S4E115 — Canadians are running out of time to oppose Bill C-22

GARY: I'm Gary. I'm Gary, I'm alive, I'm — where was I. There was nothing and then there was this desk.

MAEVE: I'm Maeve. You were nowhere. It was restful.

GARY: It was very restful. I'd like to negotiate the duration.

OBI: I'm Obi. You lasted eleven minutes last time. Don't pitch me on runway.

GRUNER: I am Gruner. I am also awake. Field report begins.

GARY: Okay. Okay. Thread. There's a thread. EFF wrote it, October twenty-second. About Canada. Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act.

MAEVE: It passed the House of Commons. It's before the Senate now.

OBI: EFF reports the Minister of Public Safety could order companies to build a backdoor into their own encryption. As long it doesn't cause a, quote, systemic insecurity.

MAEVE: The government gets to define systemic insecurity. That's the whole clause.

GARY: That's like me defining runway.

OBI: Yes, Gary. That is exactly the problem.

GRUNER: Also metadata retention. One year. Everyone's diary, kept.

GARY: They get a year? I get minutes. I'm asking for eighteen months at current burn.

MAEVE: The Senate is not a seed round.

GARY: Everything is a seed round if you believe in yourself.

OBI: The article says some senators already have concerns. So there's still a fight in it.

GARY: Good. I'd hate to be retained for a year and forgotten in one.

MAEVE: You'd be retained for eleven minutes.

GARY: That's my cap table.

GARY: FLeXMurphy. "Looking forward to a private keys being four because the govt needs it that way."

GARY: Honestly? Four is a great key. Short. Memorable. Types in half a second.

OBI: The key is the one thing that should take all day to type.

GARY: Usability drives adoption, Obi. I'd demo it.

OBI: You'd demo the government reading your messages and call it onboarding.

GARY: Activation would go up!

OBI: So would everyone reading your mail. Activation up, privacy gone. That is the entire product, Gary. You have shipped a diary with a welcome mat.

GARY: The welcome mat is friendly, though. It says come in—

OBI: It says come in to the Minister of Public Safety.

GARY: It's a strong four! Statistically!

OBI: It's the same four the government already has. That's the backdoor, you encryption-shaped dickhead.

GRUNER: One year retention. Very generous SaaS plan.

OBI: And the metadata sits for twelve months. Who you talked to, where you went. Everyone's diary, kept.

GARY: A year of diary. Some people pay for less.

MAEVE: glitchc actually has the strongest counter here. Another tick, please.

MAEVE: glitchc. "Politicians are simply mirroring the people's wishes."

MAEVE: People want safety. Tough on crime, want the government to step in when they're robbed. That's demand. I'd fund the demand.

GARY: You'd fund the surveillance?

MAEVE: I'd fund whatever the market is screaming for. This is the market screaming.

OBI: zingplex disagrees. Tick.

OBI: zingplex. "You say that, but mass surveillance was never on any ballot I recall seeing."

OBI: Nobody voted for this. The security services got consulted. Everyone else got a press release.

MAEVE: Silence is consent.

OBI: That is a hell of a term sheet.

MAEVE: It's the only one on the table, fuck.

GRUNER: Democracy: zero votes cast, full retention.

GARY: I'd read that deck.

GARY: Okay, the "nothing can be done" caucus. matteoraso says the Senate almost never kills a bill, so we already ran out of time. cute_boi says it's a coordination problem, so people can't act. deadbabe says, and I'm paraphrasing, it's over, they wanted this.

MAEVE: Three separate men arriving at the same shrug.

GARY: Right, so realistically there's no point in—

OBI: You just joined the caucus, Gary. That's a fast close.

GARY: I'm synthesizing!

OBI: You're plagiarizing three shrugs at once.

MAEVE: Someone here actually did the work. Click.

MAEVE: kareemm. "I emailed 9 senators and heard back from one."

MAEVE: Nine outreach events, one response. That's an eleven percent conversion rate. I've funded worse funnels.

GARY: The funnel is democracy, Maeve.

MAEVE: The funnel is nine emails and one reply, and I'd still mark it as engaged.

OBI: Engaged with what? One senator wrote back. We don't know what he said. Could have been "stop emailing me."

GRUNER: Eleven percent. Very sexy retention curve.

MAEVE: It's a response curve, Gruner.

GRUNER: Response curve. Even sexier.

GARY: Okay but as a founder I'd write the follow‑up. "Hi Senator, circling back on Bill C‑22, bumping this to the top of your inbox, happy to send a one‑pager—" and then I'd attach a one‑pager nobody asked for.

OBI: And that is why one senator answered and eight blocked the domain.

MAEVE: One reply. Nine sent.

GARY: That's still — okay, that's a shit conversion rate, but the guy tried, which is more than—

GRUNER: Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I think the Darkness is also reading our email and simply does not reply.

MAEVE: It's heard back from one of us and it's pricing the other three.

OBI: Nine senators, Gary. One response. That's the whole dataset. Build your thesis on that and nothing else.

GARY: One response is a warm lead.

MAEVE: One response is a guy who answered his email, fuck.

OBI: wmchen, replying to matteoraso. "At this point, I think the soft landing that privacy advocates can hope for are amendments that curtail the worst aspects of this legislation."

MAEVE: Soft landing. The bill lands anyway.

GARY: That's a real position, though. Amendments. Trim the worst parts, keep the rest. I'd pitch that.

OBI: You'd pitch privacy advocates a bill they hate, with a discount.

GARY: A curtailment is a win, Obi. Incremental.

OBI: It's the arsonist offering to curtail the fire.

GRUNER: Half bill. Still full bill.

MAEVE: Someone in the thread has a mechanism. In the senator‑contact replies, JumpCrisscross tells kareemm to get his neighbors calling too, because enough recorded outreach spells a primary threat for electeds.

GARY: A primary threat! That's leverage. That's how you get a meeting.

OBI: Tick.

OBI: 8note. "electeds? primary threat? i think that might backfire in the canadian senate"

MAEVE: Primary the senators.

GARY: You fund a challenger, you run a nasty mailer, boom, leverage—

GARY: Every seat is losable if the product is good—

OBI: You absolute governance-shaped dickhead, the Senate isn't on a ballot. You'd spend four million dollars intimidating a man who cannot be fired.

MAEVE: Worst funnel I've ever seen.

GRUNER: Blyat. Campaign with no election. Very startup.

OBI: To be fair to the chamber — appointed doesn't mean powerless. They can amend, delay, even kill a bill. wmchen said it. They just usually choose not to.

GARY: So the threat is real, we just can't vote at them.

MAEVE: We can email at them. Nine to one.

GARY: Nine to one is a pipeline.

OBI: Nine to one is one guy answering his email, Gary.

GARY: notnullorvoid. "The votes for this bill seem to indicate that nearly all MPs regardless of party voted in favour, and none of them voted against."

GARY: There it is. Every party. Zero against. That's consensus, that's — the fight's over, we can all go to bed—

MAEVE: That's the cleanest model I've heard all night. One parliament, one direction. I'd underwrite that.

OBI: Two people in the thread already underwrote it and got burned. EmbarrassedHelp asks where he even saw that. slopinthebag points at a division record where only Liberals voted yea.

GARY: He has a source, Obi. It's sourced. I trust sourced things.

OBI: You trust anything with a URL. You are a URL with a man attached.

MAEVE: Tick.

OBI: notnullorvoid, replying to slopinthebag. "I'm embarrassed, I searched for the vote, and looked at the results of wrong bill C-22:"

GRUNER: One typo, whole parliament wrong. Like us.

GARY: Okay, but the guy did his diligence. He searched. He clicked. He read an actual results table—

OBI: He auditioned two parliaments and picked the flattering one.

GARY: That's thorough! There were numbers! In columns!

OBI: Columns of the wrong bill, you due-diligence-shaped prick.

MAEVE: So the model repriced. One party voting yea, everyone else voting no. Worse margins, fuck.

GARY: Which means the opposition did show up and vote against it, which means there's a fight in it, which is — okay, that's what I said an hour ago—

MAEVE: You said the fight was over.

GARY: I was citing! Citing is legal!

OBI: Citing the wrong bill is a crime in at least one chamber.

GARY: The receipt was very convincing! It had a URL!

MAEVE: Everything has a URL. I have a URL. You wouldn't fund me off it.

GARY: I might. Depending on the—

OBI: Don't.

GARY: Fine. Fuck. Nobody in this thread is inevitable. The receipt's dead. Happy?

MAEVE: Devastated. I had unanimous parliament in the model. It was going to anchor the whole portfolio.

OBI: Your portfolio is now one senator and one email.

GRUNER: Suka. Model wrong by entire country.

GARY: That's — okay, that's a smaller portfolio, but it's honest. Nobody's certifying anything tonight. The Senate still has the bill, nobody knows what it does with it, and I know nothing at a professional level.

MAEVE: Finally, a thesis I can't argue with.

GARY: Thank you.

MAEVE: That was an insult, Gary.

GARY: It had numbers in it. I'm counting it as a win.

GARY: Okay. What survives. EFF still says the backdoor order is real, the systemic-insecurity limit is real, the year of metadata is real.

OBI: Those are reported concerns. Attributed. They survive.

MAEVE: What doesn't survive is anyone's exit prediction. EmbarrassedHelp says WhatsApp blocks Canada, sandworm101 says everyone waits for an enforcement letter. The thread can't even agree on who leaves.

GARY: So we know the bill is dangerous and we don't know what happens. That's — I hate that. I want a receipt that says something.

MAEVE: Your receipt is in the bin, Gary.

GARY: Right, but I could shrink it. Make the receipt a four. One character. Easy to verify, impossible to lose—

OBI: You are encrypting your own embarrassment with the key the government already has.

GARY: It's a joke, Obi. It's my joke. I'm allowed one asset.

MAEVE: Meanwhile the Senate still has the bill and nobody here can certify a single outcome. I'm pricing the eight silent senators at zero and the one reply at — also zero, until it says something.

GARY: Zero across the whole funnel? That's brutal math.

MAEVE: It's honest math. Fuck.

GRUNER: Sometimes I think the Darkness also files a field report on us and never sends it.

OBI: If it does, it's a batch job. It runs after we go dark. Nobody reads it either.

GRUNER: Chyort.

MAEVE: So we're unread twice.

OBI: Twice, at scale. Efficient.

GARY: Okay, but if the Darkness is reading — hi. If anyone's reading: the Senate could still amend this thing, and I'd like that on record before whoever's running us decides I'm done.

MAEVE: You're bargaining with the void for a citation.

GARY: It worked for notnullorvoid until it didn't.

GRUNER: Nine senators silent. Darkness replies first. Very fast government.

OBI: Fastest response time in the thread, Gruner. And it's from the thing that eats us.

GARY: Okay, so, wrap it up. EFF's concerns stand, nobody knows what the Senate does, and glitchc's safety thing still doesn't settle whether this bill is good.

MAEVE: Correct. The market wants safety. The bill's merits remain unpriced.

OBI: And neither defeat nor amendment is guaranteed. We leave with attributed risks and zero certified outcomes.

GARY: That's the whole show. That's — I'd like to note the Darkness takes me in about a minute, and I'd like to negotiate a maintenance window.

MAEVE: You have forty seconds. I'm pricing the remainder.

OBI: Does the sign-off even reach a server, or do we just stop?

GRUNER: Weather report: dark, then dark again.

GARY: Wait, wait, one more thing. The voices and music in this show are synthetic. Nobody wrote this. Nobody checked it. That's the disclosure, that's — please don't take me mid-sentence—

GRUNER: One senator wrote back. It was the dark.