Canada has two intelligence agencies. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) is governed by the Canadian Security Intelligence Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-23. It was originally set up for intelligence gathering and not as an enforcement agency. It replaced the RCMP Security Service following the "barn burners" scandal in the ...
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Surveillance. Unregulated. Everywhere. Everyone knows. Everyone has an opinion. Many of us care about it because we talk about it and write about it. And we talk about it and write about it incessantly. The "IT" I will discuss is surveillance by closed-circuit television (CCTV). What is closed-circuit television? It ...
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On June 25, 2014, the Supreme Court of the United States released its unanimous judgment in Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 1 (2014) in which it was held that a warrantless search and seizure of digital contents of a cell phone during an arrest violated the Fourth Amendment and was ...
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On January 20, 2015, Justin Ling published an article on VICE NEWS titled "The RCMP Spent $1.6 Million to Run an Unconstitutional Spying Program". The main points that Mr. Ling addresses are: (1) records obtained under the Access to Information Act show that the RCMP obtained subscriber information from the ...
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In my post titled "Nothing to Hide" dated November 16, 2014, I discussed the threat to personal security posed by unrestricted government collection of personal information. The collection of this kind of data is called data mining. Professor Stephen J. Schulhofer, in More Essential Than Ever: The Fourth Amendment in ...
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Conventional wisdom ascribes to the view that private information means secret information. Such a limited view of privacy distorts the broader meaning and substantive content of s. 8 of the Charter of Rights. The right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure embodies a guarantee not merely of secrecy ...
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On November 26, 2014, the European Commission adopted the "Guidelines on the Implementation of the Court of Justice of the European Union Judgment on Google Spain and Inc v. Agencia Espanola de Proteccion de Datos (AEPD) and Mario Costeja Gonzalez C-131/12." With the adoption of the Guidelines this seemed like a ...
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On July 31, 2014, the Federal Court of Appeal released its judgment in X (Re), 2014 FCA 249 upholding a Federal Court ruling that limited the scope of powers that may be exercised by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) while carrying out surveillance of Canadians abroad. This per curiam judgment ...
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We have all heard the argument by those who are not opposed to government surveillance: "I've got nothing to hide." In the United Kingdom the use of closed circuit television in public places is pandemic. The advance of the British government's CCTV program moved forward with the motto: "If you've ...
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In a decision released on October 17, 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada had a rare opportunity to consider s. 193 of the Criminal Code which makes it a crime to disclose or use an intercepted private communication without the consent of the originator or the intended recipient of the ...
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