DIGITAL CRIME NEEDS A SECURITY UPDATE.
Before Parliament broke for its summer recess, the government had introduced Bill C- 59, new national security legislation with the stated purpose of balancing the security of Canadians with their rights and freedoms.
It’s inevitable that discussion and debate around Canadian security policy is informed by recent international headlines about growing radicalization and terrorism, including this year’s London Bridge and Manchester concert terrorist attacks. We in Canada have not been immune to these warped ideologies. However, the debate over increased powers to national security agencies has been polarizing, pitting civil liberties advocates against those suggesting there are real and present dangers to national security.
The focus on existential threats, while important, has taken attention away from some other important societal challenges that have nothing to do with terrorism, but need to be considered in any policy that aims to bring security up to date with the latest digital technology.
Earlier this summer, on the eve of the Montreal Formula One Grand Prix, the prime minister’s office issued a cagey press release: In collaboration with the City of Montreal and the Province of Quebec, the federal government, in exchange for their funding support of the event, would be monitoring efforts to combat human trafficking and sex crimes during the event.
Newspapers around the country have been regularly highlighting the ongoing and growing opioid crisis hitting our communities. Recent stories have suggested that these powerful, synthetic drugs have been making their way to the streets of Canada in largepart via China.
These growing areas of crime may seem disparate and their growth isolated. However, while most Canadians are enjoying the summer weather and thinking about vacations, our country’s Chiefs of Police were in Montreal this week for discussions on the challenges of policing in the digital age.
While most f orms of crime in Canada have been declining over the past few decades, crimes like human trafficking as well as other societal ills like online child sexual exploitation and synthetic drug abuse have become growing challenges.
What ties all these growing forms of crime together is that they have been enabled by digital devices and connectivity. While society has largely benefitted from the advent of the Internet, there have been some extreme downsides.
Child sexual exploitation content, opioids and even vulnerable individuals who have been human trafficked can be procured on the open and dark-webs today. Terrorist cells have been known to use common messaging applications like “Whatsapp” which, coupled with modern smartphones, provides virtually unbreakable encryption.
These challenges, in addition to crimes committed wholly online like ransomware and phishing schemes, which are on a sharp rise, put police agencies are in an extremely precarious position. Their societal role, to both uphold the rule of law and provide community policing, is at risk.
When critical evidence to a murder case rests on a device with strong encryption, and a court orders that the phone be considered a piece of evidence, there are a number of instances where our police agencies cannot access the data. When children are lured by predators via our social media technologies, whose servers are in another country or a number of countries, investigators may have to wait months to get critical evidence through a treaty process. That is, if they can get it at all. And when Canadians trust their banks to deal with thousands of dollars of fraudulent charges and don’t even report such attempted theft to police, we should know there is a looming crisis of confidence in policing.
Our police leaders are well aware of these challenges. But this challenge is much greater than just equipping officers with upto- date tools and training. It will require more than budgets for new tools and training for officers.
Our laws and policies regarding how police investigate crime locally, provincially, nationally and internationally were written well before things like cloud computing, cryptocurrencies and “Internet of Things” devices were ever conceived of.
Canadians need a real debate, in Parliament and provincial legislatures and at international forums, not just about security in the age of terrorism, but security — and the limits of police power — in the age of the digitization of crimes that affect communities on a daily basis.
A good place to start would be to debate the circumstances under which citizens should be required to make their digital devices and the critical evidence on them available, by unlocking them, to police agencies.
This would release some pressure on Internet service providers and technology companies to release citizens’ data to police. The debate should also anticipate the length to which technology companies must comply in critical investigations, even when the data rests abroad, given that more and more critical evidence is being stored in the cloud.
Privacy is a fundamental tenet of democracy. But a healthy balance between privacy and the security of citizens is the hallmark of a strong and stable functioning democracy. It’s time for our elected officials to bring all vested interests together, including police, privacy advocates and victims of these new forms of crime, to come up with meaningful laws with the expressed purpose to keep citizens safe and protect their rights and freedoms in the digital age.