Canada Says Critics Don’t Understand Its Surveillance Bill

Canada Says Critics Don’t Understand Its Surveillance Bill

Canada’s Public Safety Minister is telling Apple, Meta, and Signal that they don’t understand his own surveillance bill. They understand it fine. That’s the problem.

• Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act, would force telecoms, internet companies, and social media platforms to rebuild their systems so police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) can access user data more easily during investigations.

  It would also require providers to stockpile metadata on every subscriber for up to a year, regardless of whether those people are suspected of anything.

  The bill has the backing of police chiefs across the country and CSIS, who have long argued they are stymied by outdated legislation in a digital world.

  The government describes this as organizing information “like a filing cabinet, where certain types of information would be available with legal authorization.”

  That filing cabinet contains a year’s worth of data showing where every Canadian goes, when they go there, and who they communicate with. On a mobile network, that metadata includes which cell towers each phone connects to and when. Retained at scale, it amounts to a comprehensive surveillance map of the population.

  Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said at a press conference Wednesday that tech companies are “using this as an opportunity to double down.” He added that “Tech giants are misinterpreting some of the safeguards that are already built in, including on ensuring that encryption is not in any way interrupted as part of Bill-22.”

  The bill would also allow the federal government to secretly order companies to weaken encryption or create backdoors and Meta’s Robyn Greene told the committee that if the government quietly mandates changes to a platform’s security architecture, Meta would be legally prohibited from telling its own users. Secret orders to weaken security, with a gag clause preventing disclosure. The government calls this “encryption-neutral.”

  
  

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