9 ms·

Regarding warrantless searches and access ... reading the text of the bill (OP link) warrants seem to be required. Simple, right? Well, no, this is a recently

• post-it 7mo ago
  I don't really see an issue with this section. A judge still needs to issue a warrant, they can also additionally waive the requirement that the cop gives you a copy right away, in special circumstances. Like are you envisioning a "I totally have a warrant but I don't have to give it to you" type situation? I think it's fairly unlikely, and you would likely be able to get the search ruled inadmissible if a cop tried it.
  • 0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
    Are you familiar with parallel construction? That's what this is for. If they have a warrant and show it to you, it says what they can search and why. If they don't tell you what they're searching for and why, they can look for anything, and then construct a separate scenario which just happens to expose the thing they knew would be there from the first fishing expedition. They then use this (usually circumstantial) evidence to accuse you of a crime, and they can win, even if you didn't commit a crime, but it looks like you did. And now they can do it with digital information, automatically, behind the scenes, without your knowledge. (or they can take your laptop and phone and do it then)
    • SecretDreams 7mo ago
      But the warrant still has to originally exist with, presumably, a timestamp that shows it existed prior to the search. And modification of the timestamp or lack of such a feature would be a good way to get the evidence thrown out?
      • freeone3000 7mo ago
        That’s not how evidence works in Canada. Illegally obtained evidence is still evidence - you simply also have a tort against the officer for breaching your rights.
        • dataflow 7mo ago
          It would be inadmissible if the court deems it to impact the fairness of the trial, no? https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/check/art242.html https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/chec...
          • sunir 7mo ago
            Maybe. Courts aren’t magic machines that do the right thing.
          • godelski 7mo ago
            You used a conditional so I assume you also know how such a system can fail. It's not hard to figure out how that can be exploited, right? You can't rely on that conditional being executed perfectly every time, even without adversarial actors. But why ignore adversarial actors?
            • ImJamal 7mo ago
              This is such a weird attitude. We can't rely on anything being perfectly executed every time, so why have warrants at all?
          • freeone3000 7mo ago
            Yes, in some cases, but this is not automatic, nor even close. The more serious the trial (ex, murder, child pornography), the more likely it serves the court’s interest to use the illegally obtained evidence. See https://doi.org/10.60082/2817-5069.3711 https://doi.org/10.60082/2817-5069.3711 for a longitudinal study. Illegally obtained evidence is routinely used.
          • 7mo ago
    • 8note 7mo ago
      i know this is an american thing, but does it actually happen in Caanda?
      • kwar13 7mo ago
        one of those 'does it happen' vs. 'can it happen'. the latter is all that matters.
        • deleted 7mo ago
          [deleted]
      • raydev 7mo ago
        Respectfully, whether it "actually happens" is irrelevant. We want to prevent it from happening.
    • mnw21cam 7mo ago
      I don't see the problem with this. It's inadvisable to try to stop the police from doing whatever they want to do if they assert that they have the right to do it. You then get the lawyers involved and sort it out afterwards. Comparing the timestamp on the warrant to the time of the police action should hopefully determine whether parallel construction is taking place.
      • basilgohar 7mo ago
        Nothing good is going to be solved by expanding law enforcement's power, reach, or lightening any existing restrictions. We are not suffering from crimes due to lack of law enforcement's legal scope. It's quite the opposite.
      • 0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
        > It's inadvisable to try to stop the police from doing whatever they want to do if they assert that they have the right to do it. The police regularly lie to and manipulate people about their rights in order to coerce them into consent. If you believe the officer is in the wrong, push back. > You then get the lawyers involved and sort it out afterwards. Comparing the timestamp on the warrant to the time of the police action should hopefully determine whether parallel construction is taking place. Parallel construction means they are using the opportunity to go on a fishing expedition. Dealing with it later is too late, they've already gone fishing. This is a much bigger issue regarding the metadata of a wireless carrier. They're not issuing the warrant to you, they're issuing it to the carrier, who has a duty to reject overly broad searches. If they don't even get to see the warrant, they can't reject the search based on the merits. So now the police get to collect everyone's metadata. Who cares if we look at the warrant after? They've already got the data. Even if they "delete it" after, they already got to go fishing.
      • skeeter2020 7mo ago
        Your parallel construction is still too linear; this isn't git history. If they get a warrant AND tell you about it, the warrant dictates what they can look at, what you have to share, etc. Now they can look at anything because you have no idea what is off limits. If they find something unrelated they don't have to act on it immediately; they can then look for motivating reasons to get a warrant targeting an area they know will turn out. They go fishing, but for next time.
  • b00ty4breakfast 7mo ago
    why even allow for the possibility of misuse? what is the utility of this little addendum?
  • mpalmer 7mo ago
    If the statute doesn't lay out exactly where exceptions can be made, it can be abused. And everyone should be skeptical enough of government power that they mentally switch out "can" with "will".
  • 1123581321 7mo ago
    It’s a huge problem. The warrant is the document the absence of which lets the public know something wrong is being done to them. A warrant is not just a term for judicial approval. The public must have the ability to easily verify police conduct is appropriate, and it must match the cadence of the police work.
    • dataflow 7mo ago
      > The warrant is the document the absence of which lets the public know Er, the warrant is still there to be examined later, no? It's just not necessarily shown to the subject at the time of investigation.
      • lazide 7mo ago
        How can you be sure, when no one ever knows it is there to examine it?
        • Joker_vD 7mo ago
          It's not like a warrant can be issued ipso fact and backdated, right? That'd be gross misconduct of justice and surely, no judge would stoop so low. /s Seriously though. If you trust the law enforcement that much, why even require a warrant from a judge at all. May as well go to the Soviet model of search warrants being issued by the district attorney.
          • lazide 7mo ago
            At least the district attorney had to fill out some paperwork?
      • 1123581321 7mo ago
        Hence my second paragraph. “Don’t worry, we have a warrant” leaves the public vulnerable to misconduct, actions that potentially cannot be reversed or sufficiently compensated.
  • layla5alive 7mo ago
    Why... would you think this is unlikely? Have... you seen videos of ICE agents claiming to have warrants when they don't?
  • _heimdall 7mo ago
    Unless I'm mistaken, it doesn't define what such special situations are. It leaves the determination of providing the warrant to the suspect entirely to a judgement call of the court. There may well be reasonable scenarios a majority of people would agree that providing a warrant isn't feasible, but that needs to be codified in law in more detail than whenever the judge deems it so.
• ActorNightly 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  • hrimfaxi 7mo ago
    > The truth is, most of the time when people complain about surveillance state or privacy, its because they just want to spout of a bunch of baseless propaganda like race realism or anti vax. Normal people aren't affected by this - nobody cares enough about politics, and most people aren't intelligent enough to form a dangerous opinion. Where did you get that idea? edit: it seems the comment I replied to was edited
    • ActorNightly 7mo ago
      Because that has literally been the history of the past 10 years. When people criticized the left, nobody was arrested, nobody got put in jail. During Obamas term, despite the fact that the Patriot act was renewed, nobody ever went to Its only when right wing people started getting deplatformed for anti vax or race realism rhetoric is when this whole idea started that "liberal governments are actually evil and want to control every citizen and suppress free speech", which all contributed to Trumps victories, and consequently Republicans proved that they were the ones anti free speech in the first place.
      • lovich 7mo ago
        Yea, I like how quickly they moved to jailing people over stuff as trivial as jokes once they got in power.[1] [1]https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/17/politics/retired-cop-jailed-over-charlie-kirk-meme https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/17/politics/retired-cop-jailed-o...
  • diacritical 7mo ago
    > The truth is, most of the time when people complain about surveillance state or privacy, its because they just want to spout of a bunch of baseless propaganda like race realism or anti vax. Normal people aren't affected by this - nobody cares enough about politics, and most people aren't intelligent enough to form a dangerous opinion. That's not the truth. Everyone's affected and the risk will only continue to rise if we let such bills pass. One day it will be too late to do anything, as mass surveillance will be so entrenched as to not be able to form any kind of opposition or to do any kind of serious journalism without getting squished in the beginning before you even get started.
• bluegatty 7mo ago
  It's not bad. Judges are not crazy and they'll require a reason for this. It could mean 'fraying at the edges' of the law but this is not bad at all. You can tell where things will land with this generally it's not bad. If it were Texas or the South where the justice dept. leans a different way it could be a problem. Canada is a bit like Europe where they have statist mentality, kind of hints of lawful, bureaucratic authoritarianism - not arbitrary or political or regime driven, but kind of an inherent orientation towards 'rules' etc. where the system can tilt wayward, but that's completely different than regime, or 'deep institutional' issues and state actors that do wild things.
  • JohnnyLarue 7mo ago
    [dead]
  • R_D_Olivaw 7mo ago
    While this might be true and we'll and good (for now) isn't it still a worry and a threat that the law is written as such? That is to say, though the "vibe" may be as you say, the law now permits, if not now, at some future instance people with different perspectives or vibes can use the law as written, to other ends. In short, yeah it may not be Texas now, but a "Texas-like" vibe could germinate and use the laws in the books later.
    • bluegatty 7mo ago
      "though the "vibe" may be as you say, " it's not a vibe so much as a real characteriztion of the law in the context of the system in which it operates. There is no such thing as a set of 'hard fast rules' like 'software' which governs us. It's always going to depend on the quality, characteristic and legitimacy of institutions, among other things. 'The Slippery Slope' can be applied in almost anything and I don't think that it is a reasonable rhetorical posture without more context. 'Written Laws' is not going to really stop anywhere from 'becoming like Texas'
  • markdown 7mo ago
    > Canada is a bit like Europe where they have statist mentality If the last decade and a half has taught us anything, it's that you can't rely on the state and arms of the state to remain consistent permanently. In the absence of a free media, as in the US where it's controlled by a handful of billionaires, the people can be manipulated to vote in a government that will run roughshod over precedent and norms.
• godelski 7mo ago
  I'm not Canadian, but it seems similarly written to how laws in the US have been exploited to be used to spy on Americans. And despite not being Canadian, as an American I have a horse in this race, as the OP notes... | many of these rules appear geared toward global information sharing I see a lot of people arguing that these bounds are reasonable so I want to make an argument from a different perspective: Investigative work *should* be difficult. There is a strong imbalance of power between the government and the people. My little understanding of Canadian Law suggests that Canada, like the US, was influenced by Blackstone[0]. You may have heard his ratio (or the many variations of it) | It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. What Blackstone was arguing was about the legal variant of "failure modes" in engineering. Or you can view it as the impact of Type I (False Positive) and Type II (False Negative) errors. Most of us here are programmers so this should be natural thinking: when your program fails how do you want it to fail? Or think of it like with a locked door. Do you want the lock to fail open or closed? In a bank you probably want your safe to fail closed: the safe requires breaking into to access again. But in a public building you probably want it to fail open (so people can escape from a fire or some other emergency that is likely the reason for failure). This frame of thinking is critical with laws too! When the law fails how do you want it to fail? So you need to think about that when evaluating this (or any other) law. When it is abused, how does it fail? Are you okay with that failure mode? How easy is it to be abused? Even if you believe your current government is unlikely to abuse it do you believe a future government might? (If you don't believe a future government might... look south...) A lot of us strongly push against these types of measures not because we have anything to hide nor because we are on the side of the criminals. We generally have this philosophy because it is needed to keep a government in check. It doesn't matter if everyone involved has good intentions. We're programmers, this should be natural too! It doesn't matter if we have good intentions when designing a login page, you still have to think adversarially and about failure modes because good intentions are not enough to defend against those who wish to exploit it. Even if the number of exploiters is small the damage is usually large, right? This framework of thinking is just as beneficial when thinking about laws as it is in the design of your programs. You can be in favor of the intent (spirit of the law), but you do have to question if the letter of the law is sufficient. I wanted to explain this because I think it'll help facilitate these types of discussions. I think they often break down because people are interpreting from very different mental frameworks. Disagree with me if you want, but I hope making the mental framework explicit can at least improve your arguments :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
• sunir 7mo ago
  Consider: you don’t give a warrant to a wiretap subject. That itself is not that big a loophole. And therefore is unlikely to provoke change.
  • b112 7mo ago
    I don't even understand the concern here. Perhaps the parent thought this meant "a warrant is not required", which is absolutely untrue. Instead, the judge still creates the warrant, and any trial/arrest/action must have a warrant. (Finding out what ISP a user belongs to, isn't really that private. If you look at the US comparatively, Homeland has a list of every single credit card transaction ever. The US doesn't need to ask an ISP if someone is a customer. What this does is simply confirm, and then the judge can create a warrant specific for that ISP.) Such as compelling the ISP, or what not, to take action. The ISP is not the subject here. And obviously hiding the warrant from the ISP makes zero sense, as they're going to know who the person is anyhow. This is stuff that goes back to phone taps. Nothing new here.
    • naasking 7mo ago
      Does a warrant ever expire? How long can they monitor you once the warrant is issued? Do they ever have to notify you or anyone else that you were being monitored and they found no criminal conduct? Don't you see the potential for abuse here?
      • b112 7mo ago
        All of these questions, and more, are answered by examining what happens with phone taps. Phone taps, which historically were treated precisely the same, and further, there was only ever one phone company in a region back then. All legislative change is interpreted by courts. So to answer your questions: # look to see how the legislation is written for phone taps # know that this new legislation is changing things, the code is being modified # now look at judicial decisions, and you will have your answer Seeing as you have no idea how other warrants work, when they expire, you're really just looking for the worst case scenario, without even attempting to see what would happen, and has happened for 100+ years. Yes?
• refurb 7mo ago
  How would a wiretap work if you sent the person notice you're listening to their phone? Clearly some criminal investigations require not notifying the suspect.
  • lysium 7mo ago
    Clearly, list the specific cases instead of letting the judge feel what is appropriate is the way to go. Also helps the judge doing the right thing.
  • kaliqt 7mo ago
    Even so, the exceptions don't nullify the rule: find a better way to investigate, citizen rights > all else. Countries AND the government exist for and at the pleasure of their respective citizens.
• everdev 7mo ago
  This makes police indistinguishable from thugs.
• verisimi 7mo ago
  I think warrantless access, deanonymising the internet, etc, are things that go together. If you want auto-governance (technocracy), to micro-manage every citizen, these are the foundations you need. As it is already determined that this is what will be happening, no amount of discussion will make a material change - the legislation is going in whether people want it or not. The individual justifications for each legal step in the construction are either going to be done with low visibility, or a trope like ('for the children/terrorists') will be wheeled out. Works every time, so why change?
  • b112 7mo ago
    There is no warrantless access to data here though. None. It's merely showing the warrant to the person being 'searched'. As mentioned elsewhere, the same has been true for decades with someone's phone being tapped. The ISP can see the warrant. The judge creates a warrant. The court sees the warrant.
• ALLTaken 7mo ago
  Is Canada (greatly) defunct? Many canucks around the world that I met seem to be of this opinion, but I've never been there and only know Canadians as hard workers.
  • iinnPP 7mo ago
    I imagine you met the people who got tired of all the slobs. Look at the recent report on CRA service inquiries and their accuracy. An amazing 17%. It's not hard work that got us there. edit: Just one of many examples. People rarely even hold doors anymore, we're a far way from our prime.
    • Sharlin 7mo ago
      Next you're going to tell me that Canadians have stopped bothering to apologize!
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • _hugerobots_ 7mo ago
    Meeting expats from any nation will hold a bias untoward the place they're from, so you're asking a poisoned well how thirsty it is.
    • ALLTaken 7mo ago
      Oh I really didn't think about this, that makes a lot of sense to be honest. But a good portion of them were also just tourists from Canada.
• canadian000 7mo ago
  Canada does not have a concept of civil liberties in the way USA (supposedly) does. There is no illusion that the government has complete control to monitor, track, and even arrest anyone they want. They do this all the time, even physically tracking and boxing in protesters to beat them.
  • SpaceNugget 7mo ago
    This is obviously a bot comment. Is there really no room for automoderation of new accounts on HN?
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    • therealpygon 7mo ago
      Bot? It sounds to me more like the words you’d hear from an astroturfing American who doesn’t understand anything about Canadian laws. I say that as an American familiar with only some Canadian law, but enough to at least be aware of Rights and Freedoms.
      • canadian000 7mo ago
        Bruh I've lived in Toronto for 30 years. Ask me more about Horseshoe Tavern and Danforth Hall.
        • FpUser 7mo ago
          I'm in Toronto since 92. And yes. Having Not Withstanding clause makes our Bill Of Rights a mockery. We have some rights until Feds / Provincial government decides that they do not like it. Basically it creates some friction / inconvenience for the government when they want to fuck with people but if they're in a mood than they will do it regardless. Judging by what is happening in the US lately maybe having "real" rights / constitution does not really guarantee protection either.
• therealpygon 7mo ago
  Are you suggesting that when investigating members of a criminal organization, they should be notified? It seems pretty reasonable for there to be cases where making a target aware of investigation would be detrimental to proving the illegal activity they are currently engaged in but would likely discontinue if literally told “we are monitoring you specifically now”.
  • armchairhacker 7mo ago
    Yes, but the warrant should be revealed eventually. Worst case, if you can't prove or disprove someone committed a crime after X time, you should alert them to discourage future crime (they may have already done more crimes during X time; besides public interest, it also forces you to cut your losses when the alternative would be to dig a deeper hole). Do these warrants have a fixed maximum duration of secrecy?
    • reactordev 7mo ago
      “warrant should be revealed eventually. Worst case, if you can't prove or disprove someone committed a crime after X time” This is the normal thinking, normal brained, route. It’s what we should all strive towards. Anyone who doesn’t agree needs therapy. There should be a window of discovery. 30 days, 90 maybe. But if you don’t have enough to justify notification of investigation, that’s it. No more resources spent. This is how normal precincts work. If they suspect, enough times, to build a large enough case file, to connect the dots and prove you are guilty, they issue a warrant. Normal, brained, behavior.
      • deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
  • lionkor 7mo ago
    This isn't about criminal organizations. One person somewhere can decide to target you, monitor you for 30 years with all the government's resources, and never need to tell you or anyone about it. I don't like that personally.
• red_admiral 7mo ago
  > warrants seem to be required Applies in the text you quoted, unlike true warrantless surveillance NSA-style? You still have to get the warrant past a judge, and convince the judge of the higher bar for keeping the warrant secret. I presume the distinction here could be between a search warrant, which you have to show the subject before entering their house, and a surveillance/wiretap warrant which you for obvious reason's don't. (Meanwhile, FIVE EYES carries on as usual.)
• j45 7mo ago
  Would the legislation become worse if any "redeeming" quotes were simply removed in the future? The thing about laws is they can be made, and changed.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 7mo ago
  Without reading the bill, this sentennce seems to refer to the requirement to _give the person a copy of the warrant_, not the requirement for the government to obtain a warrant from a judge or justice