Author: Christopher Parsons

Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.

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Links

Postal Interception Coming to Canada?

The Canadian Senate is debating Bill S-256, ‌An Act to amend the Canada Post Corporation Act (seizure) and to make related amendments to other Acts. The relevant elements of the speech include:

Under the amendment to the Customs Act, a shipment entering Canada may be subject to inspection by border services officers if they have reason to suspect that its contents are prohibited from being imported into Canada. If this is the case, the shipment, whether a package or an envelope, may be seized. However, an envelope mailed in Canada to someone who resides at a Canadian address cannot be opened by the police or even by a postal inspector.

…

To summarize, nothing in the course of the post in Canada is liable to demand, seizure, detention or retention, except if a specific legal exception exists in the Canada Post Corporation Act or in one of the three laws I referenced. However, items in the mail can be inspected by a postal inspector, but if it is a letter, the inspector cannot open it to complete the inspection.

Thus, a police officer who has reasonable grounds to suspect that an item in the mail contains an illegal drug or a handgun cannot be authorized, pursuant to a warrant issued by a judge, to intercept and seize an item until it is delivered to the addressee or returned to the sender. I am told that letters containing drugs have no return address.

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, in 2015, raised this very issue (.pdf). They recognised “that search and seizure authorities granted to law enforcement personnel under the Criminal Code of Canada or other criminal law authorities are overridden by the [Canada Post Corporation Act], giving law enforcement no authority to seize, detain or retain parcels or letters while they are in the course of mail and under Canada Post’s control.” The result was the Association was resolved:

that the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police requests the Government of Canada to amend the Canada Post Corporation Act to provide police, for the purpose of intercepting contraband, with the ability to obtain judicial authorization to seize, detain or retain parcels or letters while they are in the course of mail and under Canada Post’s control.

It would seem as though, should Bill S-256 pass into law, that seven or eight years later some fairly impressive new powers that contrast with decades of mail privacy precedent may come undone.

Categories
Quotations

On The Principles of Fundamental Justice

Section 7 protects against the deprivation of an individual’s life, liberty and security of the person unless done in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. These include the principles against arbitrariness, overbreadth and gross disproportionality. An arbitrary law is one that impacts section 7 rights in a way that is not rationally connected to the law’s purpose. An overbroad law is one that impacts section 7 rights in a way that, while generally rational, goes too far by capturing some conduct that bears no relation to the law’s purpose. A grossly disproportionate law is one whose effects on section 7 rights are so severe as to be “completely out of sync” with the law’s purpose.

Government of Canada, Bill C-27 Charter Statement

I like how tight and punchy the Government of Canada frames the principles of fundamental justice in its Charter statements. I’m familiar with each concept though, admittedly, through a different (academic) lens. I suspect that this framing will help me to have more fulsome and productive interactions with legislative drafters in the future.

Categories
Photo Essay Photography Writing

Which Photo (Or Three…) Best Represents 2022?

‘Til Pandemic Does Us Part | Excluded Audience | Amour by Christopher Parsons

Neale James, host of the Photowalk, challenged the ‘Extra Milers’ to look through our pictures and find one (or three…) which really spoke to our 2022. It could be a best photograph, or one that captures some memory or another, or really anything…the question was deliberately left pretty open to interpretation.

It served as a good experience for me. I went back through the past 11 months of images and, in the process, was reminded of numerous photos and experiences I’d forgotten about.

The first image (“‘til Pandemic Does Us Part”) speaks to how seriously some were still taking the pandemic much earlier in the year.

‘Til Pandemic Does Us Part by Christopher Parsons

The second (“Excluded Audience”) is very similar to an image I made in early 2020 which defined that stage of the pandemic in Toronto for me. “Excluded Audience” is meant to call back to that image and showcase that while things were going back to normal as the year progressed, that normal isn’t necessarily positive for everyone in the city. I’ve also included that reference image (“Down But Not Out”) below, after the set, just to indicate what I was trying to call back to.

Excluded Audience by Christopher Parsons

The final image of the year in this set (“Amour”) is meant to document how things are, today, with those in love able to see and hold one another amongst crowds once more. As a set, I think they have a symmetry in story and composition across them.

Amour by Christopher Parsons

And, finally, the reference image really just captures what Toronto was like in the early days of the pandemic when the entire downtown core had just shut down in its entirety.

Down But Not Out by Christopher Parsons

In terms of process for selecting photos, most years I start by reviewing images that I posted to social media that year, which in 2022 has been Glass. From the 300-365 images I work down to 30 images or so that best tell the story of the year. However, using this process I miss some photos that I really like but haven’t uploaded and, at the same time, include some images in the sort that I’ve somewhat fallen out of favour with since posting them.

All of which is to say: I think that going through and taking the time to review/re-examine all the images we’ve taken over a year is a splendid exercise, and especially because there’s a bit of time between when an image was captured and now. For me, at least, this helped to surface work that resonates more today than I think that it did when I first made it.

How do you go through and review your photos annually? What’s your best photo or photo set of the year, and what’s the story behind them?

Categories
Writing

Apple To More Widely Encrypt iCloud Data

Photo by Kartikey Das on Pexels.com

Apple has announced it will begin rolling out new data security protections for Americans by end of 2022, and the rest of the world in 2023. This is a big deal.

One of the biggest, and most serious, gaping holes in the protections that Apple has provided to its users is linked to iCloud. Specifically, while a subset of information has been encrypted such that Apple couldn’t access or disclose the plaintext of communications or content (e.g., Health information, encrypted Apple Notes, etc) the company did not encrypt device backups, message backups, notes generally, iCloud contents, Photos, and more. The result is that third-parties could either compel Apple to disclose information (e.g., by way of warrant) or otherwise subvert Apple’s protections to access stored data (e.g., targeted attacks). Apple’s new security protections will expand the categories of protected data from 141 to 23.

I am very supportive of Apple’s decision and frankly congratulate them on the very real courage that it takes to implement something like this. It is:

  • courageous technically, insofar as this is a challenging thing to pull off at the scale at which Apple operates
  • courageous from a business perspective, insofar as it raises the prospect of unhappy customers should they lose access to their data and Apple unable to assist them
  • courageous legally, insofar as it’s going to inspire a lot of frustration and upset by law enforcement and government agencies around the world

It’ll be absolutely critical to observe how quickly, and how broadly, Apple extends its new security capacities and whether countries are able to pressure Apple to either not deploy them for their residents or roll them back in certain situations. Either way, Apple routinely sets the standard on consumer privacy protections; others in the industry will now be inevitably compared to Apple as either meeting the new standard or failing their own customers in one way or another.

From a Canadian, Australia, or British government point of view, I suspect that Apple’s decision will infuriate law enforcement and security agencies who had placed their hopes on CLOUD Act bilateral agreements to get access to corporate data, such as that held by Apple. Under a CLOUD bilateral British authorities could, as an example, directly serve a judicially authorised order to Apple about a British resident, to get Apple to disclose information back to the British authorities without having to deal with American authorities. It promised to substantially improve the speed at which countries with bilateral agreements could obtain electronic evidence. Now, it would seem, Apple will largely be unable to assist law enforcement and security agencies when it comes to Apple users who have voluntarily enabled heightened data protections. Apple’s decision will, almost certainly, further inspire governments around the world to double down on their efforts to advance anti-encryption legislation and pass such legislation into law.

Notwithstanding the inevitable government gnashing of teeth, Apple’s approach will represent one of the biggest (voluntary) increases in privacy protection for global users since WhatsApp adopted Signal’s underlying encryption protocols. Tens if not hundreds of millions of people who enable the new data protection will be much safer and more secure in how their data is stored while simultaneously restricting who can access that data without individuals’ own knowledge.

In a world where ‘high-profile’ targets are just people who are social influencers on social media, there are a lot of people who stand to benefit from Apple’s courageous move. I only hope that other companies, such as Google, are courageous enough to follow Apple at some point in the near future.

  1. really, 13, given the issue of iMessage backups being accessible to Apple ↩︎
Categories
Links Writing

Who Benefits from 5G?

The Financial Times (FT) ran a somewhat mixed piece on the future of 5G. The thesis is that telecom operators are anxious to realise the financial benefits of 5G deployments but, at the same time, these benefits were always expected to come in the forthcoming years; there was little, if any, expectation that financial benefits would happen immediately as the next-generation infrastructures were deployed.

The article correctly notes that consumers are skeptical of the benefits of 5G while, also, concluding by correctly stating that 5G was really always about the benefits that 5G Standalone will have for businesses. This is, frankly, a not great piece in terms of editing insofar as it combines two relatively distinct things without doing so in a particularly clear way.

5G Extended relies on existing 4G infrastructures. While there are theoretically faster speeds available to consumers, along with a tripartite spectrum band segmentation that can be used,1 most consumers won’t directly realise the benefits. One group that may, however, benefit (and that was not addressed at all in this piece) are rural customers. Opening up the lower-frequency spectrum blocks will allow 5G signals to travel farther with the benefit significantly accruing to those who cannot receive new copper, coax, or fibre lines. This said, I tend to agree with the article that most of the benefits of 5G haven’t, and won’t, be directly realised by individual mobile subscribers in the near future.2

5G Standalone is really where 5G will theoretically come alive. It’s, also, going to require a whole new way of designing and securing networks. At least as of a year or so ago, China was a global leader here but largely because they had comparatively poor 4G penetration and so had sought to leapfrog to 5G SA.3 This said, American bans on semiconductors to Chinese telecoms vendors, such as Huawei and ZTE, have definitely had a negative effect on the China’s ability to more fully deploy 5G SA.

In the Canadian case we can see investments by our major telecoms into 5G SA applications. Telus, Rogers, and Bell are all pouring money into technology clusters and universities. The goal isn’t to learn how much faster consumers’ phones or tablets can download data (though new algorithms to better manage/route/compress data are always under research) but, instead, to learn how how to take advantage of the more advanced business-to-business features of 5G. That’s where the money is, though the question will remain as to how well telecom carriers will be able to rent seek on those features when they already make money providing bandwidth and services to businesses paying for telecom products.

  1. Not all countries, however, are allocating the third, high-frequency, band on the basis that its utility remains in doubt. ↩︎
  2. Incidentally: it generally just takes a long, long time to deploy networks. 4G still isn’t reliably available across all of Canada, such as in populated rural parts of Canada. This delay meaningfully impedes the ability of farmers, as an example, to adopt smart technologies that would reduce the costs associated with farm and crop management and which could, simultaneously, enable more efficient crop yields. ↩︎
  3. Western telecoms, by comparison, want to extend the life of the capital assets they purchased/deployed around their 4G infrastructures and so prefer to go the 5G Extended route to start their 5G upgrade path. ↩︎
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Aside

Which Three Terms Describe Yourself?

I can see my life by way of several extended moments and, over time, how I’d describe myself has changed and expanded—from perhaps just one term to two—and deepened insofar as the descriptions arguably better articulate who I am.

For the past several months I’ve been reflecting on the terms that likely best briefly describe me. As it stands, I think that the current stage of my life is best captured as: policy wonk, street photographer, and Torontonian. And not necessarily in that order!

Each term speaks to less what I aspire to be—there are lots of terms I could use there!!—and more to who I am, by way of the actions I undertake on a daily or at least highly regular basis.

What three terms best describe you, today?

Categories
Aside Writing

The Future of How I Share Links

man wearing vr goggles
Photo by Harsch Shivam on Pexels.com

There’s a whole lot happening all over social media and this is giving me a chance to really assess what I use, for what reason, and what I want to publish into the future. I’ve walked away from enough social media services to recognize it might be time for another heavy adjustment in my life.

Twitter has long been key to my work and valuable in developing a professional profile. I don’t know that this kind of engagement will be quite the same moving forward. And, if I’m honest, a lot of my Twitter usage for the past several years has been to surface and circulate interesting (often cyber- or privacy-related) links or public conversations, or to do short-form analysis of important government documents ahead of writing about them on my professional website.

The issue is that the links on Twitter then fade into the digital ether. While I’ve been using Raindrop.io for a while and really love the service, it doesn’t have the same kind of broadcast quality as Twitter.1

So what to do going forward? In theory I’d like to get back into the habit of publishing more link blogs, here, about my personal interests because I really appreciate the ones that bloggers I follow and respect produce. I’m trying to figure out the format, frequency, and topics that makes sense; I suspect I might try to bundle 4-6 thematic links and publish them as a set, but time will tell. This would mean that sometimes there might be slightly busier and slower periods, depending on my ability to ‘see’ a theme.

The challenge is going to be creating a workflow that is fast, easy, and imposes minimal friction. Here, I’m hoping that a shortcut that takes the title and URL of an article, formats it into Markdown using Text Case, and then provides a bit of space to write will do the trick. This is the format I used to rely on to create my Roundup posts, though I don’t really expect I’ll be able to return to such length link blogs.

Update Nov 2023: I have really just leaned into sharing notable links using my through Raindrop.io RSS feed, especially as social media services have fragmented all around us.

  1. I have, nonetheless, created an RSS feed with mostly links to privacy, cyber, and national security articles. ↩︎
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Aside

2022.11.16

Trying out the new AirPods Pro 2 and the fit with the smallest sized earbuds is far superior to the previous version. I still need to assess if they’re going to work longer term but I can’t manage to shake them loose, they don’t fall out when I’m eating something, and they don’t dislodge after walking outside for 20 minutes or so. My longer weekend photowalk will probably help clarify if I’ll keep them or return them.

Categories
Aside

2022.11.11

A whole generation of journalists and semi-public individuals (myself included) are watching one of the ways we communicated with one another, and developed as professionals, is negligently being burned down. And so a lot of electrons are being tortured into describing our collective experiences.

My question, though, is this: what is the next system or platform that younger generations will use? Will it be YouTube or TikTok or is there another, still very small or yet to be created, platform that will do the same? Will we see a recursion back to things like Tumblr or blogs and RSS more generally? Will newsletters or email become a thing?

I’m genuinely curious while, simultaneously, a bit sad that a service that I’ve very successfully used to propel my career is almost certainly in steep decline.

Categories
Links Writing

Generalist Policing Models Remain Problematic

From the New York Time’s opinion section, this piece on“Why the F.B.I. Is so far behind on cybercrime?” reinforces the position that American law enforcement is stymied in investigating cybercrimes because:

…it lacks enough agents with advanced computer skills. It has not recruited as many of these people as it needs, and those it has hired often don’t stay long. Its deeply ingrained cultural standards, some dating to the bureau’s first director, J. Edgar Hoover, have prevented it from getting the right talent.

Emblematic of an organization stuck in the past is the F.B.I.’s longstanding expectation that agents should be able to do “any job, anywhere.” While other global law enforcement agencies have snatched up computer scientists, the F.B.I. tried to turn existing agents with no computer backgrounds into digital specialists, clinging to the “any job” mantra. It may be possible to turn an agent whose background is in accounting into a first-rate gang investigator, but it’s a lot harder to turn that same agent into a top-flight computer scientist.

The “any job” mantra also hinders recruitment. People who have spent years becoming computer experts may have little interest in pivoting to another assignment. Many may lack the aptitude for — or feel uneasy with — traditional law enforcement expectations, such as being in top physical fitness, handling a deadly force scenario or even interacting with the public.

This very same issue plagues the RCMP, which also has a generalist model that discourages or hinders specialization. While we do see better business practices in, say, France, with an increasing LEA capacity to pursue cybercrime, we’re not yet seeing North American federal governments overhaul their own policing services.1

Similarly, the FBI is suffering from an ‘arrest’ culture:

The F.B.I.’s emphasis on arrests, which are especially hard to come by in ransomware cases, similarly reflects its outdated approach to cybercrime. In the bureau, prestige often springs from being a successful trial agent, working on cases that result in indictments and convictions that make the news. But ransomware cases, by their nature, are long and complex, with a low likelihood of arrest. Even when suspects are identified, arresting them is nearly impossible if they’re located in countries that don’t have extradition agreements with the United States.

In the Canadian context, not only is pursuing to arrest a problem due to jurisdiction, the complexity of cases can mean an officer spends huge amounts of time on a computer, and not out in the field ‘doing the work’ of their colleagues who are not cyber-focused. This perception of just ‘playing games’ or ‘surfing social media’ can sometimes lead to challenges between cyber investigators and older-school leaders.2 And, making things even more challenging is that the resources to train to detect and pursue Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) are relatively plentiful, whereas economic and non-CSAM investigations tend to be severely under resourced.

Though there is some hope coming for Canadian investigators, by way of CLOUD agreements between the Canadian and American governments, and the updates to the Cybercrime Convention, both will require updates to criminal law as well as potentially provincial privacy laws to empower LEAs with expanded powers. And, even with access to more American data that enables investigations this will not solve the arrest challenges when criminals are operating out of non-extradition countries.

It remains to be seen whether an expanded capacity to issue warrants to American providers will reduce some of the Canadian need for specialized training to investigate more rudimentary cyber-related crimes or if, instead, it will have a minimum effect overall.

  1. This is also generally true to provincial and municipal services as well. ↩︎
  2. Fortunately this is a less common issue, today, than a decade ago. ↩︎