Online surveillance bill critics are siding with ‘child pornographers’: Vic Toews

Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews speaks during Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on Feb. 13.

Ottawa, CANADA (NP) - Opponents of a controversial bill that would give authorities new powers to increase online monitoring of Canadians have been accused of siding with “child pornographers” by Safety Minister Vic Toews.

The so-called “lawful access” legislation, tabled in the House of Commons on Tuesday and expected to pass under a Conservative majority government, means Internet service providers and cellphone companies must hand over basic subscriber information of customers to law enforcement agencies.

Opponents of the proposed law claim it is ‘untenable’, but Mr. Toews said yesterday that people “can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.”

The claim, which caused outrage among opposition MPs, came after Liberal public safety critic Francis Scarpaleggia asked Mr. Toews in the House of Commons how Canadians were supposed to trust the government wouldn’t use the private information they obtained online to intimidate citizens.

More ... http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/02/14/online-surveillance-bill-critics-are-siding-with-child-pornographers-vic-toews/

“We are proposing measures to bring our laws into the 21st century and to provide the police with the lawful tools that they need,” Mr. Toews said to the MP for Lac-Saint-Louis, Quebec. “He can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.”

Mr. Toews’ remark prompted immediate condemnation from Green Party leader Elizabeth May and others:

@kady It just keeps on getting worse. Whenever I think we’ve hit rock bottom, Toews gets out a shovel. #hw

— Elizabeth May MP (@ElizabethMay) February 13, 2012

Vic Toews Has Been Smearing Lawful Access Critics For Weeks: a look at comments dating back to Nov 2011 is.gd/uA1twm

— Michael Geist (@mgeist) February 14, 2012

On Tuesday, the Opposition rejected Toews’ characterization.

Holding up his BlackBerry, NDP digital critic Charlie Angus said the bill would undermine the privacy of average Canadians.

“Now, every single Canadian citizen is walking around with an electronic prisoner’s bracelet,” Angus said after the tabling of the bill.

“I say to Vic Toews, ‘Stop hiding behind the boogey man. Stop using the boogey man to attack the basic rights of Canadian citizens.’ Is Vic Toews saying that Stockwell Day supports child pornography? Is Vic Toews saying that every privacy commissioner in this country who has raised concerns about this government’s attempt to erase the basic obligation to get a judicial warrant, is he saying that they’re for child pornography?”

Stockwell Day, who served as public safety minister from 2006 to 2008, assured the public during his tenure that the government would not introduce legislation forcing Internet service providers to give customer information without a warrant.

The provision in the proposed legislation, contained in a previous bill that died when the federal election was called last year, resulted in a sustained campaign by the federal and provincial commissioners to get “warrantless access” to subscriber info scrapped from the bill before the Conservatives re-introduced it.

In addition to a name, address, phone number and email address, companies would also be required to hand over the Internet protocol address and a series of device identification numbers, allowing police to build a detailed profile on a person using their digital footprint and to facilitate the tracking of a person’s movement through the location of their cellphone.

The bill, dubbed “online spying” by critics, is also expected to require ISPs and cellular phone companies to install equipment for real-time surveillance and create new police powers designed to obtain access to the surveillance data.

Some smaller changes are expected in the bill that could affect the oversight model and internal controls, but Mr. Toews has stood firm on the broad strokes, saying new measures are needed to catch criminals in the 21st century, singling out child pornography cases.

Canada’s privacy commissioners banded together last year to write an open letter to Toews, saying police shouldn’t have unrestricted access to basic subscriber information held by telecommunications companies. This, along with other new powers, adds “significant new capabilities for investigators to track and search and seize digital information about individuals.”

Jennifer Stoddart, Canada’s privacy commissioner, and Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s privacy commissioner, followed up with two separate public pleadings last fall, reiterating their concerns.

At a minimum, the “untenable” proposal for warrantless access to subscriber information “should be withdrawn,” Ms. Cavoukian argued.

Newly released information, released to Postmedia News under the access to information law, shows department officials said such a request was “not tenable.”

That’s because it “could limit the ability of police to access basic subscriber information in non-emergencies” and warrants are “generally granted for criminal investigations. Requiring a warrant would be problematic when police undertake non-criminal, general policing duties, such as contacting next-of-kin after a traffic accident or returning stolen property,” the records state.

But senior departmental officials also criticized Mr. Toews, who previously served as attorney general of Canada and Manitoba, for failing to state in his public response to Ms. Cavoukian that there are provisions of the Criminal Code that allow police to read emails without a warrant in special cases.

In a letter to the editor, he wrote in part: “Let me be clear. No legislation proposed in the past, present or future by a Conservative government will create powers for police to read emails without a warrant.”

“This is problematic because Section 184.4 of the Criminal Code currently provides for that,” the director of national security technologies at Public Safety wrote to colleagues after reading the letter.

University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, who reviewed the records, said the government appears to want to have it both ways.

While Mr. Toews publicly says the bill is designed to go after users of child pornography, internal records refer to other issues, says Mr. Geist.

“You just can’t be serious. On one hand, we’d got Vic Toews screaming about child pornography cases and on the other hand, it’s pretty clear that one of their main justifications is that this has to do with non-emergency situations that aren’t even criminal situations. To say that you’re going to drop key privacy protections because you want to return a kid’s bike is just absurd,” Mr. Geist said.

The records also show that one of the cases flagged by the RCMP to help Public Safety build its case in favour of the bill, known as Operation Carole, involved images that did not meet the Criminal Code definition of child pornography. As a result, “production orders or search warrants could not be obtained,” the RCMP summary states.

“The point here is that you’re not supposed to get a warrant and access this information for content that isn’t even illegal. What they’re saying is, this is content that wasn’t illegal and so that was why they couldn’t get a warrant, so now they need to change the law on the mandatory basis to get that same information? That just invites fishing expeditions and other forays into personal information without proper justification,” said Mr. Geist.

“Investigative tools without accompanying oversight such as full warrants, however, is not what we need,” says a statement from the Association.

” There are good reasons to require the police to obtain warrants and seek judicial oversight before invading individual privacy.  The advent of the Internet, email, cell phones and smart phones has not changed Canadians’ basic rights to privacy and freedom from unwarranted government surveillance.”

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