A shift in direction...

For years Jeff has been my little hole in the Great Firewall that allowed me to download pornography access the web unhindered while living in China. Basically the Great Firewall is a joke that only stops lazy people and stupid people (neither of whom you really want on the Internet anyway, so you could view it as a public service). Jeff, very kindly, kept a server in his basement hooked up that allowed me to redirect all requests for web pages that were deemed a danger to the state here through a Canadian server that allowed such things.

About a month ago this server's connection went flaky and died. Jeff, being newly married and kind of in a complex part of life, didn't have the time to check it out. I didn't mind, though, because very few sites I really cared about got blocked. That changed this week as Blogger turned out to be a threat to the Chinese government. It became imperative that the problem get solved and, for some reason, Jeff was incommunicado.

I decided that it was really unfair to have Jeff be responsible for my free (as in freedom, not beer) Internet access and embarked on a project to change this. So as of today I have my own tiny, cheap VPS in the USA that runs my little backdoor to the rest of the Internet; the stuff the Chinese government thinks is too dangerous to be seen. Like my blog here. The one I'm posting. Telling you what a bunch of utter shitheads the Chinese government is for being afraid of my little key-clickings telling you harmless, inoffensive things about China (for the most part). Apparently I am a danger to the state. Funny, I don't feel any different from last week this time....

Mr. Hu Jintao? I want the six hours I spent debugging this setup back. Please mail it to me you frightened little child.

Am I missing something?

So some protesters go to another country, participate in an illegal protest, get arrested and ... the whole world freaks out? What did people expect? And why is it such an international incident? What happens to people who go to, say, the USA, participate in an illegal protest and get caught? Why does the world not react with shocked outrage when the USA, or Great Britain, or Canada, or Germany, or France or any other country in the world arrests and ejects lawbreakers?

OK, this scares me.

It seems that the UK wants to follow the American path to Nazism. This war on an emotion is turning into a great tool for the authoritarian instinct. When will Canada follow suit? When will Canada join the USA in suspending civil rights and join the UK as one of the most surveilled countries in the world? I suspect it will be sooner than anybody thinks, cynic that I am, but this is one of those rare cases where I'd be really super-happy to be wrong.

I think it's instructive, for those in Canada who think "it can't happen here", to compare a couple of things. Specifically I want to compare police presence in Canada (and, quickly, the USA) to police presence in China. Of the two countries, China is the one referred to as a police state (and despite the tone of this message, I actually agree with that designation). Yet here's the funny thing: while living in Canada -- Ottawa, to be specific -- I had more official interaction with police officers (as opposed to social interaction or just happening to see them in passing) in an average month than I've had in China in nearly six years.

Yet China is a police state, but Canada is not. How sure are you of this? Think carefully before answering, because the price of a wrong answer is the freedom that is supposedly the cornerstone of our society.

Let me kick it up a notch. A long time ago I went to Houston for a job interview. (I was even offered a job, but idiot border regulations torpedoed my chances there. "Free Trade" has as much relation to freedom of trade as the "Democratic Korean People's Republic" has to democracy or the people.) The experience was an eye-opener in many ways. In one concentrated dose I got some of my stereotypes of Texas obliterated (Houston is an astonishingly diverse and cosmopolitan city!) and horrifyingly confirmed (the gun culture is at the level of insanity -- one of the people who interviewed me brought out a handgun to show off after I admired a "sculpture" that turned out to be a hard disk after being shot several times). I also had something nasty confirmed about the "Land of the Free". In my grand total of ... say 36 hours ... in Houston, I had more interaction with police officers or other gun-wielding officials of the state than I would get in a typical month in Ottawa or in six years of living in a police state!

And this was years before 9/11.

So if you really don't think a police state is possible in Canada (or Britain or the USA or wherever), keep this in mind: you're already half-way there. The USA has essentially suspended habeas corpus -- it's just going about it the smart "salami tactics" way. It also has a long history of taking laws intended for one purpose and applying them generally (War on Plant Products, anyone?) as time passes. The UK has more official surveillance cameras, both in terms of population and in terms of raw numbers (if memory serves), than any other nation. (The USA has fewer official cameras, of course, but for that can subpoena any camera logs they like should they feel they need it, so the effect is largely similar.)

And Canada? Well, I'm out of touch with Canada right now. I've been away for an absurd length of time and internal Canadian news doesn't often reach the international press. Given Canada's history, however, it's only a matter of time before we import Yet Another Bad Idea from the USA. The time span for that ranges from 5 to 20 years with the pattern being the dumber the idea the quicker we tend to take to it. So I really am afraid that Canada is following the USA's lead into Nazism.

Which leaves me in the awkward position of wondering if living in this police state isn't a better choice right now, especially given that I've got an expanding family to consider.