On November 16, 2018, the Federal Court of Appeal released the unanimous opinion of a three member panel in X (Re), 2018 FCA 207. The exact dates of oral argument and the judgment are unknown because they are redacted from the opinion. The case involved an application for extraterritorial warrants by ...
Continue Reading

On October 26, 2018, Andrew Russell and David Akin of Global News broke the story that Statistics Canada planned to collect the banking data of half a million Canadians without their knowledge and consent. The data seizure would include bill payments, cash withdrawals from ATMs, credit card payments, electronic money ...
Continue Reading

Can the state compel a person to provide the password for a locked device? A recent opinion of the Fourth District Court of Appeal in Florida indicates that the law in the United States and Canada could be moving in the same direction - but for different reasons. On October ...
Continue Reading

"It was incredibly fast," Cst Mike Laporte told jurors at the trial of Shawn Vassel for gunning down Husam Degheim in a movie theatre parking lot in Mississauga, Ontario. Cst Laporte was describing Vassel's attempt to elude the police by scaling down eleven floors of a North York apartment building ...
Continue Reading

For over thirty-five years the guideline sentence in Alberta for drug trafficking has been three years imprisonment. Speaking for a unanimous panel of the Alberta Court of Appeal in R v Maskell, 1981 ABCA 50 Justice Arnold F. Moir held, at para 20, that the guideline applies to "a commercial ...
Continue Reading

On September 13, 2018, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) released the judgment in Big Brother Watch and Others v The United Kingdom (Applications nos. 58170/13, 62322/14 and 24960/15). The case concerned the bulk interception of electronic communications by Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). The court held by a ...
Continue Reading

On April 20, 2018, Toronto criminal lawyers Emily Lam and Samara Secter filed the appellant's factum in the Supreme Court of Canada in a case styled as Tom Le v The Queen, Court File No. 37971. The factum is anchored in ss 8 and 9 of the Charter of Rights ...
Continue Reading

On July 18, 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a joint Brief of Amici Curiae in United States v Donald Wanjiku, Case No 18-1973, before the United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, Illinois. The appeal is another case making its way through ...
Continue Reading

Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Facebook's stock price took a 20% tumble this week. In an article titled Does Facebook's plummeting stock spell disaster for the social network? published in the July 26, 2018, edition of The Guardian, Olivia Solon identified "decelerating revenue ...
Continue Reading

On June 5, 2018, Professor Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School and Stuart Russell, a visiting fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard University, published a Hoover Institution essay titled Strengths Become Vulnerabilities: How A Digital World Disadvantages The United States In Its International Relations. Their central claim is that ...
Continue Reading