Public Safety committee  Thank you. I'm very glad to be able to present today on behalf of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group and our 45 member organizations. I'd like to thank OpenMedia for inviting us to join them today. I'd like to touch on three main points: first, review and oversig

Public Safety committee  We would largely agree with what Ms. Tribe just said. I think, as others have pointed out, there are also questions around the thresholds for those authorizations that we would want to keep in mind. In general, we have the same concerns that there's no distinguishing what informa

Public Safety committee  We believe both would be helpful. We believe, as we submitted in our brief, that other steps need to be taken to ensure transparency and accountability. The fact that the proposed intelligence commissioner currently isn't required to submit an annual report is a large oversight.

Public Safety committee  We also believe that would improve SCISA. In our brief, we give an outline for why we were opposed to SCISA and still have grave concerns about SCISA. We believe there needs to be more done, as the Privacy Commissioner brought up in his testimony, regarding threshold for disclosu

Public Safety committee  We would share those concerns. I would also like to highlight that publicly available information is with regard to both CSE and CSIS, as well as the collection of new datasets. Any concern regarding the CSE's collection of publicly available information, we believe, is reflected

Public Safety committee  Our concern would be that the inclusion of incidental information will in fact lead to what others have described as “mass surveillance” and collection of too much information. Concerns have also been raised about metadata not being properly defined and included. By combining tha

Public Safety committee  Do I personally ask people?

Public Safety committee  It's true, we don't know if in our communications, they could be targeted or surveilled. That's why we believe we need the strongest possible authorizations and restrictions on how the surveillance tools are used, both in Canada and.... Part of what we do at the ICLMG is argue t

Public Safety committee  Sorry, just to clarify that question, do you mean a specific kind of dataset for CSIS, or just the idea of datasets in general?

Public Safety committee  Right. Our concern is that without allowing for the definition of what datasets are on a yearly basis.... It is concerning. We believe there should be more clarity on what those datasets could and should be. As well, we're worried, just as others have pointed out, that throughou

Public Safety committee  We believe that it should be a full-time position and that, as others have suggested, perhaps a pool could be expanded from being a retired judge to looking at the current judicial pool. Definitely, because of the amount of work that's expected from the intelligence commissioner,

Public Safety committee  It's difficult to say precisely legally what it should say, but what I would say is that—

Public Safety committee  I realize that, yes. We believe that it should be based on the principles of information, on what's defined under the Privacy Act as information that's private for Canadians; that if it is to be shared for national security purposes that it meet the threshold of necessity; and th

Public Safety committee  There is record-keeping, and we believe it should be continued because it's obviously important to have records, but it should be at a necessity level. We're baffled that the expanded definition of a threat to national security is continued with SCIDA. We believe that it should

Public Safety committee  That's one of the concerns. We're also concerned regarding the inclusion of “critical infrastructure” as a threat to Canada's national security. We're also concerned—and the CCLA has raised this—about the changed wording around trying to carve out political expression and activis