Jon Penney, a law professor at Dalhousie University and Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab, was interviewed by VICE Motherboard regarding the dynamic between Canada’s security agencies and the courts. He explained the government’s tendency to fight back against the court’s insistence that CSIS and the Communications Security Estabilishment Canada (CSEC) must keep them up to date on their operations.

Citizen Lab Post-Doctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons spoke to a number of media outlets this month on privacy issues in Canada, ranging from topics such as the expansion of Toronto Police Service’s surveillance technologies, the collection of social media data by the government, and concerns with particular mobile applications.

Citizen Lab Post-doctoral fellow Christopher Parsons was interviewed in The Calgary Herald on the issue of privacy and mass surveillance.

This edition of Social Media Watch deals with top court rulings on digital privacy, social media monitoring, and mobile security news.

Post-doctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons spoke with a variety of media organizations over the past month about his research and pressing events that have taken place in the Canadian telecommunications landscape. He generally discussed lawful access to telecommunications data, the release of transparency reports by Canadian Internet service providers, and the unveiling of an access to personal information tool.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert spoke with The Globe and Mail’s telecom reporter Christine Dobby about recent issues related to the privacy of telecommunications customers’ personal information.

This post first identifies the individual and collective benefits of using the Access My Info tool to request access to one’s personal data held by Canadian data operators. It then discusses technical design decisions that went into the tool’s development and implementation.

By getting into the malware business the federal and potentially provincial governments of Canada would be confronted with an ongoing reality: is the role of government to maximally protect its citizens, including from criminals leveraging vulnerabilities to spy on Canadians, or is it to partially protect citizens so long as such protections do not weaken the state’s ability to secure itself from persons suspected of violating any Act of Parliament?

Social Media Watch returns with updates from the EU and US legal landscape, some notable cases of government access to personal data, and an overview of some important reports describing the need for updated regulation in the data economy.

Citizen Lab Post-doctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons was interviewed on CBC News on 8 May about state cyber surveillance in Canada.