R. v. TELUS Communications Co., 2013 SCC 16
I’ll leave the substantive comments on the validity and merits of the decision to those with the expertise. I’ll say only that I suspect the Harperite law & order types involved in the appointment of Justices Moldaver and Karakstanis expected them to line up on the gov’t’s side and not the civil liberties side.
I’m not sure why a telco would keep an “attractive nuisance” like a month’s worth of customer text messages around in the first place!
In the computer-networking world is it quite common to (1) keep the logging turned down to “errors only” and (2) never keep more that a few days of logs in the first place.
It’s genuinely pleasing that the SCC saw fit to treat this as wiretapping: it gives me hopes that my emails will be protected appropriately, while they are siting on a disk at my ISP, waiting for me to pick them up.
–dave