News

  • - 2018-06-06 -

    In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court has overturned the result reached in the Ontario Court of Appeal (and the court of first instance) and stayed an Ontario defamation action in favour of Israel as the most appropriate forum.

    CIPPIC intervened in the case, and was represented by CIPPIC Director David Fewer and co-counsel Professor Marina Pavlovic and Professor Jeremy de Beer.  CIPPIC's intervention focused on access to justice, forum shopping concerns, and technological neutrality.

    The dissenting justices, Chief Justice McLachlan (as she then was) and Justices Moldaver and Gascon, picked up on CIPPIC's access to justice arguments in their forum non conveniens analysis:

    [215] While the plaintiff in this case is wealthy, access to justice concerns are implicated when considering fairness, and must be considered. For many non-wealthy plaintiffs, being denied access to the courts of a particular jurisdiction — typically their home forum — means being denied justice altogether. In those cases, fairness would weigh even more heavily in favour of the plaintiff’s choice of forum.

  • - 2018-05-14 -

    Encryption is vital to maintaining the integrity of communications and computing systems in modern life. It is not only essential for securing trust in e-commerce systems, but also, in the digital age, integral to the realization of a wide range of human rights. In spite of the critical importance of encryption, some law enforcement and intelligence agencies view cryptography as a barrier to their investigative and intelligence-gathering activities, and have therefore called for limits on the public availability and use of uncompromised and secure encryption. This paper seeks to examine the parameters of this debate, with particular attention to its Canadian components and implications.

    In a sweeping report, launched today by CIPPIC in conjunction with our friends at the Citizen Lab, we canvass the importance of cryptography, historical and current attempts to undermine its utility in order to facilitate law enforcement and public safety objectives, and the legal implications of these attempts.

  • - 2018-04-23 -

    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.

  • - 2018-04-16 -

    We are pleased to announce that we are now receiving applications for our 2018 Google Policy Fellowship (Canada), which will host a Google Policy Fellow at each of Canada's two leading technology research and policy centres - CIPPIC and the Citizen Lab, University of Toronto. CIPPIC's Google Policy Fellow will work closely with CIPPIC staff on a range of dynamic, cutting edge law & technology issues as we seek to further our public interest mandate. This includes helping to formulate strategy, conducting research and analysis, and drafting submissions to various levels of court, political and legislative venues, and regulatory bodies. Substantively, CIPPIC advocacy covers a diverse range of digital rights/policy issues, including copyright, privacy/electronic surveillance, telecommunications regulation/net neutrality, online consumer protection, online speech, access to knowledge and more general Internet governance concerns. CIPPIC is strongly committed to a diverse environment, and in particular encourages applications from racialized persons / persons of colour, women, Indigenous / Aboriginal People of North America, persons with disabilities, LGBTQ persons, and others who will enrich our discourse by ensuring it is the product of a diversity of perspectives.

    Applications are due 5 pm EST, May 11, 2018. The fellowship will run for 10 weeks this summer and CIPPIC applications are open to any law students or law graduate students, with specific times and dates to be coordinated with the host organization. Application details can be found at: https://cippic.ca/jobs/google_policy_fellowship_canada_2018.

  • - 2018-04-05 -

    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.

  • - 2018-03-06 -

    CIPPIC has been granted leave to intervene in R. v. Jarvis, SCC Case No. 27833. The case is an appeal of an Ontario Court of Appeal decision acquitting a teacher of a charge under the voyeurism provisions of the Criminal Code.  The accused had used a camera pen to surreptitiously take videos of the chests and cleavage of female students.  The decision under appeal determined that the videos were not taken in "“circumstances giving rise to a reasonable expectation of privacy”, an element necessary to establish the offense of voyeurism. 

    CIPPIC will argue that the Court should interpret “circumstances giving rise to a reasonable expectation of privacy” consistently with the Court’s well-established jurisprudence on privacy: privacy is normative, contextual, and not risk-based.

  • - 2018-01-30 -

    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

  • - 2017-12-21 -

    CIPPIC has filed its intervention factum in Her Majesty the Queen in Right of British Columbia v. Philip Morris International, Inc., SCC No. 37524. The case presents the Supreme Court with a conflict of values: do the privacy interests of third parties bar a defendant to an action from accessing large health datasets in order to challenge the results of the plaintiff’s analysis of that data?

    CIPPIC argues that this conflict between privacy and transparency will be mediate by the dual protections of anonymization procedures, implemented in accordance with guidelines familiar to the health industry, and flexible judicial safeguards embedded in disclosure orders.

    The case raises important issues about the right to challenge the outcomes of analytics performed on large data sets. As we increase our reliance on big data and algorithmic decision-making technologies, privacy and accountability will be increasingly at issue.

  • - 2017-12-18 -

    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

  • - 2017-12-15 -

    CIPPIC joined in an intervention (FR) which highlights the negative impact on freedom of expression that can result if the Court of Justice of the European Union endorses global content de-referencing orders. The regulatory action under appeal in C-507/17, Google Inc v Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), arise from an order issued by the French data protection authority (CNIL) which would compel Google to extend its de-referencing of content to protect the privacy of Spanish citizens beyond google.fr. Content removal or de-referencing orders of this nature have the effect of leveraging the global reach of central online intermediaries such as Google in order to apply one nation's laws to the entire world. As a result, other states lose the ability to establish their own standards with respect to critical questions such as, in this instance, addressing the balance between the right to privacy and to freedom of expression.

    The specific type of content de-referencing order at issue in Google v CNIL seeks to protect the privacy of individuals by de-referencing their names from certain online articles: when someone searches for 'Alice Dubois', the first search hit that results will no longer be an account of Ms Duboius' 14 year old debt security proceedings. Ms Dubouis can retain some measure of control over how she represents herself to her employers, colleagues, friends—the world. However, in formulating such a right, great caution must be taken to ensure the right balance is struck between the need to protect individual's privacy and the public's right to receive information. Can professionals use this right to remove negative reviews of their products or services? Can those repeatedly convicted of fraud shield their convictions from future perspective customers? Does this right of de-referencing apply to all types of content or just prominently referenced articles that display sensitive information (an individual's sensitive financial information or health condition, for example)? The intervention (which was led by Article 19 and draws on the experience of co-interveners from Canada, Korea, Latin America, the United States, and Member States of the EU) argues that states must be allowed to balancing the important constitutionally protected interests at stake in such questions for themselves, rather than having the question determined by globally applicable content de-referencing orders.

    Image credit: Tyler Menezes, "The worst thing about censorship", June 27, 2008, CC-BY-SA 2.0, Flickr