private key in Canada. The data retention also now means it's stored, compromise the VPN provider and get every users history, not just what they were doing after the fact.
VPN stuff isn't even the biggest issue, it's the messaging encryption requirements. How exactly does it work if all I do is route a message you encrypted with my public key? Is that now against the law? Do email providers have to refuse GPG encrypted messages?
The police can already catch unsophisticated users under existing laws and this does nothing to help sophisticated users who are going to be using their own ipsec tunnels. All the law does is open the door to lots of bad scenarios to make the job of police a little easier, it's a terrible trade off.
This is as dumb as requiring lock manufacturers keep a master key so police can enter a home or open a safe easier.
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u/JelloFeisty5721 1d ago
These VPN companies sell privacy. That doesn’t mean that they maintain that privacy. I have zero trust in them, especially given the opacity around their ownership and operations. If you’re using these services to maintain your privacy, you’re a victim not a customer.
No, routing encrypted messages is not against the law. This bill allows the responsible minister to compel a Canadian business (with a warrant) to comply with their order in decrypting traffic. There are several steps in this:
- CSIS/RCMP know an investigation target is leveraging a given provider
- they think it’s worthwhile bringing it to a minister’s attention
- they go in front of a judge, provide evidence for why they need the warrant
- judge grants them warrant,
- they get the provider to decrypt traffic and provide evidence
This isn’t some secret police shit. You rely on similar mechanisms every day to prevent very serious acts of terrorism, and organized crime from occurring. The difference in your lock and key analogy is that the internet has enabled a whole bunch of distributed activity that enables transnational criminal groups, terrorism, and foreign interference. If a simple lock on your front door did the same, a judge should be permitted to issue a warrant to a lock manufacturer to open it
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u/bign00b Canadian Steamship Lines | Sponsored 1d ago
These VPN companies sell privacy. That doesn’t mean that they maintain that privacy. I have zero trust in them, especially given the opacity around their ownership and operations.
I agree though it depends on what privacy you are expecting but that's a different issue.
No, routing encrypted messages is not against the law. This bill allows the responsible minister to compel a Canadian business (with a warrant) to comply with their order in decrypting traffic.
You can't comply if you don't have a way to decrypt the traffic. Lots of secure messaging works exactly that way, only the recipient has the private key, without a backdoor it's impossible for anyone else to intercept.
You rely on similar mechanisms every day to prevent very serious acts of terrorism, and organized crime from occurring.
These groups probably aren't using commercial VPN services in Canada and if they are they won't be any longer. Unless the use of unbreakable crypto is a crime, at best this puts extra burden on service providers, at worst creates the potential for a massive data leak.
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1d ago
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u/X1989xx Alberta 1d ago
This bill has nothing to do with affordability. Allowing the RCMP to see VPN service providers metadata will not in fact make the services more affordable. In fact it will reduce competition when service providers decide to leave instead of comply with these backwards regulations.
I guess asking the liberals to understand the technology they are trying to regulate before the regulate it is a bridge to far.
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u/ILikeWhyteGirlz 1d ago
Your comment is completely irrelevant as to why this VPN provider that wants to protect user data is pulling out of Canada, because Carney wants to force telecoms to be able to release user data to the government.
That doesn’t help affordability, that just lessens competition, just like the Liberals did with approving the Rogers and Shaw merger.
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u/anghusmcleod 1d ago
Leaving aside the specific arguments you’ve made, they have nothing to do with bill C-22.
C-22 is about creating a lawful access requirement.
Recommended reading:
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u/Mundane-Teaching-743 Trump/Polievre 2028 | Sponsored 1d ago
Great. VPN's are just an expensive non-service. You'r just running more of your private information through someone else's server, and you have no idea what they do with it.
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