National Defence committee  Thank you. I'll mention another bill here. Currently the government is looking at the artificial intelligence and data act. I agree with Mr. de Boer that we need to be looking at innovative solutions, including AI, but we also need to make sure we have regulations in place. Th

National Defence committee  Yes. I would just share that I think we need a centralized office to engage with cybersecurity. One of the questions we have around Bill C-26 is that it's not clear whether this would fall under existing national security review bodies. Having an agency tasked with not only ensu

National Defence committee  Thank you very much for the question. It isn't just a concern among civil liberties and civil society groups but across many sectors in Canada that there needs to be a trust developed. There needs to be openness and transparency to the degree that we understand what Canadian age

National Defence committee  One of the reasons I have the access to information that I have today is the BC Civil Liberties Association lawsuit that resulted in disclosure. They then had to fight to publicly share the information they obtained, and only recently were they able to publish it publicly. I gu

National Defence committee  Yes, definitely. One of the things we've seen in terms of both the intelligence commissioner and NSIRA is that they're not receiving the information they require in order to do their review work and, in the case of the intelligence commissioner, their oversight work. We think th

National Defence committee  Thank you very much for that question. First, it's clear, as you said, that there is need for collaboration among national security agencies. Some of that does require the sharing of information. However, as you pointed out, what we have seen is that there are deep concerns abo

National Defence committee  Thank you very much for your question. There are multiple ways in which we collect that kind of information. For some of it, before the creation of the intelligence commissioner, there was the CSE commissioner, who initiated review, and it's the independent review and oversig

National Defence committee  I'll just quickly say no. Several of the problems I raised were actually enshrined in Bill C-59, the creation of the CSE act. One of the things we think needs to be done is to bolster the powers of both NSIRA and the intelligence commissioner to be able to review these kinds of a

National Defence committee  I think a lot is riding on that word “target” and what you were speaking about in terms of what the CSE presented to the committee. It's true that the CSE, through its mandate and through the CSE Act, cannot target Canadians, but in collecting signals intelligence and in carryi

National Defence committee  Just very briefly, it's clear that there's a role for the federal government in supporting private companies in increasing their cybersecurity and protecting national security. We think that one thing that's key to this is that there's trust and transparency around that process s

National Defence committee  Thank you very much, Chair, for the opportunity to speak to the committee today. The International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group is a Canadian coalition that serves as a watchdog around national security, anti-terrorism and civil liberties in Canada. We have long-standing exp

Information & Ethics committee  While it's true that there are rules in place to minimize mass surveillance from those agencies, as was mentioned, in recent draft guidance to law enforcement agencies, the Privacy Commissioner raised the concern that because the laws around this are currently a patchwork, there

Information & Ethics committee  First of all, we think we need a broader consultation to decide what are no-go zones. As we've said, we believe a clear part of that no-go zone would be on the use of facial recognition for mass surveillance. Beyond that, there needs to be oversight in terms of ensuring that as l

Information & Ethics committee  We had a follow-up conversation with the director of policy in the minister's office, but it was more of a listening session rather than clearly stating what the minister's actions would be. The only new information we obtained was clarification that CBSA was not using real-time

Information & Ethics committee  That's a good question. We know that the RCMP committed to making improvements to its policies, even though they did reject the overall finding that they're responsible for the lawfulness of third party technology. We haven't seen anything released publicly about that yet, and i