Securing High Value Data

"This is deadly for privacy, because invariably we're talking about defending public safety and security."
"Without privacy you cannot have freedom. What freedom means is you're free. Your stuff's not captured for potential use down the road, and linking back to you, and finding out what you were doing when and who you are connected to."
Ann Cavoukian, Ontario information and privacy commissioner

Fotolia    Canada's secret spy agency may have inadvertently spied on Canadians. Or maybe not. The records aren't complete enough to tell the agency's watchdog says.

 

Privacy, isn't that a quaint notion? At a time when people of all ages, occupations and interests are linked in to perfect strangers, offering information from the personal to the intimately private in public fora such as Twitter, and on social networking sites like Facebook and Linked In and any number of other such sites, we're still talking about privacy? People divulge extremely personal information and think little about the consequences of so doing.

If a privacy commissioner dedicated to maintaining privacy on behalf of the faceless public is so invested in her job and what it entails, perhaps she should turn her attention not to the federal security/intelligence agencies that have been formed and tasked to protect the public sphere, but to all those feckless individuals who simply cannot resist the appeal of casting a wide net to promote their unique individuality.

To protect the public's 'right to privacy', Ms. Cavoukian recommends an independent watchdog who would report directly to Parliament whose job would be to prevent privacy breaches embarked upon by the Communications Security Establishment Canada, the country's foreign spy agency. Which undertakes intercepts of phone and email transactions world wide. Much like the much-maligned American National Security Agency. Another protective intermediary between the public and those delegated to protect the public.

Most people, given the choice, and away from the hysteria of civil libertarians and those ascribing hostile and mendacious attributes inherent in those whose job it is to protect us, would willingly submit to those 'breaches' of privacy as a minor invasion with no threat to anyone, if to do otherwise would result in a terror cell gaining ground within the country, planning a deviously violent assault on government, its institutions and its citizens.

The argument advanced by Ms. Cavoukian that data could be assessed for security significance in the encryption stage (homomorphic encryption) while respecting individuals' right to privacy, built into the analytical tools, sounds harmless enough. As long as it doesn't have the unwanted effect of complicating and even restraining the intelligence agency from its primary purpose.

The solution to what upsets Ms. Cavoukian on behalf of the public however, does sound complicated and time-consuming.

Sometimes, in secret intelligence work time is of the essence, so how would that impact on the process? At the present time CSEC is overseen by an independent commissioner tasked to prevent the agency from spying on Canadians absent specific legal approval. There are exceptions when the minister of defence gives data-collection permission, as has been done over the last decades roughly on 80 occasions.

Employees of the Communications Security Establishment Canada agency will be moving into this state-of-the-art facility in Ottawa in 2014. It will contain the largest repository of Top Secret information in Canada. Photo: Postmedia News / Files
 
The commissioner, points out Ms. Cavoukian "is not an independent oversight agency. He reports to the minister of national defence, who is part of the government. He doesn't report to Parliament, which consists of all political parties. He reports directly to the head of the agency that he might be criticizing." Um, that didn't stop the Conservative-government-appointed Parliamentary Budget Officer, Kevin Page, from holding heels to the fire of his indignation.

As for "unauthorized surveillance", responds government, it remains "incidental" and rare. "The complexity of the global information infrastructure is such that it is not possible for CSEC to know ahead of time if a foreign target will communicate with a Canadian or person in Canada, or convey information about a Canadian."

On this topic, the government and its security agencies have an obligation that transcends individual privacy. And it behooves us to trust and give it the benefit of the doubt.