CIPPIC has filed its factum in R. v. Jarvis, SCC Case No. 27833, the voyeurism case involving the high school teacher charged with voyeurism under s. 162(1)(c) of the Criminal Code for using a camera pen to surreptitiously take videos of female students which focused on their chests and cleavage area. The Ontario Court of Appeal concluded that the videos were not taken in "circumstances" in which students had "a reasonable expectation of privacy", a necessary element of the offense. 

CIPPIC disagrees.  We argue that the phrase, "circumstances giving rise to a reasonable expectation of privacy", must be interpreted consistently with other areas of law that see privacy as equality-enhancing, normative, contextual, and non-risk based.  Our colleague Jane Bailey took the pen and makes a strong case for a robust vision of privacy - one that enhances equality and the ability to assert control over sexual and bodily integrity.

As Bill C-59, the National Security Act, 2017, winds its way through committee (SECU), the Government has made available a lightly redacted copy of its briefing notes developed in support of the Bill. A central point of contention in Bill C-59 is the proposed CSE Act, which will provide a new and comprehensive framework for the CSE, Canada's foreign signals intelligence agency. Elements of this framework are long overdue, such as its creation of NSIRA, which will have far-reaching capabilities to review the CSE's activities, and an Intelligence Commissioner which, if properly empowered, will provide an independent check on some of the CSE's activities.  However, as we (jointly with the Citizen Lab) pointed out in a recent analysis, the CSE Act requires significant  revision if it is to provide a reasonable framework for the CSE's activities. The briefing notes provide helpful additional insights into Bill C-59 and in particular into some of the CSE's anticipated uses of its new powers embodied in the proposed  CSE Act. However, we re-joined the Citizen Lab in analyzing these briefing notes and concluded that the government's justifications for some of the more controversial elements of the CSE Act (particularly its new poers to carry out cyber operations and an exceptoin that will permit it to direct its ativities at Canadians when collecting 'publicly available information') simply fall short. Specifically, the briefing notes present only the most innocuous uses to which the CSE's new powers might be put, painting an extremely sparse picture of provisions that are far more permissive in scope. The short analysis supplements this sparse presentation, and reaffirms the need for reform of the new proposed provisions. Read the analysis, which is authored by (in alphabetical order) Lex Gill (Citizen Lab), Tamir Israel (CIPPIC) and Christopher Parsons (Citizen Lab) after the jump, or you can obtain the analysis in PDF format here.

Image Credit: Junaldrao, "Jorge Bamboa, The Tip of the Iceberg", June 2, 2017, CC-BY-ND 2.0, Flickr