May 23, 2014

Christopher Parsons was interviewed by a number of media outlets throughout March, focusing on government access to telecommunications data held by private companies, and on companies’ internal data handling practices.

Deibert was joined by Omar El Akkad, Technology reporter at the Globe and Mail and Mornay Walters, Chief Executive Officer of Seecrypt Group, a maker of secure communications software for mobile devices.

Penney writes about how the Fair Elections Act will make it even easier for Canadian political parties to access our personal information and undermine democracy.

In this post we analyze the partial disclosures concerning Canada’s federal agencies’ domestic telecommunications surveillance practices. We argue that key federal agencies remain unaccountable to Parliamentarians and the Canadian public alike, and that accountability measures are urgently needed for Canadians to understand the extent of their federal government’s surveillance activities.

March 5, 2014

March 29, 2014

On January 20, 2014 the Citizen Lab along with leading Canadian academics and civil liberties groups asked Canadian telecommunications companies to reveal the extent to which they disclose information to state authorities. This post summarizes and analyzes the responses from the companies, and argues that the companies have done little to ultimately clarify their disclosure policies. We conclude by indicating the subsequent steps in this research project.

Our analysis traces Hacking Team’s Remote Control System’s (RCS) proxy chains, and finds that dedicated US-based servers are part of the RCS infrastructure implemented by the governments of Azerbaijan, Colombia, Ethiopia, Korea, Mexico, Morocco, Poland, Thailand, Uzbekistan, and the United Arab Emirates in their espionage and/or law enforcement operations.

April 30, 2014