Here is a letter I wrote to my Member of Parliament (CC’d to Minister of Public Safety Peter Van Loan). It details my opposition to Bills C-46 and C-47, which will provide expanded online surveillance powers to law enforcement agencies:

Dear Mr. Woodworth,

I am writing to you in opposition to provisions in Bill C-46 (Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act) and Bill C-47 (Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act). Specifically, I am opposed to provisions that will allow law enforcement agencies to obtain subscriber information without judicial oversight. I am also opposed to the provisions that will force telecommunications companies (particularly small, third-party providers) to bear the financial burden of the acquisition and maintenance of traffic monitoring equipment.

Judicial oversight is an important feature of our legal system, and removing this requirement from even something as rudimentary as subscriber information can have a negative impact on citizens’ privacy. The lack of judicial oversight on such data collection would appear to be a green light to law enforcement to commence fishing expeditions on matters that may not have passed muster before a judge. The current government, through its former Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, had previously promised not to permit collection of this information without judicial oversight. The back-tracking on this matter is both puzzling and deeply concerning.

There are better ways of conducting such requests that would satisfy both privacy advocates and law enforcement agencies. One such solution to this problem would be to legislate some maximum turnaround time for search warrants of this nature, but to still maintain the vital judicial oversight. This would allow law enforcement to act quickly, but also ensure that each request is a necessary breach of citizens’ privacy and was not undertaken hastily and without due consideration.

Additionally, the provision compelling telecommunications companies to install equipment without corresponding provisions to fully fund such installations puts an unfair burden on the small Internet Service Providers to maintain the same set of equipment that their larger competitors must maintain. In such a competitive industry with such tight margins, this requirement could put many small providers out of business. As a very happy customer of one such small provider, I am extremely worried that these provisions will make their business model infeasible and provide further market dominance for the larger providers.

Sincerely,

Craig Radcliffe

So RSS has been popular on the web for about a bajillion years and table layouts have been passée for even longer. Yet Wilfrid Laurier University’s website still uses tables and still does not have RSS feeds for its news items. I’ve griped about this before, and attempted a primitive version of a screen scraper for the website, but changes to the site tended to break that version.

Using BeautifulSoup and PyRSS2Gen, both Python libraries, I’ve created a new screen scraper that should be fairly robust thanks to BeautifulSoup’s forgiving HTML parsing engine.

So far, the scraper produces RSS feeds for the main news page and the Physics and Computer Science department news page. Any other news pages on the Laurier site can be scraped by adding a line to the script file. Let me know if there’s a WLU news page you would like me to scrape.

RSS Feeds:
Main Page
Physics and Computer Science

Code:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
import os
import datetime
import time

import urllib2
import PyRSS2Gen
import BeautifulSoup

debug = False

def parsePage(url, filename):
    rss_items = []
    prefix = "http://www.wlu.ca/"
    document = urllib2.urlopen(url)
    souped_doc = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(document)
    main_title = souped_doc.head.title.contents[0]
    for table in souped_doc('table', 'news'):
        for tr in table('tr'):
            if tr.td is not None and not tr.td.has_key('colspan'):
                title = "".join([str(i) for i in tr('td')[1].a.contents])
                date = datetime.datetime(*(time.strptime(tr('td')[0].contents[0], "%b %d/%y")[0:6]))
                link = tr('td')[1].a['href']
                if not link.startswith("http"):
                    link = prefix + link
                guid = PyRSS2Gen.Guid(link)
                if debug:
                    print "Title: %s" % title
                    print "Date: %s" % date
                    print "URL: %s" % link
                    print "Guid: %s" % guid
                    print "===================="
                rss_items.append(PyRSS2Gen.RSSItem(title=title,
                                                   link=link,
                                                   description="",
                                                   guid=guid,
                                                   pubDate=date))
    output = PyRSS2Gen.RSS2(title=main_title,
                            link=url,
                            description="",
                            lastBuildDate = datetime.datetime.now(),
                            items=rss_items)
    output.write_xml(open(filename, "w"))

if __name__ == "__main__":
    parsePage("http://www.wlu.ca/news_listing.php", "wlu_main.xml")
    parsePage("http://www.wlu.ca/news_listing.php?grp_id=2", "wlu_physcomp.xml")