On The Wire

In Defence of Justice Russell Brown

A lawyer in Victoria, British Columbia. An intern at the British Columbia Provincial Legislature. A member of the bars of Alberta and British Columbia. A doctorate in law from the University of Toronto. A law professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. A justice of the Court of Queen's ...
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Production Orders and Probable Cause

On September 14, 2014, the Alberta Court of Appeal released its split 2-1 opinion in R. v. Fedossenko, 2014 ABCA 314, 316 C.C.C. (3d) 223 holding that the standard of "reasonable grounds to believe that an offence...has been or is suspected to have been committed", contained in s. 487.012(3)(a) of the ...
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Privacy Heats Up: Major Cases in the Courts

Privacy litigation advanced on three fronts in the United States, Britain and Canada this month. In the United States, the American Civil Liberties Union headed back to the U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, in the case involving the bulk data collection program of the National Security Agency. In a ...
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Privacy Rights in Residential Buildings

A thorn in s. 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights, and in Fourth Amendment doctrine in the United States, has been this question: Do condominium owners and apartment lessees have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the common areas of their buildings? The question has received some answers in two ...
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The Crypto War Is Obsolete

On June 29, 2015, Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron caught the public ear again by claiming that the Bogeyman is lurking somewhere on the Internet. Mr. Cameron said that the privacy policies of companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter are "unsustainable" and that security services must be able to ...
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Wiretap Reports: Canada and the United States

In my post titled The Right to Notification dated August 2, 2014, I discussed s. 196 of the Criminal Code which contains the post facto transparency rule that a person who was the subject of a wiretap interception must be given notice within ninety days after the wiretap ended. It is ...
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Fourth Amendment Protects Hotel Records: U.S. Supreme Court Rules

On June 22, 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States released its ruling in City of Los Angeles v. Patel et al, 576 U.S. _ (2015) that: (1) facial constitutional challenges can be brought under the Fourth Amendment; and, (2) the ordinance in the Los Angeles Municipal Code requiring ...
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Intercepts by GCHQ Violated Privacy Rights

On June 22, 2015, the British government's intelligence monitoring agency released its ruling that the interception of private communications of two international human rights groups by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was illegal and in breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Article 8(1) provides: "Everyone ...
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What Is a Fair Trial?

On February 22, 1632, a book was delivered to Ferdinando II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, titled Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Ferdinando was a patron of its author Galileo Galilei, known mononymously as Galileo, an Italian mathematician, astronomer and philosopher. The Dialogue advocated the model of ...
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Supreme Court Rules Medical Marihuana Law Is Arbitrary

On June 11, 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada released its unanimous opinion in R. v. Smith, 2015 SCC 34 that the law prohibiting medical access to marihuana other than dried marihuana is unconstitutional. In a per curiam ruling, the court held that the legislation violated the right to life, liberty and security ...
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