Road Warrior of the Week: Richard K

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Mar 102013
 

Richard K (not pictured left) maintains a fun and informative blog at eyecrazy.blogspot.ca that at times influences reason to rear its rarely-seen head and make things a little more right for Canada.  A recent case in point: Mr. K’s blog, Communist-promoting Toronto District School Board leaders have a learning disorder, exposing the Communist and Black Panther sympathies of the Toronto District School Board, and the sequel Toronto District School Board is shamed into removing Black Panther and El Salvadoran Communist party lessons, detailing the TDSB’s hasty retreat from their ultra-left curriculum once exposed to the light of day (and shocked parents).  Kudos, Richard K!

You finance the destruction of your privacy – and bureaucrats think you don’t care!

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Apr 172011
 

British Columbia is in the forefront of a massive expansion of government accumulation of private information about citizens. The BC plan is beguilingly called, ‘Citizens @ the Centre: BC Government 2.0’

But what’s really at the centre is all your private and confidential information. And at the periphery will be tens of thousands of portals, giving bureaucrats access to your secrets.

Ms. Michael Vonn, Policy Director for the BC Civil Liberties Association, spent an hour on RoadKill Radio Tuesday night revealing hidden dangers in the system that the provincial government doesn’t want to talk about.

“It’s good to have enough time to unpack these things,” she said. Congratulations on your format.”

She stated that the Ministry of Children and Families and the Health Ministry—two bureaucracies with which RoadKill Radio has battled for two seasons—are at the forefront of the invasion of British Columbians’ privacy.

Terry O’Neill, recalling the Wikileaks scandal, asked “How easy [would it be] for one person to get access to hundreds of thousands of e-mails and then leak them?”

Micheal Vonn rephrased the question: “Could a rogue employee do something nefarious? They could. Those people do exist, and they can and will do such things.”

She gave a Canadian example: Last September, Sean Bruyea, an outspoken critic of the Veterans’ Affairs department, learned that his confidential medical information, held in the electronic system of Veterans’ Affairs, had been accessed—more than 600 times! His psychiatric records, pertaining to post-traumatic stress disorder, had found their way into ministers’ briefs all the way up to the Prime Minister’s Office.

“If we think that was a rogue situation,” she said, “the Ombudsperson who investigated… found out that his medical information in the VA system had been accessed over 400 times… people were constantly looking into these records—and apparently more than one person—to find something prejudicial, or to screen people on inappropriate criteria, or to do several other nefarious things.

“So when we speak of ‘a rogue individual’, there can also very quickly grow up a rogue culture.”

“Finally, there’s a category that may constitute the largest repository of screw-ups, and that’s ‘inadvertent’—somebody could walk out of there with an entire data base on a memory stick and leave it in their freaking car. If it’s unencrypted, and the car is unlocked, we’ve lost hundreds of thousands of confidential records!”

“We’re at a critical juncture,” Vonn said, “a place where we’re completely turned upside down… the government is going after private sector information… and it’s going to transform that information into government information, so it can do with it what it will… Right now, the government contracts with a whole bunch of community-based service providers, to provide the kind of community-based services that the government just really shouldn’t be in the business of; because the providers are closest to the demographic they serve… there’s a legacy of trust and various other things.

“The kind of community-based systems are social services, transition houses, addiction services… in which a therapeutic or confidential relationship is critical.” That relationship requires protection of privacy.

But Vonn said the government is now proposing to say to those service providers, “If we give you any money… we own your data.”

“This is horrifying,” says Vonn. She gave an example from the BCCLA’s current work:
“One of the cases we’ve been pushing forward, because alarms have gone off, is the BC Transition House Society; if that data coming out of the transition houses goes into the integrated case management system that the government is building… that information about women and children fleeing violence is going to be available throughout the province at tens of thousands of portals that can never be secured against those women’s and children’s abusers. And we’ll actually endanger their lives.”

Micheal Vonn described the provincial government and corporate submissions to a special committee to review the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act: they say, “Privacy is so yesterday, and it doesn’t allow us to do what we want to do. We’re going to update our approach”—specifically by gutting the Act. “And they’ve announced their intentions quite boldly,” she said.

Vonn told RoadKill Radio the model BC is using for Government 2.0 is the United Kingdom. She said, “I can tell you of the deep irony of wanting to be identified with the world’s most prominent surveillance society. The UK has gone down that road in a dire fashion. One of the things, apart from a million closed-circuit TV cameras, is that they are the world’s model of a data-base nation. And they’ve spent billions, billions, billions of pounds annually just maintaining the data system. One of the questions we have to ask is: ‘What are the costs?’”

Kari Simpson has called for citizen action to stop the bureaucratic invasion if privacy: “I know there’s a perception of apathy, but I don’t think it’s apathy. I think it’s ‘What do we do?’ Is there something we can do to put the brakes on? What needs to be done here?”

Vonn said, “We have some good opportunities; although the architecture has been spelled out, most of the system hasn’t been built yet… it’s going forward under so little transparency… and I’ve actually heard government officials: ‘People don’t care,’ they tell me. ‘Two percent of people care; so we’re going to roll this out.’

“To actually register on the government’s sounding board, we need ordinary people to say that they care. And I’m starting to see it, and it’s so exciting for me; because I feel I’ve been out in the wilderness, as a privacy advocate, for so long!

“I’ve actually given some talks recently, where just ordinary people are telling me stories—stories I haven’t heard before; here’s one:
“Talking about BC Education Information System, I was told, ‘My son’s in grade school, and my husband’s been looking at his report cards, and he says, “You know, he’s been pigeon-holed; they’re not looking at him properly.” Could that be the data system? Have they got a check-mark on his data somewhere, and they’re viewing him through that lens?’ And I said, ‘It’s entirely possible.’

“When people start feeling the prejudice, not only for themselves, but for their children—who may be characterized as ‘at risk’ for something, some kind of attention deficit disorder or something— some neural disorder that requires some kind of intervention—on the basis of no expertise whatever, and now it’s reified in the data base… I think people are starting to become alive to the issue.”

Vonn will be speaking in Toronto next month about cyber-surveillance.

Click here to listen to the whole hour interview on RoadKill Radio
Click here for the Citizens@the Center: Government 2.0 document

Terry O’Neill’s Evil Commentary

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Mar 182011
 

Does anyone other than a dwindling minority of Procrustean traditionalists recognize evil anymore—personal evil, that is? Oh, sure, there’s plenty of the geopolitical variety to go around these days, especially in North Africa. And there’s more than enough being identified on the national stage by perpetually outraged critics within this country too, most notably by those on the political left, who eagerly attach the E word to everything from corporate profits and free trade to the oil sands and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s piano playing.

But we rarely hear about individual Canadians doing “bad” things, exhibiting sinister behavior, acting wickedly, or carrying on immorally, let alone sinning.

Instead, there’s always some sort of exculpating explanation for bad behaviour. Shoplifters suffer from kleptomania; corrupt officials have succumbed to stress or have manifested a previously undiagnosed psychiatric disorder; prostitutes are victims of the patriarchy, poverty or both; juvenile delinquents are the recipients of inadequate parenting; inner-city gangsters are victims of racial discrimination; and thieves are impoverished or addicted, and, if the latter, are surely not responsible for the burden of the illness under which they are labouring. You get the picture.

Look at the website promoting the recent Pink Shirt Day/anti-bullying campaign—a cause that should easily give rise to descriptions of bullies acting wickedly, etc.—and you’ll see therapeutic twaddle aplenty along with much vigorous exhortation to get to the root of the problem, etc., but nothing about the plain and simple fact bullies are acting immorally.

Which brings me to Exhibit A, otherwise known as the spark that gave life to this particular column. You might have heard of a horrible hit-and-run accident in Coquitlam, B.C., two weeks ago which left two young women dead. In covering the aftermath of the crash, which included the laying of several charges against a suspect, including two counts of impaired driving causing death, a local newspaper turned to a clinical psychologist from Simon Fraser University for some “insight” into “what might lead someone to flee the scene” of a serious accident without giving help.

Dr. Joti Samra is quoted thusly: “Assuming that it’s a true accident, the reality is… even from the perspective of the person that caused the accident, it can be quite traumatic and cause an acute stress reaction.” Got that? Acute stress reaction.

The good doctor goes on to explain that the brain could be flooded with information and emotion that would cause a person to act unusually. “The fight or flight response is something we’re exposed to when we are faced with extreme traumatic events,” Dr. Samra concludes. “Our body kind of goes into a shock, it doesn’t know what to do.”

Notice the focus on the culprit’s body and not his mind? I suppose it’s true that this human-as-hormonal-machine answer is what you’d expect from a clinical psychologist, whose business, of course, is to produce exactly this sort of pseudo-scientific analysis. But there’s no excuse for the news media to limit their probing into human behaviour to “experts” such as Dr. Samra. Why not someone with some grasp of the profundity of human existence, someone like a novelist, a moral philosopher or a religious leader– someone who recognizes we’re more than just pre-programmed biological machines?

To my mind, it would be a welcome relief—and far more enlightening—to hear some real insights into moral character, the dark origins of personal cowardice, or the nature of evil in circumstances such as these. And so, for example, when asked why a driver might flee the scene of an accident in which he had struck two innocent people, a priest might comment that such a person had become alienated from God, had too easily succumbed to temptation, and had become a sinner in need of redemption.

This would be really useful information as far as I’m concerned, and might also help many readers reflect more deeply on their responsibility—indeed, their duty—to act in a moral fashion.

But, of course, in this secular, humanistic era of ours, we see very little serious discussion about evil in the public square. Perversely, one is more likely to find scintillatingly descriptive words, purring about the concept of evil, in advertisements attempting to induce a consumer to indulge in some sort of deliciously sinful wickedness for an affordable price. Moral inversion to sell chocolate pudding.

A recent full-page newspaper advertisement for Volvo is a perfect example of this lamentable trend. Emblazoned above an image of a shiny red S60 model, the ad copy informs us, “There’s more to life than a Volvo. Like raising a little hell with 300 horses, spanking corners with your all-new sport-tuned chassis. And feeling a little dangerous in a car tricked out with safety technology. That’s why you drive the all-new naughty Volvo S60.” (Emphasis added.)

A 16th-Century proverb holds, “Evil doers are evil dreaders.” Today, however, evil doers are either the next patient for the couch or a target market.