A thread on reddit pointed to Canada's consultation on what sort of legislative framework they should create to facilitate investigations in the digital world.
Many of the questions are leading and borderline deceptive in their phrasing, but if we're being charitable, this is a good opportunity to inform policy makers. To that end, these are my responses:
How can the Government address challenges to law enforcement and national security investigations posed by the evolving technological landscape in a manner that is consistent with Canadian values, including respect for privacy, provision of security and the protection of economic interests?
Evidence-based policy suggest you first demonstrate the actual need for such respective legislative changes, and further, that the proposed changes actually solve the problems they are intended to solve. Impartial third-party studies should be required for any proposed measures. As a computer scientist with some expertise in computer security, legislators simply do not have the requisite understanding to judge the need or the effectiveness of any proposed measures.
The greatest dangers to Canadians are automated software systems operating on behalf of criminals looking to compromise servers and personal devices. The most effective measures to protect Canadians would thus secure their devices against any such intrusions. We enjoy physical security due to law enforcement patrols to prevent crime, the justice system to punish, reform and deter criminals, and a good public education system that empowers people to provide for themselves such that they do not need to resort to crime.
No truly effective law enforcement or justice system is possible for online activities, given criminal activity affecting Canadians can originate from anywhere on Earth. The Internet is truly the wild west, and like the wild west, safety for all Canadians can only be achieved by empowering and educating individuals in how to secure their own devices.
On a legislative level, a modicum of regulation on the software industry to use only secure software systems when dealing with personal information, and to require companies to develop software using safer, more secure techniques, such as using safer programming languages, would significantly reduce all Canadians' vulnerabilities to online criminals.
In the physical world, if the police obtain a search warrant from a judge to enter your home to conduct an investigation, they are authorized to access your home. Should investigative agencies operate any differently in the digital world?
Why should they? In each case, our charter guarantees the security of the person against unreasonable search and seizure. Law enforcement is *supposed* to be inconvenienced if they want to violate someone's rights. That's the whole point of the charter, to safeguard against abuse of power.
Currently, investigative agencies have tools in the digital world similar to those in the physical world. As this document shows, there is concern that these tools may not be as effective in the digital world as in the physical world. Should the Government update these tools to better support digital/online investigations?
Of course, authorized use of such tools ought to be as effective as possible, so long as "these tools" do not necessitate compromising citizens' everyday software in order to be effective. For instance, these tools cannot require backdoors into people's software in order to be effective. The tools used by law enforcement *will* leak into the criminal world, and you would place every citizens' bank accounts and private life in jeopardy if you require backdoors.
Is your expectation of privacy different in the digital world than in the physical world?
Of course. Physical security and digital security are necessarily different because physical objects and digital objects have completely different properties. For example, it's trivial to digitally copy an item, it's not easy to copy a physical item. It's thus impossible to enforce the same sorts of property rights for digital items as we enjoy for physical items. You can securely share a private physical photo without too much concern that it will be disseminated globally, but as many people have learned, digital photos are easily leaked and spread online.
Since the Spencer decision, police and national security agencies have had difficulty obtaining BSI in a timely and efficient manner. This has limited their ability to carry out their mandates, including law enforcement's investigation of crimes. If the Government developed legislation to respond to this problem, under what circumstances should BSI (such as name, address, telephone number and email address) be available to these agencies? For example, some circumstances may include, but are not limited to: emergency circumstances, to help find a missing person, if there is suspicion of a crime, to further an investigative lead, etc…
In which *specific* cases has the absence hampered a time-sensitive investigation? I hear this "fact" repeated constantly, but no specifics are ever provided. If no compelling case exists, or alternate investigative methods can and have yielded the same results, then rapid subscriber access is an unnecessary infringement on our rights and freedoms, and frankly, a waste of legislators' time.
If such specifics are too sensitive to disclose, then they can be analyzed by an impartial, thirdparty investigation consisting of computer experts to determine their validity. I know of no such cases, nor any such investigation. If such an investigation justifies rapid subscriber access, then rather than infringing our rights and eliminating all oversight, establish a court that's dedicated solely to rapid processing of such applications, and cycle the judges sitting on these courts every year to prevent overly favourable relationships with those requesting warrants. No blank cheques, and any such requests must still go through a court.
Finally, subscriber information does not identify a responsible party, so relying on this will generate many false leads and waste investigative resources in time-sensitive investigations. For instance, today's deplorable software security makes it fairly easy to hijack someone else's wifi signal, so the false belief that an IP address that participated in an illegal activity will lead investigators to waste time pursuing the subscriber who was assigned that IP address. Law enforcement needs to be trained to understand these realities.
Do you consider your basic identifying information identified through BSI (such as name, home address, phone number and email address) to be as private as the contents of your emails? your personal diary? your financial records? your medical records? Why or why not?
Of course it's not as private. My kitchen is also less private than my bedroom, but law enforcement still requires a warrant to access it.
Do you see a difference between the police having access to your name, home address and phone number, and the police having access to your Internet address, such as your IP address or email address?
Internet address, home address, phone number and email address are all logical addresses via which I can be personally reached in some way, and behind which I hold significant personal and private information. My name is different from all of the above: it is not unique, and it does not provide a way to reach me personally.
The Government has made previous attempts to enact interception capability legislation. This legislation would have required domestic communications service providers to create and maintain networks that would be technically capable of intercepting communications if a court order authorized the interception. These legislative proposals were controversial with Canadians. Some were concerned about privacy intrusions. As well, the Canadian communications industry was concerned about how such laws might affect it.
As a computer scientist, I can tell you right now that reliable and complete intercept capability is impossible. If you legislate any such requirements, then those wishing to hide their activities have any number of mechanisms available to *undetectably* circumvent it. And not just via encryption, see steganography, for instance.
Given this impossibility, and the fact that IP addresses cannot identify the responsible party, but merely a means by which a criminal activity took place, interception capabilities are likely an unnecessary waste of resources that would yield too many false positives, and resources are probably better spent on more reliable and effective investigative techniques.
Furthermore, the existence of such networks makes them ripe targets for foreign governments and criminals. The potential for abuse, and the vulnerabilities created, are simply too great, even if well-intentioned.
Should Canada's laws help to ensure that consistent interception capabilities are available through domestic communications service provider networks when a court order authorizing interception is granted by the courts?
Yes, but I still question the effectiveness of such measures, and the cost-benefit ratio of creating this infrastructure.
If the Government were to consider options to address the challenges encryption poses in law enforcement and national security investigations, in what circumstances, if any, should investigators have the ability to compel individuals or companies to assist with decryption?
Never. The most significant danger to Canadians is online criminal activity. Software that compromises people's devices to leak personal information, for identity theft among other criminal purposes, is already being traded online. Any attempt to weaken or circumvent encryption puts every Canadian in danger for very little gain considering messages exchanged between criminals can be hidden via other undetectable means (see discussion of Intercept Capability above).
Canadians as a whole are better served by *requiring* devices to implement proper encryption that cannot be circumvented. Any security researcher will tell you exactly the same thing: securing an encrypted device with any backdoor is impossible. You cannot compromise every Canadian's entire life just to assist a small number of investigations.
How can law enforcement and national security agencies reduce the effectiveness of encryption for individuals and organizations involved in crime or threats to the security of Canada, yet not limit the beneficial uses of encryption by those not involved in illegal activities?
They literally cannot. It's impossible. Any computer scientist who has studied security will tell you the same. Even the best design I have seen to date, which holds decryption keys in hardware not accessible to software running on the device, and which looks pretty safe at first glance, is rife with vulnerabilities when you consider that all of our hardware is built overseas under the purview of foreign governments and in manufacturing plants with completely unknown on-premise security measures. Hardware-level security breaches have already occurred even though there's plenty of other lower-hanging fruit.
Should the law require Canadian service providers to keep telecommunications data for a certain period to ensure that it is available if law enforcement and national security agencies need it for their investigations and a court authorizes access?
Retaining information is fine, so long as that data is required to be appropriately secured from access without a warrant. In particular, telecommunication providers should not be permitted to sell this information, and should be required to conduct third-party audits of the security practices used to archive this data.
Even so, the utility of data retention will probably decrease in the coming years as more services move to the internet, and more information exchanged online becomes encrypted. Already, people can switch most of their telephony services to online voice chat services, thus reducing the effectiveness of telephony data retention.
If the Government of Canada were to enact a general data retention requirement, what type of data should be included or excluded? How long should this information be kept?
I can't imagine a use for data more than 5 years old. Retaining all Internet traffic is impossible, but this is what would be needed for truly effective analysis.
However, full retention is an unacceptable security risk. Even enacting a private key encrypted infrastructure, whereby all such data were stored in encrypted form and the decryption keys were held by the courts to be used only when authorized, securing these keys against any possible disclosure is probably impossibly difficult.
To balance the security risks against realizable data capture abilities, retaining only metadata for 5 years and encrypting it all using the above public key infrastructure would be acceptable.
Editorial Note: I have little expectation that such public key protections would be employed though, and without them, I'm not in favour of any data retention at all.
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