There are judges available by telephone 24/7 in this country. If you believe...unless it's an emergency. Every telecommunications providers will give information when it's clearly identified to be an emergency exigent circumstance—kidnapping, all the imminent threats to life—so if you can convince them of that, that's fine. Absolutely. And they should hand it over.
But everybody does need to think, in terms of their actions, whether they're cooperating with law enforcement or cooperating with somebody else, whether other legal interests are implicated. Certainly the only person who would be suing in that circumstance would be the suspect. Are they likely to sue? That's probably part of the calculus they would make in deciding that, and that's probably part of the calculus that a number of Canadian telcos have made in deciding whether or not they're going to hand over information about their customers without a warrant. Really, somebody who's accused of child pornography is going to have to go to court and sue us: what's the likelihood of that happening? But I don't think we should take that principle and extend it to everybody.
Certainly if the police were to say they were really interested in what reporters are talking to people on the Hill, so they ask every telco to give them all the calling records of every member of Parliament, they can lawfully ask for that, and perhaps the telcos can lawfully hand that over, but should they be absolutely immune from being complicit in that sort of behaviour? I don't think so. So it's a matter of degrees in a lot of these cases.