Citizen Lab Research Associate Christopher Parsons joined The Agenda with Steve Paikin to discuss the controversial Bill C-51, anti-terrorism legislation passed by the previous Conservative government. He joined a panel to discuss potential changes to the law, which has been used by agencies like the RCMP and Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police to petition for new powers to access telephone and Internet data.

The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) plans to send text messages to individuals who were present in the particular neighbourhood in which a homicide occurred, in an attempt to gain more information in solving the crime. Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons commented on the use and storage of this data.

In this post, we critically examine the Government of Canada’s proposal to indiscriminately access subscriber identity information that is possessed by telecommunications service providers. We conclude by arguing that the government has failed to justify its case for such access to the information.

In this report, we confirm the use of the services of Canadian company Netsweeper, Inc. to censor access to the Internet in the Kingdom of Bahrain.

This report investigates the surveillance capabilities of IMSI Catchers, efforts by states to prevent information relating to IMSI Catchers from entering the public record, and the legal and policy frameworks that govern the use of these devices. The report principally focuses on Canadian agencies but, to do so, draws comparative examples from other jurisdictions. The report concludes with a series of recommended transparency and control mechanisms that are designed to properly contain the use of the devices and temper their more intrusive features.

The United States Department of Homeland Security has filed a proposal to collect social media details from visitors to the country. Citizen Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons commented on the privacy implications of the proposal, as well as broader trends in social media monitoring by security officials.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert authored an op-ed for CBC News detailing the newly revamped Access My Info tool, which now includes fitness trackers and dating applications. The tool allows Canadians to exercise their right to inquire about the information that technology companies store about them.

Access My Info (AMI), a web tool used to submit disclosure requests to companies on the data they collect and share with third parties about their customers, has now been expanded to submit disclosure requests to fitness tracker companies and dating applications.

Citizen Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons reviewed documents on BlackBerry for the CBC, and was interviewed by VICE on Canada’s RCMP’s use of IMSI catchers.

Recent reports have indicated that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has had a key to unlock encrypted messages sent between BlackBerry users since 2010. Citizen Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons commented on the significance of the revelations in an interview with VICE Motherboard.