On Tuesday, Interim Privacy Commissioner Chantal Bernier called for more surveillance disclosure and a rewrite of Canada’s privacy laws
Christopher Parsons, a postdoctoral fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs’ Citizen Lab, who studies state access to telecommunications data.Some of the recommendations in the report are similar to those made before – including a call for broader powers and more robust laws to allow watchdogs to do their job.
“Many of these suggestions the privacy commissioner has put forward are indicative of that office not being able to play its role. It doesn’t have the required powers to understand what’s going on in order to a) make things right or b) blow the whistle,” he said, later adding: “Should Canadians be concerned? Yeah. What the Commissioner’s office is saying is we do a good job, we do the best we can within our mandate, but our mandate is to narrow.”
Hopefully the Commissioner’s recommendations are implemented by the federal government given how pressing national security and signals intelligence issues have become.
Source: Experts weigh in on the state of Canadaâs spying rules
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