Contributed by: evilscientist
With the revelation that it was the Harper Conservatives and not the Liberals that were using a US company to phone voters during the last election one question remains unanswered. What information did the Conservatives give this company? This is important since US law requires US companies to provide their databases of personal information to the US government on request.So at the least this company knows the names, phone numbers and voting intentions of the voters it contacted. So there's nothing stopping the US government from knowing the same thing. So if for some reason the US government doesn't like who you've voted for, they can make things difficult for you at the border.
This isn't a new problem as provincial governments have had to scramble to come up with new ways of maintaining confidential government and medical records if a US company had a contract to maintain those records electronically. Since the problem isn't new one wonders why the Tories outsourced this information to another country with the full knowledge that any info they handed to their US contractor had the potential to end up in the hands of the US government. Does this mean that they cared more about winning than the potential privacy issues they will cause with all the voters that they gave the info for? Or does it mean something more sinister, that the Harper Government is already sharing that information with their US counterparts? Given the pretensity of the Harper Government to spying on Canadians (Bill C-30 for example) one can suspect that this is already happening and thus they have no concerns about the privacy of the voters they had called from their US contractor.
Now before the con-bots come through and suggest "well everyone does it" as they do, since at least in this case this not every one is doing it. There has been no evidence that either the Liberals or NDP used US companies in the last election. Thus this argument falls flat on that alone. Not to mention, aren't the Harper Tories supposed to be better than the others? If they're not, why should I or anyone vote for them?
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Evilness
http://www.evilscientist.ca/article.php?story=20120319105900977