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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.

…

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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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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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

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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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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.