Government's Lawful access bill gives unprecedented access to Canadians’ online activities
from the National Post
Jesse Kline: Lawful access bill set to become the new gun registry
Jesse Kline, National Post - Monday, Feb. 13, 2012
For years, small-c conservatives have been arguing that the gun registry is a giant waste of money — not only because it went way over budget, but due to the fact that it serves to make criminals out of law abiding firearms owners. Meanwhile, those intent on committing crimes easily escape its grip. To their credit, the federal Tories are in the process of scrapping the registry. But while the government restores some of our freedoms with one hand, it simultaneously takes them away with the other.
Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has placed the Conservatives’ so-called “[external] lawful access” legislation — which they’ve been trying to [external] pass since 2009 — on the House of Commons [external] Order Paper. If it becomes law, the bill will give the government unprecedented access to Canadians’ online activities, by allowing police to collect the personal information of Internet users — including names, addresses and phone numbers — without having to go through the cumbersome process of obtaining a warrant beforehand.
In order to gain access to these intimate details, the government will force Internet service providers to install costly monitoring equipment on their networks. Taxpayers will likely be forced to foot part of the bill, but the rest of the cost will be borne by private industry. Smaller providers could be driven out of what is already an uncompetitive market. The law would also make it much easier for police to force telecommunication companies to retain information on their customers and to enable tracking devices on mobile phones.
This type of legislation brings us one step closer to George Orwell’s dystopian vision of a totalitarian state that keeps its citizens under constant surveillance. Yet there is no evidence the new law will achieve its public policy objectives.
Law enforcement agencies have been unable to come up with a single investigation that has been hampered by the limits of the laws currently on the books. Even the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police could not find a “sufficient quantity of credible examples” to support the additional powers the lawful access legislation would grant them, according to a series of internal e-mails obtained by the Vancouver-based group Open Media. Postmedia News has also obtained government documents, in which officials from within Public Safety Canada object to some of the key arguments the Minister has used to justify the bill.
The other problem with the legislation is that tech-savvy Internet users already have a whole [external] host of technologies for evading censorship at their disposal. Software that encrypts and anonymizes Internet traffic — and allows people to gain access to hidden networks — is already in use by those living in authoritarian countries, such as China and Syria, as well as by individuals and groups engaging in criminal acts. If our government starts acting like an Orwellian police state, it will only drive more people into the dark alleys of the online world, where unsavoury material is more readily available.
What we have in the “lawful access” legislation is a bill that violates the privacy rights of law-abiding citizens, while leaving criminals easy ways to avoid it entirely — which sounds an awful lot like 2011/08/05/jesse-kline-in-the-new-canada-the-web-browses-you.
We deserve better from our elected officials. The Conservatives have been intent on enacting laws that give more power to police and impose a heavy burden on society, despite a lack of evidence of the effectiveness of such measures. Should our government be vigorously combating such evils as terrorism and child pornography? Of course. But it must find a way to do so without sacrificing Canadians’ basic civil liberties in the process.
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Your personal data isn't safe and it's worse than we thought
Last week, a firestorm hovered over Path, after it was found to be uploading and storing user data from iPhone address books without requesting permission. The company subsequently changed its policy and apologized to users. But the selective outrage irked Michael Arrington, the blogger-turned-investor whose CrunchFund has money in Path. "As a user I'm slightly annoyed by this, and I think the apps doing this should be publicly criticized. But I think all of them should, not just one of them," fhe wrote. (Read his full post here.)
Arrington had a point. Early testing by The Next Web, The Verge and Venture Beat on other smartphone apps suggest that several also may use personal user data in unauthorized ways.
With Foursquare, for instance, personal address book information got sent to its servers without prior user notification. Foursquare subsequently tweeted its acknowledgment and then updated the app. For the record, the company also says it never stores user data.
You can read the full list compiled by the publications mentioned above, who all deserve kudos for excellent work. The more this issue gets an airing, the faster that developers, small and large, may start to clean up their act.
So it was that this evening, Twitter acknowledged to the Los Angeles Times that it retained data on its servers for 18 months after users selected the "Find Friends" feature on its smartphone app. A clarification of Twitter's privacy policy is said to be underway. A bit after the fact given that the company doesn't reveal that it downloads and stores user address books. What it does say is that Twitter users "may customize your account with information such as a cellphone number for the delivery of SMS messages or your address book so that we can help you find Twitter users you know."
There's nothing necessarily nefarious about that, but in the absence of technical solutions to restrict access to private data, we're stuck relying upon the kindness of strangers. So here's the question: when is the tech industry going to do the right thing? Or better yet: Will it do the right thing about all this, period? This isn't 1979 when computers and technology were used by a relative handful of people. This now as American as apple pie.
The proverbial gauntlet has been tossed their way. If Silicon Valley flubs the opportunity and fails to reach out and assure consumers, I guarantee you that certain folks in Washington are going to get involved quite soon.