CIMS nostalgia

Whoa, imagine finding this again!  An old CBC broadcast of CBC's Keith Boag being given a walk through CIMS with commentary from Michael Geist and Garth Turner. I've posted it twice over the years only to have it taken down at source. We'll see if it stays up this time.

First broadcast over seven years ago on Nov.21 2007, the report shows CPC Direct Voter Contact manager Andrew Harris explaining CIMS to Boag. Mr. Harris left the Cons' employ a year later and founded his own voter contact firm, Picea Partners in 2010.

Billed as "Canada's first and leading provider of Telephone Town Hall meetings", Picea did a tele-townhall in 2010 for by-election Vaughan candidate Julian Fantino, hosted by Senator Mike Duffy. They've also worked with Tim Hudak and the Ontario PC party, and more recently James Moore and Peter Kent. The governments of Canada, Alberta, and New Brunswick are listed as clients.

On their North American direct marketing and sales page, Picea boasts of "25 billion records from hundreds of different sources" :

"We gather data from real estate and income tax assessments, voter registration, hydro & gas connections, bill processors, and other sources before we output our lists to ensure quality and accuracy for your campaign."

Their "wide variety of targeting options" includes "Age, Estimated Household Income, Marital Status, Gender, Home Value, Ethnicity, and more".

Huh.

With the Manning Centre hosting workshops for Con MPs on capturing cell phone and Facebook actions using Nationbuilder :

"you can export data out of CIMS, load it into NationBuilder, interact with people, and then load that data back into CIMS"

the Cons might have actually built that "political super-weapon" they bragged about in the last election.

h/t Waterbaby for new link to CIMS broadcast.

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Here's looking at you, kid

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
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NSA : At Microsoft, your privacy is our "team sport"

Feel free to drop by this Microsoft ad and give it a thumbs down.

"At Microsoft, your privacy is our priority." 

Indeed. About that ...

Guardian : How Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages

• Secret files show scale of Silicon Valley co-operation on Prism  

• Outlook.com encryption including Hotmail unlocked even before official launch 

• Skype worked to enable Prism collection of video calls 

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian. 

• In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;

• Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a "team sport".

US lawmakers, along with Microsoft, Skype, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Yahoo all initially attempted to deny knowledge of PRISM or that the intelligence agencies have back doors into their systems, explaining they are very occasionally under a legal compulsion to cough up customer data to comply with "existing and future lawful demands" in Microsoft's happy phrase, but this tiny ISP company bucked it and won.

Meanwhile ...

NSA Writes Code Used in Google Phone  [h/t West End Bob]

The tech giant Google has confirmed the National Security Agency furnished some of the code installed in its new Android phone. The NSA says the code is intended to enhance security against hackers and marketers, but will not confirm whether it also aids the agency’s PRISM program monitoring the global Internet.

Back to the Guardian :

"Blanket orders from the secret surveillance court allow these communications to be collected without an individual warrant if the NSA operative has a 51% belief that the target is not a US citizen and is not on US soil at the time."

That's us.

Michael Geist Feb 15 2012 on the situation in Canada : 

"[W]ith ISPs and telcos providing subscriber data without a warrant 95 percent of the time, there is a huge information disclosure issue with no reporting and no oversight. This is a major issue on its own, particularly since it is not clear whether these figures also include requests to Internet companies like Google and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.  

The RCMP alone made over 28,000 requests for customer name and address information in 2010. These requests go unreported - subscribers don't know their information has been disclosed and the ISPs and telecom companies aren't talking either."

If you'd like to opt out of the NSA and their "team sport", there are other options :

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Related from Saskboy : PRISM : Oliver Stone vs NSA and Checkpoints

"The question is not Do you have something to hide? The question is whether we control government or the government controls us."

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The Can't Be Arsed To Get a Warrant For That Final 5% Act

On CBC's The Current yesterday, internet law prof Michael Geist and Paul Gillespie, a former Toronto Police sergeant and CEO of Kids' INternet Safety Alliance, faced off on the potential for invasion of privacy afforded by the Lawful Access Act ... Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act ... Can't Be Arsed To Get a Warrant For That Final 5% Act

Partial transcript :

Gillespie explains the bill. Quote :

1)Requires service providers to give subscriber data to police upon request : name, unlisted phone #, IP address, without a warrant
2) If police have the authority, they should also have the ability to monitor peoples' communications
3) With a legitimate legal search warrant, be able to get the records logs
4) Compels service providers to store data

Michael Geist:

"If you look through the bill you don't find the words 'child pornography' anywhere because it's about far more than that.
On warrantless access to suscriber information - the reality is a warrant isn't always needed. Under current privacy law, telecom companies and internet companies have the power, the ability to provide the information, things like customer name and address information, without a warrant in appropreiate circumstances where it's part of an investigation. In fact according to RCMP data, they do so about 95% of the time. So in the overwhelming number of cases, they're already disclosing this information without any kind of court oversight. What we're talking about at the end of the day is that last 5%, instances where ISP or telecom companies say "We're not comfortable disclosing this subscriber information to you based on what you've shown us; come back with a warrant and we'll give you whatever you ask for."

That's been a bedrock principle we've had in Canada - it strikes the appropriate balance and really prevents potential fishing expeditions and prevents the prospect of a significant loss and erosion of the privacy balance we have in Canada." 

From Michael Geist's column, Feb 15 :

"[W]ith ISPs and telcos providing subscriber data without a warrant 95 percent of the time, there is a huge information disclosure issue with no reporting and no oversight. This is a major issue on its own, particularly since it is not clear whether these figures also include requests to Internet companies like Google and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The RCMP alone made over 28,000 requests for customer name and address information in 2010."

Meanwhile, be sure to Tell Vic Everything #

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Internet on strike!

Why this matters in Canada : Michael Geist :

Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, WordPress, and BoingBoing, will go dark tomorrow to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).
My blog will join the protest by going dark tomorrow. While there is little that Canadians can do to influence U.S. legislation, there are many reasons why I think it is important for Canadians to participate.

First, the SOPA provisions are designed to have an extra-territorial effect that manifests itself particularly strongly in Canada. As I discussed in a column last year, SOPA treats all dot-com, dot-net, and dot-org domain as domestic domain names for U.S. law purposes. Moreover, it defines "domestic Internet protocol addresses" - the numeric strings that constitute the actual address of a website or Internet connection - as "an Internet Protocol address for which the corresponding Internet Protocol allocation entity is located within a judicial district of the United States." Yet IP addresses are allocated by regional organizations, not national ones. The allocation entity located in the U.S. is called ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers. Its territory includes the U.S., Canada, and 20 Caribbean nations. This bill treats all IP addresses in this region as domestic for U.S. law purposes. To put this is context, every Canadian Internet provider relies on ARIN for its block of IP addresses. In fact, ARIN even allocates the block of IP addresses used by federal and provincial governments. The U.S. bill would treat them all as domestic for U.S. law purposes.

continued ...

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Thursday Update : Go People Power! SOPA protest works : Key supporters of bills back off
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