Post Tagged with: "cyber-security"

Canadian Government Quietly Drops Lawful Access From Its Cyber-Security Strategy

Jesse Brown had an interesting post yesterday that raised concerns about the prospect that the government might use mounting fears over cyber-bullying to re-start their failed lawful access legislation. While it is important to remain vigilant about the possibility of the re-emergence of Internet surveillance legislation, I think a more important signal suggests the bill really is dead (at least until after the 2015 election).

First, Bill C-30 actually did include a provision that could arguably be used to help address cyber-bullying. It wasn’t the provisions involving privacy and surveillance, but rather the expansion of a Criminal Code provision on harassment. Section 372(3) currently provides:

Every one who, without lawful excuse and with intent to harass any person, makes or causes to be made repeated telephone calls to that person is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.

The limitation to harassing phone calls would seemingly exclude instances of cyber-bullying. Bill C-30 would have made provision technology neutral:

Government Releases Cyber Security Strategy

The Government has released its cyber-security strategy. The document provides limited details on a serious plan to address online security concerns, though it does confirm that there are plans to reintroduce lawful access legislation.

Canada to Launch Cybersecurity Task Force?

My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) reports that the the Conservative government is preparing to launch a Cyber-Security Task Force. Although the Ministry of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness does not list any information about the task force on its site, GEDS, the government’s electronic directory service, was recently updated to include a Cybersecurity Task Force Secretariat. The Secretariat apparently at least includes an Assistant Deputy Minister and a senior policy analyst.

While the move to address shortcomings in Canada’s cyber-security framework is welcome, the creation of this task force raises three important issues.