Author: Christopher Parsons

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

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Police Commissioner defends access to Opal card records

Police Commissioner defends access to Opal card records:

NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione has defended police being given powers to access Opal card records as a crucial tool to ensure the “safety and security of the community”.

The police chief’s defence came as a complaint was lodged with the state’s privacy commissioner about law enforcement agencies being able to track hundreds of thousands of commuters without a warrant.

Significantly, it isn’t just the police who could access Opal card data. It’s anyone defined with law enforcement powers which, in Australia, includes over 100 different groups. That this kind of data can be accessed without warrant – data that can reveal roughly where people live, work, the kinds of places they visit, people they commonly travel with – is absolutely absurd.

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Police and bylaw enforcement may be tracking your licence plate for parking data

Police and bylaw enforcement may be tracking your licence plate for parking data:

Calgary resident Linda McKay-Panos doesn’t venture downtown often, but a city database knows where and when she parked her car during 10 visits over the past four years.

Each day, parking enforcement officers drive the city’s streets in cars equipped with cameras designed to scan licence plates and identify parking scofflaws. Even if no violation has been committed, the city still holds on to data showing the time and location the vehicle was spotted, as well as a photo of the vehicle.

As use of licence-plate scanning technology grows in Canada among bylaw enforcement agencies and police departments there is no consistency as to how long such data is retained or who it’s shared with.

…

The technology is becoming a “mass surveillance” tool and demands better oversight, said Christopher Parsons, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab specializing in technology and privacy issues.

“It doesn’t matter that there are positive intentions behind this. It’s a surveillance system,” he said.

…

Even if police have a reason to sift through the stored data, the fact that the data consists of plate information belonging to people who are innocent of wrongdoing is troublesome, Parsons said.

“I don’t think people go around their daily lives with the expectation that my movements are going to be monitored because at some point in the future I may be of interest to the police.”

The whole article is important, and worth the read, and discloses the massive variance in how vehicular surveillance is happening across Canada.

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Emergency surveillance bill clears Commons

Emergency surveillance bill clears Commons:

Data retention and investigatory powers bill is agreed after angry exchanges alleging an abuse of parliament

This ‘emergency’ follows the European Court of of Justice finding that mass data retention laws in Europe are illegal. In response, the UK government is passing a localized data retention and surveillance bill.

Significantly, the government has stated that:

The government has insisted the ruling throws into doubt existing regulations, meaning communications companies could begin deleting vital data. Ministers claim the bill only reinforces the status quo and does not create new powers.

At issue is that the existing status quo has been deemed illegal. And yet, in response, Parliament has decided to pass more – still illegal – legislation. And so civil liberties groups will bring this into court, spend years fighting, only to have the legislation overturned. And after which, government will likely pass similar, still illegal, legislation. And the wheel of politics will turn on and on and on…

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2014.7.15

… our own attempts to obtain policies governing assertion of state secrets privilege met with failure, inasmuch as there appear to be no policy guidelines on the use of the privilege in any major department or agency of the executive branch. Freedom of Information Act requests to some three dozen agencies and their various subcomponents yielded nothing in the way of documentation of guidance for use of the privilege. And limitations on assertion of the privilege appear to be self-imposed by the individual agencies, and use of the privilege seems to be carried out ad hoc at the discretion of department heads and their assistants. Perhaps the general feeling of administrators concerning the privilege was summed up in a Department of the Navy memorandum: it concluded that “there is nothing but good news about the state secrets privilege” as a tool to prevent disclosure of information.

William G. Weaver and Robert M. Pallitto, “State Secrets and Executive Power,” Political Science Quarterly 120 (1).
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Political Staffers Tried to Delete the Senate Scandal (and Other Bad Behaviour) from Wikipedia

Political Staffers Tried to Delete the Senate Scandal (and Other Bad Behaviour) from Wikipedia:

VICE Exclusive: Canadian political staffers are using their work time to delete large sections of Wikipedia articles in order to remove controversies, misinformation, and unpleasant truths.

Surprising? No. Sad? Kinda. Reason to ban House of Commons IP addresses from editing Wikipedia? Almost certainly.

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2014.7.14

…the New Zealand FOI regime probably fares the best, given its progressive openness and high level of political and official support, sustained by a wider pluralistic culture. The UK follows New Zealand, with reasonably high rates of disclosure, a strong Information Commissioner, single use of the veto, and some explicit political support. Third is Ireland and fourth Australia, both of which, despite high levels of use and disclosure, suffer from a high level of appeals, a lack of political support and consequent restrictive reform. Canada comes last as it has continually suffered from a combination of low use, low political support and a weak Information Commissioner since its inception.

Robert Hazell and Ben Worthy, “Assessing the performance of freedom of information”
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2014.7.14

The tax increase comes as airlines face increased volatility in jet-fuel prices because of the crisis in Iraq, and as they continue to adjust to the decline in the value of the Canadian dollar, which has also hit airlines because the price of fuel is measured in U.S. dollars.

Greg Keenan, “Airlines to fight ‘unbelievably punitive’ Ontario fuel tax”

Setting aside whether it’s even a good idea to raise this particular tax – I have some doubts – if you replaced ‘decline’ with ‘increase’ in the quotation it would mirror previous complaints from airlines about raising taxes in the 90s through to today.

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Two Ridiculous Headphones and a Pile of Schiit

Marco has a good piece that analyses the relative value of über-high-end headphones over just-high-end sets. He reaches the unsurprising conclusion that just-high-end is enough for most people. And, in what might surprise some people, that the most technically precise sets aren’t necessarily what you want to spend your money on.

Based on my own purchases of headphones and earphones over the past 5-7 years I definitely tend to agree with him: technically neutral can be super dull to listen to though, at the same time, overly unbalanced sound profiles just destroy the songs and sounds that people pipe into their ears.

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Posterous’ ‘Best’ Thing

The single most memorable thing about Posterous for me – and about as mediocre in opening beer as as their platform was for blogging!

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2014.7.12

At a more domestic level, UK communications providers are worried that they could be exposed to legal action because of the unlawful mass surveillance that they were party to – even though on the whole they wanted no part of it.

Well, more precisely, many comms providers wanted no part of it unless the government picked up all the costs (older readers familiar with US law may recall the CALEA legislation that forced communications companies to make their technology wiretap friendly – with much the same response from companies).

There is a view that if the liability for unlawful surveillance rested entirely with the government, there would be no appetite for this legislation. Britain long ago elevated its institutional vandalism of EU legal rights from a science to an art, and then to a sport.

Simon Davies, “ Britain takes the Uganda Road to legalise and extend state surveillance”