Psiphon Ready to Leave Canada Over Lawful-Access Bill

Toronto-based Psiphon, which builds software for evading internet censorship, plans to leave Canada if the federal lawful-access bill is passed in its current form. The move was reported by The Globe and Mail, citing the company and the Citizen Lab.

What the bill demands

Bill C-22 would require electronic service providers to make secret changes to their systems so that police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) can conduct surveillance and monitoring. In practice, it means embedding tracking mechanisms into products without users ever knowing.

Why that is a problem for Psiphon

Psiphon grew out of a Citizen Lab project launched in 2006 and soon became a private company. Today its software is used by some 20 million people a month worldwide — above all in countries where the internet faces heavy censorship, such as Iran, Myanmar, Russia, and China.

The whole point of the service is to protect privacy and help users get around blocks. A requirement to quietly weaken those protective features runs directly against that purpose. So, despite its Toronto roots, the company is prepared to relocate its operations outside Canada: staying home would mean undermining the very safety guarantees that make its software worth using.

The Citizen Lab's view

Citizen Lab director and founder Ron Deibert argues that C-22 "will make it impossible for a large number of invaluable privacy-preserving tools and applications from operating in Canada."

The Citizen Lab has already dissected the bill in a separate analysis, flagging its sweeping scope, constitutional and human-rights risks, deficits in transparency and accountability, and the dangers it poses to encryption and to the country's cybersecurity as a whole. The researchers recommend withdrawing several provisions entirely and amending the rest to limit the harm.

Psiphon's case lays bare a paradox: a tool built to help people slip past the surveillance of authoritarian states may be pushed out of a democracy that intends to wire surveillance into the very fabric of its communications.

Source: Hacker News