An Ontario pathologist who was arrested on terrorism charges was acquitted today in R. v. Sher.

Dr. Khurrum Sher, a graduate of McGill University who was working at St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital in St. Thomas, Ont., visited the home of his co-accused on July 20, 2010. During this visit, his host and another guest engaged in a protracted discussion about violent terrorist activity.

The accused was present throughout the discussion, did not appear to vigorously object to their plans, and at its conclusion appears to pledge his allegiance to them. He was friends with the host of the . . . [more]

You’ve probably heard about the T-shaped lawyer. The origin of the term was the “T-shaped person” – a reference which first appeared in a 1991 London newspaper article on the subject of computing jobs. The premise is that a T-shaped person has a depth of knowledge in one discipline (this is the vertical stroke of the T) as well as a breadth of knowledge across multiple disciplines that allows for collaboration and innovation (the horizontal stroke of the T).

C-suite executives talk with enthusiasm about seeking T-shaped employees who can successfully collaborate and innovate with our rapidly changing times.

As . . . [more]

Back in March, Tim Berners-Lee — who invented the world wide web, no less — issued a call to citizens in different countries to pressure their governments to produce a bill of rights to ensure net neutrality and protect the rights of web users worldwide.

It’s a far cry from the heady days, not so long ago, of cyber-libertarians rallying around A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. But then again, we live in different times. The growing evidence of abuses committed by intelligence services (south of the border obviously, but here at home as well) are . . . [more]

At a hacker conference in New York earlier this month, security expert Jonathan Zdziarski presented a paper which should raise some eyebrows for lawyers.

Zdziarski noted the considerable developments Apple has made to ensure its iOS devices are secure, to the point where the iPhone 5 and iOS 7 is more secure from everyone. Everyone, that is, except for Apple itself.

Although third party documents on Apple devices are encrypted, the library and caches folders are typically not. What this means is that an unlocked device allows access to data which would normally be encrypted. There is currently no way . . . [more]

From Saturday’s Guardian – here is the complete transcript.

The NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, has urged lawyers, journalists, doctors, accountants, priests and others with a duty to protect confidentiality to upgrade security in the wake of the spy surveillance revelations.

Snowden said professionals were failing in their obligations to their clients, sources, patients and parishioners in what he described as a new and challenging world.

No matter how careful you are from that point on, no matter how sophisticated your source, journalists have to be sure that they make no mistakes at all in the very beginning to the

. . . [more]

Years before Edward Snowden obliterated digital innocence, showed us what the “Five Eyes” are really up to, and pulled stakes for the unlikely safe harbour of Moscow’s airport transit zone, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger released his 2009 book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. In it he urged caution for the “Digital Panopticon”, and warned against the growing trend towards mass surveillance. The Internet, as we now know, never forgets. He made the case for why it should.

Throughout human history, forgetting has been the norm and remembering the exception. Technology, as Mayer-Schönberger, a . . . [more]

Businesses that do not encrypt their information risk losing it. Legal professionals risk private and confidential client information when they do not take steps to secure it properly. Your operating system has encryption built in, through Windows Bitlocker or Mac File Vault II. If you are one of those lawyers on an older version of Windows, use Truecrypt or Diskcryptor to encrypt your hard drive.

Full disk encryption is a baseline now for legal professionals. If you must use portable drives, use your encryption software on them as well. In reality, all computers and drives are portable, which means . . . [more]

In Europe, the concern about the NSA and the “five eyes” countries is becoming more and more serious.

One of the more unusual proposals is to legislate against products that are insecure by design. A group loosely associated with the EU Pirate Parties and the Free Software Foundation proposes:

legislation to upgrade all communication among private citizens to provide necessary technical measures for maintaining an adequate implementation of the Secrecy of Correspondence required by most constitutions and human right charters. The law shall include ways to ensure its correct implementation and a transition path from the existing unencrypted systems

In . . . [more]

In case you needed another reason to get paranoid about your growing loss of privacy, Facebook has now successfully developed facial recognition software that performs to the same standard as the human brain. [Cited FB research paper.]

The project is called “DeepFace”, and its recognition rate of 97.25 is closely comparable to human accuracy at 97.53%. Even with variances in lighting; and even when the angle of the shot is different. If you’d like to get into the detail, the link above gives a nice condensed summary.

What could this mean in the future? It’s hard to predict, of . . . [more]

The limitations and restrictions regarding social media use during the 2014 Winter Olympics Games continue to be controversial. While the International Olympic Committee (“IOC”) has eased up on their social media restrictions over the years, the IOC guidelines are fairly similar to the guidelines provided for the London 2012 Olympic Games.

(So no apparent extra control over social media as compared to prior Olympics – unlike allegations that participants and athletes will face the most invasive and massive surveillance ever, including monitoring of all communications, and allegations that it is the most corrupt Olympics in history. )

Take . . . [more]

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. Precedent: The New Rules of Law and Style   2. BC Injury Law Blog   3. Doorey’s Workplace Law Blog   4. Canadian Privacy Law Blog    5. Western Canada Business Litigation Blog

I recently read Ron Deibert’s, “Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace” and so my ears perked up a few days ago when I heard Deibert talking to Matt Galloway on Metro Morning.

Diebert, who is also the Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs here in Toronto, was talking about surveillance at the upcoming winter Olympic Games in Sochi. He considers surveillance in Russian society to already be “near total,” and mentions a recent Russian directive that will ensure that all communications at the games are “collected, archived for three years . . . [more]