That's hardly surprising. I assume C3P is staffed by parents who have lost their kids. One can hardly blame them for trying to subvert privacy. Frankly their presence is a good thing; the more people who lose their kids to creeps, the stronger the social reaction to preventing that should be.

But factually I suspect we're almost as safe as we've ever been, so thankfully, their voices aren't too loud.

I'm in the middle. I have some sympathy for the Canadian intelligence community's perspective here; in recent years, much intelligence potentially preventing major criminal public safety incidents has had to come through five eyes partners because the legal situation for domestic collection has become unworkable. CSIS refers to the situation as "going dark", which is an unfortunate US terminological import.

That being said, C-22 goes way beyond what would be halfway reasonable to solve the main issues in a fair and rights-respecting way, and I have absolutely no sympathy for the reasoning and goals imported from the UK's Online Safety Act.

When I was young I believed this was the explanation. I though I was smart and everyone else (with politicians at the top of the list) are stupid. But then I learned humility, and I don't believe in good intentions anymore. They can claim good intentions, and mostly they do, but their motives are far from anything that can be called "good intentions". They are not stupid, you know. They just try hard to look stupid. The more stupid politician looks like, the more chances he is just pretending to avoid responsibility. The purpose of their actions is exactly what they get as the result. If they succeed of course.

It's not clear to me. Can you please elaborate on how it is to you? In particular I'm interested as to how you've fully excluded corporations from involvement.

To me, I don't believe you can have one without the other, in particular since so much of this power grab requires the instruments of corporations in order to accomplish. If _either one_ of Google or Apple said "we're not implementing these draconian controls, sue us" it would be over. It is interesting they're willing to use this tactic when it comes to protecting their app stores or in-game purchase streams but not when it comes to clear undemocratic overreach.

To be clear I'm not suggesting this is a natural outcome of capitalism in general, just that, in the wake of extreme monopolization, the current crop of mega corporations have become insulated from competitive reality, and are therefore hopelessly corrupt. They're willingly allowing their technology stacks to be used by the government in this way in exchange for the opportunities it affords them and the lack of enforcement it creates.