The decision by Canadian media conglomerate CanWest to move its Canada.com e-mail services to an American provider has raised a few eyebrows.
The headline over at Canadian Journalist sums it up: “Canada.com now …AMERICAN???”
Registered users should not notice any difference to their e-mail, apart from one detail – their personal information is now stored on the US servers of a company called Velocity Services Inc.
From Canada.com’s help files:
By registering for and/or logging on to the Service, you accept and acknowledge that the information processed or stored outside of Canada may be available to the foreign government of the country in which the information or the entity controlling it, is situated under a lawful order made in that jurisdiction and no longer falls under the jurisdiction of Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (“PIPEDA”) nor be subject to canada.com’s Privacy Statement.
In other words, the US government can demand access to the personal records of Canadians using Canada.com e-mail.
As Canadian Journalist says; “Given the current U.S. administration’s predilection for spying on people just for the fun of it, that’s a pretty creepy idea.”
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Is this a surprise to you? That “foreign governments” have access to our email? I spent seven years reporting on Internet privacy issues… dude, everything you’ve ever put out on the web has been monitored by a computer owned and operated by “foreign governments”. What do you think the CSE, NSA, the Australian Defence Signals Directorate, Britain’s GCHQ and the New Zealand Government Communications Security Bureau do in their spare time? Do you remember the FBI Carnivore program? Even without all the secrecy stuff, if the Americans — who you seem most worried about (Canada monitors us as well) — wanted access to Canadian emails stored on servers based inside the physical borders of Canada, how long do you think it would take a court to grant them access? It’s amazing to me how quickly the already tight shorts of reporters get bunched into knots the first time they realize the Internet ain’t all that secret and secure.
Here’s another one for you. Every time you use your credit card, debit card, Air Miles Card or in store credit card your purchase is monitored and collected by the store, by the manufacturer of the item you’re buying and by the distribution company which delivers the product. They know when you buy porn, they know when you buy a plane ticket and where you’re going, they know when you buy milk… and all of that information is free to be legally traded and bought. And the American and Canadian governments, along with several others, have access to that information and can/do add that stuff to profiles they already have based on your web surfing and emailing habits. In 1985 the RCMP, before it was split into CSIS and JTF2, had files on over one million Canadians. That’s pre-Internet and pre-digitization. That means paper files and video and audio tape. That means warehouses of storage space. If they were that willing and determined back then, think about what these agencies are capable of doing today.
And don’t be blaming Bush, because the “current US administration” didn’t create the CSE — that’s the Canadian Security Establishment — and those are the guys who are most likely to be reading this post, and particularly this response since I’ve used several of the “key words” that gets stuff noticed by these people.
That headline was cute, but if you want to know more about any of this let me know.
This is hilarious, do we not consider YAhoo, gmail, and Hotmail (Microsoft), to be US providers…of course we do, so it shouldn’t really bother us, where the info/computer data storage is for canada.com ….also yahoo on-site marketing tells me that 50% of canadians have a yahoo address, so whats the big deal…it’s free! I just hope Usa.com is being run from china