Canadian e-census review A package for the Canadian census showed up in my mail today. It included both a paper form and a URL with access code that can be used to fill it out online. Cool I thought, might as well give the online version (link removed due to suckyness, see below) a try.
The web app they have set up to run the e-census can be summed up in one word: painful. The process consists of:
1. Fill in 1-3 form fields on a page.
2. Hit submit.
3. Wait for 2 minutes, while the server loads the next (small) section of the form.
4. Repeat steps 1-3 until you grow bored of waiting for page refreshes and give up.
If they gave you one big page with all the fields available to fill in at once, then the 2 minute wait to submit would be OK. Forcing a 2 minute wait after every 10 seconds of form-filling activity is a really needless hassle.
I was a trooper and made it to the end, but only because I was writing this blog entry bashing it while waiting for each refresh. Otherwise, I would have certainly given up part-way through. It's unfortunate that what could have been an easy way for people to send in their census data was implemented so badly.
26 comments | I did it on tuesday and the loading time was only about ten seconds between pages. | | |
You have to refresh every three questions?!?! The site designers must have taken leave of their census.
Wa-wa. | | |
| Once again, goodladd census into hysterics with his puns. | | |
| Some more feedback about the Canadian e-census can be found in this boingboing post. Apparently the software and hardware are provided by American defence contractor Lockheed Martin. I wonder if the US is secretly recording all the data? If I had known that beforehand I would have just gone the paper route. I seriously do not put anything past the US government these days. | | |
No offence, Dustin (/Canadians in general), but I doubt very much that Canadian census data would be of any particular use or value (or use-value, holla Marxists!) to the US government. It's barely even useful to the Canadian government, to be honest.
That said, they are totally watching you. | | |
No offense, Andrew, but you do not think like the shadow government. A nice database full of the technological Canadians, where they live (and for how long) and other details is always a plus for big brother to have.
The fact of the matter is there are lots of Canadian organizations that could have created this tech for the census. It should have been done by one of them, without bringing US government privacy concerns anywhere near the issue. | | |
"A nice database full of the technological Canadians, where they live (and for how long) and other details is always a plus for big brother to have."
To what end? I agree that it sounds like something that should be useful, but how would they actually use it?
Besides, census data isn't classified information, there's really no need for Lockheed Martin (or anyone else) to secretly make copies of it-- they can get it quite freely on the internet! The only 'advantage' to any would-be big brother of recording the information as it's gathered is that the data wouldn't be anonymous (the way it is when Stats Can releases it publicly), so individuals could be pinpointed exactly. But if you really believe that the US government wants this data SO badly, then it wouldn't make much difference whether a Canadian company was collecting it or not-- it would be easy enough to hack the server and collect it covertly that way.
To summarise:
1. They are still totally watching.
2. Nyah on you. | | |
how would they actually use it?
They could use it to connect any other information they have (banking, passport, etc) on somebody to their current address, or to their IP address. Basically it gives them a more detailed picture of each person. Once you can associate an IP address with a name, it becomes possible to track more of that person's online activities and match it up with who they are.
IP addresses change you may say. They could do the same info with the MAC address of your computer (which stays the same on your computer forever). Since they're using a trusted applet to run the application, there's really no limit to what they could pull off your computer if they wanted to.
it would be easy enough to hack the server and collect it covertly that way.
Sorry dude, but I'm calling bullshit on that one. There's a huge difference between duplicating the data as it passes through your friendly servers and trying to hack into unfriendly servers and remove it. | | |
"here's a huge difference between duplicating the data as it passes through your friendly servers and trying to hack into unfriendly servers and remove it."
Yeah, of course there is, my point was merely that given the uber-paranoid conception you seem to have of the US government, it's a little pedantic to insist that they couldn't hack an unfriendly server if they wanted to.
Besides, you have yet to convince me of why the US government wants to keep tabs on technologically-minded Canadians in the first place. What are they going to do, blog the US into submission? | | |
You may think my conception of the US government is 'uber-paranoid', but it's based on fact. Are you aware that the US government made deals with the biggest telcos to get records of every US phone-call and all backbone internet traffic? Note that this is a separate issue from the previously made public NSA wiretapping debacle. The US government has a past history of spying on (and disrupting) political organizations they don't like both domestically and internationally. All the news reports of today make it clear that the US government just can't get enough info, on everyone and everything.
The US is currently trying to extradite and sentence to death the leader of a Canadian political party. They want to fight the people that they disagree with, be it Canadian or otherwise. Is that a sufficient why for you? | | |
Um, please, spare us your theatrics. "Leader of a Canadian political party"? You make it sound like they're going after Duceppe, when in fact it's just some pot grower in BC. And sure, that's bullshit, but if you really mean to compare it to Nicaragua, or Iraq, or Liberia, then you are completely out of your tree.
And the only thing I was ever trying to say was that I didn't think Canadian census data would be intrinsically that valuable to the US government, so please, let's stop arguing as if I would be totally okay with having a microchip in my head. | | |
Where were my theatrics? I was just stating some facts, in response to your questions. You asked why it would be valuable and I told you: to match up a person's online activities with who they are in real life. The US might want to do this to people who they are interested in spying on for one reason or another. It has been shown that they like to spy quite a bit. Do you get it now??
Please read the wikipedia article on Marc Emery if you're not familiar with him. He has been a leader in the creation and support of Canadian political organizations and media focused on legalizing marijuana. I bring it up since his extradition is a clear example of the US trying to exert their force over Canadian culture and law. It's ludicrous that we would pass our entire online census through them. That is the point that I am arguing here. | | |
| Okay, fine, let's just agree to disagree. Your point: putting census data through US is bad. My point: Lockheed Martin ? US Government, so putting relatively innocuous census data through them is probably okay, US proclivity towards spying notwithstanding. | | |
| (That question mark is meant to be a 'is not equal to' sign.) | | |
Lockheed Martin's company motto is "We never forget who we're working for." The vast majority of their business is done for the US government (mostly military). As companies go, they are pretty much equal to the US government (and they will never forget it).
Certainly they are much closer to the US government then the telco companies that have been passing over all their records to the NSA. The wired article that I linked to above had this snippet in it: "One major telco, Qwest, declined to participate in the program, despite a strong sell from that NSA that included suggesting that the company's reticence could endanger national security and the company's ability to get classified work with the government".
I doubt that there would ever be a need to threaten Lockheed with such things though. They never forget who they're working for, after all. | | |
Lockheed Martin's company motto is "We never forget who we're working for."
See, THIS is what I mean by 'theatrics'. A slogan is an advertising tool, and though this is a poor one for a company that attracts as much criticism as LM, I would hazard the guess that when they were sitting around coming up with that slogan they intended it to refer to "the customer", not "the evil US government conspirators".
Say, do you know who else uses that same slogan? Bob and Linda Lario, a married realtor team from Colorado. Are THEY also secretly working to bring down Canada? I mean, they're realtors, right? They can get inside people's houses, and, crikey, who knows what they might do after that.
For that matter, I would also start keeping an eye on the following companies:
Verizon: "We Never Stop Working For You" (clearly a tongue-in-cheek nod to the NSA)
Olympus Cameras: "Your Vision, Our Future" (no doubt referring to the Japanese government's plans for world domination)
Nationwide Insurance: "On Your Side" (meaning America in the War on Terror, obviously)
The Home Depot: "You Can Do It. We Can Help" (where 'it' means DESTROY ALL ENEMIES)
And, of course, the most nefarious of all:
Burger King: "Have It Your Way" (in this case, 'it' means 'the world political situation').
Finally, you might be interested to read StatsCan's confidentiality statement. While it admittedly disproves my claim that it would be easy to hack into their servers from outside, I would say it also disproves your claim that LM could be recording secret copies of the information. But then, that's probably just what they want us to think. | | |
Your arguments have flip-flopped so much that I'm finding it hard to piece together what you're actually trying to say now.
LM's slogan is clearly meant to imply the US government (which is "the customer" for them). Their allegiance is totally owned. I brought it up when you said "My point: Lockheed Martin != US Government" and it clearly shattered that statement of yours.
I think it's time to swallow your pride and admit that I am right on this: Canada should have had a Canadian developer run their e-census. | | |
I'm sorry, you, Dustin-- defender of all that is pure and good; staunch and valiant opponent of the evil US administration and all that it has done-- are trying to win a debate by accusing your opponent of flip-flopping?!?!?!?! That is just breathtakingly ironic.
I think that all liberal bloggers that you're so fond of linking to (myself included) established beyond fairly reasonable doubt two years ago that ad hominem accusations of 'flip-flopping' are a retarded "response" to an argument-- being that, hmm, they don't respond to any arguments, but rather deflect attention away from actual issues by supposing that never changing your mind about anything is the hallmark of a truly intelligent and reasonable person.
The only point I ever wanted to make, as I have stated several times in fairly unequivocal terms, is that I do not believe that there is any reason why the US would want, need, or try to steal Canadian census data. For my tastes, you haven't given any good reason why I should change my mind. Why not?
Your principle argument goes like this:
1. Spying is done by the US government.
2. The Canadian census is done by the US government (which I don't believe is true but will concede for the moment).
3. Therefore, the Canadian census is spying.
This is an example of the "fallacy of the undistributed middle": the 'middle' term ('things the US government does') is here said to be 'undistributed' because neither of these premises describe things that the US government does 100% of the time. Therefore it is possible for the US government to do both without the two necessarily being connected. You might as well be saying the following:
1. The war in Iraq is done by the US government.
2. The Canadian census is done by the US government.
3. Therefore, the Canadian census is the war in the Iraq.
Quite aside from all the other tangents we have both taken in this thread, this is the crux for me: your argument makes no logical sense, and is 'true' only if you believe that the US government is always doing something evil, 100% of the time-- which, I might add, is not empirically provable, so it would be impossible for you to "be right" in any meaningful, objective sense of the word, anyway. | | |
First of all, my original point would be more accurately described as follows:
1. The technical challenge for creating this e-census application is not very high.
2. There are lots of Canadian companies that meet that (not very high) challenge that could have been hired to make it.
3. Whoever runs the e-census has the ability to copy the data.
4. The US has repeatedly shown a propensity to copy data when it can (even when it may not be entirely legal).
5. As a Canadian, I would prefer the US government not have this data (and I extrapolate this onto many other Canadians as well).
6. Therefore, the Canadian government should have hired one of the many qualitfied Canadian companies to run the census instead of a US company.
Now, you have said that you "do not believe that there is any reason why the US would want... the Canadian census data". I answered this above already, and I didn't see you dispute what I said. You changed your point to be "My point: Lockheed Martin != US Government". Here's the answer again (in more detail) for you:
The US might want the Canadian census data to match up a person's online activities with who they are in real life.
For example, let's say that somebody online has posted some text on the internet, or sent some emails. They have done this from the IP address 67.68.198.21. If you could show that this person broke Canadian law you could get a court to identify them. Otherwise the only thing you can tell about this address is that it's a customer of Bell Canada.
On the other hand, a simple way of getting an automatic ID for a ton of IP addresses would be if you had some big list that gave you the name and address of each person along with the IP address they were at. That's what the census is. That's what makes it a valuable piece of intel that the US government would covet. | | |
Sigh...
Okay, first of all, even with the expanded version of your argument, the same logical fallacy still exists: just because "the US has repeatedly shown a propensity to copy data when it can", it does not logically follow that the US does copy data every time it has a chance.
Besides which, how do you know that the US copies data "whenever it can"? Do you have a record of every opportunity the US has ever had to copy data, and whether or not it did copy data in that instance? Or was that just a throw-away generalisation that you were hoping you could gloss over?
Speaking of throw-away generalisations, this one was a doozy: "Whoever runs the e-census has the ability to copy the data." Did you read the StatsCan page I linked to before? Here's another one:
"Is Lockheed Martin conducting the 2006 Canadian census?
No. Statistics Canada is in full control of all aspects of the census. All questionnaires and data are exclusively handled by Statistics Canada employees. At no point does any contractor handle or possess confidential census responses . . . Even if a request were made to any contractor to hand-over or transmit Census data, it would be physically impossible for them to comply."
This link goes to the report of a special task force commissioned to determine whether or not this year's census data is secure, in which they conclude that "it would be practically impossible for the contractors involved in the Census project to intentionally or otherwise access Census data." The findings were based on the research of three independent and accredited IT security companies.
Also, and I fully admit that I am no internet expert and you may well have some way of knowing that this is the case, but: where is it written that the e-census application logs IP addresses? For absolute certain IP addresses wouldn't make it into the final census dataset, because only a small percentage of census returns are collected online-- statistically it would make no sense to record IP addresses because they don't apply to the whole n (so provide no analytical benefit) and they can change several times through the course of data collection (so provide no practical benefit in the same way that physical addresses do).
And, finally, even supposing IP addresses are logged, so what? Someone could be online at work, or at a friend's house, or stealing the wireless network of someone else in their building, or through a VPN, or through a router that gives all ten computers connected to it the same external IP address. You really have no way of knowing who is at any IP address at any given time, even if at one point a name and address were supplied from that IP address.
We are totally the new Rap Battle thread. | | |
For goodness' sakes, people, read Article 1004 of NAFTA:
"No Party may apply rules of origin to goods imported from another Party for purposes of government procurement covered by this Chapter that are different from or inconsistent with the rules of origin the Party applies in the normal course of trade, which may be the Marking Rules established under Annex 311 if they become the rules of origin applied by that Party in the normal course of its trade."
!
| | |
This is what I meant when I used the term "flip-flopping". You had said "The only point I ever wanted to make, as I have stated several times in fairly unequivocal terms, is that I do not believe that there is any reason why the US would want, need, or try to steal Canadian census data". However, whenever I address that point head on you respond by talking about a bunch of other issues. So let me ask you straight-up: Do you now see why the US would covet such data?
I'm glad that statscan has done a security audit on the census. If you read some of it you'll see that it repeatedly mentions that Canadians have concerns about the US getting this data. That's why they did the audit. It mentions that a source code review was done, which is good. It doesn't say who compiled the source code into the final software though. If that was done by LH then theoretically they could have used different code for the audit and for the real software they shipped.
@Chris: Aren't there some exceptions in NAFTA for national security issues? Also, the US likes to use NAFTA as a doormat anyways. | | |
Ahem. Let me answer you straight up (again): NO, I still do not buy that the US would want Canadian census data. That was, I think, made clear by the last two paragraphs, especially, of my last rant.
Viz. "Where is it written that the e-census application logs IP addresses? For absolute certain IP addresses wouldn't make it into the final census dataset."
Viz. "Even supposing IP addresses are logged, so what?"
Viz. "You really have no way of knowing who is at any IP address at any given time, even if at one point a name and address were supplied from that IP address."
Considering your main justification for the US wanting the census data is to match IP addresses with specific individuals, and considering that you have not demonstrated that this is even possible using census data, I still do not see "any reason why the US would want, need, or try to steal Canadian census data." Period. | | |
Every time a person accesses a webpage it sends their IP address. It's required to make the internet work. If you run an online service and you want to collect IP addresses it's dirt simple.
You're correct that IP addresses are not fully stable. However, in practice for broadband users they generally are for long periods of time. For example, the IP address of your Stanley apartment internet connection has been 67.68.198.21 for at least the month of May (I only looked in the May logfile). I see it accessing Sillytech pretty regularly (except for the 3rd-8th and the 16th-17th when I believe you were out of town).
So matching up IP addresses with specific individuals is certainly possible for the online census takers. | | |
Dustin: Statistics Canada is specifically covered under NAFTA procurement rules. The exceptions, including those for national security, are reproduced below. I can't see how the census would reasonably fall under this, as the census-taking is hardly indispensible for national security. It would been illegal for the government to give the contract to a Canadian company that was not the lowest bidder.
My observation is that NAFTA works great for Canadians 99.9% of the time. (Sillysoft is a good example: 20 years ago, people had to pay duties on video games sold across the border.)
"1. Nothing in this Chapter shall be construed to prevent a Party from taking any action or not disclosing any information which it considers necessary for the protection of its essential security interests relating to the procurement of arms, ammunition or war materials, or to procurement indispensable for national security or for national defense purposes.
2. Provided that such measures are not applied in a manner that would constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination between Parties where the same conditions prevail or a disguised restriction on trade between the Parties, nothing in this Chapter shall be construed to prevent any Party from adopting or maintaining measures:
(a) necessary to protect public morals, order or safety;
(b) necessary to protect human, animal or plant life or health;
(c) necessary to protect intellectual property; or
(d) relating to goods or services of handicapped persons, of philanthropic institutions or of prison labor."
| | |
Yeah, yeah, of course, well done, look at you, you've matched up my IP address to me. Incidentally, even during those gaps when I was out of town and "not accessing" Sillytech, I was still, in fact, checking it regualrly. So you see the futility of relying on IP addresses to monitor web activity. Especially for the purposes of international espionage and intrigue, it's a pointless exercise. Although yes, IP addresses are often stable, the fact that they can change, and the fact that someone can access the internet simultaneously from multiple IP addresses (even if their home IP doesn't change) means that:
1. Illegally copied census data would be of no official use, as IP activity wouldn't be legally viable evidence unless you could somehow prove that, at the exact moment illegal activity occurred, an individual was at his/her computer, and his/her computer had that particular IP address. (Right, Chris?)
2. Illegally copied census data would be of no practical use, because even assuming you could be sure that the IP address used to complete the census was the individual's main IP address (rather than a work address, or a school address, or a stolen wireless network address), much of your data would still be obsolete within a few months.
IP addresses may be relatively stable, but come on, most routers need to be rebooted every now and then (to say nothing of power cuts, ISP technical difficulties, firmware updates, etc., etc.). At most you could monitor an individual with some certainty for a few months, and you would have no way of guaranteeing that they were the same individual who performed illegal activity from that IP address a few months earlier (before you got their address from the census), or that they would perform illegal activity during the few months when you could reliably track them. It would simply be a waste of time.
I am hereby announcing my retirement from this thread. I am bored, everyone else is bored, you seem incapable of giving me any reason why I should change my mind, and I seem equally incapable of doing the same for you. As I said, like, a week ago, I am resigned to disagreeing with you on this. The end. | | |
|
|
|
|
Vorg — Tag Cloud
Written by dustin Latest PhotoQuote of Now:FriendsPopular PostsComputer Games
|
