Tag: Law

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What Rogers will tell you about the police looking into your account

What Rogers will tell you about the police looking into your account:

… I emailed Rogers to ask if the police had made inquires about my account. Because of a law called the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPED) Rogers has to answer my question.

Rogers’ first response, which arrived by registered mail, was:
“A search of our records revealed that no inquiries have been made by Law Enforcement Agencies….and Rogers is not permitted to advise of this disclosure.”

Christopher Parsons from U of T’s Citizen Lab says Rogers’ response should be read, “Nobody asked for your information and if somebody has asked for your information we’re not allowed to tell you.”

…

After the Star asked for a clarification, a Rogers spokesman said in an email, “We’re also sorry that the letter you received from us dated January 19, 2015 wasn’t more clear.” They promised to update their letters to make it clear to customers “we are restricted from disclosing most information to customers.”

Last May it was revealed that in 2011 law enforcement agencies in Canada made 1,193,630 requests for subscriber information from telecoms, the majority without a warrant. In June the Supreme Court of Canada said police need a warrant to gain accesses to telecom subscriber information. The Star later reported that the police are still making warrantless requests for customer data, because of disagreement on how to interpret the court’s decisions.

Based on letters he’s seen from different telecom companies a few months ago Parsons says “Rogers’ disclosure and TekSavvy’s disclosure are about the best in the industry.” while “Most are less transparent.”

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2015.1.6

We understand that cellphone searches are sometimes necessary to obtain important evidence. But the same is true of searching your home. The most invasive searches tend to be the most useful, precisely because of their invasiveness. The U.S. Supreme Court recently recognized this in a unanimous decision requiring a warrant for cellphone searches. As a society, we’ve decided that police need a warrant to search your home, barring exceptional circumstances. But the underlying assumption – that our homes, not our phones, contain our most private information – is increasingly untrue. Should police search our homes, we would not be alone among our generation were our first thought: “Oh god – is my phone there?”

Anisah Hassan and Josh Stark, “Phones are more private than houses – so shouldn’t be easier to search”
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Privacy issues could not be ignored in 2014 (video)

This links to the full video interview I gave to Postmedia about privacy issues in 2014. On the whole I’m actually pretty optimistic about things: we know more than in the past about the extents to which governments engage in surveillance. The organizations and individuals who subsequently act on this knowledge are more capable, today, than they were even two years ago. And the political class is increasingly aware that privacy and transparency issues are becoming more and more important to their constituents.

Now, does this optimism mean that things will necessarily improve dramatically in 2015? Of course not. But momentum continues to build and more and more individuals and organizations are taking privacy issues seriously. And that’s cause for some celebration as far as I’m concerned.

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Privacy issues could not be ignored in 2014 (Transcript Summary)

Privacy issues could not be ignored in 2014 (Transcript Summary):

Telecom and online security expert Christopher Parsons, post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and director of the Telecom Transparency Project, reviews how Canadians’ shifted in 2014 and what to expect in the new year.

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Alberta Primetime – Increased surveillance powers in Canada

Alberta Primetime – Increased surveillance powers in Canada:

Discussing security, police surveillance, and the privacy of Canadians—is the federal government getting the balance right?

 

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From The Unsealed ‘Jewel v. NSA’ Transcript: The DOJ Has Nothing But Contempt For American Citizens

From The Unsealed ‘Jewel v. NSA’ Transcript: The DOJ Has Nothing But Contempt For American Citizens:

Hey, I’m sorry the leaks have made it harder for these agencies to do whatever the hell they want, but they are all part of a government that’s supposed to be accountable to the citizens picking up the check. But when faced with unhappy citizens and their diminished rights, all the DOJ’s lawyers can say is that the public doesn’t know shit and has no right to question the government’s activities.

The government has somehow managed to come to a conclusion others reached weeks ago – there’s more than one leaker out there. GOOD. Burn it down. In the DOJ’s hands, the government isn’t by or for the people. It’sdespite the people. The DOJ can’t be trusted to protect the balance between privacy and security. As it sees it, what the public doesn’t know will likely hurt it, and it’s damned if it’s going to allow citizens to seek redress for their grievances.

While I don’t agree with the whole ‘burn-the-DOJ-down’ mentality, that this is an increasingly mainstream opinion regarding key US government institutions is deeply problematic. Such attitudes are indicative of a population no longer seeing itself reflected in its government which is, in turn, a recipe for social conflicts.

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Rogers to require warrants for police requests

Rogers to require warrants for police requests:

In the wake of a landmark court ruling last month that upheld Canadians’ right to online privacy, telecommunications companies are tightening their policies on when they will share customer information with police and government authorities.

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The move by one of Canada’s biggest cellphone, Internet and home-phone companies comes as the federal government works to pass legislation that academics and privacy advocates warn will erode protections around Canadians’ personal information. The Conservatives’ anti-cyberbullying bill is still before the House of Commons, but if passed in its current form, Bill C–13 would give legal immunity to telecommunications companies that voluntarily hand subscriber information to police and other public officials.

However, if telecom providers refuse to voluntarily disclose information without a warrant or court order, that could weaken the effect of the legislation, said Christopher Parsons, a research fellow with Citizen Lab, part of the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

“Rogers’s decision shows even though that liability shield is being offered, some telecoms may decline to take advantage of it,” he said Wednesday. “Rogers is not the entire industry, of course. But if we see [others] start to take a similar position, maybe that would defray the impact of C–13, although it wouldn’t mean that C–13 was a better law.”

…

The Citizen Lab’s Mr. Parsons said Rogers’s policy shift is a positive step. “This is just making it really clear to their subscribers that no matter what interpretation [of the ruling] the authorities take, Rogers’s interpretation is going to be: You need to come with a warrant.”

Rogers, TELUS, and TekSavvy have all now changed their policies: no court order, no data. It’s good to see these companies taking seriously their duties to protect subscriber data from government overreach. Now, if only they can improve on how they respond to subscribers’ requests for their personal information…

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2014.7.12

At a more domestic level, UK communications providers are worried that they could be exposed to legal action because of the unlawful mass surveillance that they were party to – even though on the whole they wanted no part of it.

Well, more precisely, many comms providers wanted no part of it unless the government picked up all the costs (older readers familiar with US law may recall the CALEA legislation that forced communications companies to make their technology wiretap friendly – with much the same response from companies).

There is a view that if the liability for unlawful surveillance rested entirely with the government, there would be no appetite for this legislation. Britain long ago elevated its institutional vandalism of EU legal rights from a science to an art, and then to a sport.

Simon Davies, “ Britain takes the Uganda Road to legalise and extend state surveillance”
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2014.7.11

The importance of access to information is clearer when the right to freedom of expression is considered more narrowly. Suppose that our concern is with expression on a specific subject: for example, about government’s effectiveness in executing a policy. In some cases, government agencies may be informational monopolists: that is, they may have exclusive control over critical information required for intelligence discussion of the policy. If no right of access is recognized, the right to free expression is hollowed out. Citizens will have the right to say what they think, but what they think will not count for much, precisely because it is known to be grossly uninformed. A more sensible approach would be to treat government monopolists just as we treat private media monopolists, by curbing their monopoly power so that we may promote free expression.

Alasdair Roberts, “Structural Pluralism and the Right to Know”
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Want to put a snooping government back in its place? Click here

Want to put a snooping government back in its place?:

A new app helps people create compelling and legally solid requests to ISPs for the personal information the company has about them. I suggest that anyone who cares about their privacy use it to learn to familiarize themselves with what data is being held by the telecoms they’re patronizing and when that data is being shared. (You’ll find the tool at Openmedia.ca/myinfo.)