Slacktivism defeats Lawful Access

By Jesse Brown - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 8:02 PM - 19 Comments

There were no rallies against the Conservatives’ “Lawful Access” legislation. No marches, riots, demonstrations or happenings. Canadians who opposed the overreaching and wrongheaded online surveillance measures fought them (where else?) online.

Over 70,000 Canadians clicked to sign a “Stop Online Spying” petition posted by OpenMedia. Yesterday, the Harper government’s omnibus crime bill was introduced—a bundle of bills that had been assumed to include the new warrantless tracking measures. But Lawful Access was nowhere to be found.

OpenMedia quickly issued a press release claiming victory, and rightfully so. Despite a concerning lack of interest in the issue on the part of the mainstream media, OpenMedia successfully educated and activated tens of thousands of Canadians. Was their petition the reason the legislation was omitted? I suppose a letter sent last March signed by the provincial privacy commissioners, which cautioned the government about the invasive nature of the proposed laws may also have had an impact.

It’s also true that Internet service providers were less than thrilled about the prospect of building and maintaining the technical apparatus to constantly spy on their own customers. We may never know for certain what made Justice Minister Rob Nicholson think twice, but I’d hazard a guess that playing a major role in the decision was the prospect of facing down a growing horde of angry netizens, demanding answers to questions few aging legislators are equipped to answer. For example:

• How can you assure us the tracking data will be safely stored when governments routinely lose and leak personal data?
• Will the police access the data through a web portal? If so, what happens when it gets hacked?
• Will the police be allowed to build software “bots” that crawl through our data looking for suspicious online activity?

Better to simply wipe the digitally illiterate laws from the bundled bill than stand accountable for such poorly conceived policy. Lawful Access may very well return unbundled as its own separate bill. If so, those emboldened by their effectiveness so far in fighting it will surely pounce on the wounded legislation. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing just quietly goes away.

Think about it: 70,000 Canadians signed an online petition against Lawful Access, and we don’t yet have Lawful Access. Around 100,000 Canadians joined a Facebook group against a backwards Copyright reform bill, and we don’t yet have backwards Copyright reform. Almost half a million Canadians signed a petition against wholesale usage-based billing, and we don’t have that either.

The ethereal nature of these protests may be the key to their success. Their message to legislators is simple: thousands of Canadians are against what you’re doing. Right now they are angry in their homes, at their computers. Proceed and they may be angry at your door, or at the polls.

Considering its effectiveness, maybe it’s time to think of a more respectful term for online political engagement than “Slacktivism”.

Omnibus toughness

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 12:27 PM - 5 Comments

The government has announced details of its omnibus crime bill: The Safe Streets and Communities Act, which will bundle together nine separate bills.

A quick scan of the backgrounder shows no mention of “lawful access,” nor any mention of the two anti-terrorism provisions the Prime Minister has vowed to reinstate.

Fight promotion

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 5:12 PM - 4 Comments

The NDP is touting its readiness to fight the government’s “lawful access” legislation.

“What we have been hearing from experts and citizen is that this new law gives the government and police way too much power to snoop into our lives,” said New Democrat Privacy and Digital Affairs Critic Charlie Angus (Timmins—James Bay). “Canadians are right to feel that the Conservatives are not protecting their privacy and that we need to curb this bill.”

Over the summer Angus has been putting in place a team of MPs to work with civil society groups, stakeholders and citizens to fight against lawful access legislation both in and out of parliament.

“Spearheading” the fight at the justice committee will be Charmaine Borg, one of the NDP’s undergrads.

Worried about terrorism? Not us.

By Philippe Gohier - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 12 Comments

Steve Payne/The New York Times/Redux

Even though memories of 9/11 remain vivid for Canadians, the threat of terrorism is hardly at the top of our minds. An Innovative Research poll done for Maclean’s shows that 27.1 per cent of Canadians consider 9/11 to have been the most important international development of the last decade, ranking it just slightly higher than the credit crisis of 2008 (26.2 per cent) and well above other developments like climate change and the rise of the middle class in China and India. Which isn’t to say 9/11 has had a lasting impact on our national psyche. Asked to name the one issue that concerns them most, just 3.4 per cent of respondents identified the threat of terrorism. Indeed, Canadians are much more likely to be worried about the state of our health care system (19 per cent) and the potential for another recession (18.2 per cent) than they are of a repeat of 9/11.

That may be partly explained by the seemingly widespread perception among Canadians that terrorist attacks aren’t likely to affect them personally. If terrorist threats are to happen at all, Canadians believe they’ll target people other than themselves. Nearly eight in 10 Canadians say they’re either not very concerned or not concerned at all that someone they know could fall victim to a terrorist attack. A comparably meagre 3.9 per cent say they are very concerned about the possibility. The online poll had 1,066 respondents and a margin of error equivalent to plus or minus three per cent.

But Canadians have come to some firm conclusions about the fallout from 9/11. As a nation, we’ve grown particularly skeptical about the benefits of the two wars that followed the attacks. Canadians are twice as likely to say the war in Afghanistan made the world a more dangerous place as they are to say it made the world safer. The divide is even more stark when it comes to Iraq: Canadians are more than four times more likely to say the war in Iraq made the world more dangerous rather than safer.

Continue…

The RCMP and Montreal police ignored cybercrime while demanding new powers to fight cybercrime

By Jesse Brown - Monday, August 22, 2011 at 5:29 PM - 20 Comments

Canadian cops claim they need new “lawful access” laws to deal with online crime. But the case of Dennis “David Mabus” Markuze shows that when it comes to the Internet, our police are reluctant to use the powers they already have.

Markuze has allegedly been spamming atheists and scientists with online abuse and death threats for over 15 years. Here’s one example among thousands:Lots of people say lots of offensive—even illegal—things online, but Markuze lent his comments a chilling credibility when he showed up in person to an atheist event in Montreal in October 2010. One attendee snapped this now infamous picture: Continue…

Lawful access and online freedom

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, August 12, 2011 at 3:17 PM - 5 Comments

Alexander Ly and Andrew Webb oppose the government’s “lawful access” legislation.

Under current laws, internet service providers (ISPs) can voluntarily disclose customer information to the authorities, but they are only required to do so if served a warrant. Bill C-52, Section 16 (1), would supersede this liberty, and force providers to disclose consumer information to the authorities without a court order. Making matters worse, Bill C-50 would enable the police to intercept “communications” – as vaguely defined by Bill C-51 – without a warrant as long as they deem the intervention necessary. This shift toward warrantless investigations removes court oversight from the monitoring of wired and mobile internet, and allows law-enforcement authorities, without justification, to have a free hand in spying on the private lives of law-abiding Canadians.

Our own Peter Nowak considers the future of governance in the Internet age.

Lawful Access: spyware for cops

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 at 1:36 PM - 32 Comments

When I caution people about the coming Lawful Access spying laws, there’s often some confusion. Many assume that spying on the Internet is like putting a wiretap on a phone. So the police will be able to listen to my Skype calls and read my emails?

Sure. But it’s much worse than that.

Lawful Access does make traditional web surveillance easier, but it will also give the police access to your “basic information” without them having to get a warrant. “Basic information” covers your real name, your online identities, your email addresses, your I.P. address, your home address and your home phone number. If the police have one of these ingredients, they can use it to get the rest.

If you’re still not concerned, wait a bit…

Under Lawful Access, ISPs will have to build surveillance technology that stores this info and makes it available to the police. Right now, if cops go to your ISP and ask for your info (this happens all the time anyhow, often without a warrant) some human at your ISP will have to dig through your digital footprints to find it. Under Lawful Access, a police web portal will be built to automate the process.

This is hugely problematic.

First of all, what happens if (when) this portal gets hacked?  It won’t need to be a sophisticated hack, either.  If thousands of cops are assigned logins, how much do you want to bet that one of them will use “abc123″ as a password?

But let’s assume this somehow never happens. Warrantless data-tracking is still very scary, for reasons the police themselves likely haven’t considered. As anyone who compulsively checks their email knows, once you automate information requests, remove every obstacle, remove human communication from the process and throw it all online with a big shiny “search” button, usage skyrockets.

When Sprint built a similar portal for cops to track cell phone users’ GPS coordinates, usage shot up to 8 million pings in just over a year. In their idle time, police can just fish around, see where folks are at, see which avatar belongs to which human, and play the portal like a video game, hoping to stumble upon a lawbreaker.

The next step, of course, is for the police to get automated as well. With unfettered access to a massive dataset of “basic information”, why manually run hunt and peck searches when you could just write an algorithm that’ll mash it all up and spit out the names of those statistically likely to be up to no good?

Does that sound like paranoid sci-fi? Maybe, but it’s all possible with existing technology, and is really just an extension of current trends in data analysis into law enforcement. If data is accessible, machine-readable and has predictive value, someone will build an app for that. Everyone else is using “bots”, so why shouldn’t the police?

When RoboCop comes, he will look like a line of code.

Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown.

Will anonymity and hyperlinks be illegal in Canada?

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 5:20 PM - 90 Comments

I’ve blogged before about Stephen Harper’s tough-guy campaign promise to bundle up and ram through a bunch of crime bills within 100 days of gaining his majority. One of the three bills he’s mushing together deals with online crime, focusing of course on the usual boogeymen: child porn and hate speech. I’ve pointed to one atrocious aspect therein—Lawful Access, which will allow police to demand all sorts of information about Canadians from their ISPs without having to bother with pesky warrants.

Here are two more reasons to be very concerned about/appalled with the upcoming legislation: Continue…

Harper's promise: a warrantless online surveillance state

By Jesse Brown - Wednesday, April 13, 2011 at 7:56 AM - 109 Comments

“We are not in any way shape or form wanting extra powers for police to pursue [information online] without warrants.”

That was Stockwell Day, speaking to me in 2007. He was the Harper government’s public safety minister at the time, and his office came into controversy when consultation documents surfaced suggesting that the Conservatives were drafting a “lawful access” crime bill that would greatly expand the powers of police to obtain personal information about Canadians from their Internet service providers without court oversight.

If such a bill were to become law, cops would no longer need a warrant to trace, say, an Internet comment to a citizen’s name, IP address, email address, home address, and cell phone number. In fact, as long as the police had any one of the above, they could request the rest of the info from ISPs without a judge ever considering the need for such disclosure.

But Minister Day was emphatic—my concerns were misplaced, the controversy unnecessary. He had no intention of proposing any such bill. He claimed that the leaked document was a leftover from the previous Liberal administration. He later told the Ottawa Citizen that though such powers would help the police, they were an affront to “our expectation of rights to privacy.”

And warrantless web tracing?

“That is not the path we’re walking down at all, ” said Day.

Two years later, the Conservatives walked down that path.

After a cabinet shuffle, the public safety minister in June 2009 was Peter Van Loan, and he sang a very different tune to me about the need for expanded police powers.

Van Loan tabled a ‘lawful access’ bill that would give police exactly the powers Stockwell Day told me they wouldn’t need. The new minister saw this as no big deal—Canadians, he told me, had “no reasonable expectation of privacy” when it came to this information. In other words, when you leave a comment on this website under a pseudonym, it is unreasonable for you to expect that the police will not be able to trace it to your name, cell number, home address, email address, and other web activity, by linking it to your I.P. address. Such information, he told me, is just like a listing in the phone book.

Others begged to differ. The Ottawa Citizen called the ‘lawful access’ bill “out of balance,” Colby Cosh called it “a bogus, ill-advised expansion of State power,” and the Montreal Gazette called it “unnecessary” and, more to the point, “bad”.

Last month, Canada’s privacy commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, along with every provincial privacy commissioner in the country, sent Public Safety Canada a letter expressing their concerns about the lawful access bill. Namely, they didn’t see any need for it—ISPs already hand over whatever information police ask for, without a warrant, when the cops claim there is immediate danger or child endangerment. They called the bill “problematic”  and wrote that there was “insufficient justification” for the new powers, suggesting “less intrusive” ways for law enforcement to fight crime.

For years, lawful access has been bouncing around, awaiting debate and modification as yet another cabinet shuffle brought Vic Toews into the public safety minister’s office.  Now the Harper campaign promises us that all their outstanding crime bills will be bundled together and shoved through Parliament within 100 days of a Conservative victory.

It’s a promise to do significant damage to the civil liberties of every Canadian, and one Harper’s opponents would do well to pounce on.