Wiretapping the Worldwide Web

On June 18, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government rolled out the latest pillar in its tough-on-crime, short-on-imagination strategy with two bills designed to peer into the online lives of Canadians.

The Investigative Powers for the 21st Century and Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Acts were unveiled as necessary tools to “fight crime and terrorism in today’s high-tech environment,” according to a government press release.

“Evolving communications technologies like the internet, cell phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants) clearly benefit Canadians in their day-to-day lives,” justice minister Rob Nicholson said in the release. “Unfortunately, these technologies have also provided new ways of committing crimes such as distributing child pornography. We must ensure investigators have the necessary powers to trace and ultimately stop crimes.”

And while Nicholson may have hoped playing the kiddie-porn card would insulate the bill from criticism, civil liberties groups quickly cried foul over the potential invasion of privacy while small internet service providers balked at the potential cost of upgrading their data-storage capabilities.

University of Victoria political science professor and privacy and security researcher Colin Bennett says that while the bills provide some welcome provisions, such as protections against e-mail phishing and e-mail spoofing, he sees holes in the arguments made by law enforcement for the necessity of such legislation—namely, solid proof that crimes currently committed over the net that would be curtailed under the new laws.

In addition to the costs that would be incurred by small internet service providers to store all the activities that take place over their servers and the corresponding interception capabilities, Bennett wonders what sort of oversight will exist to ensure law enforcement exercises its powers within constitutional law.

He notes that while in most circumstances the police will be required to secure a warrant—which are “rarely refused by the courts”—to access information that would identify a particular web user, there are times that they won’t.

“There are provisions under this bill that allow law enforcement to obtain that information without a warrant, if they have “reasonable grounds.” That in my view is too broad. The government is arguing that this is nothing more than finding out somebody’s telephone number. The reality is that it’s a lot more than finding out someone’s telephone number because it tells you a great deal more about people’s communications.”

Finally, Bennett wonders whether we should structure our digital world around the activities of a handful of criminal users.

“We’re effectively building our network communications, we’re building surveillance capability into our network communications, as a result of the fears of the activities of very few people,” he says. “Do we want terrorists and pedophiles to control, structure and determine the nature of this radically new and very exciting technology?” M