There's been much comment this week on the insidious potential of the federal government's proposed Internet snooping laws. Under the disingenuous guise of catching child pornographers, Ottawa would like to make it far easier for authorities to see what we're all up to online.
And who can blame them? Checking online activity is a whole lot easier than struggling through judicial red tape.
But the feds are by no means the only ones who'd like to brush aside your privacy in the interests of efficient law enforcement.
Provincially, we need look no further than the Stanley Cup riots to see how when the going gets tough, safeguards get tossed in the name of catching the bad guys.
Take that awful photo on your driver's licence. Did you know that ICBC has coded it with facial recognition software and stored it with files of more than four million B.C. citizens? Or that over several months last year police made 15 requests - none of them supported by a search warrant - to use that database to identify suspects? Shortly after the riots, ICBC stepped it up a notch, proactively offering to match images of alleged rioters with photos in its database.
While police didn't take up that offer, it apparently took the privacy commissioner launching an investigation to bring home to ICBC that its unauthorized sharing of private information was wrong.
That should have been obvious - and it was, to ICBC's own privacy analyst, who advised against the practice.
But too often in our zeal to catch pornographers/rioters/terrorists/namethebadguy, we don't pay attention or care enough about what we're giving up. Big Brother is indeed watching.
