How Canada Can End Mass Surveillance
Third chapter in OpenMedia’s crowd-sourced privacy plan.
Some may remember East Germany’s Stasi spy agency, or reference China’s extensive Internet censorship. But few would express fear that western democratic governments like the U.S., Britain, and Canada were engaged in the mass surveillance of law-abiding citizens.
That all changed in June 2013 when Edward Snowden, a contractor at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), blew the whistle on the spying activities of the NSA and its Five Eyes partners in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K. Since then, we’ve seen a long stream of revelations about how Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE) is engaged in extensive spying on private online activities.
To give just a few examples, we learned that CSE spied on law-abiding Canadians using the free Wi-Fi at Pearson airport, and monitored their movements for weeks afterward. We learned that CSE is monitoring an astonishing 15 million file downloads a day, with Canadian Internet addresses among the targets.
Even emails Canadians send to the government or their local MP are monitored — up to 400,000 a day according to CBC News. Just last week we discovered CSE targets widely-used mobile web browsers and app stores. Many of these activities are not authorized by a judge, but by secret ministerial directives like the ones MP Peter MacKay signed in 2011.
CSE is not the only part of the government engaged in mass surveillance. Late last year, the feds sought contractors to build a new monitoring system that will collect and analyze what Canadians say on Facebook and other social media sites. As a result, the fear of getting caught in the government’s dragnet surveillance is one more and more Canadians may soon face.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
