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/ Canadian Government Executive
// May 2016
Strategy
important to be handled in a stealth-like
manner. We have seen time and time
again how excessive secrecy within the
national security apparatus (initially ex-
posed more than ten years ago by Justice
Dennis O’Connor in the aftermath of the
Arar Inquiry) can be devastating.
More than a domestic issue, the Arar
affair stemmed from flawed information
shared across the border. What resulted
was the detention, deportation, and tor-
ture of an innocent Canadian citizen. It
should not go unnoticed, then, that one
of the joint actions recently agreed to by
President Obama and Prime Minister
Trudeau focused on improving no-fly lists
used by airlines in both countries. Even
a minor flaw becomes a major ordeal for
undeserving travellers caught in a web of
misidentification.
The no-fly list is by no means an anom-
aly. Within months of taking office, the
Liberal Government was confronted by
accusations of inappropriate meta-data
sharing between Canadian federal enti-
ties and foreign counterparts. The Cana-
dian Securities Establishment had ille-
gally and unintentionally done so while
in an Orwellian twist (as Terry Milewski
quipped on CBC), two federal Ministers
admitted they were largely hamstrung to
investigate further - due to national secu-
rity laws limiting such political access.
Yet Orwellian may not be the best way
to characterize such dysfunction. Ameri-
can privacy expert Daniel Solove prefers
Kafka imagery, specifically the character
of Josef K in The Trial. Josef K’s life unrav-
els in the face of unsubstantiated and ill-
defined charges processed by an insular,
opaque and unaccountable bureaucracy.
Across Canada and other likeminded de-
mocracies the list of incidents of life imi-
tating art has sadly grown in recent years
– most remaining below the threshold of
media attention.
To its credit, the Liberal Government
has promised a new Parliamentary Com-
mittee on National Security (drawing from
both the House and the Senate). This Com-
mittee would see Canada lose its dubious
status of being perhaps the only Western
democracy without any political review
of its security and intelligence apparatus.
Members from all Parties (or non-parties
as the Senate goes these days) would be
sworn in as Privy Council Members, and
thereby granted access to sensitive, op-
erational information previously unattain-
able.
Though an important step, the irony of
a Committee whose members are sworn
to secrecy is that more openness and pub-
lic deliberation are required. Indeed, the
Committee’s security mandate may well
also be too narrow for the broader privacy
debate now called for.
While national security–and the invari-
able focus on terrorism–is one important
lens, other forces are also impacting the
fluid boundaries of personal privacy and
the need for new forms of governmental
action. The rise of mobile commerce and
electronic payments is equally consequen-
tial, as more and more of our financial
transactions are virtual.
In a manner analogous to the Apple-FBI
dispute, encryption is a two-edge sword,
as it is fundamental to underpinning fi-
nancial processing systems (and even new
currencies), while it also shields public
authorities from tracking and exposing
unlawful activity and potential threats.
In a very real sense, by virtue of financial
regulations and national security laws,
Canadian banks are already crucial stake-
holders in the fight against terrorism and
organized crime.
Yet this system is under siege by finan-
cial innovations such Bitcoin and new mo-
bile payment systems such as Apple Pay
and Square (Apple may well change its
tune about not having an interest in min-
ing customer data as its own payment plat-
form expands). The rise of the so-called
fin-tech sector (intermixing financial pro-
This collective
silence on this issue
is unhelpful. Matters
regarding the
evolution of
personal privacy
and government
surveillance are
too important to
be handled in a
stealth-like manner.