Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good morning from here in Calgary.
To you and members of the committee, thank you for inviting me to appear before you today.
In 1964, Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”
In 1992, our Supreme Court said, “The very efficacy of electronic surveillance is such that it has the potential, if left unregulated, to annihilate any expectation that our communications will remain private.” The Supreme Court also said that we have a right to know when the state intrudes on our privacy.
The need for this study tells us that the court has been ignored.
As we saw with Clearview AI, police sometimes sampled data-oriented policing tools with no procurement paper trail, tools they say are needed for public safety to guard against perceived threats or, as Bill C-27 allows, to provide for societal benefits. Put another way, technology itself is morally neutral. How its use is justified makes all the difference, which is why it is so very important that this study is not hidden behind closed doors shielded from full public view.
We know that the Stasi secretly spied on its citizenry, but we don't expect democratic governments to spy on theirs, yet it's now happening in Canada and around the world with journalists, executives, social activists and elected representatives whose views differ from the ruling party being spied on.
Until recently, though, Dudley Do-Right and Sergeant Preston were what people thought of when they thought of the RCMP, defenders of justice and fair play in their relentless pursuit of lawbreakers, respecting the intent in the letter of the law, the charter and Canadian's privacy, not using an unreported surveillance program to spy on Canadians' social media accounts.
Granted, spyware can help police do their work. More often, though, it's downloaded by the hundreds of thousands and used by human traffickers to control sex slaves and, in domestic conflicts, to terrorize partners.
It's also part of a lucrative new sector that's made our privacy, our freedom and our democracy only a crisis or an election away from extinction. How can any MP or bureaucrat be certain that cabinet confidences, military strategies, election plans or anything can be discussed privately when there's a very real chance that a hidden app is letting someone somewhere in the world listen, watch and record your every text, email and photo, siphon your contacts and your passwords and silently turn on the microphone and camera to watch and listen to you and your surroundings undetected?
As for the question of whether there are any social benefits in spyware, the answer is a perverse but resounding yes. It's the Ford Pinto of technology, a danger hidden to the public in general and to certain people in particular with lots of socially beneficial spinoff jobs, commerce and taxes.
The global cybercrime industry generates more than $1.5 trillion U.S. annually. The global cybersecurity industry is at $1.7 trillion and in Canada, it accounts for $3.5 billion U.S. right now.
Pegasus is just the latest spyware to make the headlines. It reminds us that spyware is a non-partisan, equal opportunity endeavour and that the post-911 tools to combat terrorism have made us all fair game to be targeted and our words used against us. Maybe they already have been.
Disrupting the mercenary surveillance industry will require multi-partisan political will, a coordinated domestic and international effort and a shift in approach to prevent the damage from being done in the first place by regulating the exploitation of privacy. Put the onus where it belongs.
Spyware developers, producers, distributors, investors and the inherently faulty technology make the risk greater than the reward, because regulating Internet content won't stop spyware or child predators, and laws banning hacking-for-hire companies and occasionally catching a criminal haven't made a dent.
Using spyware needs to be made unlawful except in specific exceptional situations and for the shortest possible duration necessary to accomplish a specific investigatory goal with its use approved in advance by a genuinely independent, knowledgeable, apolitical third party so that Canadians can regain trust in government and the public sector and have reason to think of Mounties as Dudley Do-Right, not Snidely Whiplash.
