Ottawa also sought legal advice on telco’s transparency reports
Canadian police seek online and phone data from telecommunications companies in almost every criminal investigation, according to a briefing note to the federal minister for public safety, obtained by CBC News.
The scale of the practice suggested in the memo indicates it has become routine for officers to tap into private internet activity.
“Canadian police estimate that at least one form of lawful access request is made by government agencies to TSPs [telecom service providers] in about 80-95 per cent of all investigations today,” states the Sept. 26, 2014 memo addressed to Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney, released under the Access to Information Act.
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Lawful access includes police asking telecommunications companies to install wiretaps, give access to emails or texts, and hand over identifiers like the name or address of a customer.
Tamir Israel, a lawyer specializing in internet and technology law, says the figure is likely so high because until a Supreme Court decision last June, police didn’t need a warrant to obtain subscriber information such as the name and address associated with an IP address.
“When a tool is unregulated in this way, it becomes a matter of standard practice,” said Israel, a lawyer with the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa. “No assessment is made as to the invasiveness of the tool, whether it’s justified in a particular context or not. It’s easy to do. It’s low cost, so you just do it.”
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