Homolka said, “If you want to convict my husband, just unscrew the light socket.
However, the American dailies reported from the trial, and their stories leaked across the US-Canadian border on Usenet. This caused a big Canadian upwelling of resentment that this American free speech doctrine was going to undermine our ability to convict this serial killer.Īt first I thought, “This is a legitimate Canadian policy priority that is being undermined by the US and by the Internet, and maybe there is some scope here for regulation or something.” But what we learned during her trial from Usenet was that the police had done a remarkably bad job of searching their house.
Her trial was open, but there was a press ban to prevent a mistrial later when Bernardo went to trial. She claimed that she had been coerced into it through physical abuse by him, and in exchange she was given a very light sentence. He had bleached the walls of the house and had been very careful about covering his crimes. Homolka agreed to testify against him. She was the wife of serial killer Paul Bernardo. When they were arrested, the police couldn’t find any forensic evidence. I think the watershed was the fight about the Karla Homolka murder trial. Simon Willmetts recently sat down with Doctorow in Los Angeles to discuss his thoughts on this post-Snowden age. Perhaps because he is both an activist (he ran the European wing of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and set up the UK Open Rights Group) and an author, his novels celebrate the idea that individuals can bring about change and use technology to overcome the surveillance state. Not only does it - like Doctorow’s other novels - break down for the lay public in accessible prose the range of surveillance practices and technical capabilities at the US government’s disposal - precisely the kind of conversation Snowden, Poitras, and Glenn Greenwald would be having over the next few days - but the book’s central plot is about a young and technically gifted idealist who goes public with secret evidence that incriminates the national security state’s repressive practices.ĭoctorow follows in a long tradition of novelists who have examined the implications of mass surveillance, but his message is more empowering than many writing on technology today. They settled upon a tried and tested method: a book cipher.Īnyone who has read Doctorow’s Homeland will understand immediately why Poitras settled upon it. After communicating via technical encryption for months, the pair had decided that a more analog method of encoding their discussions might prove necessary. When Laura Poitras flew to Hong Kong to meet Edward Snowden, she brought a copy of Cory Doctorow’s novel Homeland.
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