Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act: Dangerous backdoor surveillance risks remain • Hacker News Board

Re: Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act: Dangerous backdoor surveillance risks remain

#361

Post by thfuran » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 7:24 AM UTC

xtiansimon wrote: post #263

augment_me wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that's it's sadly a necessity for control of the population when you have other superpowers employing this. If you are Europe, and you have democratic elections, you have an informational power asymmetry towards the states that have mass surveillance and control. You are (as we saw last year with the Romanian election that was swung to 60% in 2 weeks over TikTok) susceptible towards influence of other super…

> "control of the population" Who is doing the controlling in this take? "The Government"? Calling for more government control when some say--at least in the US--too much government is the heart of our current political strife. Unless this argument is for corporate surveillance? As for elections in the age of social media, why not just pass Blackout laws around the date of the election? One week not sufficient? Make…

>when some say

Some say very nearly anything you could imagine and many things you couldn’t.

Re: Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act: Dangerous backdoor surveillance risks remain

#362

Post by thfuran » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 7:37 AM UTC

himata4113 wrote: post #295

I believe that this is actually a good thing because when the government is infringing on the rights it is what brings resistance to life. If you really think about it, if the government can collect the data that means some entity is ALREADY collecting that data which more often than not goes to advertisers. Another benefit is that it creates real use-cases for things such as I2P, (god forbid) crypto currency and mat…

You’re saying that it’s a good thing that the government is infringing on people’s rights because it might motivate activists to convince them to stop doing so?

Re: Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act: Dangerous backdoor surveillance risks remain

#363

Post by augment_me » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 9:09 AM UTC

mvkel wrote: post #244

augment_me wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that's it's sadly a necessity for control of the population when you have other superpowers employing this. If you are Europe, and you have democratic elections, you have an informational power asymmetry towards the states that have mass surveillance and control. You are (as we saw last year with the Romanian election that was swung to 60% in 2 weeks over TikTok) susceptible towards influence of other super…

To what end would you say the surveillance is for? So you surveil your citizens and precog their opinions... to do what? Make them have state-sponsored opinions? Don't we already have that without the surveillance? It's trivial to predict how a human will behave without any surveillance at all. Facebook abandoned their Beacon system not because of the backlash, but because they realized all they really needed to pred…

I don't think that the EU member states have the same data access as companies in the US like Facebook do, and therein lies the problem. There is no good way to gather and connect data like Meta or Palantir can, you can't just sell things to the maximum bidder here. I think that's where the necessity comes from.

Re: Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act: Dangerous backdoor surveillance risks remain

#364

Post by augment_me » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 9:11 AM UTC

xtiansimon wrote: post #263

augment_me wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that's it's sadly a necessity for control of the population when you have other superpowers employing this. If you are Europe, and you have democratic elections, you have an informational power asymmetry towards the states that have mass surveillance and control. You are (as we saw last year with the Romanian election that was swung to 60% in 2 weeks over TikTok) susceptible towards influence of other super…

> "control of the population" Who is doing the controlling in this take? "The Government"? Calling for more government control when some say--at least in the US--too much government is the heart of our current political strife. Unless this argument is for corporate surveillance? As for elections in the age of social media, why not just pass Blackout laws around the date of the election? One week not sufficient? Make…

I am not for mass surveillance, I am saying it's the cheapest option to achieve the goal without disturbing the individual and causing social unrest. If you have a blackout, you will have businesses stopped, people will complain, people will use VPNs anyways, massive economic costs. Mass surveillance will just allow you to monitor, flag and perhaps later exclude people without affecting the rest.

Re: Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act: Dangerous backdoor surveillance risks remain

#365

Post by augment_me » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 9:14 AM UTC

worldsayshi wrote: post #230

augment_me wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that's it's sadly a necessity for control of the population when you have other superpowers employing this. If you are Europe, and you have democratic elections, you have an informational power asymmetry towards the states that have mass surveillance and control. You are (as we saw last year with the Romanian election that was swung to 60% in 2 weeks over TikTok) susceptible towards influence of other super…

Thank you. Haven't seen this problem framed in quite this way before. I find the point quite persuasive. But, I don't understand how this step could possibly work: > start policing on what opinions those people are allowed to have and what measures to take to them A much more effective counter to this would be to rebalance the information asymmetry by giving citizens the tools to coordinate against state sponsored in…

It's a good suggestion, but the thing is that the average person does not care and does not want to use your tools. You can make an app that gives you correct news, where you can vote for local political issues, etc. Most people don't give a shit, you as a state are competing against the attention economy(evolving into an affection economy given LLM use).

You are competing against companies that are using biologically wired mechanisms, like short-burst 3-second information overload together with marketing signaling(consumer neuroscience) to make you do choices and then confabulate the choice to yourself as your own.

Any tool would have to either be made in a landscape where ALL of the attention/affection-economy tools are banned, OR use the same mechanisms.

Re: Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act: Dangerous backdoor surveillance risks remain

#366

Post by augment_me » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 9:23 AM UTC

armchairhacker wrote: post #248

augment_me wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that's it's sadly a necessity for control of the population when you have other superpowers employing this. If you are Europe, and you have democratic elections, you have an informational power asymmetry towards the states that have mass surveillance and control. You are (as we saw last year with the Romanian election that was swung to 60% in 2 weeks over TikTok) susceptible towards influence of other super…

As always, the devil is in the details. How will "mass surveillance" be implemented? How will bad opinions be suppressed? How will misguided officials be blocked? Even the vague outline you've provided has issues. You can't prevent someone from having an opinion. You can't figure out who is "influenced" vs merely "exposed" (and visible intrusion shifts people towards the former). You should actually consider the down…

I think the definition of what is "anti-democratic" is as hard as the initial 3 questions you pose. If you push second-order ideas, for example by using refugees as indirect fuel for anti-democratic sentiment, is that anti-democratic? The Romanian election propaganda in itself was not anti-democratic, the coordination from a foreign state was. This means that the future of this kind of interference could be a more diffuse approach, or an approach where this is done from within Europe.

Any countermeasure you propose will just lead to moving one level of abstraction, or finding another point of entry.

I do think it's a better idea than mass surveillance, but I believe that the states will see it as harder. It can be that mass surveillance is implemented, and then the states do not know what to do with the data and nothing is achieved.

Re: Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act: Dangerous backdoor surveillance risks remain

#367

Post by himata4113 » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 11:35 AM UTC

thfuran wrote: post #362

himata4113 wrote: post #295

I believe that this is actually a good thing because when the government is infringing on the rights it is what brings resistance to life. If you really think about it, if the government can collect the data that means some entity is ALREADY collecting that data which more often than not goes to advertisers. Another benefit is that it creates real use-cases for things such as I2P, (god forbid) crypto currency and mat…

You’re saying that it’s a good thing that the government is infringing on people’s rights because it might motivate activists to convince them to stop doing so?

It's more accurate to say that it gives legitimacy to using things that government has limited to no control over.

Re: Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act: Dangerous backdoor surveillance risks remain

#368

Post by worldsayshi » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

augment_me wrote: post #365

worldsayshi wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. Haven't seen this problem framed in quite this way before. I find the point quite persuasive. But, I don't understand how this step could possibly work: > start policing on what opinions those people are allowed to have and what measures to take to them A much more effective counter to this would be to rebalance the information asymmetry by giving citizens the tools to coordinate against state sponsored in…

It's a good suggestion, but the thing is that the average person does not care and does not want to use your tools. You can make an app that gives you correct news, where you can vote for local political issues, etc. Most people don't give a shit, you as a state are competing against the attention economy(evolving into an affection economy given LLM use). You are competing against companies that are using biologicall…

I agree but I also think that authenticity is one quality that such a tool could offer that other things in the attention economy cannot.

Addictive things are addictive. But people are also capable, given the right circumstances, to go and "touch grass". People are capable of making choices that are good for them. Especially if we make those choices easy enough.

I often scroll too much but I also go into nature and meet irl humans. And it's not close to an insurmountable choice.

Re: Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act: Dangerous backdoor surveillance risks remain

#369

Post by dang » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC

cwillu wrote: post #351

dang wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ignorant americans You're crossing into nationalistic flamebait if not an outright slur with that. This is not ok on HN, regardless of nationality, so please don't. Low-quality comments (especially generic tangents) are always a problem in threads on controversial topics. Trying to address that is one of the core moderation tasks on HN, and we're quite dedicated to it. But the question needs to be framed without pu…

I greatly admire your work on hn, but I have to express some skepticism that hn has the background necessary to effectively moderate a contentious discussion about another country's systems. Specifically, I feel like the cultural similarities has bred a sense of familiarity that leads to unjustified confidence in making and judging claims. My sense is that the US is much more legalistic/formal in its approach to gove…

It's impossible for a large public forum to have nuanced, correct, cogent comments on any topic, let alone contentious ones. All internet dynamics point against that. We're just trying to muddle through and stave off death for a little longer (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Even that modest, melancholy goal consumes all the time and energy we have, so the bar can't go much higher—at least not very quickly.

This isn't just a problem of other people being wrong and ignorant. It has to do with human nature, which applies to all of us. If you consider a little bit what led you to post a nationalistic swipe when you felt frustrated, that should be clear enough. We're all on the path of slowly learning not to react this way, but the solution needs also to be a self thing and not just an other thing.

By the way, it's not uncommon for people arguing about Canadian topics to both be Canadian and both be misinterpreting the other as a foreigner/outsider/other. (I say Canada because that was the topic here. It applies to other populations as well of course.) Such misunderstandings are excruciating and I sometimes wish I could step in and point this out, but we'd never out people like that. (Not a comment on the current thread; I didn't check.)

Re: Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act: Dangerous backdoor surveillance risks remain

#370

Post by cwillu » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 7:20 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #369

cwillu wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I greatly admire your work on hn, but I have to express some skepticism that hn has the background necessary to effectively moderate a contentious discussion about another country's systems. Specifically, I feel like the cultural similarities has bred a sense of familiarity that leads to unjustified confidence in making and judging claims. My sense is that the US is much more legalistic/formal in its approach to gove…

It's impossible for a large public forum to have nuanced, correct, cogent comments on any topic, let alone contentious ones. All internet dynamics point against that. We're just trying to muddle through and stave off death for a little longer ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ). Even that modest, melancholy goal consumes all the time and energy we have, so the bar can't go much higher—…

I don't disagree, and I'm content to drop it, but I do want to repeat because I feel it might have been lost that my suggestion was “having a short note in the top text”, similar to what sometimes happens on other contentious political posts.

Cheers.