Black boxes in Canada

[Richard Clayton]

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The Canadians have decided to change their laws so that they are able to
ratify the Convention on Cybercrime. There's a consultation paper out
this week at:

    http://canada.justice.gc.ca/en/cons/la_al/index.html

They seem to envisage "Black Boxes" everywhere:

    "It is proposed that all service providers (wireless, wireline and
    Internet) be required to ensure that their systems have the
    technical capability to provide lawful access to law enforcement and
    national security agencies.  The implementation and maintenance of
    this capability is the focus of this section.

    "The central tenet of the proposal is that service providers would
    be required to have the technical capability to provide access to
    the entirety of a specific telecommunication transmitted over their
    facilities, subject to a lawful authority to intercept. This would
    include the content and the telecommunications-associated specific
    data associated with that telecommunication."

which seems a bit like bad news for small ISPs who might have envisaged
staying in business :(


There's also a great deal about the interception of email (and whether
it should in fact be treated as interception or by issuing "Production
Orders" for the mail when it sits on store-and-forward systems).

With any luck this means that the Canadians should be able to sort out
the public policy issues of using search warrants to access
communications up front rather than ending up with the policy mess we
seem to be ending up with in the United Kindom.


Canada are also the first country (to my knowledge) to consult on
"preservation orders" which the Cybercrime Convention requires so that
evidence can be frozen whilst the red tape procedures are gone through
for making it available to another state.

However, the consultation does not go into the international issues at
all :(  and it certainly doesn't go anywhere near the extremely thorny
issue of partial disclosure (whereby some data can be handed over almost
instantly for dealing with issues of "hot pursuit" where trails lead
across borders).


Finally ... a little gem we all missed. The first (and so far only)
country to ratify the Convention on Cybercrime (and five must ratify it
before it comes into force, including 3 members states of the CoE) was
Albania. Says it all for me really :(

- -- 
richard                                              Richard Clayton

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.         Benjamin Franklin

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