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You are here: Home / Science and Tech / Warrantless surveillance comes to your phone

Warrantless surveillance comes to your phone

05/09/2014 by the editor 1 Comment

Old photo of bugged phoneBy Alison@Creekside

Nine out of 12 big telecoms in Canada deigned to reply to Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart with info about their disclosure of customer data to law enforcement in 2011.

  • Law enforcement agencies made 1,193,630 requests for subscriber data in 2011
  • Or, one request every 27 seconds
  • Three telecom providers alone disclosed information from 785,000 customer accounts
  • If each request had been for a different subscriber, that would work out to one in every 28 Canadians including babies
  • In 2010, 94% of RCMP requests for name and address were made without a warrant
  • Customers are not informed their private info has been disclosed
  • At least one telecom appears to have instituted a special law enforcement direct access database

And this info, these figures, are three years old.

Meanwhile the Cons look to expand that cozy relationship with two new bills:

  • Bill C-13, the cyberbullying bill, will also give immunity from civil or criminal liability to telecoms coughing up info without a warrant
  • Bill S- 4 extends the ability to disclose subscriber info without a warrant to private sector organizations as well

As telecom customers, we’re paying them twice to peddle our info — once when we pay the telecoms to collect the info about us and deliver it to law enforcement and again when law enforcement agencies use our taxes to pay the telecoms for the info.

The irony here is how important privacy and anonymity are to the telecoms – their own at least.

Their response to Stoddart included the strategy of having their answers collated by a law firm and delivered to her as a bulk package that doesn’t identify which telecom provided each piece of info. Why? To preserve their own privacy and anonymity.

Remember when we were aghast to learn that there was a “Canadian Special Source” providing CSEC with wifi data on random Canadians as part of a 2012 airport surveillance exercise? Ah the good old days of three whole months ago.

Want to know what your telco has divulged about you? They are compelled by law to respond to you with something if you ask as an individual subscriber to their services.

Citizen Law provides a template letter and the telco contact details to send it to. Takes just a few seconds. When I get my response, I’ll post it.

h/t  Lux ex Umbra and Michael Geist

Filed Under: Science and Tech Tagged With: business, Canada, Conservatives, CSEC, cyber bullying, government surveillance, Jennifer Stoddart, privacy, privacy commissioner, RCMP, telcos

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Comments

  1. Michael Heroux says

    05/12/2014 at 9:39 pm

    CANADIAN INTELLIGENCE CAN DO WHATEVER THEY WANT –

    PRIVACY COMMISSIONER OF CANADA – JUSTICE DEPARTMENT OF CANADA

    Michael Heroux said michaelheroux1967@gmail.com

    I don’t know why people are not talking more about why the watchdog of CSIS stepped down. Everyone is saying he stepped down because of a conflict of interest over the pipeline even though he was cleared of any ethics violations. My wife and I have filed a privacy complaint with the Privacy Commissioners Office Of Canada to investigate the RCMP CSIS and CSEC. They finally responded back to us and told us unless we have proof that we are being or have been investigated they can’t help us with an investigation. They told us to reapply with proof. We do have names and dates of the agents we had met and the agents my wife has slept with and the times and places so I guess we will reapply with more specific details and see what we can do. I find it strange the day I contacted their office for the first time in my life with my application November 29 2013 P.S.T. which was the next day November 30 2013 E.S.T. The Privacy Commissioner Of Canada stepped down. We first contacted the Privacy Commissioner Of Canada on November 26 2013 about our case against the RCMP CSIS and CSEC, then we contacted her again on November 28 2013 about our case and that day she changed her mind against BILL C-13. Also I find it strange the same day I revealed online my full complaint against the RCMP CSIS and CSEC the CSIS watchdog stepped down. Something that we also think is strange is when we contacted the Justice Department Of Canada looking for information they announced 2 days later they are appealing the decision from Judge Mosley and then they wanted to know why we wanted the information and where and what time we were going to use the information before they give it to us. Something else we find funny is we don’t have to enable our browser history anymore. We can clear our cache and our browser history and cookies and all and it is being cached somewhere else downstream from our ISP or maybe upstream somewhere. We think it is probably being cached by the spy in the adjacent suite. Thanks for reading.

    My wife and I are the two people Justice Richard Mosley was refering to when he ruled CSIS was end running the law. We have been following this decision very closely, we are being spied on right here in Canada. My wife and I and our 3 children have been abused by the RCMP CSIS CSEC and other police forces in Ontario and British Columbia for over 5 years now. I have a mental disability and the police started harassing my family and I when I started using Craigslist 5 years ago, what can I say, we’re swingers. My wife slept with a few of them while I watched. We are not terrorist. It sounds strange but I have been poisoned and my wife has been poisoned for speaking out publicly about the abuse. We have also been assaulted numerous times in the last 5 years. They are listening to us in our bedroom and living room because they let us know by telling us what we are talking about in the privacy of our home. We contacted the BC Human Rights and Civil Rights office last year because the police were trying to run me and my family over on the streets, but they never got back to us. We got a lawyer a couple years ago and the lawyer was able to get them to lay off for a bit. They sent a gunman to murder us last year, we managed to evade him. It also sounds strange but we have a spy monitoring us right now in the adjacent suite to us and they have been there for 13 months now. Since Judge Mosleys decision they quit harassing us but they are still messing around with our internet and phone communications. Thank God for Judge Mosley, I think he saved our lives. We think the reason they are still watching over us is because of what Judge Mosley refered to as “invasive survailence techniques” used against the people who had those warrents issued on them. They don’t want us to tell anyone about the techniques used against us for the last 5 years. Pretty sophisticated alien technology if I do say so myself. Pretty cool actually but we don’t plan on telling anyone. We are patriotic Canadians and we hate terrorist like everyone else but we don’t want to see people abused. Caught up in the fish net so to speak. They have tried to set us up numerous times for arrest over the last 5 years to get their hands on us and make us look like the bad guy’s but we have managed to evade those attempts also.

    My wife and I are concerned because Canada Post is being scaled back and it has got us worried. We use open source software for our operating system. In the last 5 years our privacy has been majorly violated. We are most concerned about our communications being sanitized. We no longer have control over who we can make contact with through electronic means. We can only contact people in person for representation so most people not within our city are off limits to us. We realize we are being followed and are being listened to in the privacy of our own home and our home has been entered numerous times when we are not home by intelligence but our means of communications are being sanitized. 5 years ago we noticed rootkits being installed on our operating systems and I was able to set up honey pots and found they were being installed by the military. Since, we switched to virtual machines from static medium verified with sha512sums (DEBIAN KNOPPIX) to get a malware free system each boot. The only website we use is Craigslist and we have met RCMP agents through Craigslist who wanted us to work for them to help them entrap people from terrorist to gangsters. We believe they were just looking for patsies though. I used to work for the RCMP over 20 years ago to infiltrate criminals and make arrests but I quit working for them because they wanted me to set people up that weren’t even breaking the law. For the last 5 years we have used Gmail and we have had numerous internet suppliers and numerous Gmail accounts and we have noticed people we have been emailing and people emailing us have not been getting the emails even though Gmail says they have been sent. We use an SSL connection so our communications are encrypted. The same thing applies to our text messages, we have used Rogers for internet, text and phone for the last 5 years. We have noticed our posting on certains forums are not showing up or they are being deleted as we are writing them right before our eyes or our browsers are being closed as we are writing stuff. Our computers are being shut down and our cell phones are being shut down as we are trying to correspond with people. We have realized that people have been contacting us through our email and our cell phones claiming to be people we know like family members for instance but we know they are imposters. We have tried contacting Human and Civil Rights advocates through electronic means but have had no replies. We have even tried to contact legal representation through electronic means but have never heard anything back over the years. It sounds strange but a gunman was sent to kill us early last year but we managed to evade him. Shortly after that someone tried hiring a hitman through the SILK ROAD website to kill us. At first when the website was taken down by the FBI the owner said the hit was for a father of 3 from Vancouver but later he admitted it was for the whole family of 5, a husband, wife and 3 children. We have been poisoned numerous times in the last 5 years and I have numerous painful swollen lumps throughout my body. Strangers have come up to us on the streets and have told us I have cancer. I went to the emergency room last year because my brain was swelling in my head and my eyes were bulging and I was having severe headaches and the doctor didn’t want to treat me and sent me home. Thanks for reading.

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