Recent research from Citizen Lab marked the first time a Canadian police service was directly linked to the mercenary spyware industry. The report identified the Ontario Provincial Police as a possible customer of a spyware company called Paragon Solutions. In a new piece for Policy Options, senior research associate Kate Robertson and legal extern Song-Ly Tran discuss how outdated protections in Canada’s decades old wiretap laws fail to protect people in Canada from abuse of spyware technologies.
Rather than shoehorning the use of spyware into a legal framework established in the 1970s, Robertson and Tran highlight the urgent need for action by federal lawmakers and privacy regulators across Canada to address the specific dangers of spyware technology, through both legislative reform and comprehensive oversight.
Read more in Policy Options.