Conservatives Declare War on Porn — and Privacy and Free Expression, Too.

Pierre Poilievre wants to introduce an age-verification system for online smut. He wants to do it in the worst way possible.

You get the idea. Source: Unsplash. Author: Charles Deluvio.

The party of ‘freedom’ and ‘small government’ and no ‘gatekeepers’ wants to extend a surveillance network across the country to check in on people during their more intimate moments. On Wednesday Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre said a CPC government would require age verification access the online pornography. His preferred approach is threat to privacy, free expression, and the integrity of the internet — whatever is left of it, at any rate.

While the party’s purported end is sensible, their means isn’t. It’s entirely reasonable to want and seek to keep minors from accessing pornography and other potentially harmful materials online. Indeed, that’s an old undertaking of the offline variety. Anyone born before stores started to remove magazines will recall opaque plastic covers and shelves that tried to keep young people from sneaking so much as a glimpse at smut. Of course, there’s a vast difference between what you’d find on those shelves and what you can find online today.

The Senate bill that Conservatives support — S-210, introduced by a member of the Independent Senators Group — has passed the Red Chamber and is now before the House. The Conservatives, the Bloc, and the New Democrats voted it along for study in committee, while 133 Liberals voted against it. Conservative MP Karen Vecchio is the bill’s sponsor and party leader Pierre Poilievre says under his government the bill — or, rather, something like it — would become law. The bill mandates a robust age check, which means no mere checking of a box on the honour system.

Attempts to prevent minors from accessing porn are picking up steam around the world. The United Kingdom recently adopted a bill to do just that. So have several U.S. states including Louisiana, Utah, Texas, and Alabama cases. Countries are grappling with the issue, but early laws are deeply flawed. So is S-210. I bet Poilievre’s eventual bill, should it come to pass, will be too.

A threat to privacy

Let’s unpack the problem with online age verification by calling these bills what they are — surveillance bills that threaten online (and offline) privacy and run the risk of censorship through mass website blocking.

Writing for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Jason Kelley and Monica Horten outlined several of the problems with the U.K. bill, problems that may plague its Canadian counterpart. As they argue, the measures, which are now law,

will result in an enormous shift in the availability of information online, and pose a serious threat to the privacy of UK internet users. It will make it much more difficult for all users to access content privately and anonymously, and it will make many of the most popular websites and platforms liable if they do not block, or heavily filter, content for anyone who does not verify their age. This is in addition to the dangers the Bill poses to encryption.

Privacy advocates are concerned because the data collected by age verification measures in this instance is particularly sensitive and there are broader issues at play, including the means by which people are identified.