More muzzling?

The harper government™ has released, through Treasury Board,  rules for public servants on use of social media. 

"We’re basically saying it’s ok to dialogue with the public, it’s ok to open up government information, it’s ok to be more productive by sharing information, but there is a framework you are going to have to develop." - clement

But open government advocate David Eaves said the rules don’t jibe with Clement’s message about improving the flow of information.  "This entire document is about improving the control of information," he said.

But while the rules may help persuade managers to let their employees go online, fear of running afoul of policy will make people’s lives more difficult, Eaves said.

Eaves says the new rules will slow communications to a crawl as departments struggle to make sure any messages distributed via the Net will be subject to far too much scrutiny.

Communications

1.      Verify that the planned Web 2.0 initiative is congruent with Government of Canada themes and messages, as well as departmental communications' and consultations' objectives and requirements. Privy Council Office should be engaged early in the process to ensure alignment of Web 2.0 activities with Government of Canada communication and consultation priorities;

As this applies, I believe, to all government departments and agencies, this gives harper that foot into controlling independent agencies’ communications products, something he has been trying to do for some time.  PCO takes an oversight position, here.

Another area of concern is how the new rules address public servants’ private use of social media.

For Professional Networking & Personal Use:

1. Your obligations as outlined in the Values and Ethics Code for the Public Service apply at all times, particularly if your employer could be identified through your use of Web 2.0 tools and services.

Simply put, anytime public servants express themselves publicly, they must make it very clear they are speaking as a private citizen, and not on behalf of their department.  However, perception is recognized as playing a part, so even a disclaimer does not protect public servants from speaking if it comes out that they are public servants.  That’s problematic since it would only take exposing the person’s identity and job to give an abusive government an excuse to shut down public servants who are occasionally critical of the elected government.

2. By virtue of your employment, information shared through Web 2.0 tools and services may be perceived as an official Government of Canada position rather than your own opinion. You should therefore clearly state in your account profile that the views expressed are your own and not those of your employer. However, it is important to note that such a disclaimer does not absolve you of your obligations as a public servant, including your duty of loyalty to the Government of Canada… An employee's public commentary (including online activity on blogs and other social media platforms) about an organization, including its minister, is subject to scrutiny under the duty of loyalty requirement.

What are the boundaries of duty and loyalty?  Will public servants be willing to test these under a government that treats any kind of dissent as criminal?  Will they have to be concerned about being spied upon?  Are they now more apprehensive over the changes to online surveillance Toews wants to implement?   

Will public servants place their loyalty to serving the public before heavy-handed policies passed down by a secretive, repressive government?  Is not the first loyalty of public servants to the public?

Only publicly available information may be shared externally, unless you are specifically authorized otherwise. Always check permissions required to reproduce or distribute any information, including Government of Canada content such as illustrations, photographs, videos, audio, logos, trade-marks or wordmarks.

There’s a troubling contradiction there.  While publicly available info can be shared, that right can be over-run by…who?  A Minister?  A Deputy Head?  A manager?  On what basis?  Already, this latest set of rules contrains public servants from using the same resources as any other private citizen.

“Duty of loyalty to the Government of Canada” comes up several times in the rules and seems to override the public servants’ rights as private citizens to express opinions or criticize.

Fulfillment of these obligations is expected at all times as follows:

• Public servants owe a duty of loyalty to the Government of Canada;
• Do no harm to the reputation of your employer;

But what if your employer is acting inappropriately and this has become information available to anyone, such as the case of Clement and the G-20 funds, or political aides interfering with ATIP requests, or the AG reports that expose lack of transparency and waste of funds?  Would criticizing Clement’s actions and lack of accountability be considered a violation of the rules if the public servant posting as a private citizen works for TBS?

There is a single line that offers public servants some small protection against abuse of power by political bosses -

·         public servants shall loyally implement ministerial decisions, lawfully taken.

 

However, that statement is immediately followed by more reinforcement of “duty of loyalty.”

·       

  In  In Canada's system of parliamentary democracy, public servants owe a duty of loyalty to their employer, the Government of Canada. This includes refraining from any activity that could compromise the efforts of Government organizations to deliver on their mandate.

Eaves is right.  These new rules are more to control communications than encourage them, and this extends even to a public servant’s right to express themselves as private citizens.

Harper begs for money for his War on Truth, Free Speech and Free Thought

I can barely keep up with the ever growing harper lexicon of what is baaaaad.

Latest addition to the baaaad elitists are people with opinions.  

I’m wondering how people like Ezra Levant, KKKKate McMillan, Stephen Taylor, and Charles McVety feel about harper declaring war on them.

In a letter sent out in the past few days, Conservative Party President John Walsh is urging supporters to help the party counter a “hailstorm” of negative attacks from the media, pundits and the “opinion elite.”

Where does that leave the wisdom of the Tim Horton’s crowd?  Maybe Timmy’s should put up signs: “no opining.”

Harper knows the power of Sleight of Mouth  and has been linking perfectly good characteristics, professions, and groups of people to negative terms, probably since he realized that the world didn’t automatically buy into his conviction that he’s wonderful and anyone who disagrees is the enemy.  Lacking any actual proof that he is the embodiment of perfection, he probably decided to change words and their definitions to suit his deluded beliefs and convince others of them.  But I digress.

Neuro-linguistic programming  used among other things to change patterns of mental and emotional behaviour in others is a key weapon in the CPC arsenal even if most of the CONs are too stump-dumb ignorant to understand how it works.  You don’t need to understand how a sexually transmitted disease functions on a cellular level in order to spread it, for instance.

What harper and the neanders are doing is attempting to define what a good Canadian is and what a bad Canadian is, what a good group of people is and what a bad group of people is.  By linking these people and groups to favourable/unfavourable terms over and over, he can eventually get the stupider segment of the public to support or attack at his prompting.

Steve had defined so very many people and groups as baaaaad during his four year election campaign claiming that if only he had a majority, he could get things done despite the opposition of these baaaad elements.  Now that he has a majority, he can’t raise funds by going on about the long gun registry, the opposition stalling Bills, the unelected liberal Senate, senate reform...

He no longer has any effective opposition in Parliament so naturally looks to who else he feels he needs to silence.  No big surprise he wants to shut up the media and social networks.  But how will donations to CPC help him do that?  Massive negative ad campaigns  against the media and people with opinions?  Silencing those few independent thinking journalist with the integrity not to kiss his ass by getting them fired?

The letter does not say how the party plans to counter the groups it identifies as a threat.

Perhaps Stevie intends to use the funds to establish re-education camps.  

Facts published by the media or through social media would be threatening to the survival of a party and leader who have been found in contempt of Parliament, who have mislead the public on spending, who have violates spending rules, who have violated election rules, who continuously refuse to tell the public how their tax dollars are being spent, who falsify documents by altering them…

Even dumb ass, thick as concrete, atavistic neandercon fanatics with no opinions or original thoughts must realize that the electorate needs to be told these facts if they are to vote in an informed fashion.  Maybe even those dullards realize that harper can't possibly represent every single preference and ideal they embrace and that they may want the chance to express their own opinion in a democratic, effective fashion, just once in their life.

Maybe not.  To recognize those things requires at least a modicum of original thought.

Be afraid.

The party that thrives on spreading false fears is engineering a true reason to be afraid.  But of course, they won’t open this piece of legislation for debate, nor will they be honest to Canadians as to how it will affect us.

The package is benignly nicknamed “lawful access,” but isn’t benign.  If the Conservatives move forward with it, it would feature a three-pronged approach focused on information disclosure, mandated surveillance technologies, and new police powers.   

(Emphasis mine)

The first prong mandates the disclosure of Internet provider customer information without court oversight...The new system would require the disclosure of customer name, address, phone number, e-mail address, Internet protocol address, and a series of device identification numbers.

The second prong requires Internet providers to re-work their networks to allow for real-time surveillance...These include the power to intercept communications, to isolate the communications to a particular individual, and to engage in multiple simultaneous interceptions.

Having obtained customer information without court oversight and mandated Internet surveillance capabilities, the third prong creates a several new police powers designed to obtain access to the surveillance data.

Lawful access raises genuine privacy and free speech concerns, particularly given the fact the government has never provided adequate evidence on the need for it, it has never been subject to committee review, and it would cost millions to implement yet there has been no disclosure on who would actually pay for it. Given this, it is not surprising that every  privacy commissioner in Canada has signed a joint letter expressing their concerns.

Not only is the substance problematic, but the attempt to fast track lawful access virtually guarantees that it will not be fully vetted. For example, over the past few weeks there has been mounting concern that the legislation would also create new criminal liability for hyperlinking to content that incites hatred and for using anonymous or false names online.

As we cheered on countries who used social media to spread the desire for change and allowed people to organize, our own government plans to control freedom of speech here, on the Net in particular.

This is no big surprise since it has been one of the few areas where harper could not control dissent.  Social media has not been kind to him, and with good reason.  With nearly every newspaper supporting the harper regime, it has been left to the Net users to expose the serious abuses of his government and the obvious direction in which he is taking our country against the will of most Canadians.

Youtube has been especially unfriendly to the master strategist.  It is a powerful social engine due to brief messaging tightly scripted, presented with visuals.

A few months ago, several articles came out about limitations public servants are subject to during elections.  While the purpose of the legislation is to assure that public servants remain non-partisan and take a moment to assess their involvement with politics before over-stepping bounds, such limitations were deemed undemocratic, stifling public servants’ rights to be actively engaged in politics.

This access act would stifle every Canadian and do so without justification, without providing those silenced with recourse, without oversight agencies protecting individual privacy or freedom of speech rights.

Meanwhile, the harper government has just made sure it can deny access to its own doings.

In a major decision, the court decided that Canada’s Access to Information Act does not apply to the records controlled by the people at the top of the government’s power pyramid: the prime minister, cabinet ministers, and their staffs.  And though the current Conservative government promised in the 2006 election campaign to ensure that ministers’ offices would be subject to the access law, it fought that principle in court.

We can see where this is going.  The harper regime can operate in secrecy as it plans major changes that affect us all, while any person who questions or criticizes - as is not only our right, but our responsibility in a democracy - will be silenced, perhaps even charged.

With a majority, harper will slide the lawful access legislation through easily since there is no longer an opposition that can vote him down.  He owns the Senate majority as well, so forget sober second thought or in-depth review working out the legalities or fairness of the act.  Harper will bury this in another omnibus crime Bill that will allow even the little bit of debate in the House to turn to the usual harper dishonesty of criticizing opposition to parts of the Bill as criticism to the more benign parts he puts in for window dressing.


And silencing dissent, stopping the sharing of information, making criticism criminal...that's just the beginning.  There are reasons why leaders like harper want to control information and discussion at all levels.  They want to make sure we don't have any chance of opposing what he knows will be highly unpopular changes to our country, our way of life, our very rights in order to pursue his own very narrow, backwards, extremist view of what Canada should be and how Canadians should live, even at very personal levels of religion, marriage, rights, and how we spend our money.

Smoke ‘em while you got ‘em, because our days of free speech and activism on the Net are numbered.  The very people who have been resisting this type of tyranny will be the first to be silenced.

Is this the Canada we want?

The Harper government is planning a Taj Mahal complex for the Defense Department's spies, complete with a hockey rink, basketball and volleyball courts and a bank in a secure facility on Ogilvie Road, says the head of the department's largest union.

While the original Taj Mahal was build as a symbol of eternal love,  Harper’s is more of a big fuck-you to Canadians.

We are subject to the dire warnings of the ever frowning Finance Minister, Deficit Jim, day after day.  You know, the guy who gave Canada the biggest deficit in Canadian history.  As Flaherty warns us faceless Canadians that we need to tighten our belts, it being our duty and all, and as Stockwell (I-pinned-a-Loonie-on-my-lapel-to-show-my-respect-for-taxpayers) Day announces that DND’s budget must be cut by 1 billion, the very same harper government decides to build this monstrous testament to the crazy kill-em-all-let-god-sort-em-out path he wants to take Canada down.

The right calls lefties crazy conspiracy theorists, but here’s their Great Leader elevating spies to that elite level he constantly spits vitriol at and using much needed tax dollars to do it as he cuts, slashes, butchers the rest of the public service and social programs for Canadians.

Fuck human rights, fuck the poor, fuck minorities, women, aboriginals.  And in particular, fuck free speech.  It will just get in the way of the spies work.

As appalling as the utter hypocrisy of spending money on a lavish centre for spies - complete with a sports complex, a hockey rink with a zambone, volley ball courts, walking trails, and of yes, a large fireplace, what such spending indicates is far worse.

Harper cut daycare.  Bashed the hell out of it.  Tried to make it sound anti-democratic by labeling it as a government nanny.  But when it comes to spies, publicly funded daycare is just okey-dokey fine.  And those elitists who ride bikes?  Doesn’t apply to spies.  Lots of bike racks for them planned.

And that lazy, over-paid public service really shouldn’t have low rate parking.  Hell no, they should pay full price!  Unless you’re a spy in training, that is, then it’s free.

So what is harper telling us here.  He’s saying that there are two types of Canadians - the ones he decides deserve extra special treatment, and the rest of us who just need to tighten our belts, shut the fuck up, pay our taxes, and never, ever criticize his rule or question how our tax dollars are spent.

That harper decides to pamper this particular group with our tax dollars at a time when all departments are being hit with major cuts tells us what he thinks is important.  Not creating jobs, not fighting poverty, not education, not the arts which are the lifeblood of a nation, not aid, not women, not children...

No, what’s important to him is investing more money into paranoia.  Investing into information gathering, population control, and mostly, spreading fear so that we taxpayers are more easy to control and bleed for every last dollar.

Also, MacKay has noted that the government would move forward with the project through a public-private partnership but MacLennan said it is unclear what role private firms will play.  Plenary did not respond to a request for comment. MacKay's office referred questions to CSE, which did not respond...MacLennan questioned the wisdom of employees of a private corporation having access to CSE buildings.

Yeah, I question that wisdom as well, and not being able to get CSE to respond to questions makes me more than a little twitchy.  Are we going to rent out spy services to private companies now?

This obscenity of harper’s has to be stopped, and we, those faceless Canadians he has such contempt for are the only ones who can do it.

We need to become far, far more vocal in pointing out where he’s taking Canada, and we need to put a hell of a lot more pressure on all other parties to take this son-of-a-bitch down before he makes Canada a target for hatred and terrorism by his policies, before he guts our laws and rights and social programs so badly that it will take decades to recover, and before he gets such a strangle-hold on our right to protest that we who protest will be the ones filling his new prisons.

The man is insane.  His idea of reality is so out there, so cold-war 50s that it’s difficult for normal people to grasp how dangerous he is. 

If you need anything more to convince you: he’s building this huge spy centre on Ogilvie Road???!!

Sometimes the good guys win

I add my congratulations to that of others on Canadian Cynic's success in holding Patrick of Nexus of Assholery to account for unrelenting, vicious, malicious attacks.

Blogs are a terrific way for anyone who has access to the Net to voice their opinion, share information, push a cause dear to them.  None of us want to see this freedom curtailed.

We all share a responsibility to keep this venue open and as unimpeded by limiting laws as possible.  And that isn't terribly hard to do.  Common sense tells us that what you can't do in other public places applies as well to the Net.

Many of us use outrageous humour to get a point across, but when what we say is treated as fact, it had damn well better be true, and legally substantiated. 

If anyone dares to say that suing someone for the type of thing Patrick did is an act against free speech, then they are Morans.  And the proof is in the fact that they can't see the difference between vicious lies spread with the intent to cause harm, and obvious satire, sarcasm, or humour.

I hope CC returns soon to keep giving us his excellent examples of the latter.

Toward a national security state

This excellent but alarming Hill Times article by Murray Dobbin ties in with several posts we have seen lately conncerning free trade, the undermining of democracy and free speech, Canada's shifting image and role militarily, and the use of fear to control citizens.

Dobbin explains how the harper government in particular has been effectivley moving our country toward a security state - Its most familiar elements are privatization, deregulation, so called "free trade," tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and massive cuts to social spending.

But in order for our budding security state to protect itself - as conditions worsen, as wages and living standards fall, as personal insecurity increases, and as the social safety net frays, (all which result from a security state) the threat of a radical response becomes real.

Any one not clouded by absolute love for the Master Strategist knows what that means: protesters are re-branded by the ruling government as criminals, more prisons are built to house them, access to information is reduced to near nothing, freedom of speech and the press is severely curtailed by whatever means available - imprisonment, false charges, threats, smear campaigns.

The national security state is intended to protect the gains made through free market policies, and at the same time, gradually redefine what government means to the citizenry. We have in Harper a prime minister who virtually never refers to medicare, education, social protection, the environment, poverty reduction or indeed any of the issues that the vast majority of Canadians say they care about.

How does he get away with this when polls consistently show most of us are at odds with the priorities of the current government?

Massive campaings meant to distract us.

Fear campaigns: fear of criminals, fear of socialists, fear of terrorists, fear of environmentalist who threaten good, old fashioned entrepreneurship, fear of whatever other country they can paint as a threat.  This allows the government not only to keep us distracted, but to boost military spending, to give greater powers to the military, policing forces, security forces.  It allows the government to invade our privacy and curtail our freedoms, all in the name of security, a security that in reality is nowhere near as threatened as they lead us to believe.

Divide the population: citizens will fight more between each other than with the government; division provides more fodder for distractive campaigns; division allows the government justification for cutting programs; division encourages fear; division allows the government to portay certain groups they seek to undermine as unsavoury, as threats to democracy.

Dumb down and simplify messages:  repeatedly portraying issues as good or evil allows the government to toss issues into one camp or another and to offer simplistic, false solutions.  It also alters the way citizens perceive issues or disseminate information , if done long enough.  Show us only black and white long enough, we begin to lose the ability to even look for shades of grey.

Cut social spending:  not only is the population less educated, then, it is so focused on simple survival that it has little time to devote to figuring out how to fight their own government, how to get information, or even to simply attend protests.  It has little interest in much more than meeting basic needs for them and their families, and when there is a little time and energy at the end of the day, they turn to non-productive activities so that they don't have to think about how rough things are.

Eventually, though, the pressure becomes to much and there is rebellion.  Bloody rebellion because it isn't well planned, and by then the security state is well entrenched to subdue its very citizens through force.

Dobbing lists several recent examples of how our civil rights are being altered: G20 arrests and violations of rights, the Montebello fiasco with undercover cops trying to create trouble so they can justify a crack-down, the harassment of anti-Olympic protesters...

Each time these outrages go unchallenged by federal opposition politicians, the national security state clicks one notch further forward and normal gets a bit worse. When tough on crime bills sail through almost without comment even when crime is declining, and when we are spending billions and billions on defence when we have no enemies, there is something terribly wrong with the body politic.  The country is changing before our eyes, and federal opposition parties are letting it happen.

And so are we, when we see the opposition fail at controlling a vicious, undemocratic minority government that has been systematically leading us toward a security state.  We are letting it happen when we continue to support these parties, offering little more than e-mails voicing our discontent.  We need to make those parties realize they will lose our vote, our financial support, and our public voices.

We will never convince harper to protect our rights and freedoms, so wee need to put pressure on opposition parties to do what they were elected to do.  Represent us and oppose what  the harper government does that undermines our collective welfare.

We need to be as critical of the parties we tend to support as we are of harper & co because they are failing us, and we need to get it through our heads that we can't compromise on fundamental issues related to rights and freedom.   When we refuse to accept the trading off of our right for temporary political gain and quit supporting the opposition parties when they do these things, they may start listening to us and act accordingly.

No backbone = no vote, no donation, no support.
No backbone = stark criticism

Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism

That diarrhea dispenser Soudas, while in Copenhagen trying to control what Canadians hear, falsely accused Steven Guilbeault, a climate change activist of perpetrating a hoax that embarrassed the Canadian government. When the truth came out, not only did Soudas refuse to apologize to Guilbeault -

Guilbeault said he is also off ended because the Canadian government accused him of being unpatriotic, due to his criticism of its policies. "It's scandalous," said Guilbeault. "It seems like we've lost freedom of speech in Canada."

I’m going to exercise my swiftly eroding right to free speech, now. Anyone who still supports this Harper...regime is either complicit in its corruption, or is a complete fucking idiot.

I’m not saying this of all conservatives, but I am saying it of anyone who supports Steve Harper and his lackeys. If you can sit back and still support that Prop Minister after this comment by Soudas, then not only are you an absolute moron, but you are unpatriotic as well.


No!!!!! We support the TROOPS! you may be screaming. We support our GOVURMENT!!!! Unlike you leftie-commie-pinko-soc’lists who bash 'em!

Well, let’s look at that.

Patriotic: Inspired by patriotism; actuated by love of one's country; zealously and unselfishly devoted to the service of one's country; as, a patriotic statesman, vigilant.

Notice the definition says country, not government. It also includes vigilance as an act of patriotism.

Our democratic system relies on our ability to question, debate, and criticize. That is why there is more than one political party - to represent the differing views, ideologies, and needs of Canadians. So - now listen carefully, I know this is very difficult for some of you - when elected members criticize or question the ruling party, they are helping to make sure that all Canadians have a voice and get to apply the power of that voice in shaping their own country. It is not unpatriotic, it’s their job, their responsibility.

Democracy also relies on individuals’ rights to voice their concerns directly. How else will the government know what they want, and since the government constantly tells us it is working for our welfare, then they need to hear what affects that welfare, and how.

But-but-but- (adscam?)

Hold your tongue and sit down.  I’m not done.

Those of you who say that criticizing the government is unpatriotic, were you unpatriotic when you criticized the Liberals when they were in power, or did you just take a sabbatical from patriotism? See how it works? You love your country, you say, and that’s why you beat on those damn Liberals and Dippers, even when they are in power. And somehow, that’s patriotic. But anyone criticizing Harper and Co. is unpatriotic because he’s in power.

So, you are all fucking idiots.

You are also unpatriotic, because you place a political party above love of country.

You are unpatriotic as well because you are not vigilant: carefully observant or attentive; on the lookout for possible danger; "a policy of open-eyed awareness"

A patriotic person is vigilant, and a vigilant person questions, examines, takes active part in “a policy of open-eyed awareness.”

Many hesitate to question any actions even remotely related to the military, because they fear questioning implies criticism and how can we criticize people who put their lives on the line for their country? I get that. I believe that avoiding questioning in such case is very wrong, but I get it, I understand the unspoken taboo. We are fortunate that our military is a decent enough one, overwhelmingly made up of decent people, I’d say (although there is the odd lying sack of shit) All the more reason to be vigilant, to make sure it is accountable to the country, not to the governing party. There are many examples in history and around the world today of what can happen when a military body serves the government rather than the country and we have only to look at the mess the RCMP finds itself in to understand what happens when we allow agencies to self-regulate and dodge questions from impartial, public panels.

So while I understand why it is difficult for some people to question or criticize anything possibly connected to the military, this accusation by Soudas against Guilbeault is a different beast. Politicians in power do not risk their lives for their country. In fact, they are paid quite well to serve and represent us. That means they should damn well listen to our concerns.

Harper has it backwards, and most of you who follow him do as well. Steve thinks it’s his job to change Canada and Canadians, make them act as he thinks they should, get them to serve who he believes they should serve. A Prime Minister should lead Parliament and make it work for the will of the people. The government should bend to our will, not us to theirs.

A final word on patriotism -
Love of one’s country: we should want it to be healthy. We should want it to function well. We should want it to grow, and to be something we can be proud of. That means paying attention, having the courage to criticize if needed, getting off our lazy butts and learning how our government works, what it’s up to, and whether or not it’s being straight with us.