The “spillover effects” of overbroad anti-terror legislation.
We’ve long been lamenting the enormous and still utterly murky – despite
the Snowden revelations – spy apparatus in the US that, in collaboration
with Corporate America, stretches from many federal agencies to
state and local agencies. It’s all there, seamless, borderless, perfect:
collecting license-plate data with photos that show who went where with
whom to do what, checking out our “secure” data in the
Cloud, collecting phone “metadata” that is not supposed to reveal
personal details….
“We kill people based on metadata,” explained helpfully Gen. Michael
Hayden, former head of the NSA. To make us Americans feel better,
he added, “But that’s not what we do with this metadata.”
On the corporate side, consumer surveillance technologies and methods,
dressed up in appealing terms like Ad Tech, are being perfected, and an
entire startup bubble has sprung up to compete with the Big Ones
that already master this.
For years, and at every level, laws have been passed in the US to give Big
Brother more and more tools to track us in everything we do. Despite
these efforts, Big Brother is just slowly limping
behind fleet-footed Corporate America.
The article below reveals how the Canadian government is marching in the
same direction, perhaps at a different pace, but with equally disturbing
undertones.
By Kimberly Carlson, Electronic Frontier Foundation:
The Canadian government is scheduled to release new security legislation
on Friday that would grant even more power to its police and domestic
security agencies. This proposal comes in response to a string of “lone
wolf” shootings of soldiers in Canada last October.
This isn’t the first overbroad anti-terror legislation we’ve seen proposed
or enacted in Canada—and that’s what’s concerning. The country has been playing
catch up post-9/11, hastily increasing state surveillance powers,
particularly during this past year. Bills that grant a broad range of
policing and intelligence powers to government agencies, as well as speech
restrictions on ordinary citizens, have already been brought forward, but we
have yet to see the implications of these laws as many of them are still
navigating through the legislature or just coming into effect now.
Tamir Israel, staff lawyer at the Samuelson-Glushko
Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), cautions
the Canadian government in creating yet another set of new powers before the
dust has even settled on the last set of expansions.
Top Canadian judges agree,
saying there are laws in place, such as provisions in Canada’s Anti-Terrorism
Act, that were crafted for this purpose. Retired Supreme Court of Canada
Justice Frank Iacobucci, cautioned
about:
the “spillover effects” that any rush to expand police powers would have
on freedom of religion, association and expression; the possible “tainting”
of Canada’s Muslim community, and the risk of “overreaching” by security
intelligence agencies when sharing information in a global fight against
terrorism.
To pile on more anti-terror legislation is simply reactionary and a recipe
for disaster. Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, however, ensures
that this proposal will contain the proper tools Canadian police and security
agencies need in order to keep citizens safe as new threats arise.
Why the need for more legislation if the country’s state surveillance
powers are already so robust?
Documents
released by The Intercept this week from the files leaked by Edward Snowden
show that the Communications Security Establishment (CSE, formally known as
Communications Security Establishment Canada or CSEC) is already using very
invasive surveillance tools. The revelations that CSE tracked millions of
downloads each day, all over the globe, as part of its foreign intelligence
spying and Five Eyes information sharing initiative exposes an overreaching
surveillance state with little to no oversight.
According to Israel, “It’s irresponsible to address modern surveillance
capacities and challenges in a one-sided manner, ratcheting up powers every
time something happens while categorically ignoring the privacy side of the
equation.” The shortcomings of Canada’s existing surveillance apparatus will
remain unaddressed as the government trudges along with no consideration of
the impact of these initiatives.
Case in point, just this summer the Canadian government shut down a
bill that aimed to “enhance transparency and oversight by establishing a
non-partisan parliamentary oversight committee and requiring the CSE
Commissioner’s annual report on CSE activities to include greater detail.” In
addition, a number of inquiries have made dozens of recommendations deemed
necessary to address increasingly gaping holes in Canada’s intelligence
framework, yet the government has shown
little interest in implementing these.
In light of what we’ve learned this week about the CSE tracking
downloads and the country’s incessant attempts to increase state powers,
it’s time for the Canadian government to see that this is a two-sided issue
and considerations for privacy protections must not be overlooked. By
Kimberly Carlson, Electronic Frontier Foundation
“We’re unwrapping the best holiday gift we could’ve imagined,” Google
gushed. But automakers beg to differ. And you’re not even asked. Read… Fight
Breaks Out Over the Absolutely-No-Privacy-Ever Car
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