Tag: Transparency

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Rogers reports sharp drop in police demands for customer data

Rogers reports sharp drop in police demands for customer data:

Christopher Parsons, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, said Rogers’ commitment to regularly releasing such data is commendable. Yet, he argued the company could go even further with certain aspects of its report, such as including information about when it discloses to customers that a law enforcement request has been made.

He noted that authorities are required to notify individuals who have been subject to wiretap requests or any intercept of live information. However, he said requests for stored data do not trigger a statutory requirement to inform the person that they were under investigation and unless the information is introduced in a court proceeding, they would never know.

“Rogers could advance the privacy discussion in Canada that much more by trying to push government and law enforcement agencies to let the company disclose that their customers were subject to a request,” Mr. Parsons said.

 

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Police asked telcos for client data in over 80% of criminal probes

Police asked telcos for client data in over 80% of criminal probes:

In recent years, civil liberty advocates, journalists and Canada’s privacy watchdog have repeatedly sought details on the frequency with which telecom companies hand over data to police officers.

Not all are convinced that the 80-95 per cent estimate is accurate.

“How exactly did they derive such high numbers? What is the methodology?” asks Chris Parsons, a post-doctoral fellow at Citizen Lab, an academic unit at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

“If it is sound, that indicates an incredibly high rate, assuming that all crimes or all investigations are some way linked with telecommunications data.”

…

Last year, TekSavvy, Rogers and Telus became the first telecommunications companies to release transparency reports — following in the footsteps of their U.S. counterparts and spurred to action by a questionnaire sent by a group of academics led by Parsons. Bell Canada was alone among the large telcos not to issue a report.

Previously released government documents suggested that Public Safety officials worried that the firms might divulge “sensitive operational details” in their reports.

The federal department sought advice on whether any potential legal issues might exist around the disclosure of how telecommunication companies interacted with police, the newly released ministerial briefing says.

“If I were being very charitable, it could be a way to assuage the concerns that ISPs [internet service providers] may have had,” said Parsons. “Less charitably, it could also mean that Public Safety was interested in seeing if there was a way to prevent the reports from coming out.”

Many internet and phone service providers cited potential legal issues — along with a litany of other reasons — as why they failed to disclose any figures.

 

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Draft Paper: Do Transparency Reports Matter for Public Policy?

Telecommunications companies across Canada have begun to release transparency reports to explain what data the companies collect, what data they retain and for how long, and to whom that data is, or has been, disclosed to. This article evaluates the extent to which Canadian telecommunications companies’ transparency reports respond to a set of public policy goals, namely: of contextualizing information about government surveillance actions, of legitimizing the corporate disclosure of data about government-mandated surveillance actions, and of deflecting or responding to telecommunications subscribers’ concerns about how their data is shared between companies and the government. In effect, have the reports been effective in achieving the aforementioned goals or have they just having the effect of generating press attention?

After discussing the importance of transparency reports generally, and the specificities of the Canadian reports released in 2014, I argue that companies must standardize their reports across the industry and must also publish their lawful intercept handbooks for the reports to be more effective. Ultimately, citizens will only understand the full significance of the data published in telecommunications companies’ transparency when the current data contained in transparency reports is be contextualized by the amount of data that each type of request can provide to government agencies and the corporate policies dictating the terms under which such requests are made and complied with.

Download Telecommunications Transparency in Canada 1.4 (Public Draft) (Alternate SSRN link)

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Access, Partners Recognize Heroes, Villains on Human Rights and Communications Surveillance

Access, Partners Recognize Heroes, Villains on Human Rights and Communications Surveillance

Transparency

Summary: States should be transparent about the use and scope of Communications Surveillance laws, regulations, activities, powers, or authorities.

Hero: Doctor Christopher Parsons

Doctor Parsons has actively pushed Canada’s leading Telecommunications Services Providers to disclose how, why, and how often they provide subscriber information to state agencies. Based on their responses, Dr. Parsons offered comprehensive recommendations on how companies could improve public transparency.

Villain: Secretary Jeremy Heywood

Under the authority of UK Prime Minister David Cameron, Mr. Heywood ordered the Guardian to destroy documents regarding surveillance activities of the NSA and GCHQ. The hard drives were “pulverized” in the basement of the newspaper’s London offices. Notably, the Guardian has stated that all documents related to its reporting on these matters are stored in other offices.

It remains amazing – and an absolute honour – to be listed as a hero alongside Edward Snowden, Navi Pillay (former UN High Commissioner), Sen. Ron Wyden, Dilma Rousseff, amongst a host of others.

Also: I guess I have something to talk about next time I run into a member of the British Cabinet?

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Telus joins transparency push by sharing demands for customer info

Telus joins transparency push by sharing demands for customer info :

Christopher Parsons, a research fellow with Citizen Lab, which is part of the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, says he commends Telus for following through on a commitment to release a report this summer and for its call for industry standards on such disclosures.

“The trick is, however, that we’re still missing Bell Canada, which is the largest telecommunications provider in the country,” he said. “Clearly, there’s an industry movement in Canada and all across North America toward these transparency reports and Bell Canada needs to be on board.”

…

Mr. Parsons says any industry standard around reporting should also include disclosure about how long the companies retain customer information.

TELUS is to be congratulated for following through on their promise to release a transparency, report, as well as for committing to publishing future reports. At this point, two of the largest telecom in Canada (Rogers and TELUS) along with a leading independent telecom (TekSavvy) have released transparency reports: where’s Bell and all the smaller companies?

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Quotations

2014.7.21

Actually taking part in deliberation on priority-setting issues might lead to increased acceptance and trust, but simply being informed that other citizens had that opportunity to do so did not seem to have any effect. Taken together, this implies that people in general might not care that much about the procedure when judging the decision in the case of priority setting in health care. The turn from a focus on principles to a focus on procedures when it comes to priority setting strategies can thus be even more problematic to implement than previous research has suggested.

Jenny de Fine Licht, “Do We Really Want to Know? The Potentially Negative Effect of Transparency in Decision Making on Perceived Legitimacy,” Scandinavian Political Studies 34(3), 2011.
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Quotations

2014.7.9

Transparency certainly destroys secrecy: but it may not limit the deception and deliberate misinformation that undermine relations of trust. If we want to restore trust we need to reduce deception and lies rather than secrecy. Some sorts of secrecy indeed support deception, others do not. Transparency and openness may not be the unconditional goods that they are fashionably supposed to be. By the same token, secrecy and lack of transparency may not be the enemies of trust.

Onora O’Neill, “Trust and Transparency”, the BBC Reith Lectures.
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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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Make police chiefs’ associations transparent, says B.C. privacy commissioner

The two associations representing police chiefs in B.C. should be subject to freedom of information laws, according to B.C. Privacy and Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham.

After years spent covering the issue, journalist Rob Wipond is finally getting some transparency into how police chief organizations operate in BC!

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Aside Quotations

2014.3.19

…undercutting this fair-to-strong record on the policy side is Mr. Flaherty’s general approach to the budget process, which could only be more opaque if it were one of Frank Underwood’s schemes on “House of Cards.” As the finance minister has tackled the budget deficit with across-the-board spending cuts, it has been impossible to get reliable information on what was being cut. Compounding the problem has been the use of omnibus budget implementation bills, which have included a host of things not directly related to the budget, such as changes to environmental regulations and policies affecting First Nations.

Not even the parliamentary budget officer, a position created as part of broader “accountability” reforms, could obtain the information needed to see what programs were being affected by the government’s austerity measures. Rather than operating on the basic democratic principles of transparency, Mr. Flaherty attacked the PBO, Kevin Page, as exceeding his proper mandate.

This is a pronounced stain on a legacy that is otherwise up for legitimate debate. Whether the GST or corporate tax cuts were inappropriate or whether one ideologically favours or disapproves of the government’s efforts to reduce the size of government, we should all agree that Canadians deserve to know, with clarity, what the government is doing. While much of the focus on Flaherty has been his ability to return the budget to balance, the climate of obfuscation surrounding his budgets is a significant and lamentable background to everything else he accomplished.

Emmett Macfarlane, “Flaherty’s policy brilliance overshadowed by darker politics”

What will be most damning is if, whenever another party is elected to govern the country, they merely change policy positions without also ending the current practices of omnibus legislation and budgetary obfuscation. Fiscal policies are something that Canadians can legitimately debate the merits of. There should be little to no debate that legislation, regulations, and budgets should be accessible to citizens who just want to understand what these things mean, how they are implemented, and the implications of their implementation. A representative democracy is farcical when citizens and their representatives alike cannot discern the actions of the day’s government; as it stands today, much of Canadian democracy is little more than a bad farce.