Surveillance: America's Pastime by Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: naixn, Jason Smith / feastoffun.com) (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Surveillance
Nobody Can Say They Weren’t Warned: Canada’s Threat Assessments Predicted the Belleville Yom Kippur Attack
The shooting outside the Sons of Jacob synagogue in Belleville on the eve of Yom Kippur should not have come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the government’s own threat assessments. For the past year, CSIS’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre has been sounding the alarm, warning that a violent attack targeting the Canadian Jewish community was a realistic possibility. Indeed, the ITAC warnings predicted that the most likely scenario was a lone actor with a simple weapon at an easily accessible target fuelled by the normalization of antisemitism. On Sunday night, a 29-year-old former soldier fired repeatedly at the synagogue with congregants inside, with only a brave police officer averting a potential massacre.
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 277: Kate Robertson on the Risks That Lie Behind Canada’s Unexpected Signing of the UN Cybercrime Convention
The Canadian government’s surprise decision to sign the UN Cybercrime Convention has sparked many questions about the convention, its risks, and what changed over the past nine months between Canada no-showing the signing in Vietnam and this month’s reversal. To help answer those questions, there is no one better than Kate Robertson, a senior research associate at the Citizen Lab, who has been vocal on the convention since negotiations began years ago. She joins the Law Bytes podcast to discuss her concerns and how the Convention fits within the broader global political and policing frameworks.
A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: The Trouble With Canada’s Quiet Decision to Sign the UN Cybercrime Convention
Last week, the government announced that Canada has signed the United Nations Convention against Cybercrime, with Ministers Anita Anand, Gary Anandasangaree and Sean Fraser touting the treaty’s child protection provisions and human rights safeguards, which were described as “among the strongest found in an international criminal justice treaty.” The announcement, released in mid-July with few paying attention, left out much of the story. The reality is that the convention is not primarily a cybercrime treaty at all, but rather a sweeping cross-border surveillance and electronic evidence-sharing agreement that Canada originally opposed, that leading human rights groups and twenty Canadian organizations and experts urged the government to reject, and that key allies have thus far declined to sign. While signing the convention does not create binding obligations (that requires ratification), the decision to sign a treaty that the government declined to sign at the official ceremony less than a year ago raises troubling questions. This post seeks to answer three of them: what is this treaty, what are the risks, and what, if anything, changed in the last nine months?
Rushing Lawful Access Backfires: Wyden Letter on Bill C-22 Highlights Political, Trade and Business Risks
Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree and the government presumably hoped that pushing Bill C-22 through a House of Commons committee past midnight without debate or a recorded vote would put an end to the lawful access controversy. A new letter from U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee that holds jurisdiction over trade, suggests the opposite. The letter, released last week, calls on the U.S. administration to treat Canada’s lawful access plans as a counterintelligence threat, to use the CLOUD Act negotiations as leverage, and to take regulatory steps to insulate American officials from surveillance demands directed at U.S. companies. Coming just weeks after House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan and House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Brian Mast warned that the bill harms U.S. national security and economic interests, the letter confirms that Bill C-22 has become a bilateral irritant with the potential to emerge as a full-blown trade issue. Given the latest threats of new tariffs, lawful access could add yet another complication in the increasingly fraught trade relationship.
The Data on Australia’s Social Media Ban: The Better the Privacy Protection, The Less Effective the Ban
As regular readers know, the Canadian plan to establish a social media ban for under 16s in Bill C-34 is based largely on the Australian model that took effect last December. With more data on the ban’s effectiveness continuing to roll in, multiple studies now confirm that it simply hasn’t worked as the majority of under-age users still have access to social media accounts. Yet rather than treating that as a reason to reconsider the model, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told Parliament in late June that his government is working “as a priority” to strengthen the law. The failure highlights a troubling correlation: the better the privacy protection, the less effective the ban. In other words, since users will find ways to circumvent the ban, “strengthening” the law likely means less privacy and more surveillance.
Recent Posts
A Definition That Meets the Moment: Federal Government Recognizes Antisemitism Includes Anti-Zionism 
Nobody Can Say They Weren’t Warned: Canada’s Threat Assessments Predicted the Belleville Yom Kippur Attack 
An AI Transparency Act for Canada: My Submission to the Government’s AI Transparency Consultation 
Not If, But When: The Yom Kippur Terror Attack in Belleville 
A Canary’s Song: What Antisemitism Reveals About the Health of Canadian Democracy
