The NSA has been causing technology providers of all stripes — on-premise hardware vendors, cloud application providers, traditional software vendors — no end of headaches as the Snowden revelations continue to pile up. As a recent article by security expert Bruce Schneier outlines, the scale and impact of the NSA surveillance machine is almost beyond comprehension.

Microsoft’s GC, Brad Smith, went so far as to characterize the NSA as an “advanced persistent threat,” a industry term usually reserved to refer to sophisticated and malicious hackers backed by a foreign government. The cost to US technology providers of the NSA . . . [more]

There are things we can control (we think), and things we cannot. Most natural phenomena, big and small, fall into the latter category — which is to say damn near everything that happens. Sensibly, we avoid the dangerous much of the time and try to adapt when we can’t run away far enough. Ice age coming? Oh bother! That means up stakes, heavy coats, and a few millennia of wandering. That sort of thing. But, as a moment’s thought will confirm, our record of staying out the way of “bad” natural phenomena is, well, less than stellar. We build cities . . . [more]

Environmental regulators and tribunals bear substantial responsibilities and make important decisions regarding development in Canada. If they won’t listen to opponents of a project, will they breach the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms?

The issue has been raised before the courts recently regarding both a pipeline approval before the National Energy Board and regulation of ongoing fracking activities before the Alberta Energy Regulator. The AER replaced the Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB), and provides “full-lifecycle regulatory oversight of energy resource development in Alberta – from application and construction to abandonment and reclamation, and everything in between.”

The mandate . . . [more]

Commission Charbonneau : La commission Charbonneau pourra utiliser les communications interceptées lors de la surveillance électronique de dirigeants de la FTQ.

One to watch — but not spy on, perhaps: the Dark Mail Alliance is aiming to develop the software to enable email that has end-to-end encryption in order to frustrate government efforts to read your post. At the moment the alliance with the name that only Darth Vader could love comprises Silent Circle and Lavabit, though the invitation to join them is extended to any others who share their mission to develop and:

 . . . to open source the protocol and architecture and help others implement this new technology to address privacy concerns against surveillance and back door threats

. . . [more]

British novelist and journalist John Lanchester wrote an interesting piece in last week’s Guardian, on his review of material leaked by whistleblower Ed Snowden.

He starts by admitting he does not share the instinctive opposition to state secrecy. As he puts it: “Democratic states need spies”. Because democracy has enemies, he argues, the right to privacy must be qualified, just as other rights are qualified. But the danger in the digital age is that “with a couple of clicks of a mouse an agent of the state can target your home phone, or your mobile, or your email, or your . . . [more]

BrightPlanet has created a new online product called “BlueJay,” which it is advertising as a "Law Enforcement Twitter Crime Scanner." The tool allows users to monitor virtually every single public tweet published by Twitter users in real time for indicators of crime or wrongdoing. Users can set up virtual perimeters or geo-fences to track tweets specific to those areas. BrightPlanet’s main business is “open source intelligence”: searching the “deep web”—those parts of the World Wide Web that are public but which regular search engines cannot reach.

Last week’s revelations that the NSA may be able to decrypt most of the traffic on the internet sent shockwaves through the global community. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption was thought to provide a secure and virtually impenetrable “tunnel” for sensitive internet traffic, such as credit card data or confidential client documents; the NSA, however, has reportedly circumvented the security of SSL connections through a combination of brute-strength computing power and a network of “back doors” inserted into the equipment and algorithms that provide SSL security.

These code-breaking capabilities have left many users of cloud-based services asking if traffic they . . . [more]

A recent survey from the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) shows a disturbing trend that online surveillance often happens without transparent judicial oversight, and yet appears to be raising relatively little concern among the public. As a result, the CIRA, which is the organization that manages the .CA Internet domain, is calling for a national dialogue on online privacy.

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada's award-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from forty-one recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. Avoid a Claim   2. Finding Legal Information   3. Michael Geist    4. Canadian Legal History Blog    5. All About Information

Data about individuals is very valuable. It can be used to discern trends, popular thought, individual buying habits, customer behaviour, do medical research, and many other things. But it is important that the collectors and users of that data use it in a privacy friendly manner.

One of the deflections by the NSA is that they don’t record conversations, just metadata about phone calls and other communication. Metadata means information about information, and can be just as personal and invasive as the data itself.

The Ontario Privacy Commissioner, Ann Cavoukian, recently published a paper entitled A Primer on Metadata: Separating . . . [more]

Edward Snowden’s recent disclosures have revealed a need to rethink the way that the current legal structure governing the clandestine activities of intelligence agencies provides for proper oversight by Congress and the public at large.