Friday, April 05, 2013

Why did a student in Montreal get arrested for an instagram post?

On Wednesday night, news broke that a 20-year-old “supporter of the student movement”, Jennifer Pawluck was arrested in Montreal for posting a picture to Instagram that she took of a graffiti wheat paste illustration that showed Montreal’s police commander Ian Lafrenière with a bloody bullethole in his forehead. According to the CBC, the image was thrown up on a brick wall in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighbourhood. And Jennifer Pawluck – not that this even matters – didn’t even draw the anti-cop graphic in the first place.

While Montreal does have a certain set of harsh laws in place designed to fine graffiti artists and the building owners who do not properly deal with graffiti on their buildings, those are laws set in place to keep Canada’s most Euorpean city looking clean and pretty. But the idea that someone who is walking past a controversial graffiti stencil, who then takes out their iPhone, grabs a photo and publishes it to their Instagram account should be arrested is completely ridiculous. It also speaks to the level of fearful internet monitoring that’s clearly going on in Montreal right now.

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Our friends in America are even worse off right now. The FBI has made it clear that simply getting a warrant to look through someone’s Gmail account, for example, is not good enough. They are now looking to spy on the internet in real-time (instead of waiting months for a warrant to clear) and monitor the conversations that are occurring on the internet’s many social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, even in-game conversations in Minecraft. There are countless networks through which to pass information online, that are owned by a variety of different companies, but the more legislation that gets passed to extend the surveillance capabilities of the authorities online will make those digital nooks and crannies less and less protected. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Censorship is alive and well in Canada – just ask government scientists...
  2. Canadian workers warned against criticizing Harper government...
  3. Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper muzzling science and scientists...
  4. Angry Canadians "make noise" with pots and pans...
  5. Maple Spring: 'Canada vs totalitarian govt crackdown'
  6. DHS announces plan to illegally scan emails, web traffic for 'homeland security'

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