It’s been a year like no other for those who follow the privacy, telecommunications and online security debate in Canada.
It started with a bombshell revelation that Canada’s electronic spying agency CSEC had monitored Canadians at airports and elsewhere within the country, apparently in contravention of the law. That was followed by a series of data breaches, court rulings, new legislation and a robust public debate about when and how citizens’ personal data can and should be accessed.
To help put 2014 in perspective, we spoke with telecom and cybersecurity expert Christopher Parsons, post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and managing director of the Telecom Transparency Project, to review how the discussions around privacy shifted in 2014 and what to expect in the new year.
Postmedia: Looking back on a year of new privacy legislation, Supreme Court rulings and yet more Snowden revelations about how much governments are spying on us, what were the biggest takeaways for you as a researcher who studies these things?
Christopher Parsons: Some of the largest takeaways for privacy in 2014 for Canadians relates to the early revelations that our signals intelligence agency, CSEC, was involved in the mass domestic monitoring of communications data. That’s led to recriminations in the public, but also discussions in the Senate and the House of Commons. So for the first time in a long time, signals intelligence is an actual issue in Canada.
For industry, which is providing telecommuncations service writ large, we’ve really seen a change in the degree to which they reveal how often government is requesting information. We have companies like Rogers, Telus, TekSavvy and SaskTel all releasing transparency reports for the first time, making clear that they want to disclose to their customers how often information is requested and, where possible, they’ve pushed back.
Have Canadians come to expect more transparency about how their information is being collected and used?
I think Canadians are beginning to expect that telecommunications companies explain in more detail how and why they comply with government orders for surveillance. It’s still at a nascent stage, so we’ve got four companies in Canada right now that are releasing transparency reports right now. The largest carriers — Bell, throughout all of Canada, as well as Videotron in Quebec — have yet to provide any information as to what they do. So I don’t think we’re at the point where all Canadians expect that information is released by their carriers every year, but we’re at the beginning stage.
We’re often presented with a devil’s bargain of sorts, that if we want convenience in our communications and in all these amazing tools we have to talk to people around the world, that a necessary cost of doing business is our personal data. Is that a necessary compromise we need to make?
Many Canadians understand and almost expect that when they use services — Facebook, the internet writ large — that they just lose some of their personal information, there’s not getting it back and that’s just the cost of enjoying our digital life. Quite frankly, that’s not the case. In Canada, even when information is public, even when you publish a tweet, you have some degree of privacy interest in what you say, in what you tweet, in what you post on Facebook. Now the extent of that interest varies, but we don’t have to accept this zero-sum thinking that if we use the internet then we lose privacy. Canadian privacy law is much more nuanced than that, and Canadians have seen the Supreme Court in particular strongly assert that we have rights to privacy online and that companies and governments alike have to obey it.
Is there a clear path the legal and judicial system is taking in Canada when it comes to this?
The Supreme Court of Canada was very involved with the privacy file this year. Earlier this year there was a ruling on R. v. Spencer, which was about the ability of law enforcement and other government agencies to warrantlessly request access to subscriber data. So what happens is they go to your telecom with an IP address or phone number and go to a telecom and say, “Hey, who does this belong to?”
The Supreme Court said in order to do that you need to either have a judicial order or you have to come with some statutory power. You can’t just ask, you have to have a right to ask. So in that sense, we saw a reaffirmation of our privacy rights.
But this has been complicated a bit. A more recent ruling involved cellphones, the ability to access cellphones at time of arrest without a warrant. But rather than say police can or cannot access engage in those searches, the court established a four-part test in order to limit fishing expeditions and they recognized that if you have a password then the police can’t just go through it. So that wasn’t a strict win [for privacy] in that latter case, but the court is and remains sensitive to smartphones and other devices being incredibly personally revealing and trying to limit the ability for officers to just dig through your phone.
It seems now that privacy, information security and these issues have now become political where they may not have been in previous years. Did 2014 represent a shift and do you think it will become an issue in the 2015 election?
We’ve seen privacy become a more prominent theme in federal politics, to be sure. We’ve always had data breaches at the federal government level, although at the provincial and municipal levels as well, to be fair, but now we’re starting to see politicians not just use those to make cheap shots or to make an issue of it for a while and then let it die. Now we’re seeing members of parliament, both on the NDP and Liberal benches, really try to understand the extent to which the government of Canada is involved in monitoring Canadians, the rationales for it and the cost. How much does it actually cost to spy on us?
It’s been positive because it hasn’t been a one-off question. We’ve seen a succession of questions from both [opposition] parties. Is this going to be the primary ballot question? I’d like to imagine so but I doubt it. But we’re seeing federal politicians take a real sustained interest and that’s a really positive shift in both the tactics they’re using and their ability to promote that information not just in Parliament but to Canadians more broadly. We’re seeing a raising of awareness within parliamentarians about the importance of privacy, and the value of talking about it.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
No comments:
Post a Comment