Bill S-210 made an appearance before a House of Commons committee. It was mixed with debate of the notwithstanding clause.
There was quite a moment at a House of Commons committee meeting recently. The hearing in question can be found here and it really showcased just how low political discourse in this country has sunk. It was sparked by MP Iqra Khalid when she put forward a very reasonable motion saying that the comments by Conservative Leader, Pierre Poilievre, suggesting that he would use the notwithstanding clause to carry out his agenda. It also said that we should protect the right to privacy as it related to Bill S-210.
So, there’s a lot going on here. So, just a quick recap on Bill S-210. This is Canada’s notorious age verification bill. As we noted in our analysis, it would require Canadians to submit personal information to third party websites just to access the free and open internet. This would include facial recognition scans, drivers licenses, and whatever else the heck MPs pushing this bill are wanting to subject Canadians to. In turn, that highly sensitive information gets placed in a massive database where the ability to protect that information is highly questionable – leaving open the very real possibility of hackers breaking in, stealing that information and blackmailing Canadians afterwards for profit. To add insult to injury, there are no penalties for failing to protect that personal information. The legislation simply asks “pretty please” protect that information. Beyond that, the legislation does nothing to protect the generation and distribution of that highly sensitive information.
The legislation has been blasted by numerous experts as well as civil rights organizations as a massive threat to the privacy rights of Canadians. This for reasons including the ones I mentioned above.
To add to this terrifying Orwellian push is comments made by Poilivre late last month. In comments he made openly to the press, he suggested that he would use the notwithstanding clause to carry out his agenda if it is found that his approach to lawmaking is found to be unconstitutional:
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says he would use “whatever tools the Constitution allows” to pass criminal laws if his party forms the next government.
Speaking to the Canadian Police Association on Monday, Poilievre promised to implement more stringent requirements for bail and make it harder for convicted murderers to transfer out of maximum security prisons.
“All of my proposals are constitutional,” Poilievre said.
“We will make them constitutional, using whatever tools the Constitution allows me to use to make them constitutional. I think you know exactly what I mean.”
The comments by the Conservative leader should send chills down the spines of every Canadian. What this implies is that the Conservative leader considers the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as merely a suggestion on how to govern rather than the law of the land. Every time the notwithstanding clause is invoked, it hugely controversial because it’s the governments veto over everything else. Here’s a quick rundown of what this is:
33. (1) Parliament or the legislature of a province may expressly declare in an Act of Parliament or of the legislature, as the case may be, that the Act or a provision thereof shall operate notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15 of this Charter.
(2) An Act or a provision of an Act in respect of which a declaration made under this section is in effect shall have such operation as it would have but for the provision of this Charter referred to in the declaration.
(3) A declaration made under subsection (1) shall cease to have effect five years after it comes into force or on such earlier date as may be specified in the declaration.
(4) Parliament or the legislature of a province may re-enact a declaration made under subsection (1).
(5) Subsection (3) applies in respect of a re-enactment made under subsection (4).
In short, the Government of Canada can, theoretically, override the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms if it so chooses. Fortunately, it is very rarely used, but Poilievre’s announcement suggests that if he were to ever take power, he would happily use it to carry out his right wing agenda.
Ultimately, at committee, those two debates got intertwined and it led to some of the most insane comments made by supporters of Bill S-210 at committee. After MP Khalid tabled her motion (which was pushed back by other MPs), it led to some of the most divorced from reality comments by MPs we’ve seen in a while.
Khalid rightfully pointed out that the bill gets web services to collect vast amounts of personal information and store that for the purpose of carrying out these age verification systems. These are the very websites that MPs pushing Bill S-210 have been demonizing for years now. She is right to suggest that this makes absolutely no sense and that we must do better to protect people’s personal information.
Conservative MPs, in response, used their time in responding to the motion by saying that protecting privacy rights is “outrageous”, “disgusting”, and “shocking”. They went on a massive defamation campaign against Pornhub, describing it as a “crime scene” and pushed the debunked conspiracy theory that sites like Pornhub are destroying young people’s mental health.
Those MPs then went further and said that anyone who is opposed to their legislation hasn’t read the bill (which is obviously a huge lie) and said, ironically, that the bill doesn’t create any sort of “Digital ID” system. As a result, it makes it clear that those Conservative MPs have never read the bill themselves because that’s exactly what the bill pushes for. The bill explicitly demands that people’s identification be confirmed, envisioning some sort of system, token or otherwise, to access the free and open internet. How the heck you go about that without some sort of “Digital ID” is a complete mystery.
Still, the Conservative MPs continue to go off into their own reality bubble and said that saying that no one is suggesting that sites like Pornhub are being entrusted with people’s personal information and that anyone suggesting otherwise is being disingenuous because the legislation only gets websites to verify the identity of their users. I mean, seriously, do these MPs understand the words that are coming out of their mouths here?
Even more shocking was that Conservative MPs suggested that because the notwithstanding clause is part of the Canadian Charter, that this makes it perfectly OK to use that to carry out whatever agenda they wish to pursue. Where do you even begin with such insane statements like that?
The MPs baselessly claimed again how what is going on on Pornhub is a “crime scene” and what is going on on there “is criminal”. They went on to push the moral panic argument that this is about “protecting children” (even though the policy pushed for in Bill S-210 actually endangers children while doing nothing to protect them). The Conservative MPs claimed that the people who run Pornhub are “monsters” and that they monetize, through advertising, nonconsensual material, content uploaded without permission, and CSAM material, clearly doing everything they can to defame the site.
The level of ignorance expressed in that meeting by supporters of Bill S-210 is just off the charts. I mean, where do you even begin with this? With respect to the accusations that Pornhub happily profits off of material that was uploaded without permission, well, this clearly demonstrates a complete lack of understanding with how the website operates and the history it has had.
In 2020, Pornhub underwent a massive purge of its content, removing anything that was uploaded by unverified users. This was in response to credit card companies refusing to allow users to use their services with respect to the website. This development was widely known and isn’t that hard to find:
Pornhub, a website owned by Montreal-based company Mindgeek, said Monday it has removed all uploaded content not created by verified users.
The move comes as the site deals with the fallout from a recent New York Times report that Pornhub hosts videos of child sexual assaults and exploitations. Opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote that the site carried revenge pornography and explicit video taken without consent of the participants.
That led credit card companies Visa and MasterCard to announce on Friday that they would no longer allow their cards to be used on the Pornhub site. MasterCard said its move was permanent, while Visa said it was suspending activity while it performs its own investigation.
Published reports on Monday suggested the number of videos on Pornhub had dropped from 13.5 million on Sunday to about 4.7 million by Monday morning.
In a statement, Pornhub said the removal of the videos “means every piece of Pornhub content is from verified uploaders, a requirement that platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter have yet to institute.”
Now, the accusations by the New York Times were never really proven. As TechDirt noted, the investigation techniques employed to implicate PornHub brought those accusations into serious question:
In December 2020, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times published his “The Children of Pornhub” column. That Kristof column was used by many to justify claims that the entire industry was engaging in illegal behavior. The New Republic staff writer Melissa Gira Grant published a few days later a column entitled “Nick Kristof and the Holy War on Pornhub.”
Grant explained that Kritof’s column failed to differentiate between unlawful activity and lawful activity, referring to another anti-porn activist named Laila Mickelwait. Mickelwait “has said porn is a root cause of sex trafficking, which it isn’t. For years, porn performers have tried to draw attention to the exploitation at the heart of the tube site business model—YouTube clones, which now dominate an online porn ecosystem that, not long ago and like much of online media, once offered independent creators more control over their work,” Grant writes.
There is a clear distinction between legal and consensually produced pornographic materials and the illegal material that a criminal enterprise like GirlsDoPorn produced and profited from. It is a very ugly truth that Pornhub, under previous ownership, turned a blind eye to the activity of Pratt and his associates. However, there has been a significant change that these anti-pornography campaigners continue to overlook and dismiss.
Even though the criminal elements in this case were excised like a malignant tumor, Pornhub and its affiliated properties are now setup to prevent a repeat of that activity. In fact, this has been a key focus ever since the Kristof fallout. Shortly after Kristof’s column, they removed unverified uploads on the platform – millions of photos and images. They started reporting to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the organization’s CyberTipline. With Aylo’s porn platforms in the past few years, they started reporting voluntarily to CyberTipline. Aylo supports the NCMEC’s TakeItDown program, which allows minors and adults who are the victims of image-based sexual abuse to work with the center and law enforcement anonymously to remove the non-consensual material. The site is also a sponsor of StopNCII.org, which is a similar tool that caters to removing non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII). They also go as far as openly supporting sex workers’ rights and reform in porn.
Not exactly the ‘profit off of illegal activity’ that the Conservative MPs in that meeting would have you believe. It could be that those MPs have been living under a rock over the last 4 or 5 years and it is totally fair that not everyone is following the porn business all that closely (heck, even I don’t follow it all that closely), but if we are to talk about how a web service like Pornhub operates today, then the MPs in question could stand to at least do some basic research on the topic before flying off the handle when they are full of shit.
Now, this would all be just stupid comments that is worthy of little more than an eye roll if the implications weren’t so serious. The fact remains that MPs pushing Bill S-210 are demanding that ordinary Canadians submit vast troves of personal information to third party websites which would then be used by websites they themselves called “crime scenes”, and protect that information with little more than a simple “I pinky swear I’ll protect that information”. If you think your information is going to be safe, well, Australia recently showed that your information is not safe in such systems.
What’s worse is that Australia has shown that when busy body nanny state types implement an age verification, they are chomping at the bit to expand their censorship powers into other areas such as video games. It has been demonstrated that those who push for these so-called “age verification” laws are merely looking this as a stepping stone to target other forms of content – to the point where in order to access anything online, the government will want to know what you access, where you access it, when you access it, and, as the international war on encryption proved, will do everything in their power to outlaw encryption they can’t backdoor.
The only reason that MPs are going after porn sites is because they feel that it is the easiest way to shoe-horn a surveillance state as they chip away at our fundamental rights. After all, for some political parties, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is little more than a speed bump because the notwithstanding clause was there to be used as far as they are concerned.
(Via @FanCRTCProfling)
