Neither civil libertarians nor privacy advocates are likely to be pleased with the two Bills introduced last week by Canada’s federal government, Bills which are intended to give police wider powers to access online data without a warrant. If passed, the Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act (Bill C-47) will require Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) and other “telecommunications service providers” to install equipment facilitating the interception of communications, and to allow police access, without a warrant, to the personal information of users including names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses and internet protocol addresses. The Investigative Powers . . . [more]

Those of us who were trained to look at the documents – always the documents as I.F. Stone taught – will find the attached documents on the torture of those detained at Guantánamo Bay detention centre both fascinating and chilling.

For the record here are the links: . . . [more]

Cory Doctorow writes on Boing Boing about the latest anti-terrorist campaign in England.

His entire post is a worthwhile read – but to get a flavour of it:

The London police have bested their own impressive record for insane and stupid anti-terrorism posters with a new range of signs advising Londoners to go through each others’ trash-bins looking for “suspicious” chemical bottles, and to report on one another for “studying CCTV cameras.”

Essentially, this redefines “suspicious” as anything outside of the direct experience of the most frightened, ignorant and foolish people in any neighborhood.

So in addition to being . . . [more]

Major report out this morning commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust in Britain taking the Brown government to task not merely for the dubious policy choices involved in the extension of many public sector surveillance and record-keeping databases but for their very illegality. . . . [more]

After doing online writing for about a year and a half now, one of my most read pieces is Employee Privacy in Canada. I also get plenty of legal inquiries by e-mail on it, and of course have to respond that I cannot provide legal advice.

It’s also a topic of interest to in-house counsel, who increasingly have to respond to managers about the checks and monitors they are allowed to use for their staff.

Perhaps then it’s no surprise that the subject was also prominently featured at the OBA 2009 Institute of Continuing Legal Education on Feb. 3, . . . [more]

Few people probably noticed the changes to one of the software features in Google Pack last month. Fewer still have considered the privacy implications.

Picasa, a photo management and sharing system, launched a facial recognition system. Users tag their photos, and the software searches through pictures to find the same people and place tags on them too.

Google, who owns Picasa, has had these capabilities for a couple years now since they acquired Neven Vision.

Theoretically a user could pick off other people’s photos from Flickr or Facebook, upload them to their Picasa account and tag . . . [more]

According to the Secrecy Report Card 2008 of the U.S. advocacy group OpenTheGovernment.org, U.S. government secrecy continued to rise in 2007.

It is the organization’s fifth annual report assessing trends in public access to information in that Great Republic to the South.

A representative of the American Association of Law Libraries sits on the steering committee of the watchdog group that fights to push back government secrecy.

Among the highlights:

• The American government spent $195 maintaining the secrets already on the books for every one dollar the government spent declassifying documents in 2007, a 5% increase in one year. At

The September 2008 issue of Scientific American is all about the Future of Privacy.

Content includes:

• Industry Roundtable: Experts Discuss Improving Online Security
• Internet Eavesdropping: A Brave New World of Wiretapping
• How RFID Tags Could Be Used to Track Unsuspecting People
• Digital Surveillance: Tools of the Spy Trade
• Data Fusion: The Ups and Downs of All-Encompassing Digital Profiles
• Cryptography: How to Keep Your Secrets Safe
• Beyond Fingerprinting: Is Biometrics the Best Bet for Fighting Identity Theft?
• Tougher Laws Needed to Protect Your Genetic Privacy
• Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?
• How Loss of Privacy May Mean Loss of

First Monday, that veteran academic web journal, has a sustained critique of the web in its current issue. Here are the titles of the articles, linked to abstracts, which will give you a feel:

• Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0
• Web 2.0: An argument against convergence
• Interactivity is Evil! A critical investigation of Web 2.0
• Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation
• The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0
• Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance

All of which is framed by a Preface . . . [more]

The U.K. organization Privacy International, together with the U.S.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, have published their 2007 privacy rankings for European and some other countries. In their judgement Canada has in the last year slipped from the best category (“significant protections and safeguards”) to the middle category (“some safeguards but weakened protection”). They provide a detailed analysis that forms the basis for this judgement.

Clearly intended to shock, the report now puts the United States into the worst possible category, that of an “endemic surveillance society.”

This report is the result of serious analysis and deserves careful attention. My only . . . [more]

[Bill SB 362] would prohibit a person from requiring, coercing, or compelling any other individual to undergo the subcutaneous implanting of an identification device, as defined.

California Senate Bill 362, made law October 12, 2007

I had no idea that anyone was considering the insertion of chips into employees, but I find I’m not surprised by the revelation. Apparently, a Cincinnati video surveillance company, Citywatcher.com (seemingly no longer online), required that employees be so branded.

[via Deeth Williams Wall E-Tips] . . . [more]

Today is World AIDS Day. In Canada we mark World AIDS Day by making a donation to CANFAR and wearing the red ribbon symbolizing the fight against the spread of HIV and AIDS.

CANFAR donation page.

From the World AIDS Day Message by the World Health Organization’s Acting Director-General Dr Anders Nordström:

In August this year, at the XVI International AIDS Conference, 30 000 of us came together in Toronto in reply to the Conference’s call to action. That action, we agreed, must reflect a balanced mix of prevention, treatment and care. This year’s World AIDS Day theme