Public Safety committee  Yes, absolutely. My expertise is in law rather than the technical side, but that is what you'll hear from the tech people.

Public Safety committee  The cyberbullying question is an interesting one. It's an area in which we've been engaged here in Nova Scotia. As I'm sure you are aware, we had the Cyber-safety Act here, and then that was struck down, and now they're considering different solutions. Generally speaking, the problem we had with the cyberbullying law is that it was too broadly defined.

Public Safety committee  I'll just briefly add to that. Yes, I completely agree with the statement about the privacy aspect. There's a global trend of countries tending to offer some privacy protection to just their own people. The U.S. is a really obvious example. There are some privacy protections that it offers to its people, and it offers virtually none to foreigners.

Public Safety committee  Yes, certainly. One of Daesh's main sales pitches is this idea that Muslims are under siege in North America and in the west, and that Muslims are being attacked. The increasing breadth of these laws and their inevitable application to groups that are marginalized groups is very troubling from that perspective, I would say.

Public Safety committee  You're talking about offensive operations against different states, which I don't think is necessarily what we're talking about here. It certainly wasn't what I was talking about. I think that's a different question.

Public Safety committee  You're asking about foreign states using these techniques to attack Canadians?

Public Safety committee  I'm a bit confused, but I think you're asking how our intelligence agencies can compete with Russia and China.

Public Safety committee  This is an argument for better security. That's what I'm hearing. This is an argument for why strong encryption is important in order to put up the strongest defence possible. In terms of whether or not we should take a more intrusive stance against our people because Russia and China are going to take an aggressive stance against us—

Public Safety committee  Sure, and this is not just against citizens on an individual level. It's about structural networks. It's about data minimization at the federal level so that the government does not act as a giant warehouse of information that there's no necessity for it to keep, because when you make yourself a big target like that and a breach eventually occurs, it is much more damaging.

Public Safety committee  This brings us a little to what we were talking about with encryption before. In terms of the need, one of the things that is important to remember is that encrypted information is only useful if it's in an unencrypted form. When information is in that encrypted form, it's inaccessible to law enforcement, but it's also useless to its user.

Public Safety committee  No, I wouldn't say that intelligence should begin when there's an imminent threat.

Public Safety committee  It's speech offences, yes.

Public Safety committee  I'm sorry; did you say “around intelligence gathering”?

Public Safety committee  I think I said that in relation to the inciting terrorist propaganda or inciting terrorism provisions, not in terms of all intelligence gathering.

Public Safety committee  You do get a challenge because of the general rule that laws should be written in as technologically neutral a fashion as possible to prevent them from having to be revised or revisited every year or two. The way that technology changes does lead to challenges. In terms of a good formula, criminal procedure is not my specialization, but I will endorse the lawful access provisions that David Fraser has put forward as a way of providing for proper procedure for obtaining warrants to access subscriber information.