(Updated. See below.)

The Canadian government has begun another consultation process on lawful access. This one focuses specifically on access to basic telco customer information — names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and IP addresses.

What’s interesting is that they’re doing it quietly, and trying to keep civil society groups out of the loop. From the same CBC article:

Michael Geist, chair of internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, said the process is not being conducted publicly as two previous consultations have been, in 2002 and in 2005.

The consultation has not been published in the Canada Gazette, where such documents are normally publicized, or on the agencies’ websites.

Interested parties have been given until Sept. 27 to submit their comments, which is a short consultation time, Geist said. Several organizations and individuals contacted by CBCNews.ca only received their documents this week.

On his blog, Geist adds that he “was asked not to post [the consultation documents] online.”

Back to the CBC article:

More pointedly, a number of parties that took part in the previous consultations, including privacy and civil liberty advocates — and even some telecommunication service providers — have not been made aware of the discussion, he said.

“It’s really disturbing particularly in light of the fact that they’ve had two prior consultations on lawful access in the past, so it’s not as if they don’t know the parties that are engaged on this issue,” Geist said.

Officials with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association were not aware of the consultation.

To those of us who have been following the lawful access issue, this is not surprising. The first round of lawful access consultations in 2002 faced heavy objections from privacy and civil liberties advocates (not to mention telcos who felt lawful access was an excessive burden on their operations). A second round of consultations took place in 2005, but as I have mentioned before, “civil society groups got one meeting in which the proposals were outlined for them, and then a laughably short two-week window in which to submit their comments.”

Also, keep in mind that the basic customer information being discussed in the current consultation is just the first phase of lawful access. The original consultation also looked at far more frightening possibilities like data retention and access to information related to the actual content of your activities online (e.g., what sites you visit and what’s in the emails you send). In 2005, when the Liberal government introduced its so-called Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act, it only included less serious first-phase proposals like the ones under discussion in the current consultation. (They tried the same thing with a private member’s bill last March.)

So, to recap:

• Canada’s cops and spies want more power to spy on you online.
• The Conservative government is helping them by sidelining civil society’s objections, while working closely with the telco industry (and the cops and spies).
• The Liberals did the same thing when they were in power.
• If our cops and spies get access to basic subscriber information — and they probably will, since both the Liberals and the Conservatives support the idea — they will be coming back to ask for expanded and more intrusive powers.

UPDATE, September 13: CTV has posted the consultation document (PDF) on their website.

UPDATE, September 19: That peculiar noise you heard late last week was the sound of the Conservative government backpedaling furiously:

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said the government would not introduce legislation forcing internet service providers to give customer information without a warrant.

“We have not and we will not be proposing legislation to grant police the power to get information from internet companies without a warrant. That’s never been a proposal,” Day told the Ottawa Citizen late Thursday.

“It may make some investigations more difficult, but our expectation is rights to our privacy are such that we do not plan, nor will we have in place, something that would allow the police to get that information.”

I’m glad to hear it. Let’s make sure they stick to this promise.

As for that leaked consultation document:

Day told the Citizen that the original document sent to a select group of stakeholders “never would have gone out if I had seen it” and that it “somehow went out without my approval.”

In other words, either our Public Safety Minister is incompetent, or significant erosions of due process don’t merit his attention.

The new deadline for public comment is October 12.

Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, is concerned that Google’s new Street View feature could break Canada’s privacy laws.

Street View is a feature in Google Maps that displays street-level photographs for various cities in the US. It allows you to see what those cities look like “on the ground.” Unfortunately, the photographs in Street View include candid images of people who happened to be in the street while Google’s photographers were taking pictures.

Street View isn’t currently available for Canadian cities, but that could change. In her letter to Google, Stoddart wrote, “I am concerned that, if the Street View application were deployed in Canada, it might not comply with our federal privacy legislation. In particular, it does not appear to meet the basic requirements of knowledge, consent, and limited collection and use as set out in the legislation.”

Stoddart’s letter also points out that Immersive Media, the company that supplied Google with the photos it uses for Street View, has already collected similar photos for six major Canadian cities, including Vancouver.

If you read this blog via RSS, you might not have noticed that I’ve added a new feature. The right-hand column now includes a list of news headlines on information policy-related topics — in other words, important or useful articles from other websites on Internet and telecommunications policy, privacy and personal information, and so on. It’s updated much more frequently than the rest of this blog, and it has its own RSS feed. Let me know if you find it useful.

The CRTC has just deregulated home telephone service in Fort McMurray and several cities in the Maritimes. CTV News says the decision “is the first of what is expected to be a flurry of decisions that will result in home telephone services being largely deregulated in many regions of the country.”

CTV also claims that the decision “[opens] the door for more competition and lower home telephone bills.” Reading that made me laugh. How, exactly, does deregulation lead to increased competition in the current environment? As we’ve seen with the upcoming spectrum auction in the US, there are structural barriers to newcomers in the telecommunications market; in the absence of regulatory policies to counteract those barriers, the “free market” is slanted in the favor of incumbent telcos.

As for lower phone bills, well, Canada’s deregulated wireless market has given us the highest cell phone bills in the developed world. So I’m not holding my breath on that one.

The CRTC’s decision comes on the heels of the creation of a new non-governmental office, the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services. As Michael Geist notes, the new commission lacks teeth: membership is voluntary and it can’t assess penalties of more than $1,000, which is pocket change for the big Canadian telcos.

In other words, the interests of the big incumbent telcos continue to trump the interests of ordinary Canadians.

Declan at Crawl Across the Ocean sums it up:

As for the no-fly list, I guess it’s like they always say, innocent until proven guilty, or until placed on a secret government list for unknown reasons with little hope of appeal.

In case you missed the news, Canada’s no-fly list went into effect on Monday. There are up to 2,000 people on the list — 2,000 people who are an “immediate threat to aviation security” but haven’t, you know, actually done anything we can arrest them for.

If Cory Doctorow hadn’t mentioned it in passing in a Forbes article, I would have missed this story from last April:

“Talking” CCTV cameras that tell off people dropping litter or committing anti-social behaviour are to be extended to 20 areas across England.

They are already used in Middlesbrough where people seen misbehaving can be told to stop via a loudspeaker, controlled by control centre staff.

Talking surveillance cameras.

I’ll say it again:

Talking surveillance cameras.

Home Secretary John Reid told BBC News there would be some people, “in the minority who will be more concerned about what they claim are civil liberties intrusions”.

“But the vast majority of people find that their life is more upset by people who make their life a misery in the inner cities because they can’t go out and feel safe and secure in a healthy, clean environment because of a minority of people,” he added.

I live in downtown Vancouver. You know what makes me feel safe? There are always people around. If someone tries to mug me, 20 Korean ESL students will be standing there watching it happen. You know what won’t make me feel safe? CCTV cameras telling me to put my garbage in the garbage can.

I’m not exaggerating about the garbage, by the way:

Downing Street’s “respect tsar”, Louise Casey, said the cameras “nipped problems in the bud” and reduced bureaucracy.

“It gets across the message, ‘please don’t litter our streets because someone else will have to pay to pick up that litter again’,” she told BBC News.

Talking surveillance cameras. To deal with litter.

Also, why does the national government of the United Kingdom have a “respect tsar”?

Competitions would also be held at schools in many of the areas for children to become the voice of the cameras, Mr Reid said.

Talking surveillance cameras … with the voices of schoolchildren.

I guess there’s a kind of poetic justice to it, since the British government insists on treating its citizens like children.

I was all set to write a scathing critique of Mark Helprin’s idiotic plea for perpetual copyright in the New York Times. But I see Lawrence Lessig has set up a wiki page devoted to dismantling Helprin’s argument, so I guess I don’t have to.

Warner Brothers has announced that it’s not going to show advance screenings of its big summer movies in Canada, because 20-25% of pirated copies of movies are made by recording the movies with camcorders in Canadian theatres.

Michael Geist has been all over this story for a while now, so I won’t go into detail here — except to note my annoyance at the lobbyists’ claim that camcording a movie in a movie theatre is not against the law in Canada. That’s blatantly untrue. We don’t have legislation that specifically addresses camcording, but it definitely counts as infringement under our copyright laws.

I wish Hollywood would spend less money on lobbyists who lie to the press, and more on improving the quality of their films. Spider-Man 3 sucked.

(Incidentally, the CTV news item linked above is a remarkably shoddy piece of journalism. Halfway through the article, the author says, “Filming inside a theatre is not a criminal offence in Canada, and theatre owners are lobbying Ottawa to bring in tougher laws to combat the practice.” Yet the end of the very same article has this sentence: “The maximum fine under the federal Copyright Act is $1 million and five years in jail for camcording a movie for commercial distribution.” And large chunks of the article simply repeat stuff from this article from last January, sometimes word for word.)

Joy Smith, a Conservative MP, has introduced a private member’s bill called the Clean Internet Act (Bill C-427). It’s a private member’s bill and therefore unlikely to pass, but still, it’s a scary piece of work. Here are the highlights:

• All ISPs would have to be licensed. Since the bill defines an ISP as “a person who provides a service that facilitates access to the Internet, whether or not the service is provided free or for a charge,” that would apparently include libraries that offer free public Internet access, not to mention Internet cafes, your workplace, and possibly you yourself if you let other people use your Internet connection. More generally, as Russell McOrmond notes, “ISPs should not need to be licensed any more than owners of photocopiers or computers should be licensed” — they’re access providers, not content providers.
• ISPs would be required to block access to hate speech, material that incites violence against women, or child porn. It would also be an offense, not only to post such material, but to possess any of this material if you got it off the Internet — even though we already have laws governing hate speech and child porn.
• ISPs would be required to deny service to anyone who “has used the Internet within the previous seven years for a purpose that would be an offence under this Act.”
• The executives of any ISP that violates this law would be subject to a fine or jail time. In addition, as Ars Technica points out, the bill would allow the government to revoke an ISP’s license — thus presumably cutting off Internet access for all of that ISP’s customers — if one of the ISP’s executive officers is convicted of committing violence against women, inciting hatred, or possessing child pornography. No, seriously — it’s section 4(3) of the bill.

An expert quoted in CBC’s article on the bill put it best: “The sentiment’s right, but the practicality is out to lunch.”

Incidentally, when she introduced this bill in Parliament, Joy Smith said, “We must all keep in mind that we need to stop the human trafficking that is happening in our country now and this bill makes a strong statement about that part of the Internet.” Needless to say, the bill doesn’t have anything to do with anything you or I would understand as human trafficking.

Did you know that the Canada has the highest cell phone fees in the developed world? As someone who pays $60/month for a pretty basic service package (a modest number of minutes, no long distance or Internet plan), I must say I’m not surprised. The Canadian wireless industry is simply not favorable to consumers. We pay $80-$100 a year in unnecessary system access fees; we’re locked into long-term contracts (it would cost me $200 if I wanted to leave Rogers before my contract expires); and our phones only work with the service provider we bought them from. Sure, we finally got phone number portability last week — but we should have had that years ago.

If the NDP can push to get rid of ATM fees, surely something can be done about the sorry state of the cell phone market in this country.

(Hat tip to Michael Geist, as usual.)