I think the one of the solutions is to have a sort of centralized control over it. I recommended in the submission that there needs to be some centralized control of information sharing. The departments could do their piece, but somewhere in government—maybe in Public Safety—there would be someone overseeing all of this. The Privacy Commissioner and SIRC and everybody will do their audits, and we're calling for a national security review agency. Those will be the watchdogs, but someone in government needs to be shepherding the whole thing by asking what's being shared, what are the thresholds that are the same across government, and then asking, “Are we doing this and is it consistent?” Then if there's a false positive or something, that person or that entity within government would be able to issue instructions across government to say, “Search your databases for this record and this person and remove that information.”
It's not a fail-safe method, because government is so huge and people forget and whatnot, but it still leaves us with the real problem back in the world, because if it has left here and has gone to the Five Eyes or to Saudi Arabia, we'll never get it back. We have no control over how they deal with that information. We don't even have control anymore to tell them that they have to use that information “relevant to these issues”. They could use it for some other purpose completely.
I think there's a possible fix, but in today's big-data world where there is so much information, it's very hard to clean that up. I think one attempt would be a centralized review, and then a way to issue instructions across government.
Take, for example, the no-fly secure air travel passenger protect program. I don't even know what's happening, because it's shrouded in secrecy. We can debate about whether it works, but let's say you get the passenger manifest and you check for the names. If none of the names are on the flight and the flight lands safely, why should that information be kept?
I remember Bill C-17 years ago, when they introduced the regulatory framework for the no-fly list. That information could be shared around and kept indefinitely. I do not want the travel data of all Canadians flying on Canadian airlines kept in government databases to then be mined for travel patterns. We know that CSIS and CSE have played funny with metadata and and have crossed the line.
You have metadata and travel patterns, and you might be pulled in here now. You can see that all of this is there in government databases, and the preamble to the act says that there is the ability to collate. That, to me, is data mining. That's what it's enabling. Clearly, that's what part of it is. We do need to do some of that, but again, the net is cast so widely.
My starting position is that Canadians' privacy needs to be protected. If the government doesn't need to have information about you to do business with you—to vet your taxes or your health records—they should not have it as a starting point. If they have collected it in this process of security screening, once you're not a suspect or the flight has landed, etc., they should expunge that information. That's how we minimize the databases and avoid errors.