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

In this post we explain how Canadians can issue requests to their telecommunications companies to learn what personal information those companies collect, retain, and disclose about them. We argue that Canadians should do this both to empower themselves and to enable Canadian policy experts and government officials to better hold the companies to account.

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.

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.

Canadians should demand more from government in reigning in electronic spying and cyber-policing. But we should also, as citizens, subscribers, and users, demand more from our internet and telecommunication service providers.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert spoke about the security challenges governments face in the digital environment.

A top secret document leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden and obtained by CBC News shows that “Canada’s electronic spy agency, the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), used information from the free internet service at a major Canadian airport to track the wireless devices of thousands of ordinary airline passengers for days after they left the terminal.”

Canadian scholars and civil liberties organizations have come together to ask that many of Canada’s most preeminent telecommunications companies disclose the kinds, amounts, and regularity at which state agencies request telecommunications data pertaining to Canadians.

February 28, 2014