Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to address the committee today.
My name is J.M. Porup. I am a national security and cybersecurity reporter based here in Toronto. I have covered wrongdoing at the CSE for the CBC, specifically on how the agency's hoarding of zero day security flaws endangers Canadians. Earlier this year, I broke the story in Ars Technica that the NSA's SKYNET program is killing thousands of innocent people due to a faulty machine learning algorithm. My work has appeared in the CBC, The Economist, The Christian Science Monitor, Ars Technica, VICE Motherboard, the Daily Dot, and others.
For many years, I reported from Colombia during that country's civil war. Next year, I will join the Berkman Klein Assembly at Harvard University. The Berkman Klein Center is arguably the world's leading think tank on cybersecurity. The views I share with you today are my own.
Why am I here? Cybersecurity changes everything. Technology writes constitutional law. Let me say that again: technology writes constitutional law. Mass surveillance and targeted hacking disrupt democracy and redistribute power to the intelligence agencies.
Where does that leave us? Canada faces a constitutional crisis. The powers that CSIS, the CSE, and the RCMP have seized for themselves in collaboration with their Five Eyes partners constitutes a direct assault on the powers of Parliament, a direct assault on Canadian democracy, and a direct assault on Canadian sovereignty. The question you must ask yourselves is, what are you going to do about it?
For my part as a journalist, I will continue to investigate and report on the crimes these agencies commit on a daily basis. I have no choice. For exercising my charter rights, I have personally been hacked, stalked, harassed, and interfered with while practising journalism right here in Canada. If Parliament is unable or unwilling to put an end to this kind of abuse by these agencies, then it falls to us, the press, the fourth estate, to defend democracy in Canada. If you do not do your job, then we, the press, will do it for you.
Thank you.