Canada's New Anti-Terrorism Legislation Echoes The PATRIOT Act, Expands Spying Powers And Government Reach

from the let-no-tragedy-go-unexploited dept

Canada looks to be next in line for broadly-written, government-expanding "anti-terror" legislation. This new legislation was prompted by a couple of recent attacks on government employees. The first attack involved a man said to be "inspired by the Islamic State" who ran over two soldiers in a Quebec parking lot before being killed. The second attack struck a bit closer to home, when a gunman shot a soldier at the national war memorial before making his way into Parliament.

An attack on the government's turf will always provoke a legislative reaction. One might think some security fixes at Parliament would be in the offing, but Prime Minister Stephen Harper has much bigger plans.

Canada will introduce new anti-terror laws that will make it a crime to encourage terrorism against Canadians, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Friday in response to two recent attacks.

The laws will also allow anyone suspected of being involved in a terror plot to be detained without charge for up to seven days, and empower Canada's spy agency to thwart attacks directly in a significant expansion of their powers.

If this sounds eerily close to the laws enacted after the 9/11 attacks, there's a reason for that. For those with government expansion and broader spying powers on the mind, a scary, but ultimately ineffectual, attack on prime government property is an opportunity -- not an isolated incident. Peter Watts (an "an awk­ward hy­brid of bi­ol­o­gist, sci­ence-fic­tion au­thor, and [ac­cord­ing to the US De­part­ment of Home­land Se­cu­rity] con­victed felon/tew­wow­ist") sums up the birthing of this horrendous legislation beautifully at his No More Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons blog:

We had a shooting up here in Canada the other day. Like most things Canadian it was a modest, self-effacing affair, nothing that even a couple of losers from Columbine would write home about: a single death, a geriatric hero. A Prime Minister cowering in the closet, scribbling back-of-the-napkin notes on how best to exploit this unexpected opportunity.

He didn’t have to think very hard. Harper’s always seemed almost pathetically eager to turn Canada into a wannabe iteration of the US— think the dweeby eight-year-old, desperate to emulate his idolized older brother— and the Patriot Act has, I suspect, always been his Beacon on the Hill (or his Castle Anthrax grail-shaped beacon, depending on your cultural referents). So our beloved leader is once again trying to resurrect all those measures he couldn’t quite sneak into C-52, or C-10, or C-30— all those measures that no sane citizen would ever oppose, unless of course we chose to “stand with the child pornographers“. You know the list: lowered evidentiary standards. Increased powers of police surveillance. Increased powers of detention and “preventative arrest”. Increased data sharing with the US.

Basically all that stuff they were doing anyway with impunity, only now more of it will be legal.

Canada's Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) will receive broadened powers. It will be allowed to directly perform "police work" rather than turning intelligence over to law enforcement agencies. It will also be able to disrupt Canadian citizens' travel plans unannounced.

The new law will also allow the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the country's spy service, to directly approach terror suspects in order to disrupt their plans. CSIS is currently permitted only to collect intelligence and pass the information on to police.

The spy agency will now be able to cancel plane or other travel reservations made by Canadians suspected of being involved in terrorism. The new activities by CSIS will require approval by a judge. Police already have many of these powers that CSIS will acquire but the government wanted the spy agency to be able to act right away if they see a threat.

We've seen how well secret "no-fly" lists work here in the US. Once you're on the list, you can't get off it, barring an expensive lawsuit. We've also seen how well the US government's "terrorist watchlist" works, what with 40% of those "watchlisted" having "no recognized terrorist group affiliation." If this legislation passes (and seeing that Parliament is stocked with Harper supporters, there's no reason to believe it won't), Canadians can expect the same sort of secretive incompetence. Supposedly, citizens will be able to challenge their appearance on the "no fly" list, but given the wording used in the legislation, they may as well throw their written requests into the nearest wastebasket.

If the Minister does not make a decision in respect of the application within 90 days after the day on which the application is received, or within any further period that is agreed on by the Minister and the applicant, the Minister is deemed to have decided not to remove the applicant’s name from the list.

Not making a decision is one of the easiest things anyone can do. Not making a decision in a timely manner is even easier. The "administrative recourse" process effectively ends the minute it hits the Minister's desk. To take someone off the list is to take a risk. To simply do nothing for 90 days is easier and safer.

Harper himself has been selling the bill to the public, tossing out statements no public should willingly get behind.

Under current law it is a crime to make a specific threat. The new law will make it a crime to call for a terror attack against Canadians generally. It includes any public threat including online.

"We cannot tolerate this any more than we tolerate people that make jokes about bomb threats at airports," Harper said. "Anyone engaging in that kind of activity is going to face the full force of the law in the future."

Wonderful. This is sort of zero-tolerance thinking that gets careless Twitter users arrested. "Joking" about non-specific threats will soon be indistinguishable from actually making terroristic threats -- and subjects jokers to a possible five-year prison sentence.

New problems also arise for website owners.

If the court is satisfied, on a balance of probabilities, that the material is available to the public and is terrorist propaganda or computer data that makes terrorist propaganda available, it may order the computer system’s custodian to delete the material.

So, linking to "terrorist propaganda" is illegal, which would make retweeting anything terrorist-related a potentially criminal act. And the legislation provides no safeguard for websites and platforms that host or transmit third-party content. Instead of addressing the users who post this content, the government is looking to just pin it on whoever's URL happens to be at the top of the webpage.

As for the CSIS, the nation's spy service will enjoy expanded powers to spy on both foreigners and domestic citizens alike. The legislation suggests the spy agency's domestic powers will be more limited inside Canada…

The Service shall not take measures to reduce a threat to the security of Canada if those measures will contravene a right or freedom guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or will be contrary to other Canadian law…

before going on to strip away most of these protections by the end of the sentence:

...unless the Service is authorized to take them by a warrant issued under section 21.1.

Section 21.1 is being heavily amended as well and ties warrant application rejection/approval to :

...the facts relied on to justify the belief on reasonable grounds that the warrant continues to be required to enable the Service to take the measures specified in it to reduce a threat to the security of Canada…

Goodbye, probable cause and say hello to national security exceptions and a lowered bar of "reasonable grounds." It's the PATRIOT Act all over again. Only the flag in "flag-waving" has changed. It's not that legislators actively wish for attacks on their constituents and fellow government employees. It's just that they're so quick to leverage attacks into expanded government power.

Filed Under: anti-terror, canada, patriot act, privacy, stephen harper, surveillance

How Australia's New 'Anti-Terror' Censorship Law Could Cover Up Botched Intelligence Operations

from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong? dept

As we reported a few weeks ago, Australia has passed a dreadful "anti-terror" law that not only allows the authorities to monitor the entire Internet in that country with a single warrant, but also threatens 10 years of jail time for anyone who "recklessly" discloses information that relates to a "special intelligence operation." But what exactly will that mean in practice? Elizabeth Oshea, writing in the Overland journal, has put together a great article fleshing things out. Here's her introduction:

The parliament has passed legislation that permits the Attorney General to authorise certain activities of ASIO and affiliates as 'special intelligence operations'. We can only assume that ASIO will seek such authorisation when its operatives plan to break the criminal or civil law -- the whole point of authorising an operation as a special intelligence operation is that participants will be immune from the consequences of their unlawfulness. It will also be a criminal act to disclose information about these operations.

So the Australian government can designate activities of its spy services as "special intelligence operations," which may well be illegal, and then it becomes a criminal act to disclose anything about those operations, however bad they are. Indeed, that even seems to include operations that result in death, as Oshea explains in one of her examples of what could happen under the new law:

A botched operation is conducted that results in the death of an innocent bystander (credit this suggestion to the former Independent National Security Legislation Monitor). Note that if a person with three children dies as a result of a failure to take reasonable care, her family will be unable to make a claim for the cost of raising her dependents. If she is maimed but not killed, she will be unable to make a claim for the cost of her medical care, lost earnings, pain and suffering, and the cost of raising her dependents.

That's a hypothetical case, but Oshea also lists a number of incidents that have already occurred, but which are likely to be covered by the new law -- and would thus become impossible to write about. Here are a couple of them, with links to the real-life cases:

Agents and officers raid a couple in their home and hold them captive at gunpoint for an hour, only leaving when they discovered they were at the wrong address. The couple will have no entitlement to compensation for any property or personal damage arising from imprisonment, trespass and assault.

Agents kidnap and falsely imprison a young medical student. They attempt to coerce answers from him, making making threats that go beyond what is permitted by the relevant search warrant.

There's more of the same, listing previously-reported incidents that would probably be censored in future. The post also explores legislative proposals that are equally disturbing:

The parliament is considering laws that will punish people with life imprisonment for a range of new offences associated with 'subverting society' (which is a component of the new definition of 'engaging in hostile activities'). The law contains a defence of advocacy, protest, dissent or industrial action, but it is very unclear how these would be applied.

Here's the kind of thing that might get you life imprisonment in Australia in the future:

Leaking materials taken from government information systems that demonstrate serious wrongdoing (as per Manning or Snowden).

Organising and engaging in denial of service attacks – the online equivalent of a sit in – against government websites, such as that of the President, Prime Minister, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Stock Exchange.

There's also an explanation of what data retention might mean for the public. All in all, it's a valuable guide to some of the seriously bad stuff that Australia is doing. Let's just hope that other countries don't take it as a blueprint.

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Filed Under: anti-terror, asio, australia, censorship, leaks, special intelligence operations, whistleblowing

UK Police Abuse Of Anti-Terrorist Snooping Powers To Reveal Journalists' Sources Leads To Widespread Calls For Reform

from the and-they-want-even-more-surveillance-powers??? dept

Last month, we wrote about how the UK police used powers brought in to tackle terrorism and serious crime to snoop on a journalist's phone records in order to reveal his source. Last week, we learned that this was not a one-off: journalists at the UK's Mail on Sunday newspaper were also spied on using the same anti-terrorism law:

Police used anti-terrorism powers to secretly spy on The Mail on Sunday after shamed Cabinet Minister Chris Huhne falsely accused journalists of conspiring to bring him down.

Detectives sidestepped a judge’s agreement to protect the source for our stories exposing how Huhne illegally conspired to have his speeding points put on to his wife's licence. Instead they used far-reaching powers under the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) -- originally intended to safeguard national security -- to hack MoS phone records and identify the source.

They trawled through thousands of confidential numbers called by journalists from a landline at the busy newsdesk going back an entire year, covering hundreds of stories unrelated to the Huhne case.

These two cases have finally set the alarm bells ringing in the UK. The newspaper affected in the first case has written to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal about the incident:

The Sun has made an official complaint about the Metropolitan police's use of anti-terror laws to snoop on its political editor's phone calls.

It has written to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal to seek a public review of the Met’s use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to obtain Tom Newton Dunn's phone records.

That's unlikely to have much effect, but a move by Keith Vaz, chair of the powerful home affairs select committee in the UK Parliament, may do:

Every police force in the UK is to be asked by a parliamentary committee to reveal how many times they have secretly snooped on journalists by obtaining their telephone and email records without their consent.

Keith Vaz, chairman of the home affairs select committee, said he wanted a detailed breakdown of police use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) to force telecoms companies to hand over phone records without customers' knowledge.

Indeed, things have become so serious that even the Interception of Communications Commissioner, who oversees this area, is launching his own inquiry (pdf) - but not a public one, which is what The Sun newspaper has requested:

Today I have written to all Chief Constables and directed them under Section 58(1) of RIPA to provide me with full details of all investigations that have used Part I Chapter 2 RIPA powers to acquire communications data to identify journalistic sources. My office will undertake a full inquiry into these matters and report our findings to the Prime Minister and publically so as to develop clarity in relation to the scope and compliance of this activity.

This double-pronged attack should force the UK's top police officers to own up to what they have been doing secretly with RIPA. If it turns out that its powers have been routinely abused, the pressure for reforming the outdated RIPA will be greatly increased. Already, the Liberal Democrats, the junior partner in the UK's coalition government, have called for changes to RIPA that would protect journalists and whistleblowers from state snooping, while Keith Vaz wishes to go even further, as the Guardian reports:

Vaz said Ripa was not fit for purpose and needed "total refurbishment". He said: "It is important that the public and parliamentarians get statistics on the number of times it is being used and how it is being used without journalists having to submit freedom of information requests. All kinds of mistake are being made. Anecdotally we've heard of local authorities using it to check people's addresses when parents make applications for schools."

It's rather rich that at precisely the moment we find out how the UK police have been abusing RIPA's anti-terrorism surveillance capabilities to investigate minor offenses, the head of the UK's National Crime Agency has the gall to ask for even more powers.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: anti-terror, journalists, ripa, snooping, surveillance, uk

UK Crime Agency Boss: 'Yes, The Public Must Give Up Its Liberty If It Wants Security'

from the deserve-neither dept

Last week, the UK Home Secretary pitched the current UK government's plan to ramp up anti-terror laws to further stamp out privacy and free speech rights in the UK. This week, Keith Bristow, director general of the National Crime Agency, doubled down by arguing that he needs to teach the public that of course they need to give up liberty if they want security. He argues that "public consent" is necessary, but that legislation is "public consent" and thus he needs to help convince the public (or, really, Parliament) to cough up some liberty.

He said: “If we seek to operate outside of what the public consent to, that, for me, by definition, is not policing by consent … the consent is expressed through legislation.”

He added that it was necessary to win “the public consent to losing some freedoms in return for greater safety and security”.

And while the famed Ben Franklin quote on "safety" v. "liberty" is mostly used out of context, that doesn't lessen the importance of the premise behind it. Giving up liberty for the sake of presumed (without evidence) security is a very dangerous game, often used by those who just wish for more control and power, not any actual concerns with safety and security.

Filed Under: anti-terror, keith bristow, liberty, national crime agency, privacy, security, surveillance, uk

Australian AG Insists New Anti-Terror Law Only Allows What It Allows; Refuses To Say What It Allows

from the democracy-in-action dept

Yesterday we told you about just one of the troubling aspects of a proposed "anti-terror" law in Australia, in that under a single warrant, ASIO, the intelligence gathering organization, could effectively monitor the entire internet. During some Parliamentary discussions on this, Senator Scott Ludlam tried to add an amendment limiting the number of computers that could be monitored under a single warrant. Brandis' "contribution" to the debate on this was to accuse Ludlam of being a "liar" for claiming that the law would allow the tapping of the entire internet under a single warrant and then... refusing any further explanation. The exchange is really quite incredible. Ludlam says he'd be happy if, in fact, his understanding of their previous conversation was in error, and thus wished for clarification. Brandis responds:

What ASIO would be empowered to do is that which is authorized by the warrant, which is, in turn, governed by the terms of the Act.

Holy tautology Batman! Ludlam appears reasonably sarcastically frustrated in return:

Thank you for your opaque and utterly unhelpful response.

He asks further specific questions about what the law would cover and Brandis repeats: "I don't have anything to add to my previous answer." It's basically a giant "fuck you" to anyone wanting to make sure that the law isn't overly broad and doesn't allow spying on the entire internet. Remember, Brandis claims that was a lie, but refuses to clarify beyond the "utterly unhelpful" statement he made. Unfortunately, despite all of that insanity, the bill still passed, without Ludlam's amendment, meaning that this is likely to be the law in Australia soon. And, of course, there are other troubling aspects to the law beyond just being able to monitor everything on a single warrant. As many people have pointed out, there's a free-speech destroying provision that would allow for 10 years of jail time for whistleblowers and anyone (including journalists) who repeat what the whistleblowers revealed.

Anyone — including journalists, whistleblowers, bloggers and others — who "recklessly" discloses "information ... [that] relates to a special intelligence operation" faces up to 10 years' jail.

In short, Australia is guaranteeing that not only will they not have their own Edward Snowden but they won't have their own Glenn Greenwald, either. Combine that with the massive new powers to spy on everyone with a single warrant, and Australia just massively expanded the surveillance state, and put a gag order on anyone who wants to expose its abuses.

Filed Under: anti-terror, australia, george brandis, journalism, privacy, scott ludlam, warrants, whistleblowing

UK Using Anti-Terror Laws To Harass And Intimidate Human Rights And Democracy Activists

from the shameful dept

You may recall that, last month, Glenn Greenwald's partner David Miranda was detained at Heathrow for nearly 9 hours for helping Greenwald do journalism. There were many problems with this detention, not the least of which that officials used an anti-terrorism law, called Schedule 7, for the detention. The author of Schedule 7, Charles Falconer, specifically has said that the law wasn't intended for such purposes. And yet, it appears that the UK authorities aren't backing down from abusing Schedule 7 to intimidate people having nothing to do with terrorism.

The latest is using Schedule 7 to detain and intimidate a human rights and democracy activist from Yemen. Let me repeat it: this is someone advocating for democracy, and they're being detained and harassed under an anti-terrorism law. Something is seriously screwed up here.

Baraa Shiban, a respected human rights activist who works in Yemen as a project co-ordinator for the London-based legal charity Reprieve and was travelling to London to speak at an event, said he was held for an hour on Monday night and questioned about his work and political views.

He was detained under schedule 7 to the Terrorism Act, the same legislation used last month at Heathrow to detain David Miranda, the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who has written about mass internet surveillance by the US National Security Agency and Britain's GCHQ.

Shiban is a member of Yemen's National Dialogue – the body tasked with mapping out the country's democratic future

Shiban was going to the UK to give a speech on, of all things, "security, diplomacy and aid." He may want to edit the planned remarks slightly. Shiban further pointed out that the detention was focused on his human rights activities. Remember this is under a law that is supposed to only be used to stop terrorists.

Shiban said: "I was stunned when the border agent said I was being held simply because I came from Yemen. It was even more shocking when he spent the entire time asking me about my human rights work and about Reprieve, the charity I work for.

"Is the UK the kind of place that human rights activists are fair game for detention, intimidation and interrogation?"

The excuse given by Sussex police is especially pathetic:

A spokesman said: "He was referred to Sussex police by Border Force officials. He spoke with officers for around half an hour and was then free to continue his journey. We are satisfied that our actions were legitimate, justified and proportionate and were carried out in accordance with the act."

Remember, the act is supposed to only be used in investigating possible terrorist activity. These are the kinds of activities that we used to associate with authoritarian non-democratic countries. And now we're regularly seeing such abuse in the US and the UK.

Filed Under: activism, anti-terror, baraa shiban, human rights, schedule 7, terrorism, uk, yemen