Refine by MP, party, committee, province, or result type.
Public Safety committee Further changes.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Prof. Craig Forcese
Public Safety committee Yes, subject to my concern about personal information that might be swept into the ministerial authorization or not swept into the ministerial authorization.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Prof. Craig Forcese
Public Safety committee Absent a specific suggestion in this bill, I don't know that I would single anything out as better embedded in regulation. Professor Wark and Professor Carvin this morning both mentioned that the concept of dataset is broadly clothed. If we were to define it rigidly in the act, then we may have a problem.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Prof. Craig Forcese
Public Safety committee In response to your question, yes, I would prefer to see it in legislation.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Prof. Craig Forcese
Public Safety committee It's for the reasons you've described. For one thing, it is embedded and more difficult to change. For another, in the past, ministerial directives were not always transparent. We know about only the 2009 and 2011 ministerial directives through the use of access to information. As a policy matter, the government is more proactively disclosing ministerial directives, but of course it would be nice to ensure that going forward there was always transparency in this area.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Prof. Craig Forcese
Public Safety committee Essentially proposed subsection 24(4) constitutes that, for greater certainty, it is possible legally for the CSE to acquire information incidentally in the course of its properly authorized foreign intelligence and cybersecurity conduct. That incidentally acquired information would presumably then be pulled into the retention rules and how you're supposed to govern that information.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Prof. Craig Forcese
Public Safety committee The classes of Canadian datasets have to be approved by both the minister and the intelligence commissioner. Then, if the service chooses to retain individual datasets, that retention is subject to court approval, and the court could impose conditions on queries and exploitation.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Prof. Craig Forcese
Public Safety committee The amendments I'm proposing would affect the foreign intelligence authorizations and the cybersecurity authorizations that are alluded to in proposed section 23, to ensure that in those two contexts information that triggers a constitutional interest is steered through the authorization process by a minister and then the intelligence commissioner.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Prof. Craig Forcese
Public Safety committee My preference is to steer every new change through the intelligence commissioner process. The issue here is that these authorizations are broadly textured. At present, for example, for foreign intelligence I understand there are three ministerial authorizations and one cybersecurity authorization.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Prof. Craig Forcese
Public Safety committee There are two sorts of false positives. There's the false positive that stems from when the person has the same name as someone who's on the list, and that's the discussion we've been having as of late. That's where a redress system—“I'm not really that person”—is effective. There are also false positives in the sense of a person who is the person the government has targeted, but who feels they've been wrongfully listed.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Prof. Craig Forcese
Public Safety committee My single concern really relates to the circumstances in which the director of CSIS can authorize a query of a dataset that hasn't gone through the regular retention process involving the Federal Court, for instance. There's no indication in the statute as to what the service can then do with the product of that query.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Prof. Craig Forcese
Public Safety committee Off the top of my head I would just make it clear that the results of queries done in exigent circumstances under proposed section 11.22 should be tied into the rules on retention that you find in proposed section 11.21. Obviously, that's going to require some tinkering.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Prof. Craig Forcese
Public Safety committee I wasn't party to the drafting of Bill C-51 so I can't comment on the circumstances that drove its manner of drafting. Certainly, Bill C-51 opened the door to the service doing threat reduction of any sort, which before was a disputed issue. We know from what the director has said approximately 30 times now that, I believe, the service is engaged in threat reduction, albeit never crossing the line to threat reduction that might violate a Canadian law or transgress a charter right.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Prof. Craig Forcese
Public Safety committee Sure, absolutely, although I fear the translator may be driven mad by the effort to turn my microprint into French.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Prof. Craig Forcese
Public Safety committee My response would be that, certainly from my perspective, Kent Roach and I did not dispute the policy objectives that Bill C-51 was trying to accomplish, with one exception, and that is the new speech crime. We thought it was unnecessary. If one were to repeal those provisions that Bill C-51 introduced, one would be left still with the policy issues that would have to be addressed.
December 5th, 2017Committee meeting
Prof. Craig Forcese