Tag: Government

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The Canadian Government Wants to Pay More People to Creep Your Facebook

The Canadian Government Wants to Pay More People to Creep Your Facebook:

But government social media monitoring could very easily cross over into a legal gray area. Christopher Parsons, a cybersurveillance researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, said the collection of personal data from online sources needs to be rigorously justified, and even when it is, the data needs to be handled and stored safely.

“The government can’t just collect information about Canadians—even from public sourced data repositories such as social media—just because it wants to,” said Parsons in an email to me. “There have to be terms set on the collection, handling, disclosure, and disposal of personal information that the government wants to gather. As a result, even when data is collected for legitimate reasons that doesn’t mean the data can then be used in any way that the government (subsequently) decides.”

Strict oversights into how the government gleans and uses this intelligence—even in the service of testing policy reactions, as Parsons thinks this service will likely do—is required.

According to Parsons, that comes in the form of internal “privacy impact assessments” related to the specific social media surveillance program.

“Government agencies are supposed to conduct such assessments before collecting Canadians’ personal information and explain the specifics of how and why they will collect Canadians’ personal data,” said Parsons.

…

In the medium term, it appears Canadians can count on more of their tweets to be sucked up into a government social media surveillance system—then potentially shared across government departments.

Parsons told me that the sharing of the personal data of Canadian, in general, is only becoming more pervasive across government agencies.

“There has been a marked increase in the sharing of personal data between and across different departments because information is initially being collected for vague or far-sweeping reasons. Were social media information collected for similarly vague reasons then the government could then try to expansively share collected information across government,” he said.

 

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Press Release: CCLA Challenges Constitutionality Of Privacy Legislation « Canadian Civil Liberties Association

Toronto –  The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) has launched a constitutional challenge to parts of the federal privacy legislation that effectively permits private companies to engage in warrantless disclosure of personal information to government. The challenge is part of CCLA’s ongoing work in the areas of privacy, national security, and accountability in law enforcement, and comes in the wake of recent revelations that telecommunications service providers provide government agencies with customer information on a massive scale.  CCLA’s General Counsel, Sukanya Pillay, described the court challenge as “a way to protect the privacy rights of Canadians and ensure accountability across the board.”

CCLA is challenging parts of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) that allow private corporations to disclose their users’ personal information to a government institution (including law enforcement agencies) for a number of reasons including national security and the enforcement of any law of Canada, any province or a foreign jurisdiction.  While law enforcement may have a need to access some personal information in a narrow set of circumstances, the current law is too broad and should be struck out.  The consequences of government accessing and sharing personal information without an individual’s knowledge or consent, can be very serious and violate fundamental constitutional rights.  The fact that information is being obtained from the private sector further complicates things.  As CCLA’s General Counsel stated:  “Non-state actors are playing an increasingly large role in providing law enforcement and government agencies with information they request.  The current scheme is completely lacking in transparency and is inadequate in terms of accountability mechanisms.”

CCLA’s legal challenge asks that provisions of PIPEDA be struck as an unconstitutional violation of the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.  CCLA brings this challenge to create the impetus for change necessary to effectively protect the privacy rights of individuals.

Click here to read CCLA’s Notice of Application.

Press Release: CCLA Challenges Constitutionality Of Privacy Legislation « Canadian Civil Liberties Association

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Accountability and Government Surveillance | Technology, Thoughts & Trinkets

I’ve been busy parsing a nice hefty government document that documents a lot of federal agencies’ surveillance practices the past few days, and my post on “Accountability and Government Surveillance” is the result. It’s admittedly long but is fairly interesting. Go read!

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Quotations

2013.8.1

When members of the intelligence community brief Congress on highly classified programs, they’re incentivized to do so in a way that provides the necessary amount of detail to satisfy legal and administrative requirements, and not a shred more. Since most members of the intelligence committees aren’t experts, an imbalance is built into the system. The briefers will use technical language, knowing that members often can’t share with their staffs enough information to develop follow-up questions. Members know this and tend to be the alert for weasel words or any hints or indications that there are depths to the particular program that might not be visible in a briefing. The less trust there is between institutions, the more games are played in the briefings. These games have become endemic, which for oversight is troubling. The less trust we have in government, the more likely it is for freelancers and hobbyists, people who traffic in classified information that is expressly often pulled from its context, to decide whether to publish secrets. Don’t blame this on the lone wolves. Blame it on the gatekeepers for failing to maintain credibility.

Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry
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Aside Quotations

Government photograph databases form the basis of any police facial recognition system. They’re not very good today, but they’ll only get better. But the government no longer needs to collect photographs. Experiments demonstrate that the Facebook database of tagged photographs is surprisingly effective at identifying people. As more places follow Disney’s lead in fingerprinting people at its theme parks, the government will be able to use that to identify people as well.

In a few years, the whole notion of a government-issued ID will seem quaint. Among facial recognition, the unique signature from your smart phone, the RFID chips in your clothing and other items you own, and whatever new technologies that will broadcast your identity, no one will have to ask to see ID. When you walk into a store, they’ll already know who you are. When you interact with a policeman, she’ll already have your personal information displayed on her Internet-enabled glasses.

Soon, governments won’t have to bother collecting personal data. We’re willingly giving it to a vast network of for-profit data collectors, and they’re more than happy to pass it on to the government without our knowledge or consent.

Bruce Schneider, “The Public/Private Surveillance Partnership”

It’s the ability for government to prospectively combine public and private data that makes American laws such as CISPA, which would permit the disclosure of private information to public bodies without absent warrant requirements, so significant. Privacy legislation serves as a necessary friction to delay, limit, and prevent governments from accessing citizens’ and resident aliens’ personal information unless such access is absolutely necessary: we need to strengthen such laws to preserve basic democratic freedoms, not weaken or erode them.

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Quotations

2013.5.21

In 2010 and 2011, many discounted and differentiated Julian Assange from mainstream journalists by comparing him to a spy or foreign agent, despite the fact that he was just doing what every major US journalism organization does: publishing leaked classified information in the public interest.

Well, the government alleges in Rosen’s case that he acted “much like an intelligence officer would run a clandestine intelligence source” and communicated his “clandestine communications plan.” This is reminiscent of a disturbing House Judiciary hearing last year where the committee’s lead witness compared the New York Times’ David Sanger to a spy, saying he “systematically penetrating the Obama White House as effectively as any foreign agent.”

By that language, the government is arguing journalism is now akin to spying, no matter if its WikiLeaks or the mainstream press.

Trevor Timm, “Virtually Everything the Government Did to WikiLeaks is Now Being Done to Mainstream US Reporters”
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Aside Humour

Canada or Child Pornographers?

SFU OpenMedia.ca, Facebook timeline photos

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Quotations

2013.2.10

It saddens me that America’s so-called government for the people, by the people, and of the people has less compassion and enlightenment toward their fellow man than a corporation. Having been a party myself to subsequent legal bullying by other entities, I am all too familiar with how ugly and gut-wrenching a high-stakes lawsuit can be. Fortunately, the stakes in my cases were not as high, nor my adversaries as formidable as Aaron’s, otherwise I too might have succumbed to hopelessness and fear. A few years ago, I started rebuilding my life overseas, and I find a quantum of solace in the thought that my residence abroad makes it a little more difficult to be served.

Bunnie Huang, “A Moment of Silence for Aaron Swartz”
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Links Writing

A Poignant Comment on Deleting Email

For the past two months I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about something Peter Fleischer, Google’s Global Privacy Counsel, wrote about his personal email retention and deletion policies. After talking about whether people should worry about “covering their tracks” from government snooping, he writes (emphasis added):

In the meantime, as users, we all have to decide if we want to keep thousands of old emails in our inboxes in the cloud.  It’s free and convenient to keep them.  Statistics published by some companies seem to confirm that the risks of governments seeking access to our data are extremely remote for “normal people”.  But the laws, like ECPA, that are meant to protect the privacy of our old emails are obsolete and full of holes.  The choice is yours:  keep or delete.  I’m a pragmatist, and I’m not paranoid, but personally, I’ve gotten in the habit of deleting almost all my daily emails, except for those that I’d want to keep for the future.  Like the rule at my tennis club:  sweep the clay after you play.

His comments struck me as being incredibly poignant when I first read them, and remain so today. I’ve stopped archiving email. I delete email (as best I can, given cloud data retention policies and all…) on a regular basis. Over the Christmas break I removed an aggregate of about 6 GB of mail that had just…accrued…in my various accounts over the past decade. In short, his post motivated me enough to spend the better part of 3 or 4 days sifting and sorting through my digital life. Ultimately I removed an awful lot of what was there.

At some point I hope to spend more time writing about, and thinking through, some of Peter’s points. At the moment, however, I’d just recommend you think about what it means when Google’s Global Privacy Counsel – the guy who is best able to go to the mat to protect the privacy of his own inbox – chooses to routinely delete his email from the cloud. If he takes that precaution, and he has the influence that he does, shouldn’t you at least consider following his lead?

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Links Writing

Can Nulpunt “Abolish Government Secrecy?”

In a word: No.

Nulpunt is an online database that lets individuals subscribe to topics and, when a freedom of information request on the topic becomes available, ‘pushes’ the content to the user. This mediates the present format for such requests, where individuals tend to be hunting for specific information and the population generally has no effective means to see or understand the information divulged to fellow citizens.

The aspiration of the service is that government secrecy can be undermined by making information more prominently available. I’m not confident that this can possibly be the case because the service fails to address the primary means by which states keep citizens in the dark: it does not prevent state agents from refusing requests nor from redacting significant elements from released documents.

While it may be effective in nations such as the Netherlands, which have recently adopted new transparency laws, I can’t imagine Canada or the US moving to entirely new document release processes without a significant stick. Nulpunt is not, and cannot, function as that stick so long as governments refuse to recognize their situatedness as servants, rather than masters, of the population at large.