Since my last post titled Canada's Bill C-51 and The Right To Privacy dated April 16, 2015, the proposed anti-terrorism legislation has been in review by the Senate Standing Committee on National Security and Defence. On April 30, 2015, Professor Craig Forcese of the University of Ottawa, in his National ...
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In my post titled Privacy and Personal Autonomy dated January 2, 2015, I agreed with Professor Stephen J. Schulhofer in More Essential Than Ever: The Fourth Amendment in the Twenty-first Century (2012) that the ability of the individual to flourish in a vibrant democracy cannot survive in the absence of ...
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In my last post titled Informal Coalition Opposes Canada's Anti-Terrorism Bill dated March 22, 2015, I reviewed the criticism of the government's position on Bill C-51 and the attendant decline in public support. I will focus here on two aspects of the bill that have been denounced by the critics: ...
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In my post dated March 16, 2015, titled Canada's Bill C-51: Therrien v. Harper, I concluded with the CBC News report dated March 12, 2015, by Kady O'Malley that the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Daniel Therrien, was blocked by the government from the witness list of the Standing Committee on ...
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On March 5, 2015, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Daniel Therrien, released his office's Submission to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security of the House of Commons. The submission focused on the new Security of Canada Information Sharing Act (SCISA) that I described as a "bill within Bill ...
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In my post titled Canada's Anti-Terrorism Bill Fails Accountability Test dated February 22, 2015, I closed with the report in The Globe and Mail of February 20, 2015, that the Prime Minister sees no need for more oversight of the new powers that would be given to the Canadian Security Intelligence ...
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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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