cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11349801
…
The federal government of Canada will help to fund “a sovereign broadband backbone that connects Canadians from coast to coast to coast, with more direct and secure links to Europe and Asia,” Prime Minister Mark Carney announced.
A “broadband backbone” is the high-capacity core of the internet network that carries traffic between cities and countries. Speaking with reporters later, Mr. Carney said the backbone would also include connections to the Arctic.
…
Representatives for Canada’s major telecom companies supported Mr. Carney’s announcement … As Mr. Carney’s government continues to seek alternatives to reduce dependence on the United States, calls have grown to develop more networking infrastructure that would avoid routing Canadian data through U.S. internet exchanges, thereby exposing that data to potential surveillance.
…
Researchers at the University of Toronto and York University studying the journey taken by data between two points in Canada have found that, among their data sets, about a quarter of those journeys routed through American interchanges, exposing that information to access by the U.S. National Security Agency.
…
Mr. Carney did not provide further details about the broadband project. However, discussions about the ownership and financing model for the project are currently being held between telecom companies and the Major Projects Office, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter.
…
Goddamn he’s on fire.
The madder Trump gets at Canada, the more sure we can be that we’re moving in the right direction.
Then there’s Little PP with the jelly spine who thinks we should play nice. I don’t know how the fuck anyone supports him at this point. Basically “lay back and think of England”. Pathetic.
Carney needs to stomp on the Moneris sale, or work with the EU to replace it. The US is already weaponizing payment systems against people they don’t like (literally “don’t like”, not even folks with criminal accusations of any sort…)
As the PM of a member nation of the Five Eyes, I’m pretty sure he’s keenly aware of the mass surveillance done on the Internet traffic of everybody (even of that from nations referred to as “allies”) routed through nodes controlled by Five Eyes member nations and the uses of that info for industrial espionage and political interference.
When setting up his sovereign internet network might want to bypass the UK too, by the way, given that as the Snowden Revelations showed they were some of the worst at this and already back then used their control of the end-points of most Atlantic underwater cables connecting Europe to North America, to do massive amounts of surveillance on Internet traffic between Europe to North America and then gave tons of that info to the US.
Including Britain in this network would just be a two-step way of giving the info to the US rather than direct.
Lethamyr’s UK ping is about to get better.
So, I seem to recall that early in the trade dispute, the Ford government in Ontario ripped up a Starlink deal they’d been working on, making a big show about not giving them more leverage. The next week, Rogers inked a deal with Starlink to provide satellite peering/connections to their customers, and then the Ontario government could get that service through a “Canadian” telco.
Point being, I don’t believe a word our government says when it comes to their intentions with regards to detangling from US tech oligarchs, especially when they’re leaning on companies like Bell, Rogers and Telus, which are massively dependent on US tech oligarchs. They’ll “build up” a “sovereign” internet setup, by outsourcing the work to either American companies directly, or to Canadian companies acting as proxies for American companies to spare some optics. Sorta like how “Telus” doen’t actually have Canadian sovereign email, they just resell google or microsoft. Hell, Telus’s VoIP product, “Business Connect”, is just a rebrand of Ring Central. They literally point users to the Ring Central manuals, because our big rich hugely profitable mighty telco, can’t even write/maintain their own branded documentation. Even routes through RC servers down south for most calls.
It’s also likely worth highlighting that some of those big telcos, like Telus, have like $19.5 billion in long term debt, with a market cap of like $20 billion. There’s talk of big overhauls being required for Telus, as it’s become too outsourced/unfocused, and its debt’s out of control. But hey, Carney just announced a government bailout! Yay, liberal hand outs to big business! Canada foots the bill for the infrastructure, the Telcos get the profits, and it sounds like they’ll get to completely write off taxes for a while too.
As for people in this thread mentioning things like “Good the US shouldn’t control the internet”, I don’t think they really grasp the state that Canada’s internet is in. There are practically no east west data cables / redundancy around, we just use the US’s backbone most of the time. Almost all of our software reaches south for updates / patches etc, as the US doesn’t put any of those things into Canada, even on proxy boxes – but also, it’s way faster for a server in Vancouver to grab updates from Seattle, than it is to route data to the east coast. This is partly due to our country having crazy bad population distributions, with metropolitan areas like Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal each having more people than entire provinces such as Manitoba and Sask – it’s nearly impossible to justify huge infrastructure spends in communities of like 500-1000 people. At best, this is likely to fill that infrastructure gap a bit – but it won’t change our dependency on US tech in a more practical way.
It’s been like 2 years+ of this shit, and we still can’t get something like a fairphone through the regular telcos – like 99% of cell phones in Canada are Google or Apple, totally entrenched in those ecosystems. That’s how much the telcos care about Data Sovereignty/Canada.
Not to mention we have very little, basically zero sovereign cloud compute.
Gotta build them data centers though! For the American tech fascists to use!
As an American, please do this, my government should not be in charge of the global internet
Not be in charge of global anything you mean.
👀 four eyes minus American five eyes 👀
Good deal.
Holy fuck I love this
Why?
No really. Unless you are browsing sites that do no use HTTPS or you are running applications that do not encrypt traffic (not very common) it really doesn’t matter where your traffic goes before it reaches the destination. Yes they US could throttle traffic or cut us off but that is several orders of magnitude more nuanced than trump will ever pull off.
You don’t think 5 Eyes has backdoors into CAs?
If CAs are compromised than it doesn’t matter where your traffic is routed.
Because I’m tired of being subject to whatever the US wants.
The US deserves to lose their privileged positions on the internet. We need to make sure when they turn things off we’re safe.
Love that so many Canadians are saying this after Lake America and not fucking Abu Ghraib, or when Facebook facilitated a genocide in Myanmar. Canada has been subject to what the US wants for a century, and it’s so fascinating that that became a problem only after they started doing a bit more imperialism in the metropole.
Not that it’s wrong, just insufferable.
You know Lake Ontario was not the only thing that happened just now, right? And you know public pressure in Canada has been high ever since Trump got elected, right?
Yeah, almost like I mentioned things from ten to twenty years ago to point out how vapid and inauthentic the recent outrage is.
You guys are so desperate for easy dunks that you don’t even consider if something is hyperbolic. It’s so gross how self-rewarding this group is.
I’ve been saying this for my entire adult life.
I never understood how so many countries could be dependent on another country. Lots of governments use MS or Google suits so that means the states has access to all those government emails and information.
Every one of them says that too. Must just be super lucky.
Doesn’t have to include you for it to be true. Or are you seriously going to pretend like Canadians were super concerned about US imperialism before it became an inconvenience for them?
Begone troll.
Trolls are when you say Canadians should be more critical.
deleted by creator
So about that…
- Traffic going through the US is subject to their censorship and blocking. Using SNI for hostnames would let them block by domain or they can always block by IP.
- even encrypted traffic can be stored for later decryption. The NSA has been hoovering up data for years. Once quantum computing reaches a certain point (most likely on the next 2-3 years) any encryption that is not utilizing quantum resistant ciphers will be trivial to decrypt
- Take all of that non-encrypted and soon-to-be-decrypted data and they’ll funnel it all into AI to have everything they ever wanted on who you are
Because the US could disrupt or kill Traffic from Canada. If the US severs the “lines” it would screw up Canada. We route our traffic over lines in America what if they didn’t exist anymore?
Found the fed.
Not everything is encrypted. For example, the Server Name Indication (SNI), which tells the server the website address you want to connect to before the connection is encrypted, is not encrypted. This means that anyone can spy on your behaviour by the sites you visit.
Encrypted Hello encrypts that. Might be why it hasn’t taken off.
Yes but as far as I know, it’s only widespread with Cloudflare using websites.
In terms of cross-country/continental communication, this provides a bit more context on the current dependencies Canada faces. This is a great move in the right direction.
Since all the submarine cables from Canada but “Greenland Connect” go via Britain (another Five Eyes member and one who the Snowden Revelations showed were already back then doing bulk traffic surveillance on their submarine cable endpoints and giving that data to the US), just not routing internet traffic via the US will only transform America’s eavesdropping on Canadian Internet traffic with Europe from a direct process to a two-step process as they’ll still be getting the data via the UK instead.
If Carney is serious about avoiding American digital industrial espionage and kompromat gathering operations, then a submarine cable to Ireland or directly to continental Europe will be needed.
also Canada needs nukes.
ITS LITERALLY THE ONLY THING AMERICA UNDERSTANDS.
Hopefully we can also get sovereign internet services to our entire population. Where I live in NB, 20 minutes outside the capital city, the options are: overloaded and poor reception to Xplore fixed wireless (which was sold to a US company is 2022), strangled and under-invested DSL circa 1995 from Bell, or Starlink.
It’s fascinating how different access can be in places where Robellus aren’t the only options. I live in a town of 6000, 1+ hours away from any major centre and I get 1 gig fibre, all because of Sasktel.
It still amazes me how utilities can be privately owned. There’s literally no benefit to it.
I’m across the water from you in PEI. Same thing. I’ve got Bell fibre at my company in town, but my home is hooped for Canadian based internet. We HAD to go with Starfink because it is literally our only option outside of 2 Mbps DSL which is impossible given we need to do video meetings.
Granted, my house is in the woods in the boonies, but still. I hate giving money to Starfink.
Skeptical ye ol Carney will achieve this in his current term, it’s a lot of work to do, and even if he does I suspect this will just be another tool to track Canadians.
Now this is finally getting to core problems with American dominance in tech.
Cool, now fix internet and cell prices to match europe and asia. I do not give a shit where my encrypted traffic gets routed if it costs 5x as much as the rest of the world.
Awesome! Don’t a few undersea cables already route through Canada? That should make it easier!
Courtesy @derp@dbzer0.com
There are actually surprisingly few intercontinental submarine cables with an end-point in Canada and all of the ones to Europe go via Britain which, as shown by the Snowden Revelations, do bulk surveillance on everything going via the cables with end-points in Britain and pass that data to the US.
At first sight there seem to be only 2 “clean” submarine cables with end-points in Canada, one to Greenland and one to Japan.
Nova Scotia has a few and that one heading to Greenland too, right? It’s not perfect but it’s a good starting point and it’ll take only a few years to a decade to build these out. But your point about the eyes is valid.
But that’s not what they’re trying to prevent here, I think. They’re just trying to make it so that Canada is not dependent on US infra.
Busineswise, it makes sense that the one to Greenland when it was built did not need much capacity so it or at least its endpoints and routing in Canada and Greenland were probably not really designed to be able to take over a significant part of the traffic that goes to Europe via the US.
I might be wrong, it just makes sense to me for that to be the case from a systems design logic.
I thought that was the one that takes the financial data across at super speed? The one that shaved off a few milliseconds and it’s estimated that its value to financial ppl is in hundreds of millions per year?
I have no idea since I’m not Canadian.
Technically speaking, the bandwidth necessary for algorithmic trading is nowhere near that needed for bulk Internet traffic and generally in electronics (in this specific situation I’m thinking mostly of routing, though maybe it also applies whatever is used for maintaining long distance signal integrity in fiber, plus possibly single-mode vs multimode in fibre has transmission speed implications) if you’re trying to get the greatest speed possible you’re not going to get as much bandwidth since at the bleeding edge the optimizations done for one tend to have as tradeoff less of the other.
That said, this is all informed speculation (I worked in Finance, and have an EE Degree) rather than specific knowledge of that situation, so take it with a big pinch.
UBC has several big pipes, I’m sure there’s some on the East Coast too
