Public Safety committee  I would like to thank the chair, the clerk, and the honourable committee members for the privilege of this opportunity to speak to them today. I'm here on behalf of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, a non-profit, non-governmental organization that works to promote and pr

Public Safety committee  In terms of broad-scale surveillance, yes, China, North Korea, and these other countries might be hacking, but they're not doing it on anywhere near the same scale as what's going on from governments from within their own countries. Whereas within Canada, through any number of me

Public Safety committee  Yes. That is extremely dangerous. To scrap that broad-scale digital surveillance, which has never been proven to stop an imminent attack anywhere in the world, and instead target individual people, solves the problem of having these massive databases that are hackable. If you hav

Public Safety committee  Absolutely. To go into what could be found, there was a study done in the United States where basically a bunch of university professors got people to agree to let them access their metadata, and the professors would see what they could glean from that. They were able to determin

Public Safety committee  Absolutely. It's both the vague definitions and the lack of oversight and review that lead to massive potential for abuse. The idea that we would give CSIS enforcement powers when they were stripped from the RCMP in the 1970s because of the dirty tricks that they were doing....

Public Safety committee  Yes, absolutely. Data security is extremely important for journalists abroad. One of the main things we do is fight to get journalists out of jail overseas. We only communicate via encryption. We do everything we can to minimize that. But if the government is intercepting our co

Public Safety committee  To use the G20 as an example, that was before the ATA came to power, and you saw how incredibly repressive of protest the government was at that time, arresting protesters who had peacefully gathered in Queen's Park even though they were nowhere near the area where there was conf

Public Safety committee  Absolutely, I was recently on a panel with someone from the National Council of Canadian Muslims, and obviously they have a deep interest in the no-fly list, because of the names of the people who show up on it. One of the main concerns with it is that people aren't notified wh

Public Safety committee  When it comes to encryption, the battle for that is lost. There is absolutely no way that the Canadian government can prevent outside organizations from communicating through encrypted technologies. We can go to every single Canadian company that deals in encryption and demand a

Public Safety committee  I am not a legal scholar. I am referring to the works of other legal scholars. People like Kent Roach and Craig Forcese have analyzed this, and we've based a lot of research on their research as well. What it comes down to is that the way this is worded all depends on how you r

Public Safety committee  I believe so. I'll let Alice take this one.

Public Safety committee  To build off that very quickly, I can give you a concrete example of this. The winner of our Tara Singh Hayer Memorial Award this year is a man by the name of Ali Mustafa. He was a Canadian citizen who was killed in Syria. He was one of the only photojournalists in Aleppo at the

Public Safety committee  Thank you. I apologize for being late. I think we've all had experiences with Porter Airlines before. Thank you for allowing me to testify. I am speaking today as executive director of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, CJFE, a non-profit, non-governmental organization

Public Safety committee  Yes. We certainly feel that if the police suspect that a journalist has actually committed a crime this type of immunity would not apply in that case. But, again, to echo what the Media Coalition is saying, the fact that there may be suspicion that a crime has been committed, tha

Public Safety committee  We haven't supplied an entire amendment. We deferred to the Media Coalition in that regard.