Canada’s Bill C-22: Why Signal, Apple, and top VPNs are fighting the 'surveillance' law

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Also listen to this podcast if you have interest in Canadian politic:

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It seems to have been fast-tracked and passed the ‘House of Commons’. Now heading to the Senate.

Hopefully, it gets somehow stopped…

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The ‘good’ new is that the version pass clarifiy the part about backdoor and encryption:

‘A new decryption provision, borrowed from U.S. law, states that nothing in the Act compels a provider to decrypt user-encrypted data unless the provider supplied the encryption and holds the key.’

source: Midnight Madness: The Government Rushes Lawful Access Bill Through the House Without Debate or a Recorded Vote - Michael Geist

The governement (Liberal Party) dismiss critict has being from ‘foil hat’ people.

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Yep, it seems the Liberal party has been pretty dismissive. From the article you shared:

Rather than use the final days of the House session to answer the privacy, security, and oversight concerns raised by the Privacy Commissioner, academics, technology companies, and civil society groups, the government spent the time ensuring it would not have to, rushing the bill through committee, cutting off debate, and maligning critics with tactics that they once decried when in opposition.

Yet none of this cures the core of the bill. The secret ministerial orders survive, the mandatory metadata retention regime survives, the capability requirements survive, the expansive electronic service provider definition survives, and the Privacy Commissioner remains excluded from any oversight role. Google, which warned the committee that the bill would establish a surveillance infrastructure that compromises cybersecurity, said after the amendments that the changes have not eased its concerns, and the Chamber of Progress, an industry coalition, dismissed them as “half measures” and “cosmetic changes to a fundamentally flawed bill.” The companies that have signalled they may limit services or leave Canada are unlikely to read the amendments any differently, and the changes are themselves the clearest evidence that the concerns were serious rather than imagined, since a government does not amend a bill to address tinfoil hats.

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Some context on recent VPN bans:

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