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CIPPIC Summer Internship Program offers outstanding law students an unequaled opportunity to work on cutting-edge research and advocacy issues relating to law and technology.

CIPPIC advocacy involves submission of briefs to government and other policy‐makers, intervention in precedent‐setting cases before judicial and quasi‐judicial tribunals, provision of public legal education resources, publication of reports, participation in multi‐stakeholder policy-making forums, provision of expert testimony before parliamentary committees, and advising under‐represented organizations and individuals on relevant public interest issues.

Working closely with CIPPIC lawyers, interns learn how to be effective researchers, policy analysts, and advocates while contributing to public interest policy and law reform in such areas as copyright law, privacy, consumer protection, telecommunications regulation, net neutrality, free speech and civil liberties on the Internet. Interns may additionally have opportunities to attend conferences and workshops such as the CIPPIC summer speaker series and to participate in other aspects of the Centre for Law, Society, & Technology.

CIPPIC has filed its factum in R v Jarvis, SCC Case No 37833, an appeal involving a 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

CIPPIC joined the Citizen Lab today in releasing a detailed analysis of Bill C-59 which, among other things, seeks to comprehensively modernize the Communication Security Establishment (CSE)'s legal framework. The CSE, Canada's foreign intelligence agency, is granted expansive powers and a mandate that is intended to be 'foreign facing', a tradeoff intended to limit safeguards applied to the Establishment while limiting its ability to impact on Canadians. The Bill C-59 reforms in many ways improve the CSE's current operational regime, by requiring the CSE to operate in a proportionate manner and under some independent control for the first time. Ultimately, while the Bill modernizes many of the CSE's powers and capabilities, it remains stuck in the past with respect to its oversight and control regime—a regime that remains driven by executive authority. The report suggests over 50 reforms to the Bill, with varying degrees of impact. Of particular concern is the Bill's open embrace of mass and bulk surveillance practices, a range of newly introduced exceptions that will grant the CSE more scope to operate domestically, a new domestic private sector cybersecurity regime, and new cyber operation powers that would allow the CSE to disrupt and undermine security, the integrity of communications networks and human rights in Canada and abroad.

At the same time, the report points to deficiencies in the independent control and oversight mechanism proposed by Bill C-59. The embodiment of these mechanisms (the Intelligence Commissioner) is presented as a quasi-judicial check on the Minister's otherwise broad powers to authorize the CSE's activities. However, the Commissioner lacks the independence and scope of oversight necessary to meaningfully carry out the function envisioned for it. Notably, while the Commissioner may now refuse some authorizations as issued by the Minister of National Defence, the process remains largely driven by the executive branch of government. The Commissioner lacks basic fact-finding powers, mechanisms for direct adversarial input, formalized appeal mechanisms and even the obligation to issue reasons when approving a ministerial authorization. The scope of Commissioner oversight is similarly deficient. As others have noted, Commissioner approval is only required if CSE activities would otherwise violate a law of Canada or the Charter, a triggering mechanism that falls well short, allowing significant invasive CSE conduct to fall outside the scope of Commissioner control. Critically, Bill C-59 introduces a range of new cyber operation powers that could well be the most invasive in the Establishment's toolkit, yet these fall altogether outside the scope of Commissioner control. As Bill C-59 continues to make its way through parliamentary committee, it is hoped that some of these issues (and others itemized in a civil society coalition statement) will be addressed.

Image Credit: Gautier Poupeau, "Magnifying Glass [Loupe], 1963, Roy Lichtenstein", July 14, 2013, CC-BY-2.0, Flickr