On the move!
Agh! You’re still here? My new site and weblog, ianking.ca is now up and running; new posts are building up over there, never to be mirrored here. Go! What are you waiting for? All the stuff worth keeping has been migrated over to the new server, and I don’t anticipate making any more posts here.
Bloggers and webmasters: Update your links! Simply replace vancouverscrum.blogspot.com with www.ianking.ca in your blogrolls or bookmarks to point to the new site. Old posts will remain on this server for as long as the people at Blogger/Google allow them to remain; unfortunately, I’m not going to bother to come up with any way of converting permalinks on this blog to their corresponding posts on the new site. Yes, I plead laziness. I also realize the irony of switching away from Blogger just it starts to add features that the demanding blog nerds insist upon.
Thanks for reading and linking, and see you over at ianking.ca!
—Ian King, December 13, 2004
Thursday, September 26, 2002
Canada's Privacy Commissioner, George Radwanski, is once again calling on the government to halt plans for another surveillance and person-tracking program. As well he should.
This latest idea is from the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, It would track the passenger information of every Canadian who travels outside the country including name, date of birth, destination, form of payment, pieces of luggage, tracel documents, and more... and keep this stuff on file for SIX YEARS! What makes one subject to this kind of monitoring? That oh-so-suspicious activity of leaving the country! So, let me get this straight... every person who books a round-trip to, say, L.A. gets their names in another Big Brother Database?
Of course, law enforcement has reason to keep tabs on suspicious activity. I don't think that leaving the country is a strict enough criterion.
[Radwanski] so troubled by government plans to establish a database of Canadian travel patterns that he said Thursday that he has no choice but to make his concerns public.
In an open letter to Revenue Minister Elinor Caplan, George Radwanski characterized the plan as "an unprecedented move to treat every Canadian as a suspect" that has "no place in a free society."
Right on, George. Here's a bit of his letter to the Minister of National Revenue:
"Very frankly, the government of Canada has no business systematically recording and tracking where all law-abiding Canadians travel, with whom we travel, or how often we travel," he writes. "And the government of Canada has no business compiling databases of personal information about Canadians solely for the purpose of having this information available to use against us if and when it becomes expedient to do so."
Right on, brother.
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