Verizon in Canada risk to privacy: union
U.S. telecom’s links to NSA are worthy of ‘code red alert status’
OTTAWA — Canadians’ personal data could end up in the hands of U.S. intelligence agencies if American telecom giant Verizon is allowed to operate here, warns the union representing communications workers.
The Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada charged Friday that Verizon’s recently revealed co-operation with the U.S. National Security Agency in its clandestine collection of telephone records of millions of U.S. customers could extend north under a federal policy that eases the sector’s foreign ownership restrictions.
New York-based Verizon Communications Inc., with about 100 million wireless customers, has said it’s eyeing the possibility of entering Canada’s wireless market under relaxed restrictions that allow foreign entrants to buy small Canadian wireless carriers with less than 10 per cent of the market share by revenue. The federal government says the intent is to increase investment and competition.
Canada’s Big Three telecom providers — Rogers, BCE Inc. and Telus — have responded with a fierce lobbying campaign to pressure the government to back down, which observers say is unlikely. Unions and others have joined the fray.
“It’s long been accepted that there are privacy and national security concerns with foreign companies controlling Canada’s telecommunications sector,” communications union president Dave Coles said in statement. “With Verizon so deeply tied to U.S. intelligence agencies, these concerns should be upgraded to code red alert status.”
In an interview, Coles said the company is dependent on billions of dollars in U.S. military contracts and bound to comply with the U.S. Patriot Act and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
“That should be a significant concern to Canadians, not to just individuals but to corporations,” he said.
Behind closed doors, federal officials have had concerns, too. Bloomberg News last year obtained a 2011 letter, marked “secret,” from Daniel Lavoie, a senior official with Public Safety, to Industry Canada officials.
“The security and intelligence community is of the view that lessening or removing restrictions from the Telecommunications Act, without implementing mitigation measures, would pose a considerable risk to public safety and national security,” he wrote.
Verizon has reportedly been in talks with owners of Wind Mobile, offering as much as $700 million to buy the Canadian upstart and secure a toehold in the Canadian wireless market. The company reportedly also has held exploratory talks with another small Canadian provider, Mobilicity.
Verizon’s link to NSA snooping was exposed in June by U.K. Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald and based on information supplied by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who was granted temporary asylum in Russia recently.
Snowden revealed the NSA has been collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. Verizon customers under a top secret court order granted to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over — regardless of whether they are suspected of wrongdoing — as is location data, call duration and unique identifiers, the newspaper said. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, later said the “metadata” collection has been going on for seven years.
Soon after, the New York Times reported that a Virginia telecommunications consultant disclosed that Verizon had set up a dedicated fibre-optic line running from New Jersey to Quantico, Va., home to a large military base, allowing government officials to gain access to all communications flowing through the carrier’s operations centre.
This week, quoting unnamed intelligence sources, the Times revealed the NSA is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ email and text communications, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance.