Technology

This is a general catch-all category for all topics that relate to technology.

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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Mobile Security and the Economics of Ignorance

/ Christopher Parsons

Day 24/ Mon 17 Aug 09 Mobile penetration is extremely high in Canada. 78% of Canadian households had a mobile phone in 2010, in young households 50% exclusively have mobiles, and 33% of Canadians generally lack landlines. Given that mobile phones hold considerably more information than ‘dumb’ landlines and are widely dispersed it is important to consider their place in our civil communications landscape. More specifically, I think we must consider the privacy and security implications associated with contemporary mobile communications devices.

In this post I begin by outlining a series of smartphone-related privacy concerns, focusing specifically on location, association, and device storage issues. I then pivot to a recent – and widely reported – survey commissioned by Canada’s federal privacy commissioner’s office. I assert that the reporting inappropriately offloads security and privacy decisions to consumers who are poorly situated to – and technically unable to – protect their privacy or secure their mobile devices. I support this by pointing to intentional exploitations of users’ ignorance about how mobile applications interact with their device environments and residing data. While the federal survey may be a useful rhetorical tool I argue that it has limited practical use.

I conclude by asserting that privacy commissioners, and government regulators more generally, must focus their attention upon the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of smartphones. Only by focusing on APIs will we redress the economics of ignorance that are presently relied upon to exploit Canadians and cheat them out of their personal information.

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Towards Progressive Internet Policy in Canada

/ Christopher Parsons / 7 Comments

Canadian FlagDigital literacy is a topic that is regularly raised at Internet-related events across Canada. As Garth Graham has noted, “some people will remain marginalized even when everyone is online. It’s not enough to give those who are excluded basic access to the technologies. It requires different social skills as much as different technical skills to come in from the cold of digital exclusion” (29). Perhaps in light of Canadians’ relative digital illiteracy, key Canadian policy bodies and organizations have seemingly abandoned their obligations to protect Canadian interests in the face of national and foreign belligerence. Bodies such as Industry Canada, the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), and the Canadian Internet Registry Authority (CIRA) are all refusing to take strong leadership roles on key digital issues that affect Canadians today.

In this post I want to first perform a quick inventory of a few ‘key issues’ that ought to be weighing upon Canadian policy bodies with authority over the Internet. I then transition to focus on what CIRA could do to take up and address some of them. I focus on this organization in particular because they are in the process of electing new members to their board; putting votes behind the right candidates might force CIRA to assume leadership over key policy issues and alleviate harms experienced by Canadians. I’ll conclude by suggesting one candidate who clearly understands these issues and has plans to resolve them, as well as how you can generally get involved in the CIRA elections.

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Online Voting and Hostile Deployment Environments

/ Christopher Parsons / 4 Comments

Voting requiredElections Canada recently stated that sometime after 2013 it intends to trial online voting, a system that lets citizens vote over the Internet. Fortunately, they are just committing to a trial but if the trial is conducted improperly then Elections Canada, politicians, and the Canadian public may mistakenly come to think that online voting is secure. Worse, they might see it as a valid ‘complement’ to traditional voting processes. If Canadians en masse vote using the Internet, with all of its existing and persistent infrastructural and security deficiencies, then the election is simply begging to be stolen.

While quick comparisons between the United States’ electronic voting system and the to-be-trialed Canadian online voting system would be easy to make, I want to focus exclusively on the Canadian proposition. As a result, I discuss just a small handful of the challenges in deploying critical systems into known hostile deployment environments and, more specifically, the difficulties in securing the vote in such an environment. I won’t be writing about any particular code that could be used to disrupt an election but instead about some attacks that could be used, and attackers motivated to use them, to modify or simply disrupt the Canadian electoral process. I’ll conclude by arguing that Elections Canada should set notions of online voting aside; paper voting requires a small time investment that is well worth its cost in electoral security.

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Letter to Stephen Harper on Lawful Access Legislation

/ Christopher Parsons / 1 Comment

SurveillanceFor the past several years, public advocates, academics, the privacy commissioners of Canada, and members of the Canadian Parliament have all voiced concerns about proposed lawful access legislation. There are generally three types of ‘powers’ associated with such legislation: (1) enhanced search and seizure provisions; (2) increased interception of privacy communications powers; (3) production of subscriber data. During the last election cycle, Stephen Harper assured Canadians that within 100 sitting days lawful access provisions would be passed, along with other legislation, in an omnibus crime bill. Lawful access legislation has not been fully debated in the House or Senate, and has significant implications for the future of anonymity and privacy on the Internet, while simultaneously expanding police powers without a clearly demonstrated need to expand such powers.

Working from the most recent lawful access bills, which died when the last election was called, advocates and academics have come together to send a letter of concerns to Prime Minister Harper. Our concerns are as follows:

  1. The ease by which Canadians’ Internet service providers, social networks, and even their handsets and cars will be turned into tools to spy on their activities further to production and preservation orders in former Bill C‐51 – a form of spying that is bound to have serious chilling effects on online activity and communications, implicating fundamental rights and freedoms
  2. The minimal and inadequate amount of external oversight in place to ensure that the powers allotted in these bills are not abused
  3. Clause 16 of former Bill C‐52, which will allow law enforcement to force identification of anonymous online Internet users, even where there is no reason to suspect the information will be useful to any investigation and without adequate court oversight and
  4. The manner in which former Bill C‐52 paves the way to categorical secrecy orders that will further obscure how the sweeping powers granted in it are used and that are reminiscent of elements of the USA PATRIOT Act that were found unconstitutional.

On a final note, we object that Canadians will be asked to foot the bill for all this, in what essentially amounts to a hidden e‐surveillance tax, and are concerned that compliance will further impede the ability of smaller telecommunications service providers to compete in Canada by saddling them with disproportionate costs.

It is of critical import that the lawful access provisions of the omnibus crime bill are shaved off into their own batch of legislation and are afforded their own debates and hearings. Failing to do otherwise would underplay how much the bills’ massive expansions of surveillance capacities might impact the Internet in Canada, and digital communications in this country more generally. If you want to learn more about the concerns listed above, you can read the full letter that was sent to the PMO (.pdf), and you can take action by voicing your concerns at the Stop Online Spying website. Sign the petition located there and then contact your MP: it is only by demonstrating public interest and concern in these bills that they might be clarified, reformed, and potentially prevented from being brought forward in the first place.

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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