Author: Christopher Parsons

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

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Google to deploy 180 low-orbit satellites that provide Internet access

Google to deploy 180 low-orbit satellites that provide Internet access:

Billion-dollar project will complement Google’s balloons and drones.

It would be particularly interesting to see if Google tried to marry its satellites with its Loom project, to the effect of not having to integrate Loom balloon networks with known censorious ISPs in various countries around the world. If Google could  overcome technical and regulatory hurdles it could, by routing through space, try to proxy data access via ‘open’ Internet nations. Of course, this would mean that Google would become the ‘real’ pipe to the Internet itself…

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Quotations

2014.7.1

The lack of teaching skills means we are supporting institutions that not only don’t do what we idealize them to do, they don’t value and professionalize the things that we expect them to do well. In fact, we have gone to extremes to prevent the job of university teaching from becoming a profession. The most obvious example is hiring adjunct professors. These are people who are hired for about the same wage as a fast food server, and are expected to teach physics or philosophy to 18 year olds. They don’t get benefits or even long-term contracts. So, in effect, they never get the chance to develop into highly skilled teaching professionals. Instead, they spend most of their time worrying about heating bills and whether they can afford to go to the doctor.

Now, of course, universities will argue that they are research organizations. And that is true. Universities do value research over teaching. Meaning that tenured and tenure-track professors, even if they love teaching, cannot prioritize it, because their administration requires them to be good researchers. Indeed, if you admit that you are a middling to average researcher and want to focus on teaching, you become viewed a burden by your department.

Yet, for the great majority of people, their only interaction with a university is through the people doing the teaching. It’s as if a major corporation, say General Motors, decided that their public face would not be their most visible product—hello Chevy Volt—and instead decides to place the janitorial service front and center. Then, just to top it off, decided not to train the janitors.

Chris Lee, “Universities can’t fulfil the myth, but they can’t become a vocational school either”
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On Creating a Prototype Transparency Notice

On Creating a Prototype Transparency Notice:

… the traditional website privacy policy is failing to protect the interests of online consumers. The argument was based on the idea that the privacy policy’s main goal was to protect the owners of the site, and that it had been mis-sold as a vehicle for better consumer information.

Instead, we put forward the idea of a transparency statement, as a device solely dedicated to informing visitors, principally about how their information is treated. When writing the article, we had no idea really what the transparency statement would look like, but of course the immediate challenge coming back was to produce one.

I think everyone who’s reasonable can agree that privacy policies are an insufficient way of informing individuals about how their personal information is collected, retained, used, and disclosed. But I don’t think that a ‘transparency notice’ is quite the response either. I also have no real clue as to what the appropriate solution really should be…

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Privacy Levels

One (user-friendly) way of considering a gradient of ‘privacy levels’ for the Internet. Certainly a reasonable way of thinking about things generally.

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A Three Front Legal Campaign: CSEC, Metadata and Civil Liberties – National Security Law Blog –

A Three Front Legal Campaign: CSEC, Metadata and Civil Liberties:

There are now three lawsuits in Canadian courts related to the Communications Security Establishment Canada’s intercept of metadata.  These are:

  • BC Civil Liberties Association’s action for a declaration in BC Superior Courtalleging that CSEC’s intercept activities violate sections 8 and 2 of the Charter.
  • BCCLA’s class action in Federal Court, brought “in order for those persons whose private communications and/or metadata have been intercepted to have access to remedies under s.24 of the Charter once the issues of the unconstitutionality of the impugned provisions, Authorizations and Directives are resolved in the [BC Supreme Court] Declaratory Action”.
  • Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA)’s application for a declaration in Ontario Superior Courtthat sections 7 and 8 of the Charter are violated by those provisions in the FederalPersonal Information and Protection of Electronic Documents Act(PIPEDA) that permit government agencies (including, it is alleged, CSEC) to obtain personal information from Canadian telecommunications companies with prior judicial authorization.

These cases overlap.  The BCCLA class action is intended to be derivative of its BC Superior Court declaratory action.  The CCLA case seems likely to engage the question of a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy of metadata in the possession of third party telecommunications providers.  That question must inevitably also arise in the BCCLA declaratory action.

If you track surveillance and national security issues in North America you know that litigation of these issues has been ongoing and active in the United States. An oft-heard critique of Canada has been ‘where is the litigation?’ As Craig Forcese notes, there are a series of important actions ongoing in Canada that may significantly affect how our signal intelligence agency conducts its business on behalf of Canadians.

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Here’s Proof Canada Is Snooping on People’s Twitter Accounts

Here’s Proof Canada Is Snooping on People’s Twitter Accounts:

The government logged all those “asshole” tweets directed at Vic Toews.

I’m am increasingly impressed with the length, clarity, and directness of Vice’s tech reporting in Canada. It’s quickly becoming one of the best sources in Canada for this kind of news.

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The Pressure’s On Harper to End Online Spying — Let’s Keep it Up

The Pressure’s On Harper to End Online Spying — Let’s Keep it Up:

And let’s not forget that criticism of the online spying bill comes from across the political spectrum. We’ve seen leading figures from the NDP, the Liberals, and the Green Partyall speak out against this reckless online spying plan. None of this would have happened without you and tens of thousands of other Canadians taking action to pressure decision-makers. And our own Steve Anderson is planning to take your voices directly to leading MPs. Steve is currently scheduled to testify on June 3 before key MPs on the Parliamentary committee examining Bill C-13 – we’ll let you know early next week how you can help shape Steve’s testimony.

That’s not all. In the past few days alone we’ve seen two major efforts from members of Canada’s largest-everPrivacy Coalitionto curtail the government’s out of control spying. First, coalition members at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association joined with leading expert Dr. Chris Parsons to announce alandmark constitutional challengeto the parts of Canada’s privacy legislation that enable the government to obtain our private information without a warrant.

Second, dozens of top privacy experts, supported by pro-privacy groups including OpenMedia.ca, launched the Ottawa Statement on Mass Surveillance – a set of high-level proposals to rein in out-of-control government spying for once and for all. (Learn more and sign on to the Statement here)

A good summary piece of the actions taking place in opposition to contemporary Canadian government surveillance practices. There’ll be another piece coming out in a while that’s even more comprehensive: it’s actually pretty amazing how much is going on in Canada post-Snowden once you list it all!

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Declaration on mass surveillance calls for new privacy measures

Declaration on mass surveillance calls for new privacy measures:

One of the voices behind a new declaration on mass surveillance says Canada needs a commission of inquiry to ensure governments and corporations respect privacy in an era of big data.

While I’m sympathetic to the sentiment behind the Ottawa Statement, I remain unclear about how useful it is – when presenting the Statement to the media – to state that the current government of the day is unlikely to listen to anything the signatories have signed off on. If that’s the case, then what is the aim of the Statement itself?

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The Internet Is Burning

The Internet Is Burning:

Online security is a horrifying nightmare. Heartbleed. Target. Apple. Linux. Microsoft. Yahoo. eBay. X.509. Whatever security cataclysm erupts next, probably..

One of the better, more cogent, recent articles on the hell that is contemporary Internet security.

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RCMP use of data may spark probe

RCMP use of data may spark probe:

Canada’s privacy watchdog is considering a formal review into the RCMP’s use of Canadians’ personal data gleaned from telecom and Internet companies without a warrant. The potential review comes after the Mounties admitted to Parliament in April that they do not track how often requests are made for “basic subscriber information” from telecom and Internet service providers.

At this point, there is a Supreme Court of Canada case concerning warrantless disclosure of data, a constitutional challenge being mounted against the section of Canadian commercial privacy law authorizing such disclosures, newspaper editorials calling for a Royal Commission on Spying (based, in part, on these warrantless disclosures), along with additional (related) legal, policy, and advocacy efforts to reform contemporary surveillance in Canada. Something in the current regime has to give.