Are you listening? Are we listening – because “they” certainly are.

By Ray Rivers

BURLINGTON, ON. June 24, 2013.   I grew up in the back woods of Ontario with a party-line phone.  Everybody listened to everyone else’s conversations, and the rumour mill churned faster than Coronation Street.  At university, we spent more time speculating who the narcs were tapping than we ever did smoking.  Working in Ottawa, I recall a well-placed senior bureaucrat, who despite his high-level position in the Canadian government was a self-avowed communist, and so convinced his house was being bugged he refused to talk politics.  

 So I got used to people listening in.  When the story broke recently about the Obama administration continuing the Bush electronic surveillance program, I initially just shrugged it off.  I mean wasn’t that the kind of program which caught the Toronto 18 and almost got the Boston 2.  If you’re not planning evil, then you have nothing to worry about, I reassured myself.  And it’s the authorities who are doing the monitoring – they wouldn’t abuse their power.  There must be something more important to worry about.

Listening has something to do with freedom of speech?  You don’t say.

 How can listening in on conversations have anything to do with freedom of speech?  And how could a meta-data computer be more intrusive that the cameras catching your every move in a public toilet cubicle?  By comparison, the streets in the UK are blanketed with closed circuit TV cameras, according to the TV show MI5.  Surveillance is just one of those compromises we need to make for security in this crowded, complex world that has evolved.  So what is the big deal?

 The big deal is the slippery slope.   Big Brother is really here!  Thank goodness for whistle-blowers, like Edward Snowden, who are forcing the debate about how far a state can go riding roughshod over our constitutionally guaranteed rights to privacy, and by extension, freedom of expression.  But now, that everyone knows the state is listening in, how effective can this snooping be?  The professional terrorists will just find other ways to communicate, like the burner cell phones used in the TV series The Wire.  And the government will still be collecting troves of personal information on the rest of us – and looking for another way to use it?

 Back home, it is no surprise that Canada is in-step with the Americans, conducting warrantless electronic surveillance, started as part of the Anti-Terrorism Act back when Canada was heavily engaged in the Afghanistan conflict .  The snooping was put on pause over privacy concerns in 2008, but Mr. Harper brought it right back after his election victory in 2011 – at the same time he was killing the long gun registry.

 Stephen Harper would not suffer the long gun registry because a handful of hunters and farmers thought it violated their privacy.  It seems government recording a rifle’s registration number is dangerous.  Yet, the Harper government has no trouble recording and listening in on our every personal conversation.  Indeed, there is silence among the Tory libertarians, who don’t give a stuff about this violation of privacy and where it may lead.  Or, are they just being a bunch of desk-thumping seals that according to former Alberta backbencher, Brent Rathgeber, best describes the Harper Conservative caucus?

Ray Rivers writes weekly on both federal and provincial politics, applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat after which he decided to write and has become a  political animator. Rivers was a candidate for provincial office in Burlington where he ran against Cam Jackson in 1995, the year Mike Harris and the Common Sense Revolution swept the province.