Public Safety committee  Thank you for the question. I hope it's appreciated that the BC Civil Liberties Association takes security very seriously. The importance of getting this correct, getting these rights and freedoms of Canadians to fit together with the ability of the government to provide national

Public Safety committee  Could I get back to the committee on that? It's because I feel I have given insufficient attention to that particular aspect of the bill, being focused on other ones. We would be happy to share our views with you.

Public Safety committee  You see the tension around this when you give the CSE broad, active cyber-powers that exploit vulnerabilities in the system that of course Canadians need to protect themselves against. Are you going to disclose those or are you going to exploit them? It's one of the tensions inhe

Public Safety committee  Thank you. It's of critical concern to civil libertarians that the public understand that collection, incidental or otherwise, of personal information into national security agencies is not innocuous. In part because we do have these alliances, information sharing does flow in

Public Safety committee  Certainly we have found, for example, the annual reports from SIRC and the CSE commissioner to be immensely valuable. If we were going to make a recommendation, over-reporting as opposed to under-reporting would absolutely be the direction we would want to go for accountability a

Public Safety committee  That's the essence of our proposal here: to find a way to harness the accountability mechanism that is being proposed for all collection of Canadians' information, whether or not it hinges on this finding of a reasonable expectation of privacy. How are you ever going to get to th

Public Safety committee  Certainly Canadians are becoming increasingly alive to the sense that what constitutes incidental collection—again because of the nature of the communication networks—could very well implicate them. This is a growing awareness, I would say, in Canada, and it becomes problematic w

Public Safety committee  Is that question related specifically to CSE...?

Public Safety committee  That's right. There are a number of aspects of data collection that are touched on. I think, in the main, depending on the kinds of collection, that introducing elements of necessity would clearly be of privacy benefit to Canadians. In terms of whether or not that's appropriate a

Public Safety committee  I'm happy to go first. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the committee for this invitation. My prepared remarks are about the CSE and CSIS bulk data collection. In his testimony to this committee, Professor Craig Forcese made a very important point about the thresholds fo

Information & Ethics committee  I would have to consider that and be able to get back to the committee. I don't have it off the top of my head—

Information & Ethics committee  You bet. The first thing that's wrong with the interim guidelines is that we don't know whether they're being followed. They don't have the force of law. They are guidance. We would hope that they're being used, but we don't actually know, and we have no means of enforcing them i

Information & Ethics committee  In terms of the wording, they talk about “indicia”. We would like to see that translated into what we consider to be standardized legal language, so that would be “reason to suspect”, probably, on that one.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. What that translates into in terms of legal standard should be clarified.

Information & Ethics committee  I have nothing substantial to add to that.