Tag Archives: nsa

Byron Holland: Putting blinders on Big Brother’s surveillance apparatus

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   Byron Holland, National Post | 13/08/28

The Internet has been around for two decades. But from a public-policy perspective, we’re just starting to figure it out. Fortunately, there are some online activities for which there is an established offline precedent. Most of us would agree that surveillance is one of those activities.

Governments — even generally transparent, democratic ones, such as our own — always have engaged in surveillance activities. But as a society, we long have recognized the need to place safeguards on surveillance activities. Wiretaps and other forms of “traditional surveillance” are subject to judicial oversight, requiring warrants. Outrage at RCMP activities in the 1970s, including unauthorized mail openings and wiretaps without warrants, resulted in the MacDonald Commission, and ultimately the creation of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

In fact, it was not so long ago that we found the issue of oppressive state scrutiny so repugnant that we were willing to go to war over it (albeit a cold one): The liberty-destroying surveillance regimes imposed by the Stasi, and by other communist agencies, epitomized the reason we stood up against the Soviets.

Fast forward a few decades, and we now have the U.S. National Security Agency’s PRISM program, which copies virtually every online message sent to and from the United States — all without transparent judicial oversight. Cell phone data, Facebook updates, Google searches, emails – pretty much all communications – are tracked and stored by the U.S. government.

And in case you thought you were safe because you’re Canadian, it turns out that your data is tracked and stored, too.

But, if the lack of vocal outrage on the part of Canadians is any indication, most of us are apparently fine with it. This is why my group, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), has decided to work with the polling firm Ipsos Reid to find out what Canadians think of online privacy and government surveillance.

We were surprised to find that about half of Canadians (49%) believe it is acceptable for the government to monitor email and other online activities of Canadians in some circumstances. When those circumstances include preventing “future terrorist attacks,” that number rises to 77%.

That means that more than three quarters of Canadians are fine with indiscriminate and ongoing government monitoring of Canada’s online activity without a warrant, as long as it is in the interest of national security.

Given past lessons about personal privacy, how can Canadians seem so apathetic? What is it about the Internet that changes our perceptions and values concerning civil liberties?

Our apathy may be partially due to the fact that only 18% of us start out with the baseline belief that our Internet activity is confidential to begin with. In fact, our research shows that 63% of Canadians believe the government already is monitoring who visits certain websites, while 40% think the government is collecting and saving Internet activity records so they can be reviewed in the future. If most of us aren’t expecting privacy on the Internet, it would follow that we would be ambivalent when we learn that government is indeed watching us.

This is a problem. Canadians deserve internet privacy.

The argument that “if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t be concerned” is baseless. Even in cases where people really do have something to hide, there are plenty of historical examples of behaviour that once was criminally sanctioned, but which we now recognize to be justified acts of resistance to unjust laws. Think about the civil rights movement, for instance.

The argument that the NSA collects only time, place and tech “metadata” — as opposed to the actual content of internet messages — also is not convincing. Such metadata provides information about whom you contact, when and how you contacted them, and where you contacted them from. With that information, a profile of an individual and their actions can be created. But this data is devoid of context. And so linkages can be inferred that erroneously connect individuals to illegal activity. We Canadians need only remember what happened to Maher Arar to understand what can happen when authorities misinterpret information.

Moreover, the definition of what constitutes “terrorism” in the eyes of governments continues to expand. From environmental activists to members of the Occupy and Idle No More movements, the net seems to continue to be cast even wider.

The time has come for a national dialogue about online surveillance in Canada. Yes, governments should have the power to monitor citizens under certain circumstances and with the appropriate oversight. But we are now in uncharted waters, with governments having unfettered ability to monitor the wide-ranging activity of an unprecedented number of people in every corner of the world.

To this end, my organization, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority — which manages the .CA domain space on behalf of all Canadians — will be dedicating its Canadian Internet Forum to a discussion on government and corporate online surveillance. I invite you to join us at cif.cira.ca.

If we found out that the government were opening every single letter in the Canadian postal system and monitoring all of our phone calls, Canadians would be enraged. Why is it, then, that when the government does the very same thing online, we become complacent?

National Post

Byron Holland is the CEO of The Canadian Internet Registration Authority.

NSA North: Why Canadians should be demanding answers about online spying

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By Adam Kingsmith| July 22, 2013   http://rabble.ca

 

Photo: OpenMedia.ca

 

“We are living in an age of surveillance,” concludes Professor Neil Richards, privacy law and civil liberties expert at Washington University. “There’s much more watching and much more monitoring, and I think we have a series of important choices to make as a society — about how much watching we want.”

Last month’s realisation that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) — by means of a top-secret program codenamed “PRISM,” has been trawling the audio, video, photo, email, and phone records of millions of Americans at home and abroad, serves as a stark reminder to those of us living in supposed “liberal democracies” that we’ve increasingly allowed state-surveillance mechanisms to become normalised and domesticated in a post 9/11 world.

Since the early 2000s, considerable advances in personal technology and the public’s broad tolerance of monitoring — due in part to illusory fears concerning the exacerbated threat of terrorism, have served to strengthen government capabilities and legal justifications to covertly monitor and record the digital activities and behaviours of entire populations.

Additionally, we’ve learned that private technology companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook — institutions that repeatedly preach customer confidentiality, have been quietly supporting programs such as PRISM all along by providing government agencies with warrantless access to massive amounts of our personal user information.

Of course, some Canadians will probably brush off these revelations.

After all, PRISM is a U.S. government program, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are American corporations, clearly this breech of privacy and constitutionality is an American problem, and we Canadians would best to just keep quiet and let them figure it out right?

Wrong. Dead wrong.

What these people fail to realize is that when it comes to the Internet, an American problem is everyone’s problem because the World Wide Web is essentially under U.S. jurisdiction.

“There is no border,” emphasises Professor Ron Deibert, head of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. “The way telecommunication traffic is routed in North America, the fact of the matter is about 90 per cent of Canadian traffic — no one really knows the exact number — is routed through the United States.”

Thus the telecommunications infrastructure of Canada is inextricably linked to the United States. This means that the vast majority of Canadian metadata — data that describes other data, is filtered through NSA-monitored Internet exchange points, and these points serve as informational intersections where “personal” user traffic is transferred between websites.

As we only have two Internet exchange points in Canada, an email sent from a Toronto server could pass through Chicago, Los Angeles, even Miami, before being routed back to Canada — along the way its content can be subsumed via filters and checkpoints monitored by American intelligence agencies which stress that while surveillance programs such as PRISM do not target U.S. nationals, the data of foreigners — i.e. Canadians, are fair game.

In short, the U.S.-centric architecture of the Web — coupled with the fact that copying and storing massive amounts of data has become relatively easy, makes it inevitable that some personal communiqués between Canadians will be subjected to American data mining.

Unfortunately, the NSA monitoring Canadian information in transit is just the tip of the surveillance iceberg up here. Raw documents brought to light through the Access to Information Act reveal that the Harper Administration has silently implemented a surveillance program of its own modeled after the scope and reach of the NSA’s PRISM.

Administered by the mysterious Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) — a highly secretive government agency that employs 2,000 people and has an annual budget of about $422 million, this “PRISM-North” intercepts domestic communications to order to cultivate metadata from phone records, Internet protocol addresses, and other data trails.

If armed with enough raw computing power to sift through gigantic pools of data, all of this metadata — essentially a record of who we know, and how well — can then be used to map our social networks, patterns of mobility, professional relationships and personal interests.

What’s more, oversight of CSEC is practically non-existent — even when compared with the NSA. “PRISM-North” is scrutinized by a lone retired judge who issues an annual review — concealed from parliamentarians, journalists and the public, a review that in all its years has never reported a single invasion of privacy by CSEC that would merit further inquiry.

Subsequently, while the extent of CSEC’s current monitoring activities are kept confidential from everyone except the Minister of Defense, the agency has not only reconfirmed it is collecting metadata, CSEC also said this data is being shared with the so-called “Five Eyes” — a clandestine group of intelligence agencies from Australia, New Zealand, U.S. and U.K.

I know what many of you are thinking. This is Canada, we have rights — doesn’t a federal agency like CSEC warrantlessly monitoring, stockpiling and sharing all of my private data not violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in some really big way?

Shockingly no.

“Canada has similar disclosure provisions as those found in the USA Patriot Act,” asserts Professor Michael Geist, technology law expert at the University of Ottawa. “For example, s. 21 of the Canadian Security Intelligence Act provides for a warrant that permits almost any type of communication interception, surveillance or disclosure of records for purpose of national security.”

Listening to our phone calls, monitoring our Internet searches, scrutinizing our emails, trawling our social media accounts, and sharing it all with intelligence agencies around the world — these things are not only possible, but as the law suggests — entirely legal. And as virtually everything is shrouded in secrecy, there’s no way to know how deep this goes.

Now that technology has caught up with the ambitions of government intelligence agencies, we are seeing a move away from targeted surveillance — where law enforcement would be granted limited powers to investigate by judicial ruling, to a sort of dragnet paradigm — where law enforcement is permitted to amass as much information as possible, sort through said information at its leisure, and then discard the irrelevant bits later, maybe.

So as cries for increased transparency and civilian oversight ring out from our neighbours to the south, it is time for Canadians to speak up against the spying taking place within our own country as well. Only by fighting surveillance and secrecy with discourse and dissent can we start to pull back the veil of suppression to recapture the agency in our democracy.

Adam Kingsmith has an M.A. in International Relations and his writing and research explores the linkages between technology, culture, and political dissent within a uniquely Canadian context. He currently splits his time between his hometown of Vancouver and Toronto.