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