While we can argue about whether the Commander-in-Chief (you know, the guy who is empowered to overturn verdicts and pardon death-row criminals) is allowed to authorize access to your phone records, hopefully there is no disagreement over whether the police can simply use web search engines to help find criminal behaviour.

I’m talking run-of-the-mill web-surfing. That’s what Maryland fire inspectors did to crack a case of 17 fires over the past 4 months.

And today’s winners of the coveted ‘what-the-heck-was-I-thinking’ award are the two teenaged arsonists who bragged about their exploits, complete with photos, to their friends on MySpace.com.

I’m waiting for their lawyer to file suit for unreasonable search. After all, it’s called MySpace, not OurSpace.

Safety tip, kids: the internet is a pretty wide open public space. When bragging about arson, shop-lifting or whatever helps pick up dates these days, you may want to try some other approach.

The freedom to associate with who ever you want to is a pretty fundamental civil right. In Canada, that freedom is found in Section 2d of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In the US, the right is established by the first amendment.

By no means am I a constitution expert.

I like to ensure that people examine issues from both sides now, from win and lose, from up and down and still somehow… sorry, that was another Canadian.

A hot news story is how the US National Security Agency has been looking at people’s phone records. Some are arguing that this constitutes unreasonable search and seizure. People are up in arms. I find it fascinating that people don’t mind their phone company having this information, or that someone working in a call centre half-way around the world can look at your calling patterns. But, not the people who take an oath of office to defend and protect you.

Have we seen too many movies?

Let me just note that both the Canadian Charter and US Fourth Amendment use the modifier ‘unreasonable’ in front of ‘search and seizure’. Both countries modify the freedom of assembly with the adjective ‘peaceful’. So, neither right is absolute. Both sides now.

These are different times. When we read that the UK had identified the transit bombers in advance but did not act because of resources, one wonders if people would have preferred that there had been no surveillance at all.

Why am I weighing in on this? It appears to me to have telecom policy issues associated with it although clearly this is an area better kept for real lawyers – not those of us trained for the NY criminal bar by distance learning – otherwise known as watching Law & Order.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll state that my politics on this subject are likely skewed in part by having one of my kids attending school in a part of the world that sees more than its fair share of terrorism. Is any amount fair?

It’s interesting for me to try to figure out who reads these postings. Sometimes I wonder if it is simply cathartic – not a bad thing, of course.

Clearly, the internal website team at the CRTC does not read my blog. Otherwise, they would never have posted a note on their site today:

Not after yesterday’s commentary about The Xanga Tango. With one weekend’s power interruption, the CRTC goes to 99.5% availability – two 9’s. That’s if nothing else happens all year – and we know the chances of that!

I guess that Canada’s regulatory departments just can forget about access to the archives this weekend. Take the weekend off. Miller time. There’s nothing important happening anyway. Oh yeah, there was something I read recently about an abbreviated schedule for the VoIP reconsideration. Wait ’til you get through reading the Sunday papers. No problem.

I understand that government security regulations may stand in the way of using off-site third party hosting. Otherwise, there are a lot of carriers and hosting companies that could provide guaranteed up-times, redundant 4-barrel, overhead cam, turbo-charged, gonkulators and all that.

Maybe the CRTC and Public Works can take a look at finding a secure site, somewhere in Canada, to provide business grade hosting services that don’t need to go off the air for 42 hours at a time. By the way, the folks who can help build that for you will be speaking on Wednesday afternoon, June 14 at The Canadian Telecom Summit.

I know, it’s a shameless plug. Hey, this is my blog and it is cathartic. I told you.

Michael Geist has been reminding us that, with other issues like net neutrality (among others) grabbing people’s interest, the scourge of spam is perhaps forgotten but hardly gone away.

My ISP uses two different filter systems to try to minimize the amount of spam I receive. Last week, the ISP successfully blocked 835 messages, perhaps costing me the opportunity to save a lot on prescriptions from Canada and leaving my wife without the benefit of me purchasing chemical performance enhancements. My PC filtered another couple hundred messages.

I am actually far more concerned about filters blocking legitimate mail – I had 10 messages blocked that should not have tripped the filters. Ten people who thought I was ignoring their urgent requests for information. To them I say – sorry. I promise, if I want to ignore you, I’ll do it to your face.

How do we address spam in legislation? Defining it is one problem. Effectively stopping it, instead of simply chasing the spammer off-shore, is another. As I wrote last week, we shouldn’t legislate etiquette. I think that a democracy gives you the right to be merely offensive and annoying – otherwise, my brother would say that I should have been put behind bars years ago.

Where would you draw the line?

I was just minding my own business, surfing around various blogs in a lonely search for voices of reason when I tripped across a blog hosted by Xanga.com: the self-proclaimed “Weblog Community”. The site came up with the following message:

Seriously! This was really posted.

Now, when I first saw this message, it didn’t have the correction to the original 4 pm target for restoration, nor the ‘P.S.’. And I don’t know if the 7 pm time is going to be met.

But, hello Xanga: This is no way to run a hosting service!

Your operations team has actually wasted a lot of effort in moving out of your old location. Hopefully, you no longer have a space problem. Any of your customers with half a brain have left and found a service provider that actually takes their clients’ needs into consideration.

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Update: As of 5:15pm, Xanga appears to be back in service. The Xanga.com home page has a note that appears to have been posted yesterday, warning folks that the service would be down until 2 pm.

I’m guessing that most of their customers are on the free service. And they are getting exactly what they are paying for in service quality. But I’m willing to bet that they support Net Neutrality!