In a submission to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights, Citizen Lab researchers warn of the dangerous rhetoric of “birth registration and certification as a prerequisite for other rights” and the risks digital ID infrastructure could pose to human rights.

In a new piece for Policy Options, senior research associate Kate Robertson and legal extern Song-Ly Tran discuss how outdated protections in Canada’s decades old wiretap laws fail to protect people in Canada from abuse of spyware technologies.

Our preliminary analysis of Bill C-2 situates the legislation within the context of existing research by the Citizen Lab about two potential data-sharing treaties that are most relevant to the new proposed powers being introduced in Bill C-2: the Second Additional Protocol to the Budapest Convention (2AP) and the CLOUD Act. Both of which carry significant constitutional and human rights risks.

Legal researchers Cynthia Khoo and Kate Robertson warn that a Canada-U.S. CLOUD agreement would extend the reach of U.S. law enforcement into Canada’s digital terrain to an unprecedented extent, and that if signed, this agreement would effectively allow U.S. police to demand personal data directly from any provider of an “electronic communication service” or “remote computing service” in Canada, so long as it had some ties to the U.S.

Police led mass iris scan collection in Qinghai, a region with a population that is 49.4% non-Han, including Tibetans and Hui Muslims. Iris scan collection is part of long-standing police intelligence gathering programs. Through this data collection, Qinghai’s police are effectively treating entire communities as populated by potential threats to social stability.