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Post Paris, Are Canada’s Internet Privacy Laws at Risk?
Post Paris, Are Canada’s Internet Privacy Laws at Risk?
Attacks may renew calls to go beyond Bill C-51 and restrict encryption technologies.
The Paris attacks have also escalated calls to reconsider plans to reform Canadian privacy and surveillance law, a key election promise from the Trudeau government. Photo by Garry Knight, Creative Commons licensed.
Despite the temptation to slow the re-examination of Canadian privacy and surveillance policy, the government should stay the course. The Liberals voted for Bill C-51, the controversial anti-terror law, during the last Parliament, but promised changes to it if elected. Even in the face of a renewed terror threat, those changes remain essential and should not have an adverse impact on operational efforts to combat terror threats that might surface in Canada.
The Liberals promised to establish an all-party review mechanism similar to those found in many other countries that will bring members of Parliament into the oversight process. The Conservatives’ opposition to increased oversight was always puzzling since oversight alone does not create new limitations on surveillance activities. Rather, it helps ensure that Canada’s surveillance and police agencies operate within the law and restores public confidence in those entrusted with Canadian security.
The other Liberal commitments would similarly address oversight without curtailing surveillance powers. For example, the party promised to increase the powers of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and to add a mandatory three-year review provision to the law.
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Paris Attacks and Climate Change Push Us to Fix a World of Broken Systems
Paris Attacks and Climate Change Push Us to Fix a World of Broken Systems
In much the same way that 9/11 saw the birth of a new era of perpetual war in the Muslim world, the 11/13 Paris attacks are giving rise to a new phase in that perpetual war: a relentless state of emergency, in which citizens are expected, in the words of British Home Secretary Theresa May, to possess “vigilance”—a euphemism for constant paranoia, suspicion, and fear in their everyday dealings with other citizens.
The terror-state did not emerge out of the blue.
This response would make sense if, indeed, ISIS were merely an unfathomable horde of psychopathically evil barbarians that had popped into existence out of the blue.
But as with any psychopathology, one requires a meaningful diagnosis to offer a prescription with a reasonable chance of success. That chance can be found in the grassroots creativity seen in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy: spontaneous calls for solidarity, with people of all faiths and none coming together to condemn the atrocity, mourn the victims, and rebuild bonds of humanity, regardless of official policies.
But first we must understand how this atrocity happened.
While neither the barbaric nature of ISIS nor its puritanical fanaticism is in dispute, the problem is that the terror-state did not suddenly emerge.
President Hollande’s response—bombs away abroad and permanent emergency at home—is premised on the idea that ISIS subsists inexplicably in a sort of barbaric no-man’s land outside the sphere of civilization.
He is wrong. ISIS is a product of civilization, through and through.
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