It was recently revealed that in 2011 over 780,000 Canadians’ personal information was disclosed by telecom providers to the government. You may have been among them.
This tool helps you learn about the information that your telecom provider collected about you and what it could potentially disclose to third parties. Under Canadian privacy law, your telecom provider is LEGALLY OBLIGED to respond to requests sent using this tool.
La Ligue des droits et libertés is launching this week the spring 2014 issue of its magazine Droits et libertés. In a context where the revelations of Edward Snowden sparked a healthy public debate on the establishment of a system for monitoring populations, this edition aims to shed further light on the evolution of issues of surveillance and of privacy and personal information protection, their implications for democracy and human rights as well as the prospects in terms of resistance and alternatives (in French only).
ICLMG’s National Coordinator, Roch Tassé, and ICLMG’s Communications and Research Coordinator, Anne Dagenais Guertin, have each written an article in this issue.
A working paper by Craig Forcese, Associate Professor, University of Ottawa – Common Law Section
Abstract: Two thousand and thirteen was the year of the spy. Edward Snowden – “leaker” or “whistleblower” depending on one’s perspective – ignited a mainstream (and social) media frenzy in mid-2013 by sharing details of classified US National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programs with the U.K. Guardian and Washington Post newspapers. For related reasons, 2013 was also the year in which the expression “metadata” migrated from the lexicon of the technologically literate to the parlance of everyday commentary. The NSA revelations fuelled media, academic and other speculation about whether similar surveillance programs exist in Canada. That attention focused on Canada’s NSA equivalent (and close alliance partner), the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC). CSEC does have a metadata collection program, prompting questions about its legal basis, and the extent to which CSEC is governed by robust accountability mechanisms. This article focuses on a single aspect of this debate: By reason of technological change and capacity, have the state’s surveillance activities now escaped governance by law? A broad question with a number of facets, this article examines the specific sub-issue of metadata and its relationship with conventional rules on searches and seizures. The article concludes that the privacy standards that CSEC must meet in relation to metadata are much more robust than the government seems to have accepted to date.
