After receiving immense public pressure to make amendments to new online surveillance legislation that the government re-introduced on Tuesday, Prime Minister Harper announced today that these proposals could change as the bill makes its way through Parliamentary debate. The legislation will be referred to legislative committee prior to second reading, leaving room for significant changes in principal as opposed to minor changes of a technical nature.
The proposed legislation at issue is Bill C-30, An Act to enact the Investigating and Preventing Criminal Electronic Communications Act and to amend the Criminal Code and other Acts -- it is otherwise known as the "lawful access" legislation. If this name sounds familiar, it's likely because the government unsuccessfully tried to introduce similar legislation in 2009 and again in 2010. Heavily criticized by the federal and provincial privacy commissioners -- as well as by civil society and the public -- these past efforts never made their way to a legislative committee. Nevertheless, the new bill remains largely unchanged from these earlier attempts. Some of the more alarming provisions include:
-
new powers that will let police force telecommuncations companies to identify anonymous online activity on request, and even where there is no reason to suspect the information might be useful to an investigation;
-
new requirements for internet service providers to maintain sophisticated technologies for real-time wiretapping of internet communications;
-
immunicty for telecommunications companies that choose to hand over customer data to police, even in situations where it is completely unreasonable to do so; and
-
a surprising lack of sufficient Parliamentary review or oversight coupled with gag orders likely to prevent telecommunications companies from warning individuals when abusive requests have been made.
Reprisals against this bill have been pouring out from across all party lines. However, we strongly encourage everyone to keep up the pressure. The government has not yet commited to any specific amendments or improvements. We encourage you to talk to your M.P. and sign the StopSpying.ca petition now.
CIPPIC joined a group of privacy experts comprised of academics and public interest organizations today in calling on the government to rethink a set of legislative proposals (innocuously dubbed 'lawful access') that threaten to seriously undermine online privacy. In doing so, the group of privacy experts have added their voices to the 46,000+ Canadians who have already signed an online petition, Charlie Angus and Jasbir Sandhu (NDP Privacy Spokesman and Public Safety Ciritic, respectively), the BC Civil Liberties Association, as well as to Canada's federal and provincial privacy Commissioners, collectively, all of whom have already stated grave concerns with respect to the proposed erosion of online privacy.
This Wednesday, July 27th, the Forum to Stop Online Spying will be held at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. The forum will examine issues arising from proposed cyber surveillance legislation that threatens to undermine online privacy in serious ways. The forum will be hosted by the SFU School of Communication, with support from OpenMedia.ca, the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, and the BC Civil Liberties Association.
Charlie Angus and Jasbit Sandhu, the NDP Ethics, Privacy and Digital Issues Spokesman and Public Safety Critic, respectively, in a letter to Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews, are calling for careful scrutiny of a legislative proposal that threatens to create a "digital panopticon" where online citizen actions can be tracked at rates unprecedented in Canada.
The letter highlights a number of concerns, foremost of which are the warrantless disclosure provisions in the proposed legislation, which will force telecommunications service providers to identify anonymous customers upon request. Anonymity is key to any meaningful privacy protection online, and such identities will be the doorway to a host of personal information ranging from online political speech on blogs to exposing the social connections of anonymous accounts on services such as Twitter, to geolocation data. Yet under these lawful access bills, state agents will be given the power to seize such information, even where there is no reason to suspect it will be useful to an investigation.
OpenMedia.ca has launched a petition to stop the Government's online spying mandate. The petition, which is directed 'lawful access' legislation the federal government has committed to pass as part of an omnibus bill within 100 days of Parliament's sitting, expresses concern with the broad, warrantless powers that the government seeks to put in place without any real oversight. These powers are troubling in that they will allow state agents to identify anonymous online users in situations where there is not even any reason to suspect the information will be useful to an investigation. Indicative of this concern, the Privacy Commissioners of Canada had collectively denounced the lawful access bills, as drafted, in a historic joint letter to the government in May.
On February 14, 2012, the federal government once more introduced a legislative package of lawful access bills. This time, they rolled all of the proposed amendments into a single omnibus measure: Bill C-30, An Act to enact the Investigating and Preventing Criminal Electronic Communications Act and to amend the Criminal Code and other Acts.
Towards the end of 2010, the government introduced three complementary bills into the House of Commons with the aim of increasing the investigative powers of police:
On June 18, 2009, the Canadian Government tabled two parallel bills with the stated purpose of providing law enforcement bodies with the tools to combat crime in the digital era:
In September 2007, after a closed consultation became public, Public Safety Canada issued a Consultation Paper on the issue of giving police expanded powers to obtain certain subscriber identifying data (e.g., name, postal/email/IP address, tel number, cell phone identifier) without a warrant or any reasonable grounds to suspect criminal activity. Strangely, the consultation followed assertions by the Minister of Public Safety, that "We are not, in any way, shape or form, wanting extra powers to police to pursue items without a warrant."
On November 15, 2005, the federal government introduced Bill C-74, the Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act (MITA), "an act to compel all telephone and Internet companies to create and maintain infrastructures that are intercept capable and to provide access to basic subscriber contact information such as a name, address or telephone number." Note that this bill does not introduce new Production Orders, Preservation Orders, or other Criminal Code amendments that are described below as part of the broader package of "Lawful Access" proposals on which the government has been consulting.
The proposals described below were set out by the government in a series of Powerpoint presentations made to a select group of stakeholders in March 2005. These presentations were not made public until Jason Young obtained them by way of an Access to Information request, in October 2005.
New information and communication technologies such as the Internet, email, cellphones, and encryption offer individuals new ways to communicate, organize, and engage in criminal behaviours, creating challenges for law enforcement agencies in their efforts to investigate and prosecute criminal activity. On the other hand, these same technologies provide authorities with access to potentially vast amounts of personal information on individuals.
