Tag: Canada

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Why can’t, or won’t, your phone company detail data it shares with the feds?

From the Globe and Mail:

Canadians have “no way of knowing for certain the number, scale, frequency of, or reasons for, such disclosures, although we understand that they are substantial.”

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The companies that responded to Citizen Labber Christopher Parsons included Bell, Rogers, Shaw, Telus, Videotron, Cogeco, Eastlink, MTS Allstream and Distributel, with the general sentiment that the privacy of their customers is of great concern. But their responses were short on details, instead citing vagaries about legal restrictions and national security, and in some cases shifting the onus on transparency to the government instead.

According to David Fraser, a Canadian privacy lawyer and partner with the firm of McInnes Cooper, “They’re able to provide a whole lot more information than they actually are.”

Further pressure on the companies to make it clearer just how, why, and how often they share information with state agencies.

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Sensitive personal information revealed in smartphone metadata, study finds

The ability to draw similarly revealing information about Canadians’ lives is just as possible, said Christopher Parsons, a post-doctoral fellow specializing in privacy and surveillance issues at the Citizen Lab at Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

The debate over the secret interception of digital, transactional records from smartphones and mobile devices, including their locations, numbers called, duration and Internet sites browsed, extends beyond the claimed security intelligence needs of the CSE and the massive, bulk metadata collection practised by the NSA.

Parsons believes some Canadian telecommunications companies could use metadata to deliver advertising and sell consumer intelligence to marketers. “Canadian companies do recognize this kind of data as a place to make money,” he said. “There is clear value in it.”

Sensitive personal information revealed in smartphone metadata, study finds
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Internet firms play coy on how they share info with police, government

Via the Ottawa Citizen:

Internet companies have hung up on a call by privacy advocates to reveal the extent to which they share subscriber information with police, security services and government.

 

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Some ISPs don’t cave when asked for subscriber info, says report

IT World Canada:

A Canadian privacy and security group isn’t impressed with the answers it got from Canadian Internet service providers about their policies on

 

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Telecoms evasive on how they co-operate with spies, police: researchers

The Spec:

Privacy advocates say they’re disappointed with vague responses from Canadian telecommunication companies about when and how they hand customer information to police and security agencies.

 

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Internet firms play coy on how they share info with police, government

Ottawa Citizen:

Internet companies have hung up on a call by privacy advocates to reveal the extent to which they share subscriber information with police, security services and government.

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The Murky State of Canadian Telecommunications Surveillance – The Citizen Lab

On January 20, 2014 the Citizen Lab along with leading Canadian academics and civil liberties groups asked Canadian telecommunications companies to reveal the extent to which they disclose information to state authorities. This post summarizes and analyzes the responses from the companies, and argues that the companies have done little to ultimately clarify their disclosure policies. We conclude by indicating the subsequent steps in this research project.

The most recent posting about our ongoing research into how, why, and how often Canadian ISPs disclose information to state agencies.

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2014.2.14

Politicians are welcome to do strange things at home –read a book for pleasure, think for themselves–as long as they do it in private and nobody finds out. A politician who does random things in public, in front of cameras and microphones, is not merely departing from the disciplined advancement of a political idea, he is undermining it.

Paul Well, The Longer I’m Prime Minister
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U of T steps into Internet privacy conversation

In the post-Snowden era of Internet privacy, Parsons and others are continuing the often difficult and unpopular work of pulling back the veil of government surveillance. Students across the country, continent, and indeed, the world, are aware of the new status quo, but may not have considered the full privacy implications of increased access to information online. It is, unfortunately, easy to ignore the droning of television anchors or the frequently updated headlines of news sources as they appear on Facebook and Twitter, especially when the medium lends itself to distraction. The irony, of course, is that as these stories appear, they are swiftly buried under an infinite stream of online information.

From the editorial board at The Varsity, U of T’s student newspaper.

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2014.2.11

Each Five Eyes partner collects information over a specific area of the globe in accordance with their national priorities, but their collection and analysis activities are orchestrated to the point that they essentially act as one. Precise assignments are not publicly known, but research indicates that Australia monitors South and East Asia emissions. New Zealand covers the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. The UK devotes attention to Europe and Western Russia, while the US monitors the Caribbean, China, Russia, the Middle East and Africa.

As it did during the Cold War, Canada’s arctic territory provides considerable sigint advantage. Canadian Forces Station Alert, on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, was originally an arctic weather station, but began sigint duty by eavesdropping on northern regions of the Soviet Union in 1958. Alert remains active today, collecting information from the interior of Russia and China.20 Other Canadian sigint assets reach into Latin America and out into the North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans.

James Cox, “Canada and the Five Eyes Intelligence Community(.pdf)”