Information & Ethics Committee on May 8th, 2007

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

I have another basic question on something that was brought to my attention by a constituent.

I know you talk in other documentation you have here about people phishing to get information about people, usually on the Internet, and what there is in terms of your name, birth date, and all those things that happen to be maybe on my Facebook, which somebody else looks after. One question came to me from a constituent, and I didn't have a good answer for them. They were unhappy that their phone number and address were in the phone book because that would be the beginning of somebody finding out who they were and where they lived, and then they could go through their garbage and they'd have a start.

Is there a law that exempts the use of that information in the publication of the phone book?

[Jennifer Stoddart]

No, I don't think there's any law that addresses that, but you can ask that your number be confidential. You can ask that your number be taken out of the directory.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

You have to pay for that service, and that was one of their issues. Here they are, interested in trying to be as private as possible, and it's costing them money to do so. It had never been brought to my attention—since I don't mind being in the phone book—that this is people's information. It's not their SIN number or something you could go to the bank and use, but it would be a start.

No one has challenged this in the courts that you know of? Can anybody answer that question?

[Jennifer Stoddart]

Before I became the Privacy Commissioner, there was the Englander decision that went up to the Federal Court about how people could choose and how the telcos had to respect their right to be out of a public telephone directory at a minimal cost. That was about the issue of consent and so on.

You're getting to the issue of privacy versus the fact that we do live in communities and we need a certain amount of public information to live in the community. If we're all anonymous in this society, I think that poses other problems. You could also question my colleague Robert Marleau, the Information Commissioner, on that.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Are there any questions from the opposition?

We'll have Mr. Van Kesteren and then Madam Lavallée.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Johnston, I want to go back to RFID, just for the sake of the committee. I found this really intriguing.

I had one of the techno wizards working for me, and we had quite a conversation when he was briefing me on this. I want you to elaborate on some of the concerns that the Privacy Commission has. Maybe just tell us quickly what this radio frequency identification technology is. What's involved? Briefly tell us, and then tell us why you're concerned about some of this technology and where it might go.

[Steve Johnston]

Thank you. I was kind of hoping you'd come back to that question, because we didn't get to it the first time.

Radio frequency identification systems typically consist of these components: the tag itself, which may or may not have processing capability; the antenna, which is part of the tag; a reader that emanates radio frequency energy, which is used to power passive tags; and then the software that interprets the information that comes back from the tag to the reader, because usually all that the tag contains is what's known as the electronic product code. You then have to look up in a database what that code is associated to in terms of the product, when it was manufactured, what its pedigree is, etc.

The privacy concerns around RFID stem partly from the fact that it's very small. It can be embedded in virtually anything, and it can give up its code or any other information that's stored on the tag without the individuals being aware that it's actually being read.

The major concern is that even if you can't necessarily associate a particular tag to an identity—in other words, tag number 123456789 is associated to me—you can associate the tag with a person of interest. For instance, it has been rumoured—and I don't know how true the rumours are—that law enforcement agencies have been using surreptitious readers to identify tags that are on objects possessed by individuals. So we get to the point where items of clothing, for example, are tagged. What you end up with is a series of numbers that are associated with a particular individual, and if that particular individual is at anti-war rally or some other form of protest, that marks them as a person of interest. If at some point that individual goes to go through a border control point, for example, and those tags are read again, they've now made the association to a specific identity and can take the individual aside for secondary screening or whatever.

So the notion of the RFID tags as a proxy for an identity is an issue of concern for us.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

But it certainly opens up some exciting new prospects, and I guess I'm looking for that balance. There's some wonderful technology here that can really benefit mankind, and we don't want to stifle that. At the same time, we don't want it to be abused.

Have you found a little bit of a balance there? Are you looking at that?

[Steve Johnston]

The tipping point seems to come at the point where the tags come in contact with individuals. For example, supply chain optimization is great technology, and we're all for that simply because it makes things more efficient, more cost-effective, and so on. At the moment, that's where the bulk of RFID use is. We're tagging large items. We're tagging cases and pallets; we're not tagging individual objects.

The concern is that at some point the technology will become cheap enough and small enough that it will be embedded in everything. The way the electronic product code is constructed, every single object on the planet could have a unique identifier. So unlike the bar code, where every can of Coke has the same identifier, every can of Coke could have a unique identifier. If that becomes associated with an individual and then is used for invasive marketing or tracking, or something like that, that's where we have the concern. Up to that point, it doesn't seem to be much of an issue, either at our level or with other commissioners around the world.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, sir.

Madam Lavallée.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Earlier you talked about the Commonwealth countries, but also about the countries that were particularly effective or that were forming task forces to see how to solve the problem. If I did an Internet search, what countries could serve as models?

[Jennifer Stoddart]

For your guidance, we've included the summary of the U.S. study. The Americans are trying to solve this problem, but they don't have laws with standards similar to those of Canada. Credit access conditions in the United States are much more relaxed than in Canada. The problem may be more serious there.

Internationally, we are virtually all dealing—I don't know whether there is one country—

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

We're all at the time stage.

[Jennifer Stoddart]

That's correct.

Mr. Watson, I don't know whether you are familiar with white collar crimes, which are a kind of fraud. Is there one country that can serve as a model?

[Wayne Watson]

Not really. The Americans, by the size of their population and under the legislation, are on the lookout for the latest investigation technologies and techniques. However, this is an international problem. We can control certain things here at home, but we can't do it elsewhere. We'll eventually have to find an international solution to solve the problem of identity theft. No country will be able to solve it. It's too big a problem.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

All right.

Mr. Tilson, it is 10:28 a.m. So I'm going to stop there.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

You want to cut yourself off, Madam Lavallée?

Madam Stoddart, thank you very much, and to your colleagues, for appearing before us, and for the book, which we will refer to. We will be asking other witnesses to come to this committee and it may be that in the future we will ask you to return.

Thank you, to all of you, for coming and making your presentation to us.

We will recess for a couple of minutes to allow the commission to retire.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

We're going to reconvene, ladies and gentlemen. I would ask for some order in the room.

Madam Lavallée has requested to have the floor at 10:30.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I started talking about this last week. You received a motion in both official languages. Recently, an internal report of the Department of International Affairs was the subject of a number of questions in the House and of a number of interviews.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Madam Lavallée, to make this appropriate, perhaps you should actually make the motion. Please move the motion for the record and then we will proceed with debate.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

I'm going to go about it in the order you wish, Mr. Chairman.

The motion that I introduced was as follows:

That the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics urgently address the internal report by the Department of Foreign Affairs entitled Afghanistan-2006: Good Governance, Democratic Development and Human Rights, a report that the government claimed did not exist and took every step to prevent its release but was finally forced by the Information Commissioner to reconsider and then published the report but in a highly censored form.

That is the motion that I introduced. May I now present my arguments, Mr. Chairman?

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Do you have a point of order, Mr. Wallace?

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

On a point of order, Mr. Chairman, if I look at the bible around here, the House of Commons procedures book, on page 449 it says: “A motion should not contain any objectionable or irregular wording. It should not be argumentative or written in the style of a speech.”

My suggestion to you, Mr. Chairman, is that this motion is out of order because it is against those rules. I would like you to rule on that.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Mr. Dhaliwal.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Newton—North Delta, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

In looking at this particular situation, The Globe and Mail received a report that was clear. The way I look at it is—