Security trumps trade at the U.S. border

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Wednesday, September 7, 2011 - 1 Comment

Deeper economic integration has been stalled by a risk-averse U.S. government

Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, then-foreign minister John Manley was relaxing on an Air Canada flight from Germany when a pair of flight attendants asked him to come up to the cockpit. The pilots wanted to know what to tell the passengers about the extraordinary events on the ground. They gave Manley headphones for listening to radio updates. Airports in Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa were closing. “It was chaos,” he recalled. “No one knew if it was four planes or a dozen.”

Canada’s then-ambassador to the United States, David Kergin, had just arrived at his office near the Capitol to see black smoke rising from the Pentagon building across the Potomac River. “We very quickly concluded maybe we were best to stay in the embassy because it was secure,” he recalls. As rumours abounded of bombs in the U.S. capital, the ambassador had a call from prime minister Jean Chrétien. “You know, the world will never be the same again,” Chrétien told him. It wasn’t—and neither was Canada’s relationship with the U.S.

Ottawa’s relations with Washington had generally focused on trade disputes such as softwood lumber and agriculture. Since then, the focus of time, energy, and spending has been the border. No longer is the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office the most important for Ottawa. Now the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), created in the aftermath of the attacks, eclipses all else. The job of DHS is not to ensure trade and prosperity, but help to prevent another attack. And Canadians have felt the difference.

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Oops! You're not a child pornographer after all.

By Jesse Brown - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 12:59 PM - 12 Comments

Homeland Security done goofed.

Beware of moral absolutes. For example: there’s not much room for debate in the war on child porn; we all agree that the stuff is atrocious and must be snuffed out. So we hand over extraordinary powers to those who would fight it. But righteousness and competence are two different things.

Case in point:

Last week the U.S. Department of Homeland Security proudly announced that they had “seized” thousands of child porn websites. Visitors to the sites now found stern government message screens reading “SEIZED” and warning that “Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution” (link).

It was later revealed that the DHS had goofed—84,000 of these sites were seized by accident, and had nothing whatsoever to do with child porn. Given the special place in hell we reserve for child pornographers, one wonders what the innocent owners of those websites thought about being publicly associated with kiddie porn on their own homepages.

It’s not the first blunder (or questionable outcome) in the global crusade against child porn. Here are a few others:
- Parents charged with child porn for taking bathtub pics of their own kids. Walmart turned them in when they went to have the shots developed, and their kids were taken from them by Child Protective Services. The parents have since sued (link).
- Minors charged with child porn for texting nude pictures of themselves. It’s happened a bunch of times. (link) (link) (link).
- Australia’s national Internet filter was sold to citizens as a safeguard against child porn. But the “blacklist” of censored sites got leaked, and was shown to include many errors, including a dog kennel and a dentist. Also on the list were political enemies of the government, and Wikileaks. Not to mention the problem that a leaked index of child porn sites is a handy resource for none other than child pornographers. (link)
While many innocents can have their lives and reputations ruined by over-zealous law enforcement, actual for-profit child pornographers have had plenty of success evading authorities and Internet filters. The FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin reports that savvy criminals use a combination of proxy servers, encryption, and foreign computer servers to place themselves out of the reach of the law. Facing a tangle of technological and bureaucratic hurdles (extradition, etc.) police often skip the big bad guys and focus on low-hanging fruit (link).
Canada’s biggest problem? America

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 130 Comments

From protectionist policy to border security to environmental laws, our best friend is making our lives miserable

It has been almost two years since Stephen Harper disclosed that his cabinet was having serious discussions about what to do to “restore the special Canadian and American relationship” that he said had become “lost” in the Bush years. “What has happened is that Canada lost that special relationship with the United States. We increasingly became viewed as just another foreign country, albeit an ally, a good friend, but nevertheless a foreign country. You know, the northern equivalent of Mexico in terms of the border,” the Prime Minister told Maclean’s in an interview back in December 2007. “That isn’t just a shift in the view of the administration, that’s somewhat a shift in American public opinion as well, which concerns me.”

At the time, Harper was preoccupied with a new passport requirement that threatened tourism and trade, adding a new scale to the ongoing red-tape “thickening” of the world’s longest undefended border. “I’m certain this trend will not be reversed in the lifetime of the current American administration,” Harper said at the time. “I’m more optimistic it will be deferred later by a new administration.” But, he added, “I’m far from sure.” Continue…
Why the U.S. doesn't trust Canada

By Paul Rosenzweig - Monday, October 5, 2009 at 2:15 PM - 71 Comments

Ottawa hasn’t been serious about security, says one former Homeland Security official

On June 1, for the ﬁrst time in history, Canadians and Americans crossing the border were required to show a passport (or equivalent) document. By all accounts the transition has, despite Canadian fears, proceeded with remarkably modest disruption. Canadians, however, continue to question the requirement and to object to other U.S. border security measures. As I worked (on behalf of the United States) over the past four years to prepare for these changes, most Canadians expressed a quiet dismay: “How,” they wondered, “could you be doing this to us when we are such good friends?”

After all, it has been a major sea change in the American approach to the land border with Canada. For more than 100 years, though Canadians have thought frequently and almost obsessively about the United States, most Americans have paid relatively little attention to Canada. Except for those who live close to the border (let’s all say it together: “the longest undefended border in the world”) or whose business is linked to Canadian products, most Americans don’t hold any strong opinion about Canada. You’re just like us, we think, only a little different and a little less temperate. We’re the lucky ones, because we have Florida (though each winter the residents of Ontario invade). Continue…
Janet Napolitano, secretly Canadian

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at 11:37 PM - 17 Comments

Mark Holland, April 23. Mr. Speaker, while the minister is in denial, the homeland secretary is making quotes like this, “To the extent that terrorists have come into our country…it’s been across the Canadian border.” Does the public safety minister think this statement is acceptable, that we should just leave it out there, that terrorists come from Canada? Does he realize that such myths cost Canadian jobs and that in a tough economy we cannot afford to have him sitting on the sidelines with his fingers in his ears? He should stand up, speak for Canada, protect Canadian jobs, and confront this appalling lack of knowledge.

Janet Napolitano, May 27. Let me say once again, we know and I know that 9/11 terrorists did not cross the Canadian border. I regret that the Canadian media only seems to hear an early misstatement by me to that effect. So let me be perfectly clear: we know that.

Canadian Press, tonight. In the Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey, conducted this summer in the United States and Canada, 29 per cent of Canadian respondents said they believed some of the hijackers accessed the U.S. through Canada eight years ago. Only 19 per cent of American respondents agreed.
Napolitano and who gets in

By John Geddes - Wednesday, April 22, 2009 at 11:11 AM - 9 Comments

It goes without saying that Canadians are frustrated by U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s bizarre remark, in that CBC interview, to the effect that the Sept. 11 attackers slipped into the States through Canada. (They didn’t, of course, but the myth persists, as myths have a way of doing.)

But beyond her alarmingly vague grasp of the how 9/11 really happened, I’m wondering about Napolitano’s less blatantly ludicrous comment, “The fact of the matter is that Canada allows people into its country that we do not allow into ours.”
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