Evidence of meeting #43 for Public Safety and National Security in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was subamendment.
A video is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Tamara Kronis Conservative Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
I'll leave that for now. I want to ask a different question specifically about that kind of situation with the phone numbers.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but is it not prevalent for people who are engaged in organized crime to use burner phones specifically for this reason, which is so that their information isn't available?
Acting General Counsel, Policy Sector, Department of Justice
They do. There is another provision in part 1 that deals with burner phones that there's no amendment for, so I'm not sure if we're going to get to discuss that, but it will come up during clause-by-clause.
Conservative
Tamara Kronis Conservative Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
In terms of the utility, you used an example of being able to get phone numbers. We've established that many of those people use burner phones, so that's probably an example of limited utility. Can you give a different example that might be more relatable?
Acting General Counsel, Policy Sector, Department of Justice
A case was recently reported in the CBC, I think a couple of days ago, where the subscriber information production order would be of use. It had to do with investigating a ring of men who were harassing women with sexualized deepfakes. The way the police officer was able to connect the suspect of the crime was through records that they obtained through Airbnb. This type of production order has utility not only for telecommunications but for short-term rentals, hotels and things like that.
Conservative
Tamara Kronis Conservative Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Just so I have it straight in my head, can you explain what the delta is between the data that would be involved without the Bloc amendment, the data that is involved with the Bloc amendment and the data that's in the subamendment? What does the delta look like? Operationally, what are we doing here?
Acting General Counsel, Policy Sector, Department of Justice
In the current amendment, as far as I know, we're not limiting the data that's available. That was in a different amendment. It's subscriber information. The Bloc amendment and the subamendment are making explicit that when you seek a production order, the judicial discretion remains with the judge to decide what subscriber information shall be ordered within that specific production order.
Conservative
Tamara Kronis Conservative Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
If I could turn to one of the RCMP witnesses, can you translate...
I apologize. I'm so used to this happening automatically.
I want to thank all the people who are assisting us today—all of the translators, the technical people and everyone who's here. This is my first term as an elected official, and these are really long and intense weeks. You are the people who are making it possible for us to do this work. We're very grateful for that.
Could one of the witnesses from the RCMP translate what I understand legally into the practical and operational implications? What information don't you get from this, as a result of this amendment?
Aaron Gilkes Acting Officer-in-Charge, RCMP Lawful Access, Royal Canadian Mounted Police
I suppose I can bring it back to the burner phone situation, because if we're looking simply for phone numbers, like you mentioned, there could be a phone that's being swapped or a SIM card that's being swapped. There are a number of different things they can change to try to maintain their anonymity.
Some of the information you can recover from, for example, a service provider in this list would be devices being used or equipment being used. What we've seen in the past is that we've established, potentially, the residence of the individuals or individual involved in a crime, and we're able to see, as a result, that they've used multiple devices to access a certain website, for example.
In the case of a bank fraud or something like that, it could be that a particular account was accessed by multiple different devices, but from potentially the same location. That gives us an indication that different devices are being used by a particular individual, even though they are swapping SIM cards or something like that. It's the same device or the same type of device being used, or it's a similar device that they're changing to try to mask their actual identity.
Conservative
Tamara Kronis Conservative Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Just following up on that, as you're speaking I'm running through some of the emails that I get from people in my community about this bill specifically. There's a lot of talk about—and we've been focusing on this idea—asking for a judicial order stage, and we're thinking about what kind of information we're looking for in that context.
How do we get here? You talked about multiple devices being used for a fraud from the same location. How does this come across your desk in the first place? Is this one of those situations where someone has reported a crime and you're doing an investigation? Or is it something that you would initiate on your own? If I could ask you to—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Jean-Yves Duclos
I'm sorry to interrupt.
The bells are ringing. We've been summoned to the House to vote.
Before continuing, we need unanimous consent.
Is it the will of the committee to continue the meeting?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Jean-Yves Duclos
There's no unanimous consent. We will suspend.
MP Mantle, I'm fortunately surrounded by great advice. You're apparently not a member of the committee now, you're not a substitute. I just wanted to check whether you were alone or supported by others.
We're suspending the meeting for the duration of the standing vote in the House.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Jean-Yves Duclos
Thank you for coming back.
We're continuing with Ms. Kronis, who would like to pick up where she left off.
Did you want to continue your questioning?
Conservative
Conservative
Tamara Kronis Conservative Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
When we broke, I think we'd talked a little bit and had some legal discussions about the differences between the wording of the clauses in the original bill and the amendments, and again in terms of the subamendments.
I would invite our witnesses here from the RCMP to talk a little bit more about what that practical difference is.
Acting Officer-in-Charge, RCMP Lawful Access, Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Where I left off before was introducing you to how a police file may get started. Now, I'm going to choose just one type of file. It could be very different, depending on the type of investigation that you're conducting.
Much of the time, it will start off with a complaint from an individual. If I take, for example, someone who claims to have been defrauded at a bank, then they may make a complaint to the police department—
Conservative
Tamara Kronis Conservative Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
I apologize for interrupting you.
When they say “defrauded at a bank”, do they mean a complaint of being defrauded that they're making to the bank, or is it a complaint of being defrauded by the bank?
Acting Officer-in-Charge, RCMP Lawful Access, Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Well, they're not sure yet. They're just trying to say that there are funds missing, but they don't know why those funds happen to be missing.
Acting Officer-in-Charge, RCMP Lawful Access, Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Now, there can be a discrepancy between what they say and what the bank says, for example. The bank may allege that this person was complicit in whatever actually happened.
Conservative
Tamara Kronis Conservative Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Do you mean that the bank might say, “You're right. The sum of $12,000 has been withdrawn from your account, but our records show that you did that on Friday in person here at the bank”?
Acting Officer-in-Charge, RCMP Lawful Access, Royal Canadian Mounted Police
It could be something like that, yes.
We may receive a complaint, and then that complaint would have to be triaged. A department has to receive it, review it and establish its priority based on what could be the modus operandi, the amount of money that was defrauded or anything like that. Then it has to be assigned to an individual or a team of investigators. Then that investigator has to have the time to begin the file. There could be a considerable amount of time before work actually begins on the file itself.
Depending on what the alleged event was, it's possible that the police may try to obtain certain information from the bank. For example, they might want to obtain IP logs, or logs of the account that had been accessed. If they are able to write a production order to the bank to obtain this information, it could take 30 days, or it could take whatever time it actually takes to for the bank to reply. In that reply, it could be that there are several IP addresses that had accessed the account.
In order to continue with next steps, police would likely try to figure out who would be behind the IP addresses that had accessed the account. Part of the challenge that police face now is establishing exactly which company is in control of the subscriber information associated with those IP addresses.
Conservative
Tamara Kronis Conservative Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
When you say, “the subscriber information associated with those IP addresses,” that means that you have the IP addresses, and you geolocate them, presumably.
Acting Officer-in-Charge, RCMP Lawful Access, Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Well, we can't—