It's in your riding? Hello.
I'm also a collaborator with the Snowden Digital Surveillance Archive that's hosted at Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.
I'm here today to speak about mass surveillance in terms of Bill C-51. I'd like to impress upon the committee the opportunity you have to really set Canada apart, which is supposedly what the Trudeau government was elected to do. You have the opportunity to take this bill, which is malformed in many ways, and potentially repeal it and spend time developing something proper, something that puts human rights into the centre of the regulation of communication or the regulation of privacy, something that values people's privacy instead of violating it.
As one of the previous speakers said, you have the opportunity, for instance, to step away from the Five Eyes alliance, which automatically makes every Canadian citizen a victim of mass surveillance around the world. This isn't just speculation. This has been proven time and again over the last three years. I think mass surveillance is dangerous to parliamentarians and to our democracy. The fact that I can't knowingly communicate securely with my member of Parliament is a problem. The fact that you and I can't send encrypted emails to each other is a problem.
Last year, I had the opportunity to interview a deputy chair of the Senate committee on national defence and security. I spoke with him about the management of computer networks at Parliament. He had no idea who set the policy, but thought that, you know, maybe using encrypted email would be a good thing to do because the government in power can spy on me, because CSIS can know what I'm doing, and because maybe privacy is something that I should integrate into the way I operate.
I'll stop before the three minutes is up, but—