Tuesday:

Canadian MP: if you oppose warrantless snooping, you “stand with child pornographers”

Vic Toews, the Canadian Tory MP pushing for the new spying bill says that people who oppose him are “standing with child pornographers.” Mr Toews’s bill will require ISPs to record all your online activity and give police access to those logs without a warrant. Ontario police recently busted a huge child-porn ring without needing any further spying power. In fact, no one can find any police investigation that has failed for lack of snooping powers. A leaked memo from the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police shows that Canada’s law enforcement has been scouring its records for evidence supporting the need for this bill, without luck.

Friday:

Canadian tweeps bare all for spying MP

Canadian MP Vic Toews is pushing bill C-30, a domestic spying bill that requires ISPs to log your online activity and give it to police without a warrant. He says that if you don’t support this, you “stand with child pornographers.” Canadians are giving MP Toews what he wants: on Twitter, Canadians are flooding his account with the hashtag TellVicEverything, spilling the intimate secrets of their lives: “Had impure thought,” Jeremy Klaszus.

…then they laugh at you, and then you lose?

Appeals to emotion – and indirectly to the force of the mob – must to appeal to a shared narrative in order to work; it doesn’t sound like that is happening any more in Canada.