Obscuritus.ca A nerd making a nerdy blog

Boomerang Routing and Canadian Sovereignty

This is based on a specific of the Canadian Elections Act. This is a specific thing that luckily no longer exists - since it was a weird and problematic part of an election. However, it was also a a question of what we are. The purpose of the rule was mostly to deal with the ripples of time throughout the size of Canada - allowing people to make their vote without knowledge of what's happened in the past. Which makes sense. BUT it does mean that there were issues when Canada was using these rules.

OK, important and kind of nerdy tangent. Bell doesn't peer inside Canada, which is a weird and complicated thing - but specifically means that Bel causes all of their packets to pass into the US whenever you connect to another point in Canada. Another related issue is that Elections Ontario (and presumably Elections Canada) uses Bell for connectivity. This observation is based on my time with Elections Ontario - and it would be good to confirm that this is the case. However, the other large ISP, Rogers also peers mostly outside Canada (importantly they do peer in Toronto, so that's good).

Now, we also know that all packets that traverse the Canada/US border are picked up by the NSA.

Therefore, Canada made it illegal for Canadians to transmit electoral results to persons outside of their electoral district - but - at the same time - showed all of them to persons in the US.

Is that something we're ok with?