The issue here is that data reduced to paper form loses much of its usefulness. The effect is to take power away from the recipient of the data (and by extension in this case from you as a citizen) and conserve it in a government institution as much as possible. Unless the user is bloody-minded enough to re-enter it manually, which of course is only possible at a certain scale.
The Times Colonist has a particularly good opinion piece concerning authorities’ use of automatic license plate recognition. This technology was recently subject of an investigation in British Columbia, with the provincial information and privacy commissioner asserting that many of the current uses of the technology must stop. For more information, you can read the decision (.pdf) or some press coverage about the decision.
When speaking about authorities’ interests in retaining locational information about people who aren’t immediately of interest to police, the author of the opinion piece writes:
And the concept [of collecting such information] goes against the golden thread that winds its way throughout our justice system – the presumption of innocence unless proven otherwise. A person shouldn’t become the focus of an investigation just because he or she happened to drive along a certain street at a certain time.
But a person who hasn’t done anything wrong shouldn’t worry, right? Ask that to people whose lives have been ruined when they have been investigated or charged for a crime and later exonerated. That stigma of being the target of a police investigation is not easily erased, even when a person is cleared of all wrongdoing.
This latter paragraph – that the stigma of a false investigation can significantly alter a person’s life possibilities for an extensive period of time – is often forgotten about or glossed over when reporting on new policing surveillance practices. In an era where information is in abundance, and the attention span to monitor stories and issues is at a premium, a false charge may be legally overturned without the population more generally ever correcting their false impressions. This can create a long-standing disadvantage for falsely accused person as they try to carry on with their lives.
Moreover, the very potential that information could be used against you turns the (popular) understanding of guilt on its head: instead of authorities clearly linking a person’s presence at a location with a crime, it becomes the responsibility of each individual to demonstrate the innocence of being in place X at time Y. Given that these license plate scanners can capture where people are, at any time of the day, there isn’t a necessary reason that a person will know why they were at X at Y. While such oversights ought to be understood as the reasonable failings of a reasonable human’s mind, the danger is that an inability to justify one’s presence at a particular place could be taken as an indication of potential guilt. As a result of such ‘suspicious’ behaviour an individual who was just driving at the ‘wrong place’ at the ‘wrong time’ could be subjected to more intrusive police surveillance, simply because a scanner identified a person at a particular place at a particular time.
Fortunately, the privacy commissioner has significantly come out against this ubiquitous form of surveillance. Her stance should limit these dystopian risks of license plate scanners in her jurisdiction. Now it’s up to the authorities to respect the decision and mediate how and why they use the technology.
But first and foremost, Canada must get its own house in order. Thailand wasn’t the only country requesting that Google remove content; Ottawa did as well. What is most notable, and troubling, about Canada’s takedown requests is that an increasing number were not accompanied by a court order, but rather fell into Google’s category of “other” requests from the “executive, police, etc”.
This demonstrates that the government increasingly is bypassing formal and lawful processes in their attempts to get the compliance of private sector companies in their Internet censorship activities. Meanwhile, the government continues to resurrect Bill C30, despite widespread condemnation. The proposed electronic surveillance law would give the government unprecedented access to Canadians’ private online information without the requirement of a warrant.
If the Canadian government fails to respect freedom of expression, the right to privacy, and the rule of law in our own country, how can it expect other countries to do so in theirs?
Kieran Bergmann, “Throttling free speech, at home and abroad”
David Fraser has a terrific breakdown of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police’s recent argument for lawful access legislation. If you’re Canadian you should definitely check out what he has to say.
National mail carriers are important for loads of reasons, including legal protections around letters carried by them versus those carried by couriers. These mail carriers are far less agile than their private competitors and have been incredibly slow to recognize the need to change existing processes and practices. They desperately need to find new growth avenues to remedy declining gross and net revenues.
As a demonstration of how little Canada Post ‘gets’ the market and business it’s in today, we can turn to this comment:
Canada Post chief executive officer Deepak Chopra foresees a future in which consumers receive and pay their bills, get their paycheques, renew drivers’ licences, pay parking tickets, buy magazines and receive personalized ad pitches – all online, through ePost.
This isn’t a future: it’s the present. The only ‘future’ part of what he is outlining is that all these (already daily) functions would be routed through ePost. Unless Canada Post has an incredible value proposition – security, government mandates, or somehow implementing these functions better than existing services are mechanisms that immediately come to mine – I can’t see how the organization will exist in any semblance of what it is today, tomorrow.
An infographic that depicts surveillance creep under Bill C-30
A major challenge facing Canada’s “new” mobile companies is this: how can they extend network coverage across Canada to increase the utility of their product offerings? One way they address the challenge involves entering roaming agreements with incumbent carriers. As Wind Mobile is finding out, Rogers Communications is willing to both do the least possible to enable roaming and fight at the CRTC to maintain this minimal standard.
Specifically, from The Telecom Blog we find that
…Wind Mobile complained again to the CRTC stating that Rogers continues to discriminate against its roaming customers. Though RIM managed to muster support from the Consumer Association of Canada, the CRTC has ruled again in favor of Rogers. The upstart carrier claims that currently there’s no way for Wind subscribers to continue a live call when they hop onto Rogers network. The call is dropped and the subscribers are forced to redial.
Though Wind has been lobbying hard to get seamless roaming onto the Rogers network, the CRTC declined the request stating that “in view of its determination that RCP had not granted itself a preference, it would be inappropriate to deal with the issue of mandating seamless call transition.”
Needless to say, these are the actions of an incumbent doing what it can to limit the appeal of competitors’ products. The reason that Rogers wasn’t found to have granted itself a preference was because Rogers hadn’t rejigged their network in response to the roaming agreement: Rogers simply made the decision not to make technical improvements that would enable seamless live call transitions.
Much of the issue around transitions, and other telecom-related battles between incumbents and competitors in Canada, stem from the CRTC’s basic position that the Canadian telecommunications market should be directed by facilities-based competition. In other words, the position is (generally stated!) that competitors are recognized as temporarily needing access to incumbent networks when they first incorporate, but that the same competitors should build out their own infrastructure over time.
This CRTC’s preferred mode of competition is incredibly expensive and is arguably redundant; structural separation is postulated as one means of addressing the issue, as are spectrum sharing, and improved infrastructure sharing agreements that are driven by federal institutions’ fiats. Regardless of the particular solution you favour – if you see a problem as existing, in the first place! – something should be done to better enable new competitors in Canada. The CRTC theoretically attempts to promote market competition so that services are less costly for Canadians while simultaneously ensuring that offered services are of high quality and are efficient. Where something so basic as call transitions isn’t addressed, one has to wonder whether some federal institution shouldn’t be a lot more involved than they are in enabling competition in Canada’s mobile marketplace.
From the New York Time we find that American officials are campaigning for updates to CALEA, a surveillance bill that was passed in 1994. The officials claim updates are needed because
some telecommunications companies in recent years have begun new services and made system upgrades that caused technical problems for surveillance.
…
Albert Gidari Jr., a lawyer who represents telecommunications firms, said corporations were likely to object to increased government intervention in the design or launch of services. Such a change, he said, could have major repercussions for industry innovation, costs and competitiveness.
“The government’s answer is ‘don’t deploy the new services — wait until the government catches up,’ ” Mr. Gidari said. “But that’s not how it works. Too many services develop too quickly, and there are just too many players in this now.”
In essence, it appears that the US government is advocating for updates to their laws that are similar to provisions in Canada’s lawful access legislation. The tabled Canadian legislation includes provisions that preclude interception capabilities from degrading over time (Section 8), mandate that interception capabilities continue to meet government requirements as telecommunications services providers upgrade their services (Section 9), and require new software and product offerings to be compliant with interception demands (Section 11). It would seem that, without these provisos, CALEA is showing its age: ISPs are deploying services that ‘break’ existing wiretap capabilities and that it takes some time to restore those capabilities. ISPs innovate, and then surveillance catches up.
Of course, it’s useful to remember that none of the details surrounding the FBI’s problems in maintaining wiretaps is really made clear in the article. The sources that the reporter draws upon are primarily from law enforcement agencies and, as we have seen in Canada and in prior US legislative gambits, such agencies are prone to overstating problems and understating their complicity in generating/maintaining them. It’s also unclear just how ‘impaired’ investigations actually were. In essence, a full accounting of the alleged problems is needed, and the accounting ought to be public. If the American public is going to shell out more money for surveillance, and potentially endanger next-generation telecommunications services’ innovative potentials, then the government has to come totally clean about their allegations so that a rational and empirically-grounded debate can occur.
We recently learned that the Australian government had blocked Huawei from tendering contracts for Australia’s National Broadband Network. The government defended their position, stating that:
As such, and as a strategic and significant government investment, we have a responsibility to do our utmost to protect its integrity and that of the information carried on it.
Of note, internally Huawei had been a preferred choice but the company was ostensibly blocked for political/security, rather than economic, reasons. This decision isn’t terribly surprising given that American, Australian, and United Kingdom national intelligence and security agencies have all come out against using Huawei equipment in key government-used networks. The rationale is that, even were a forensic code audit possible (and likely wouldn’t be, on grounds that we’re talking millions of lines of code) it wouldn’t be possible to perform such an audit on each and every update. In effect, knowing that a product is secure now isn’t a guarantee that the product will remain secure tomorrow after receiving a routine service update. The concern is that Huawei could, as a Chinese company, be compelled by the Chinese government to include such a vulnerability in an update. Many in the security community suspect that such vulnerabilities have already been seeded.
Does this mean that security is necessarily the real reason for the ‘national security card’ being played in Australia? No, of course not. It’s equally possible that calling national security:
Moreover, simply because Australia isn’t tendering contracts from Huawei doesn’t suggest that whatever equipment is purchased will be any more secure. In theory, were Cisco equipment used to power the National Broadband Network then the American government could similarly compel Cisco to add vulnerabilities into routers.
In part, what this comes down to is who do you trust to spy on you? If you see the Americans as more friendly and/or less likely to involve themselves closely in your matters of state, then perhaps American companies are preferred over your economic and geographical next-door neighbours.
I should note, just in closing, that Huawei has contracts with most (though not quite all) of Canada’s largest mobile and wireline Internet companies. Having spoken with high-level governmental officials about security concerns surrounding Huawei’s equipment there seems to be a total lack of concern: just because GCHQ, NSA, and ASIO have publicly raised concerns about the company’s equipment doesn’t seem to raise any alarm bells or worries with our highest government officials.
Excited Pixels