OTTAWA • The RCMP is breaching privacy law by holding onto the personal information of Canadians who have been convicted of a crime even after they have been pardoned, according to an audit by federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart.Even though “people have a right to get on with their lives, information about their past can continue to be shared,” writes Ms. Stoddart in the report released Thursday.
The issue of questionable RCMP record-keeping comes as the Conservatives prepare to shred 10 years worth of records related to the federal long-gun registry — a process made difficult by the fact that duplicates of the records are buried deep within RCMP databases.
“The police always believe it to be in their interest to have as much information about citizens as possible … not only law-abiding gun owners but also individuals who have been cleared of crimes,” said Solomon Friedman, a criminal defence lawyer and frequent commentator on firearms issues.
Ms. Stoddart’s report focuses mainly on the Police Reporting and Occurrence System (PROS), the RCMP’s primary database. It contains records of individuals who have had run-ins with police — including suspects, victims, witnesses and offenders — from the moment an incident is reported to its resolution. About 1.6 million files are processed in the system each year.
Under privacy law, details of an individual mentioned in PROS are supposed to be scrubbed clean once they have been pardoned or wrongfully convicted. “This hasn’t been happening,” the report says.
Access to the database was also found to be poorly controlled. The RCMP’s policy requires that PROS users be blocked from the database after 14 months of inactivity. “We found there were over 1,000 users with active accounts who had not accessed PROS for a period of 14 months or longer,” wrote Ms. Stoddart.
She noted the danger of PROS security breaches because it “contains extensive sensitive personal information that, if improperly used or disclosed, could have a significant impact on the rights and freedoms of individuals as well their reputations, employability and safety.”
In a separate report filed Thursday, the privacy commissioner found that by trying to solve crimes rather than keep airplanes safe, Canada’s airport security agents are similarly encroaching on privacy law. The Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA) “is not a police organization,” reads the 38-page report.
Of the 10,400 incidents in CATSA’s files at the time of the audit, more than half had nothing to do with aviation security. For instance, auditors found that agents would routinely call the police when they spotted passengers travelling domestically with large sums of money. “It is not an offence to travel domestically with a large sum of currency,” notes the report.
Auditors also found that personal information was poorly secured. “Documents containing sensitive personal information were left on open shelves and in plain view in a room where passengers may be taken for security checks,” the report reveals.
In one case, auditors visited the rooms where CATSA officials screen full-body scans and discovered a cellphone and a closed-circuit TV camera — even though these devices are forbidden under the agency’s operating procedures. By being loose on security procedures, “images — and potentially the identity of the passenger,” were at risk of exposure, the report says.
Both audits were released Thursday along with Ms. Stoddart’s annual report to Parliament. Both CATSA and the RCMP told the privacy commissioner they would take “immediate steps” to meet her recommendations.
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Source: National Post
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