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#CyberFLASH: Canada’s Police Allowed Journalists to ‘Embed’ to Argue For More Surveillance

29/11/2016 by canux

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Police in Canada have been making their case in the media for greater powers to crack encryption and other digital privacy measures, which they say are increasingly stymying investigations into criminal activities online.

To demonstrate the need for expanded powers, federal police recently gave “unprecedented access” to two of the country’s biggest media outlets. The RCMP allowed journalists from the Toronto Star and the CBC to access 10 “top secret” case files, which were essentially vetted summaries prepared by police, intended to illustrate the roadblocks that investigators say they are coming up against.

The CBC/Star five-part investigative series, which was published in November, sparked widespread debate about police powers and privacy online. In Motherboard, critics accused the police of using the media to spark “moral panic” about encryption. Talk from RCMP officials about criminals “going dark” mirrors language used by the FBI in the US, which has had its own debate about these issues going back for years.

Canada is in the midst of a public consultation on a green paper on national security that highlights four proposals, including one that would give police “warrantless access” to Canadians’ basic internet subscriber information. Police argue that they need expanded digital powers to keep us all safe from crime. Privacy advocates, on the other hand, say that the police already have wide-ranging capabilities to surveil Canadians, maybe more now than than ever. And encryption, of course, isn’t just used by criminals.

Read More: Exclusive: How Canadian Police Intercept and Read Encrypted BlackBerry Messages

The CBC/Star investigation comes at a charged time, amid revelations that spies here had been illegally storing Canadians’ metadata for a decade; that police in Quebec had been surveilling journalists in the province; and amid public consultations on Canada’s controversial Bill C-51, which has been sold as an anti-terrorism measure.

Read more here

Filed Under: Canada Online Privacy News Tagged With: Bill C-51, Canada, encryption, metadata, news, Online Privacy, RCMP, surveillance

#CyberFLASH: Privacy watchdog urges Ottawa to pass ‘metadata’ legislation

27/09/2016 by canux

hacker-stolen-passwords Canada’s privacy czar is calling on the Liberals to fulfill a promise to pass laws constraining the federal spies who are allowed to capture records of Canadians’ phone and Internet activities.

The Communications Security Establishment needs new legislation because it has not been careful enough in handling such material, says Daniel Therrien, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. “The National Defence Act should be amended,” he said in an interview. “I would want some clarity around the standards used to collect and share ‘metadata.’ Right now, the act is completely silent on this.”

“Metadata” is the name federal officials give to phone logs, Internet exchanges and similar activity that spy agencies can electronically intercept in bulk. The substance of the underlying communications and the identities of communicators are not known.

CSE has been tasked with providing intelligence about foreigners to the Canadian cabinet since the 1940s. Mr. Therrien’s call for new laws for CSE was formally made in his office’s annual report on Tuesday. While the Liberals are not obliged to implement his findings, they promised new CSE laws on the campaign trail last year.

Canadian police officers who want access to an individual’s phone records must get a judge to sign a warrant. CSE’s technological analysts, which work with Canada’s closest allies to capture and share communication trails of as many people as possible, operate without warrants and largely through secret edicts signed by the minister of national defence.

#CyberFLASH: Rogers reports marked decline in police requests for data

20/05/2016 by canux

web-rogers-0107 OTTAWA—Rogers Communications saw a marked decrease in police requests for Canadians’ data in 2015, a year after the Supreme Court put serious restrictions on law enforcements’ ability to access personal information without a warrant.

The company reported 86,328 requests for their customers’ information in 2015, a more than 50 per cent drop since Rogers’ first started publicly reporting law enforcement requests in 2013.

Dave Watt, Rogers’ chief privacy officer, said he thinks the main reason for the decline is the company no longer hands over customer information without a warrant — except in emergency circumstances.

“I think that would be the biggest reason. I don’t think that crime has diminished to that extent,” Watt said in an interview Thursday. “It really is the fact that the system, the process, is now really well-understood.”

The Star reported in 2014 that law enforcement agencies had asked nine of Canada’s largest telecommunications and Internet providers to hand over their customers’ data 1.2 million times in 2011.

Police routinely asked for what is known as “basic subscriber information” — name, address, Internet protocol address, telephone number — without a warrant.

While basic subscriber information sounds innocuous, often called “phone book” data by police, privacy advocates have warned it can be used to paint a detailed picture of Canadians’ activities both online and offline.

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in June 2014 that law enforcement and security agencies must obtain a search warrant to request that information, except in emergency situations.

#CyberFLASH: Canada’s electronic spy agency broke privacy law by sharing info

28/01/2016 by canux

1297799092521_ORIGINAL OTTAWA — Canada’s electronic spy agency broke privacy laws by sharing information about Canadians with foreign partners, says a federal watchdog.

The Communications Security Establishment passed along the information — known as metadata — to counterparts in the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, said Jean-Pierre Plouffe, who keeps an eye on the highly secretive agency.

Metadata is information associated with a communication — such as a telephone number or email address — but not the message itself.

The Ottawa-based CSE uses highly advanced technology to intercept, sort and analyze foreign communications for information of intelligence interest to the federal government.

Documents leaked in 2013 by former American spy contractor Edward Snowden revealed the U.S. National Security Agency — a close CSE ally — had quietly obtained access to a huge volume of emails, chat logs and other information from major Internet companies, as well as massive amounts of data about telephone calls.

As a result, civil libertarians, privacy advocates and opposition politicians demanded assurances the CSE was not using its extraordinary powers to snoop on Canadians.

#CyberFLASH: Report on CSE must be released

08/01/2016 by canux

dynamic_resize Our new Minister of National Defence, Harjit Sajjan, certainly faces very challenging problems providing for an effective defense of Canadians in the current international context.

However, some of his statutory obligations, such as facilitating the oversight of Canada’s Internet spies, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), mandate relatively straightforward actions that are intended to enhance privacy and, ultimately, freedom. In particular, the National Defence Act requires him to table in Parliament the annual report on the activities of the CSE, which he has not done yet.

This report, entitled “Activities and Findings of the Commissioner of the Communications Security Establishment,” is one of the few, regular public sources of information about the CSE, an agency possessing enormous power to spy on Internet users, including Canadians, without any form of judicial review.

The unreleased 2014-15 report should be especially interesting reading, as it apparently will contain a summary of a review of the CSE’s use of metadata – information automatically embedded in electronic communications about, among other things, the identity of the sender and receiver of a message, such as an email or text.

The covert collection of metadata is also one of several subjects of an ongoing lawsuit brought against the CSE by the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association.

The last published report, covering the period 2013-2014, was tabled in Parliament by former minister Rob Nicholson on Aug. 20, 2014. It has now been well over a year since that report was made available, although the current, unreleased report has been in the hands of the Ministry of Defence since at least September of 2015 but probably much earlier.

#CyberFLASH: Canada supports UN Expansion on Anti-Spying Resolution to Include Metadata Collection

26/11/2014 by canux

G3-Nov16-20 A United Nations committee agreed to adopt a softened version of a resolution on limiting government surveillance and the mass collection of personal data, after the U.S. and its allies invoked the need for effective intelligence-gathering to combat terrorism.

The General Assembly’s human rights committee today adopted by consensus the non-binding resolution, which invoked possible dangers posed to privacy rights by the mass collection of metadata, such as bulk records of phone calls gathered by the U.S. National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies.

The resolution stopped short of condemning metadata collection after the U.S. and its allies lobbied to remove language classifying it as “highly intrusive,” according to two UN diplomats involved in the negotiations who asked not to be named commenting on private consultations.

The Obama administration said that such intelligence-gathering is needed to fight terrorists such as Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria and to address the threat of foreign fighters coming home to stage terror attacks in Europe or the U.S., the diplomats said.

That U.S. argument was backed by its fellow members in an intelligence cooperation agreement known as Five Eyes, they said. The other members are Australia, New Zealand, the U.K. and Canada.

#CyberFLASH: Proposed bill calls for more oversight and accountability for Canada’s electronic spy agency

31/10/2014 by canux

Joyce Murray There will be a second reading of the CSEC Accountability and Transparency Act this afternoon in the House of Commons (as this is being posted).

The bill is proposed by Joyce Murray the MP for Vancouver Quadra and the Liberal Critic for National Defence.

This bill will restore much-needed public confidence in the operations of CSEC by updating its legal statute, which dates back to 2001. Canadians need to know that CSEC is operating effectively but also in accordance with laws that make sense and are suited to the realities of global communications, and with a much greater degree of transparency than Cold War thinking allowed. CSEC has intrusive powers and Canadians need reassurance that their privacy, including the privacy of their communications, is not been infringed upon simply because technology now exists that allows intelligence agencies to vacuum up vast quantities of information.

The Bill modernises the now-out dated law governing CSEC. It takes away the Minister’s power to secretly authorise the interception of Canadians’ protected information, including meta-data, and it places that authority in the hands of an independent judge of the Federal Court. It strengthens the internal and external accountability of CSEC, and establishes new requirements for transparency, including the requirement that CSEC publish an annual public report on its operations. The bill makes these changes while affirming the essence of CSEC’s contribution to national security by preserving its mandates for foreign intelligence, cyber security and assistance to domestic law enforcement and security agencies. We are not proposing to change CSEC, only to surround its operations with better democratic controls.

#CyberFLASH: Stephen Harper says Canadians’ metadata not collected

26/09/2014 by canux

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OTTAWA—Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s assertion that Canadian security agencies don’t collect “metadata” has some cybersecurity experts scratching their heads.

That’s because the Communications Security Establishment of Canada (CSEC) is not only legally mandated to collect metadata — data that details the circumstances around electronic communications — but has repeatedly confirmed that they do.

“Unfortunately we live in a ‘black hole’ around CSEC’s activities,” Ron Diebert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, said in an email.

“(It’s) a situation in which secret interpretations of secret laws are the standard, thus leaving citizens with no recourse but to . . . wonder just what is the real meaning of the phrases ‘targeting,’ ‘collection,’ or, in this case, ‘we don’t do that.’ ”

Speaking to a business audience in New York on Wednesday, Harper delivered some of his most detailed comments on CSEC’s activities and electronic surveillance since the agency was thrust into the spotlight in 2013.

Saying he’s not “a big believer” in wide-net electronic surveillance, Harper said Canada doesn’t use metadata for domestic surveillance on homegrown terrorists.

#CyberFLASH: Canada’s Police Allowed Journalists to ‘Embed’ to Argue For More Surveillance

#CyberFLASH: Privacy watchdog urges Ottawa to pass ‘metadata’ legislation

#CyberFLASH: Rogers reports marked decline in police requests for data

#CyberFLASH: Canada’s electronic spy agency broke privacy law by sharing info

#CyberFLASH: Report on CSE must be released

#CyberFLASH: Canada supports UN Expansion on Anti-Spying Resolution to Include Metadata Collection

#CyberFLASH: Proposed bill calls for more oversight and accountability for Canada’s electronic spy agency

#CyberFLASH: Stephen Harper says Canadians’ metadata not collected

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