Canada, welcome to the US-style Surveillance State

Obama likes to say, “We’re all in this together.” Well, our 2 populations are now together as targets of spying.

The notorious Bill C-51 to expand spying on citizens in Canada has passed the House of Commons, by a vote of 183-96. It now moves to the Senate, where passage seems inevitable.

A few comments:

It’s likely that much of this “expanded spying” is already taking place in Canada. Making it law protects the spying agencies from accusations and recriminations.

Here is how a law like C-51 will operate as time passes: every federal agency in Canada with a taste for meddling (in other words, every single bureaucratic agency) will horn in on the action, using the justification of “national security.”

Every agency will hop on the bandwagon, because “national security” justifies their budgets and makes them seem more important.

Concurrently, more citizens, activists, and groups will be labeled “potential threats.”

Interested in natural health? Want to live off the grid? Want to protest against politically correct free-speech restrictions? Want to expose the dangers of genetically engineered food? Are you a home schooler? Do you speak out against vaccines?

There is a federal agency you’re impinging on, and that agency will be interested in you and what you’re writing, saying, and doing.

That agency will cook up a new and vague definition of “potential threat” in order to include you.

That’s how the game works.

What starts out as a “carefully crafted law, designed to protect the nation against real terrorism, balancing security against privacy concerns,” will grow new branches.

Here are a few features of the present version of Bill C-51:

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) will no longer simply collect information and turn it over to law-enforcement agencies. CSIS will be able to take direct action against citizens.

For example, it can detain private citizens on grounds of “suspicion” for seven days.

Federal agencies can more easily share information (e.g., medical records, surveillance reports) on private citizens.

The government can, without notice, stop private citizens from traveling.

Even jokes about terrorism can be viewed as utterances carrying hostile intent toward the State.

Websites that link to other sites that contain information which can be construed as a threat to national security can be cancelled, deleted, removed.

And all this is just for starters. Once federal agencies get their hands on C-51, they will frame thousands of pages of regulations which spell out how they will enforce the law.

These regulations always give the agencies more work to do—in this case, more spying, more analysis of data on citizens, more sharing of data, more defining and parsing what constitutes a “threat.”

The overall rationale behind C-51 is identical to that of the US Patriot Act and the programs of the US National Security Agency: collect as much information as possible on everybody all the time—and then sort it out and decide what is actionable.

However, this is a ruse. As Snowden and others have pointed out, accumulating so many tons of data makes it harder, not easier, to ID real and true terror threats. The system becomes clogged, overloaded, unworkable.

You could call this method wrong-headed, but you would miss the point. Spying on everybody is a conscious choice, and its motive has nothing to do with preventing terrorism.

If it did, a better and more selective approach could be devised in a matter of months. No, this program is built to track, tag, observe, catalog, and analyze the entire population, as a giant step forward to greater control of the citizenry.

From above.

In the eyes of the State, freedom is the enemy.

It always was, and it always will be.

As soon as severely limited central government becomes a thing of the past (which is usually about five minutes after that government is formed in founding documents), the State focuses on its own survival, expansion, and power.

What does the State have to work with? What is the raw material it grinds up for energy?

People. Citizens. The population.

To the State, “power” means “power over,” “power against.”

Pretending otherwise is extreme folly.

Sprinkle in a motley collection of incompetents, outright crooks, dupes, true believers, power-hungry losers, and outright psychopaths, and you have a broad syndicate of organized crime, under the flying banner of the law. Called the government.

The modern up-to-date version of this lunacy involves technology contractors and bureaucrats, who are dying to utilize their latest tricks and systems for the purpose of spying on everything that moves.

And thus you get Bill C-51.

Welcome to the show, Canada.

No one will be able to say you’re lagging behind America.

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.