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Privacy Advocates Fear Bill C-51 Consultations Will Be Skewed

September 10, 2016

Privacy Advocates Fear Bill C-51 Consultations Will Be Skewed

Backgrounder on national security written to address policy concerns, not the public’s, says OpenMedia.

960px version of 'Stop Bill C-51'
The Liberal government has announced wide-ranging consultations on national security, including Bill C-51. Photo by Kent Lins, Creative Commons licensed.

A Liberal government plan to hold public consultations on national security including changes to Bill C-51 is presented in a way that is biased in favour of police and other authorities, warns a privacy watchdog.

The controversial bill, also known as the Anti-Terrorism Act, has civil liberties groups concerned over how vaguely some aspects of the bill are worded and how easily it allows law enforcement to breach the privacy of citizens.

Brought in by the former Conservative government in 2015, critics also saidthe bill criminalizes non-violent free speech and creates a chill on freedom of expression.

Concern about oversight of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service under the bill was also raised.

On Thursday, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale and Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould announced wide-ranging consultations on national security, which will take place until Dec.1.

Ottawa said the consultations will “inform” any changes to national security policy while safeguarding Charter rights. The Liberals promised to repeal “problematic” parts of C-51 during the election campaign.

But David Christopher of the Internet rights group OpenMedia said the wording of the consultation’s backgrounder is biased in favour of law enforcement, for example often detailing how current legislation impedes law enforcement.

“Much of the explanatory information that is presented is really one-sided,” Christopher said. “We have all this background information written in a way that seems to address police concerns rather than what the public [is] most worried about.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Eyes on the Spies: Canadians Deserve Accountability

June 1, 2015

Eyes on the Spies: Canadians Deserve Accountability

Yet while surveillance budgets balloon, watchdogs starve. Last in a series.

For anyone involved in the privacy debate, it’s been a busy couple of years. Barely a week goes by without new revelations about the activities of the Canadian spy agency known as Communications Security Establishment (CSE), and its Five Eyes partners in the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand.

In just the past few weeks, for example, we learned that the CSE actively exploited security holes in a popular mobile web browser. We also learned that the U.K. government passedquiet legislation granting Government Communications Headquarters (Britain’s version of CSE) immunity for hacking into our computers and mobile phones. And we’ve seen the U.S. National Security Agency implicated in extensive spying on European citizens and private companies, in ways that go far beyond national security.

As leading privacy expert professor Michael Geist wrote last week, “nothing surprises anymore” when it comes to surveillance.

What these reports reveal about our spy agencies’ activities are indeed disturbing. But the seemingly unending stream of revelations also point to a larger problem — the striking lack of accountability, transparency and oversight that people have over what are, at the end of the day, government agencies operating with taxpayer dollars.

Canadians are clearly unhappy with this state of affairs. Concerns about lack of accountability were expressed again and again by those who took part in our crowdsourcing work for Canada’s Privacy Plan, the pro-privacy action plan launched recently by OpenMedia.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Canada Can End Mass Surveillance

May 27, 2015

How Canada Can End Mass Surveillance

Third chapter in OpenMedia’s crowd-sourced privacy plan.

Just two short years ago, if you asked strangers on the street about mass surveillance, you’d likely encounter many blank stares.

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…

Want to Roll Back Bill C-51?

May 20, 2015

Want to Roll Back Bill C-51?

So does OpenMedia. Internet freedom group launches plan to ‘turn this debate on its head.’ First in a series.

It’s clear Canadians are deeply unhappy with the way the federal government views the privacy rights of its citizens. Last week, Bill C-51 passed in the House of Commons. It’s now before the Senate and is expected to become law within weeks.

This is a piece of legislation so extreme that experts say it will lead to widespread violations of our charter rights.

Today, OpenMedia, which advocates for more Internet freedom, is launching a privacy plan aimed at rolling back Bill C-51, ending government-supported surveillance and restoring the privacy rights of Canadians.

The report, entitled Canada’s Privacy Plan, was the result of a crowd-sourced survey that gathered input from more that 100,000 Canadians. More than 10,000 of you used thiscrowdsourcing tool to provide detailed input on how you want to tackle our privacy deficit.

Bill C-51 has been widely criticized by Canadian civil liberties advocates. Among other things, it permits federal departments to exchange the private information of Canadians, and makes it easier for police to restrict the movement of suspects.

But Bill C-51 is just one aspect of the alarming privacy deficit the government has created. In the last 12 months, we’ve seen stunning revelations about how the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSE) — the agency that collects foreign security intelligence from the Internet — is spying on Canadians’ private online activities and on private emails that Canadians send to members of Parliament.

And we’ve seen Justice Minister Peter MacKay’s online spying Bill C-13 become law, despite opposition from 3 in 4 Canadians.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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