ISPs

Publication: (Un)Lawful Access, Its Potentials, and its Lack of Necessity

/ Christopher Parsons

Cover of the 2011 Winston Report (Winter)

Last year I was approached by the founder and editor in chief of The Winston Report to update and publish one of my postings on Canada’s forthcoming lawful access legislation. The Report is the quarterly journal of the Canadian Association of Professional Access and Privacy Administrators (CAPAPA). The updated piece that I contributed is more compact than what I originally wrote on this site, though I think that this makes it a stronger, more direct piece. I want to publicly thank Sharon Polsky for the opportunity that she provided to me, and for being so kind as to position my piece as the lead featured article in the Winter edition of the journal. I also want to thank my tireless editor, Joyce Parsons, for her incredible work strengthening my prose. A preprint version of my contribution, which retained a creative-commons license as part of my agreement with the editor in chief, is made available to you below under the normal Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial 2.5 Canada license.

Download pre-print .pdf version of (Un)Lawful Access:  Its Potentials, and its Lack of Necessity.

The Anatomy of Lawful Access Phone Records

/ Christopher Parsons / 5 Comments

ACL 2006 - Phonebook Canadian advocates, government officials, and scholars are all concerned about the forthcoming lawful access legislation. A key shared concern is that authorities could, under the legislation, access telecommunications subscription records without court oversight. Moreover, as a condition of accessing these records businesses might be served with gag orders. Such orders would prevent Canadians from ever knowing (outside of court!) that the government had collected large swathes of information about them. In response to concerns aired in public, the Public Safety Minister has insisted that the legislation would merely let police access “phone book” information from telecommunications providers.

I maintain that such assertions obfuscate the sheer amount of information contained in the records that authorities would collect. The aim of this post is to make clear just how much information is contained in a single lawful access “phone record”, demonstrating that the government is seeking information that grossly exceeds what is contained in the white or yellow pages today. As a result, I first provide an example phone record that resembles those in every phonebook in Canada and then offer an example of a lawful access record. Remember that such requests may be filed to multiple service providers (e.g. Internet service provider, web forum hosts, blogs, mobile phone companies, etc) and thus a swathe of records can be combined to generate a comprehensive picture of any particular individual. By the conclusion of the post it should be evident that information provided under lawful access powers is more expansive than the phone records government ministers allude to and lay bare those ministers’ technical obfuscations.

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Lawful Access, Its Potentials, and Its Lack of Necessity

/ Christopher Parsons

Image by mattwi1s0n

New surveillance powers are typically framed using benevolent and/or patriotic languages. In the United States, we see the PATRIOT Act, the Stored Communications Act, and National Security Letters. Powers associated with this surveillance assemblage have been abused and people have been spied upon in violation of the law, bureaucratic procedure, and regardless of demonstrating real and present dangers. The UK has the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which significantly expanded the capabilities of police and intelligence to monitor citizens in previously illegal ways. This legislation is also used improperly, as revealed in the yearly reports from the Interception Commissioner. In Canada, the Canadian government has publicly stated its intention to press ahead and introduce its lawful access legislation despite concerns raised by the public, members of the advocacy and academic community, and the information and privacy commissioners of Canada. Here, we can also expect uses of lawful access powers to overstep stated intents and infringe on Canadians’ rights, intrude upon their privacy, and injure their dignity.

Over the past months I’ve been actively involved in working with, and talking to, other parties about lawful access legislation. This has included speaking with members of the media, publishing an op-ed, and conducting various private discussions with stakeholders around Canada who are concerned about what this legislation may (and may not) mean. Today, in the interests of making public some of the topics of these discussions, I want to address a few things. First, I quickly summarize key elements of the lawful access legislation. Next, I note some of the potentials for how lawful access powers will likely be used. None of the potentials that I identify depend on ‘next generation’ technologies or data management/mining procedures: only technologies that exist and are in operation today are used as mini-cases. None of the cases that I outline offer significant insight into the operational working of stakeholders I’ve spoken with that can’t be reproduced from public research and records. I conclude by questioning the actual need for the expanded powers.

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ISP Audits in Canada

/ Christopher Parsons / 2 Comments

Union members call for an independent investigation to ensure safety in Milwaukee County.There are ongoing concerns in Canada about the CRTC’s capacity to gauge and evaluate the quality of Internet service that Canadians receive. This was most recently brought to the fore when the CRTC announced that Canada ranked second to Japan in broadband access speeds. Such a stance is PR spin and, as noted by Peter Nowak, “[o]nly in the halcyon world of the CRTC, where the sky is purple and pigs can fly, could that claim possibly be true.” This head-in-the-sands approach to understanding the Canadian broadband environment, unfortunately, is similarly reflective in the lack of a federal digital strategy and absolutely inadequate funding for even the most basic governmental cyber-security.

To return the CRTC from the halcyon world it is presently stuck within, and establish firm empirical data to guide a digital economic strategy, the Government of Canada should establish a framework to audit ISPs’ infrastructure and network practices. Ideally this would result in an independent body that could examine the quality and speed of broadband throughout Canada. Their methodology and results would be publicly published and could assure all parties – businesses, citizens, and consumers – that they could trust or rely upon ISPs’ infrastructure. Importantly, having an independent body research and publish data concerning Canadian broadband would relieve companies and consumers from having to assume this role, freeing them to use the Internet for productive (rather than watchdog-related) purposes.

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ISPs, Advocates, and Framing at the 2011 Telecom Summit

/ Christopher Parsons

3183290111_989c5b1bec_bEach year Canada’s leaders in telecommunications gather at the Canadian Telecommunications Summit to talk about ongoing policy issues, articulate their concerns about Canada’s status in the world of telecommunications, and share lessons and experiences with one another. This years Summit was no exception. While some commentators have accused this year’s event of just rehashing previous years’ content – it is true that each Summit does see similar topics on the conference agenda, with common positions taken each year – there are some interesting points that emerged this year.

Specifically, discussions about the valuation of telecom services regularly arose, discussions of supply and demand in the Canadian ISP space, as well as some interesting tidbits about the CRTC. For many people in the industry what I’ll be talking about isn’t exactly new; those not inside the industry’s fold, however, may find elements of this interesting. After outlining some of the discussions that took place I will point to something that was particularly striking throughout the Summit events I attended: Open Media loomed like a spectre throughout, shaping many of the discussions and talking points despite not having a single formal representative in attendance.

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Publications in OpenMedia’s ‘Casting an Open Net’

/ Christopher Parsons

Openmedia.caFor the past several months I’ve been working away at a series of ‘traditional’ publication-type writings. One of those pieces included major sections of OpenMedia.ca’s report that was released today, entitled “Casting an Open Net: A Leading Edge Approach to Canada’s Digital Future.”

More specifically, I worked as the lead author on the economic section of the report, arguing that obtrusive network management practices, bandwidth speeds, and download/upload capacities that unduly favor one party over another are damaging to innovation in Canada. I’m also third author of the technical section, where I brought my expertise around deep packet inspection and usage based billing to the group of excellent authors who led that section. I’ve included the introduction, below, as well as links to download the report. Comments are, of course, welcome.

The Open Internet: Open for Business and Economic Growth

The Internet is widely regarded as one of the modern era’s greatest engines of economic growth and innovation. Ensuring ubiquitous, affordable, and open access to the Internet across all social sectors supports and promotes economic growth. By providing a reliable platform for applications development, communications improvements, and content distribution, we create the potential for greater efficiencies and growth in business-to-business, business-to-consumer, peer-to-peer, and consumer-to-business transactions.

In this section, we delve deeper into the essential role that the open Internet plays in the Canadian economy as an engine of innovation and growth. The unique characteristics of the Internet have allowed Canadians to create some of the world’s leading websites and applications. We argue that when businesses and citizens are forced to pay more for Internet access in Canada, or face other restrictions on use — especially compared to our global counterparts — we have fewer opportunities to invest in and develop the kind of innovations that make our economy flourish.

In Section One, we argue that co-invention and web-based entrepreneurship flourish best in neutral networks and that the Internet’s innate openness enables a democratization (i.e. of access and success) that fosters creativity, competition, and innovation. In Section Two, we argue that Canadian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are transitioning towards technical architectures that discriminate against and seek to control certain applications, and we warn that this gradual enclosure of the Internet threatens to restrict user access, choice, and innovation, and thus threatens to reduce the value of the Internet overall. In particular, we discuss how ISPs use the practice of bandwidth throttling of specific applications (e.g. P2P file sharing) and usage-based pricing to discriminate against certain types of online activities in an effort to centralize control. Finally, we conclude by emphasizing that ISP interference undermines the core values of equality and neutrality operating at the heart of the Internet and that this interference threatens the Internet’s invaluable role as an engine of innovation and economic growth.

The ability for Canadians to innovate is more and more central to our economic well-being and competitiveness. As we explain below, the open Internet is an essential engine of innovation; without a fast, ubiquitous, and open Internet, Canada will continue to fall behind in economic productivity. E-commerce, the information and communications technologies (ICT) sector, and increasingly, traditional businesses, depend heavily on open access to the Internet. Any barrier to Internet use is a barrier to business development in general.