"But a young Black man who's ever been stopped simply for the crime of driving Black would be deeply and intimately aware that it doesn't matter if you're blameless. "It comes from a place of incredible privilege to say, 'I have nothing to hide, so I have nothing to fear.' So a middle aged white woman like me might be able to say that and think she means it," she said. That kind of data collection and surveillance can be particularly alarming for people of colour, said McPhail. "To me, that sounds like they're looking to leverage artificial intelligence applications and they want to be able to potentially combine large data sets to train and draw inferences from combining different sets of data," she said. That worries Brenda McPhail, privacy director at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. WATCH | Head of CSIS says he's 'most concerned' by the actions of Russia and ChinaĢ:16 Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) David Vigneault says the organization is most concerned by the actions of the governments of China and Russia. Rather, it is about ensuring CSIS analysts have the tools and authorities to help them make sense of exponentially growing data, in strict accordance with Canadians' expectations of privacy." "The changes contemplated are not about addressing the issue of encryption. Information was stored in silos," said Townsend. "When the CSIS Act was drafted in 1984, telephone books and alligator clips on phone lines were among the tools used to identify threat actors and collect information. Vigneault also said the act needs to be updated so that the service can "use modern tools and assess data and information" - in part to keep up with the flood of information. "It's fair to say that intelligence agencies in Canada have had a track record of asking for more of the former without due regard for the latter." CSIS's request for 'modern tools' questioned "The greater a state actor's ability to infringe our privacy rights and our other constitutional rights, the more robust the mechanisms for prior judicial authorization, oversight and review must be," she wrote in an email to CBC News. But they also really like legal certainty."īut lawyer Lex Gill, an affiliate with the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, said lawmakers should be reluctant to entertain CSIS's requests for greater authority in light of the court's concerns. "I think there's this real misconception that intelligence services want to operate in the dark and in the shadows and things like this, and to a certain extent they do. "What the director is effectively saying is, 'Look, we've stressed our mandate as far as it goes, but it's no longer adequate to address some of these threats,'" she said. Stephanie Carvin, a professor of international affairs at Carleton University and a former national security analyst, called Vigneault's speech a plea for attention from Parliament. Trudeau government pressed to shield secret operational information in court.
CSIS use of geolocation data could be unlawful, says watchdog.
The government of Canada has filed an appeal of that recent Federal Court decision posing specific questions pertaining to the interpretation of CSIS's authority to collect foreign intelligence. "The court's interpretation of the 'within Canada' limitation in the context of new technology significantly impacts the ability CSIS to provide advice to the minister of foreign affairs or national defence," CSIS spokesperson John Townsend told CBC News this week. The court has noted in the past that Parliament imposed the "within Canada" requirement because collecting intelligence in other countries could harm Canada's international relations - an interpretation CSIS rejects. Just this month, a judge denied the service's request to collect foreign information, ruling that a proposed technique would stray beyond the spy service's legal mandate. In recent years, the Federal Court has ruled against CSIS over its approach to foreign intelligence. "There's a gap for people in Canada who store their data outside of Canada," said West. "And that's a gap that, if I was a foreign state entity, I'd be looking to take advantage of." Federal Court has pushed back at CSIS Meanwhile, the Communications Security Establishment - Canada's foreign signals agency - is prohibited from collecting intelligence on people within Canada. In a rare public speech earlier this month, CSIS Director David Vigneault took aim at the spy agency's legislation.