Alireza

Increasingly concerned about yet another Liberal bill called C-22. This proposed legislation has the potential to massively expand the surveillance state in Canada and significantly lower the threshold for the government to access your personal information (including location data). It would also require telecom and tech companies to create tools (i.e. backdoors) to access certain data from your devices and mandate the storage of that data for up to a year. This would apply to every citizen, not just those under investigation, and could be expanded through secret ministerial orders that Canadians would never even know existed. Equally concerning is that the legislation would lower the legal threshold for the government to demand and seize this information from companies, increasing the likelihood of errors and abuse. Even setting aside the potential for abuse by our own government, the massive storage of this data creates new vulnerabilities that foreign actors could more easily exploit. What’s more, aside from the obvious privacy concerns, many large tech companies and messaging apps are already warning that if this bill passes, they may have to exit the Canadian market altogether - including some companies currently based in Canada. Now, law enforcement does have real and valid concerns about how long it takes to obtain crucial information (known as production orders) on genuine criminals. But that problem can be solved without turning the entire country into a massive surveillance state and without turning every electronic device into a tool that can spy on Canadians. A special thanks to my colleagues @strauss_matt and @jacobmantle for relentlessly digging into this issue, and for being determined to hold the government to account.