Opposing Bill C22 (yet another security-backdoor bill) with Manly Firmness

Dear Ms. Royer,

I can't remember how many times the government of Canada has introduced bills in the last 2 decades asking for law-enforcement back-doors on secure communications. And I can't remember how many of them I missed the opportunity to speak up against them, as much as anything because every time we do this, it makes us look like idiots; if it were ever to pass it would make us all more vulnerable to bad actors; and really, can we just learn from others' mistakes and the words of experts and just drop this?

Earlier this evening I was watching "Vera" (the "Christmas Special" about a student group reunion on an island only accessible by car at low tide), and once again it struck me how Britain's surveillance state has used that show, Morse, Midsomer, all the detective shows to give good press to their pervasive system of CCTV cameras (which a certain band held up to ridicule on their low-budget music video -- paid for by editing and postage stamps on FOIA requests) -- which episodes always strike me as to how lazy CCTV systems made policing there. This highlights the first problem with legislated back doors in encryption: why do the hard work of human intel and gumshoe investigation if you can just unlock the communication. The automatic comparison to the PRC's Public Security Bureau (公安部) are striking to me -- the last work I did at *****, one of the things that drove me out, was realizing that enabling GRE of IPv6 traffic for routers destined for [Chinese companies] was to aid the surveillance state. Or it reminds me of Russia's Interior Ministry. Our law enforcement should be ashamed to come out in support of things that grant them those kinds of powers.

But it gets worse. If every secure channel is available through keys known only to the participants, the chances that a bad actor will get access to everyone's communication (as happened in 2024 with China's Salt Typhoon attack on American targets) is unthinkably impossible. Force access through a law enforcement key or key infrastructure, and the occurrence becomes practically a certainty -- especially over the long haul. You may be being sold on C22 making Canadians safer by helping law enforcement find the bad guys quicker but the bad guys will use illegal encryption anyway -- and our police will be foiled ---- AND bad actors have a FANTASTICALLY valuable target to hit for: get the right key and you can unlock all Canadians' so-called secure messaging -- and we'll all be walking around digitally naked in a hostile world. Your government should be ashamed to consider in any kind of a positive light any measure that has a finite (and significant) chance of leading to that outcome.

Finally, it's not as though this is new news that a back door is a bad idea. Everybody knew it already even before the Clipper chip was put out as a tentative standard for secure telephony. The security boffins knew it was a bad idea and fortunately mobilized the public to oppose it, so it didn't become a widespread, mandatory-because-everyone-uses-it like gmail or Microsoft Office, standard and it just died.

This bill must die, too, and someone needs to drive a stake through its heart so that it never comes back. Please. Oppose it (to borrow a phrase from our neighbours) "with manly firmness" (read that as "with adult firmness" -- their founding Fathers weren't paragons of gender neutrality). Oppose it in caucus. Oppose it in committee. Oppose it on the floor. And sneer confidently that you're siding with the smart and the good people to mock the proposal to scorn on any occasion when it arrives in the future.

I have been having a stressful week because of all the other things your government is doing that I see ending badly for the welfare of all my neighbours here in Canada, too many to enumerate now -- and then along with the suspension of bicycle travel to work because physics overcame physical structure too many times (not to my injury, thankfully! but to my impediment), this (C22) comes along: the bad idea of escrow or secondary key that will just never go away.

I am not a drug dealer but I treasure the freedom to be private.

I have no vile secrets, neither do I write love letters and last-will-and-testament instructions on postcards.

I want our police to catch all the miscreants, but I am UTTERLY and to my last breath opposed to surrendering one ounce of my privacy to make their job easier. They're already doing a pretty good job and they don't need this kind of a short cut -- or if they feel they do need it, it comes at too high a price in the welfare of myself and all my neighbours that we should even DEIGN to consider the request, let alone to grant it.

And so I will always say, Sincerely and with utmost respect -- despite the straits of tension and inner panic its repeated consideration is inducing.

Arthur N. Klassen