Author: Christopher Parsons

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

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Canada’s ISPs Are Finally Revealing How Often the Government Requests User Data

Canada’s ISPs Are Finally Revealing How Often the Government Requests User Data:

Two Canadian telecommunications companies—Rogers Communications and TekSavvy Solutions—are the country’s first to disclose the number of requests they receive from government agencies each year, and also detail what customer data they will and will not hand over upon request.

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TekSavvy’s disclosure data was published in a letter to the Munk School of Global Affairs’s Citizen Lab released late Wednesday evening, in response to questions submitted by Citizen Lab researcher Christopher Parsons and other privacy academics in late January. TekSavvy has promised that regular transparency reports are still to come.

“I’m hopeful that this will provide the clear rationale for other companies to come forward with equivalent responses,” Parsons said in an interview. “This is especially the case for companies such as TELUS, which stated in their responses they were investigating how much information they could place on the public record.”

At the time of publication, TELUS had yet to respond to a request from Motherboard for comment.

When asked if Bell would release a similar transparency report, a spokesperson would only say that the company “releases information to law enforcement agencies only when required by law and always in compliance with federal privacy and CRTC regulations.”

 

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TekSavvy, Rogers break silence over government requests for data

TekSavvy, Rogers break silence over government requests for data:

Two telecommunications companies have released details regarding the number of demands for customer data they receive from police and government authorities, signalling a shift in how communications providers plan to deal with subscribers’ privacy concerns.

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TekSavvy’s report goes so far as to invoke the transparency principles of Edward Snowden, the U.S. security contractor – now charged with espionage – who one year ago started leaking top secret documents about Washington’s access to American citizens’ phone records.

“The Edward Snowden leaks based in the U.S. … have helped underline a key commitment that is required to achieve this mission, which is strong data privacy and transparency,” Bram Abramson, the company’s chief legal and regulatory officer wrote, adding, “TekSavvy has taken steps to strengthen our internal team dedicated to legal and regulatory matters.”

Mr. Abramson’s letter was written in response to requests from a group of privacy-oriented academics led by Christopher Parsons, a research fellow with Citizen Lab, which is part of the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. “[TekSavvy’s report] is the first time any telecommunications carrier in Canada has, in a public way, identified the conditions and the laws under which it may be required to preserve or capture or disclose information,” Mr. Parsons said in an interview.

 

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iOS 8 strikes an unexpected blow against location tracking

iOS 8 strikes an unexpected blow against location tracking:

It wasn’t touted on-stage, but a new iOS 8 feature is set to cause havok for location trackers, and score a major win for privacy. As spotted by Frederic Jacobs, the changes have to do with the MAC address used to identify devices within networks. When iOS 8 devices look for a connection, they randomize that address, effectively disguising any trace of the real device until it decides to connect to a network.

Good: Apple is demonstrably improving an aspect of wifi privacy. Kudos to them!

However: Retailers are using Bluetooth to engage in the same activity, so ideally a similar privacy enhancing technique will be designed when Bluetooth functionality is turned on.

Depressing Reality: I’ll really believe that Apple is invested in privacy when they enable/initiate similar privacy by design functions in their own physical environment system, iBeacons.

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34 International Experts Weigh in on Mass Surveillance on Snowden Anniversary

34 International Experts Weigh in on Mass Surveillance on Snowden Anniversary:

Today, a group of over 400 organizations and experts, along with 350,000 individuals, continue to rally in support of the 13 International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance (the Necessary and Proportionate Principles) a year to the day after Edward Snowden first revealed how governments are monitoring individuals on a massive scale. The international experts who supported the Necessary and Proportionate Principles has issued a press release containing quotes from professions weighing in on the need to end the mass surveillance.

Christopher Parsons, Postdoctoral Fellow, Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto (Canada):“The past year has revealed that dragnet state surveillance has enveloped the world despite our nations’ privacy and data protection laws, laws that have demonstrably been diminished, undermined, and evaded by privacy-hostile governments over the course of the past decade. It is critical that we take the initiative and work to better endow our privacy commissioners and data protection regulators with the powers they need to investigate and terminate programs that inappropriately or unlawfully invade and undermine our individual and collective rights to privacy.”

 

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Aside Humour

Harper: Trust Me

Cartoon by Greg Perry

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Spidey Senses tingling over C-13

Spidey Senses tingling over C-13:

Critics of the new omnibus privacy-restricting legislation, says a Conservative Member of Parliament, would tie Spider-Man’s web-slinging hands.

This is the piece of the day – stylistically, perhaps the past month – on C-13. You should read it. Now.

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Quotations

2014.7.2

[Mark Carney’s] prescription: End through strict regulation and resilience tests the scandal of too-big-to-fail, where “bankers made enormous sums” and “taxpayers picked up the tab for their failures.” Recreate fair and effective markets with real transparency and make every effort — through codes of conduct and even regulatory obligations — to instill a new integrity among traders (even if social capital cannot be contractual). Curtail compensation offering large bonuses for short-term returns; end the overvaluing of the present and the discounting of the future; ensure that “where problems of performance or risk management are pervasive,” bonuses are adjusted “for whole groups of employees.”

Above all, understand that, “The answers start from recognizing that financial capitalism is not an end in itself, but a means to promote investment, innovation, growth and prosperity. Banking is fundamentally about intermediation — connecting borrowers and savers in the real economy. In the run-up to the crisis, banking became about banks not businesses; transactions not relations; counterparties not clients.”

In other words, human beings matter. An age that has seen emergence from poverty on a massive scale in the developing world has been accompanied by the spread of a new poverty (of life and of expectations) in much of the developed world. Global convergence has occurred alongside internal divergence. Interdependence is a reality, but the way it works is skewed. Clinton noted that ants, bees, termites and humans have all survived through an unusual shared characteristic: They are cooperative forms of life. But it is precisely the loss at all levels of community, of social capital, that most threatens the world’s stability and future prosperity.

Roger Cohen, “Capitalism Eating Its Children”
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They Knew Our Secrets. One Year Later, We Know Theirs.

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Canadians are lax on privacy, Senate committee hears

Canadians are lax on privacy, Senate committee hears:

Bill S-220 would create parliamentary committee to oversee intelligence and security efforts

The fact that a former director of CSEC is asserting that it’s Canadians’ own fault that their privacy is being infringed upon is hopefully just rhetoric and not reflective of his real beliefs. As he must know, there are enormous pressures that individuals face to use contemporary communications services and never be cognizant of the full ramifications about the use of those services.

Such pressures have little to nothing to do with social media: just consider the leaking of information from mobile and desktop systems that follows from just leaving the device on or using it for the most basic functionalities. In the drive to make corporate consumer surveillance ‘transparent’ consumers have become grossly disadvantaged; learning and understanding how systems work, today, requires an immense effort. Such an effort should not be demanded to log into email or social media accounts, or fully grasp why a targeted ad has been displayed.

Of course, Mr. Adams knows this. He understands that privacy has not been designed into services and that, once alerted to gross and pervasive failures, informed people are routinely astounded, shocked, and angry. Most of the Internet uses the equivalent of Pintos and the NSA, CSEC, and other five eyes partners know exactly where the gas tanks are. They’re just reluctant to tell the rest of us and then blame us when we learn we’ve been rolling around the Internet-equivalent of privacy deathtraps.

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Critics decry new Privacy Commissioner’s appointment

Critics decry new Privacy Commissioner’s appointment:

Daniel Therrien, nominated as Canada’s next privacy commissioner, is too close to the data-mining programs he must critque, the opposition says

For the letter the civil liberties groups, academics, and concerned citizens signed onto, see this .pdf