It’s now official law: Alberta bars can collect information on people they arbitrarily deem “problem patrons.” But before you freak out, though, there has actually been key progress on the matter in terms of our privacy rights, specifically regarding the new legal prohibition of photo-scanning of ID cards, which contain your personal information (including your signature). According to new rules set out by the Gaming and Liquor and Alberta Privacy Commission, bars can no longer make copies of our IDs. At all.

As the Calgary Herald put it, “The amendments allow establishments to ask patrons for identification as a way of verifying their age. Bars can also record a patron’s name and age and take their photo — but they can’t scan driver’s licences or other forms of ID.”

Although submitting to a photo as a condition of entry into an establishment is now completely illegal in B.C. — we haven’t gotten there yet — my main problem with this system has always specifically been the scanning of IDs, a practice which in every other sensible circumstance we’re told to guard against with extreme caution, and in no way prevents any crimes in already videotaped bars and clubs.

Though I’ve been sneered at as being needlessly “old school punk” by employees for resisting having a digital photocopy of our personal information in the brains of some strange computer, the province and the legal system disagree. We now no longer have to be in the uncomfortable position of asking a door worker why we should trust him with our IDs if he doesn’t trust us. Though their jobs are fraught with all sorts of ridiculous legal liabilities that come with babysitting the inebriated public, I won’t back down from my contention that they can do it just as well without the privacy intrusion and digital transmission over their networks. The bar-code scan is enough to determine a person’s age, after all. Write my name down all you like.

It’s a step. So next time someone tries to scan your ID, feel free to call the cops or Gaming and Liquor — it’s against Alberta rules.

Which brings us to a much more sinister cloud moving in, one which will potentially affect everyone who uses the Internet. Recent talks in Seoul, Korea by country-club government officials have been thrown in order to decide what to “do” exactly about this pesky Internet thing.

Pushed over the edge by desperate, shit-producing Hollywood and music industry lobbyists, these behind-closed-doors meetings are shaping the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which as a title is hardly contentious — who could object to stamping out counterfeiting? Unfortunately, a more appropriate title would be The Transformation of Internet Into Police State.

You can roll your eyes, but some of the actual suggestions the Obama administration, which is spearheading the treaty ratifications, wants kept secret for “national security” reasons are ferociously draconian. “We’re dealing with intellectual property agreements that are being treated as akin to nuclear secrets and that just doesn’t make any sense at all,” Ottawa law professor Michael Geist says. “Then, of course, there’s the content side of it. This week, they crossed the line into the realm of affecting individuals very, very directly.”

If this fucker goes through, Internet service providers like Shaw and Telus would by law be forced to enforce a “three strikes” rule, policing their own customers and cutting entire households — not just alleged infringers — off the Internet after three accusations of copyright violation. Basically, Flickr and YouTube could collapse under litigation, and again, “accusations,” not convictions. It is a complete cultural rout — one which would attempt to stop us even from sharing snippets of our common vernacular because we didn’t pay someone. Someone who gives CDs bad reviews could lose their right to quote lyrics, for example. I’m not kidding.

Of course, what will really happen — what always happens — is that the technology will evolve further underground. Pirates might trade music via USB connections instead of over the Net, for example. But since ACTA will be law as soon as possible in 2010, you might just want to hurry up and download The Complete Cultural Works of Humankind before next year, while it’s still technically legal in Canada.