The Conservatives are expected to revisit the intersection between telecommunications and law enforcement when the House returns this fall with legislation to address cyberbullying. Justice Minister Peter MacKay (Central Nova, N.S.) has already signalled that the government plans to introduce such legislation in the forthcoming Parliamentary session.
“There are certain legislative gaps that we’ve identified in the Criminal Code that we hope to plug as soon as this fall, if we can get those amendments properly drafted and before Parliament in the coming session,” Mr. MacKay said in an Aug. 19 speech to the Canadian Bar Association, referring to a recent report on cyberbullying by a working group of federal, provincial and territorial Justice and Public Safety ministers.
In July, the group released a report on cyberbullying and the non-consensual distribution of intimate images. Recommendations included updating Criminal Code laws that prohibit false messages, indecent phone calls, and harassing phone calls to include other forms of digital communication such as social media, email, and text messages.
The working group was established in response to a growing number of cases of Canadian teens committing suicide after enduring online bullying and harassment.
In 2011 Jamie Hubley, son of Ottawa city councillor Allan Hubley, took his own life after years of harassment at school and online. British Columbia teen Amanda Todd took her life last fall after being bullied over topless photos that were circulated online, and earlier this year, Halifax teen Rehtaeh Parsons committed suicide after photos of her being sexually assaulted were circulated online.
The report also includes recommendations to “better facilitate the investigation of criminal activity… as part of any legislative package responding to cyberbullying,” including addressing the preservation of communications data, the system for obtaining warrants and production orders for digital communications, and the introduction of “other amendments to existing offences and investigative powers that will assist in the investigation of cyberbullying and other crimes that implicate electronic evidence.”
OpenMedia spokesperson David Christopher agreed that measures are needed to address cyberbullying, but his organization wants efforts to police cybercrime and cyberbullying to be matched with a “strong pro-privacy commitment” on the part of governments.
“We would be very concerned if they proposed something like retaining data on everybody’s everyday internet or [social media] use on the off chance that someone might get charged with cyberbullying. I think that kind of mass data retention would concern many Canadians,” Mr. Christopher said.
The Conservatives failed to pass legislation enhancing law enforcement’s ability to monitor and intercept citizens’ private communications in the last Parliamentary session.
Bill C-12, the Safeguarding Canadians’ Personal Information Act, would have amended the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act to allow law enforcement agencies to obtain the communications data of telecommunications customers without a warrant. Bill C-30, the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, would have similarly expanded the ability of law enforcement agencies to monitor and collect communications data without obtaining a warrant.
Both pieces of legislation were met with significant public opposition. The bills failed to make it beyond first reading in the last Parliament and died on the order paper with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) recent decision to prorogue Parliament. The fallout from former Public Safety minister Vic Toews’ statement that opponents of Bill C-30 were on the side of child pornographers may have hastened his exit from federal politics. Mr. Toews stepped down in July ahead of the Prime Minister’s most recent Cabinet shuffle.
Paloma Aguilar, Mr. MacKay’s press secretary, confirmed that the government was looking at legislation to address cyber-bullying, but denied that new legislation would be introduced to expand the ability of law enforcement officers to gather private communications data without a warrant.
“[W]e have no plans to move forward with measures related to the warrantless mandatory disclosure of basic subscriber information or the requirement for telecommunications service providers to build intercept capability within their systems,” Ms. Aguilar stated in an email to The Hill Times.
David Fraser, a Halifax-based lawyer specializing in internet and privacy law, said that there likely still is a desire on the part of law enforcement and Public Safety Canada to expand its access to communications data, but he would be surprised if the Conservatives made another attempt to introduce lawful access legislation.
“I don’t expect that the impulse to come up with lawful access legislation has gone away at all, but the reception it got was profoundly negative,” Mr. Fraser said.
He disputed claims that there was a need to make it easier for law enforcement to access telecommunications data.
“Lawful access, in the form that the Conservatives introduced in the last session of Parliament, is not necessary. The warrantless access to customer information, where they would [take] an IP address and be able to identify the [internet service provider] customer associated with that IP address—I don’t think that’s necessary. They can get a production order to get that,” he said.
Mr. Christopher called previous legislative efforts to expand law enforcement’s ability to monitor communications “highly invasive” to individual privacy.
“The amount of data they would have been able to collect with no judicial oversight could really paint a very detailed picture of somebody’s life—even something as simple as collecting mobile phone metadata would have allowed the police to take the names and addresses of everybody who attended a rally on Parliament Hill or another event of interest,” Mr. Christopher said of Bill C-30. “The fact that this sort of thing would have happened without judicial oversight got a lot of people very concerned.”
The NDP supports legislation to address cyberbullying, but NDP MP Charmaine Borg (Terrebonne-Blaineville, Que.), her party’s critic for digital policy, told The Hill Times that efforts to modernize law enforcement’s ability to investigate cybercrime and bullying needed to be balanced with judicial oversight.
“Last time the Conservatives brought this up for debate in Bill C-30, they said it was time to modernize the language in the law, which is true, but inside of the bill you found provisions for warrantless access to personal information,” she said. “If you’re going to give access to personal information, there need to be checks and balances in place to make sure personal information is not abused and is… actually going towards fighting crime.”
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com
Author: CHRIS PLECASH
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