Canada’s Federal government looks to build ‘cyber perimeter’ for ‘national security’ as P.M. Harper announces Canada to join the (TPP).

Federal government looks to build ‘cyber perimeter’ over ‘hostile threats’ to national security

OTTAWA — Online spying and other cyber threats have pushed the government to invoke a national security exemption on trade obligations, effectively banning foreign IT companies from working on a new federal telephone system in Ottawa.

It’s the first in a series of planned contracting restrictions intended to erect a “cyber perimeter” around the multibillion-dollar overhaul of the government’s vast and aging email, telecommunications, networking and data centre infrastructure.

“These systems have been the target of hostile threats which causes grave concerns about the implications of cyber threats on Canada’s national security,” warns a Public Works letter recently circulated to the IT industry.

A “national security exception” is typically invoked for military procurements and overrides trading obligations under the North American Free Trade Act, the World Trade Organization and the federal-provincial Agreement on Internal Trade.

Now, it’s being enlisted for what might escalate into a cyber Cold War, most notably with China.

The range of available restrictions under the exception include limiting competition to Canadian companies, a preference for Canadian goods and services, withholding highly sensitive information about how some systems operate, contracting only to pre-selected firms and requiring winning bidders to hold SECRET-grade security clearances.

“The government of Canada’s email, data centre and telecommunication systems are inextricably linked to one another; they are the key tools used in the creation, transmission/communication and storage of the government’s information, and must be appropriately protected in order to create a secure ‘cyber perimeter,’” Public Works said in a written statement Friday.

Jesse Kline:

Why we should open our borders to the world

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced this week that Canada will join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks, along with he United States, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, Mexico and, we hope, Japan. Some say this will be a historic free trade deal that will extend the NAFTA zone into emerging Asian markets; others believe the United States is using the process to impose its own draconian copyright regime on its trading partners, while protecting key industries, such as auto manufacturers. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

The problem is that the agreement is being negotiated under a veil of heavy secrecy. And if rumours that the negotiated sections of the agreement already contain over 1,000 pages prove to be correct, it is certain that the TPP will not give us anything resembling real free trade. Indeed, the Canadian public has little idea about what we are getting ourselves into, or how much the government knew about what it was agreeing to. Based on a leaked chapter of the agreement, it looks as though we just signed up for an entirely new copyright regime, a mere hours after the government passed its own made-in-Canada solution.

To the government’s credit, it is simultaneously pursuing trade deals with the European Union and China. But in these times of global economic uncertainty, we need to see the benefits of trade sooner, rather than later. Free trade leads to higher standards of living, and benefits society through lower prices and increased variety of consumer goods; it forces domestic industries to be more efficient. Fortunately, there is another way to achieve these benefits: The Canadian government could open our borders to the world by unilaterally removing all our trade barriers.

It is said that if you put ten economists in a room, you will get ten different opinions. But as Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman wrote in his essay The Case for Free Trade, “Economists often do disagree, but that has not been true with respect to international trade.”

The Shock Doctrine 2009

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism — the rapid-fire corporate re-engineering of societies still reeling from shock — did not begin with September 11, 2001.

The films traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today.

New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, shock and awe warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.