In the years since the tragedy of 9/11, citizens across the globe have seen privacy protections compromised by the introduction of sweeping national security measures in many countries.
As governments scrambled to head off terrorist attacks, protect their borders and intercept would-be terrorists, new laws and additional surveillance techniques were implemented, some of the most far-reaching occurring in the United States and Britain.
And although Canada has some of the best protections for individual privacy in the world, Canadians can expect their privacy to be further whittled away in 2008.
2007 ended with a warning from Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart that the coming year will be "another challenging one" for privacy in Canada.
"Heightened national security concerns, the growing business appetite for personal information and technological advances are all potent — and growing — threats to privacy rights," said Stoddart in a news release.
A few days after Stoddart's warning, the London-based privacy watchdog, Privacy International, released a report saying that in recent years, Parliaments throughout the world have enacted legislation "intended to comprehensively increase government's reach into the private life of nearly all citizens and residents."
The report, which rated the privacy records of 47 countries, ranked Canada, Rumania and Greece the highest while China, Russia and Malaysia ranked low. Britain and the U.S., along with China, Russia and Singapore fell into the "black" category, denoting endemic surveillance.
The report said the 2007 rankings reflect an overall worsening of privacy protections across the world, driven by immigration and border control concerns which have spurred countries to "implement database, identity and fingerprinting systems, often without regard to the privacy implications for their own citizens."
"It's very difficult to have the highest level of privacy protections when the state or government is wanting to obtain personal information for security purposes," says Janina Kon, professor at the University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business and the chair of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Section of the Canadian Bar Association.
What makes Canada a cut above the rest in safeguarding peoples' privacy against encroachment by the government, says Kon, is the existence of "a very detailed structure" of legislation at both the federal and provincial levels.
In addition, legislation exists in B.C., Alberta and Quebec regarding how companies are allowed to use the information they collect on individuals. However, there is a flow of Canadian information across the border, says Kon, where privacy isn't nearly as well protected.
While there are strong privacy laws in California and some other states, the wide-ranging Patriot Act, introduced after 9/11, can override all other laws.
"We share a border, so there's a lot of political pressure," says Kon. However, she doesn't see such sweeping legislation ever happening in Canada.
"There is much less public support in Canada for sacrificing privacy rights for the purposes of security and the government knows this, so there will be much tighter controls in my opinion in Canada." The Privacy International report criticized Britain for planning to introduce an ID system that will be the "most invasive in the world," for its ubiquitous surveillance cameras and for a lack of accountability, among other things. The report said the 2007 rankings show an increasing trend among governments to collect data on the communications, geographic and financial records of all their citizens.
"This leads to the conclusion that all citizens, regardless of legal status, are under suspicion." Ian Kerr, Canada research chair in ethics, law and technology at the University of Ottawa law faculty, says concerns about the erosion of privacy increased with the development of computer systems and data banks.
However, in the interest of state security, events such as 9/11 can prompt the information in such data banks to be accessed and used for purposes other than that for which it was collected.
"It's definitely true that we're living in what is now thought of as a risk-based society, where we order the structure of our society around risks, and therefore the dominant rhetoric is one in which it's often said that security needs to trump privacy," says Kerr.
Currently, the Canadian government is looking at new laws to ratify the European Convention on Cybercrime which might jepoardize privacy, says Kerr.
One of the laws "that is very likely to be proposed" would mandate that all telecommunications service providers build an intercept capability or a "back door" into their technologies in order to increase law enforcement's ability to gather information in an investigation, he says.
This would, under certain circumstances, enable the police to intercept Internet communications. Such legislation would also give the police the power to order Internet service providers to hand over an individual's name and address without a court order.
New copyright legislation is also currently being looked at by the government. One proposal possibly being considered, says Kerr, would give protection to "copy technologies" that companies use to prevent their product from being copied, but wouldn't include any built-in privacy protections.
"If they move forward with that kind of an approach it would lead to another kind of erosion of privacy laws."
Privacy International, which calls privacy a human right, says technological advances and the globalization of information among other things have had the effect of creating "surveillance societies that nurture hostile environments for privacy."
"There's no doubt that there's all sorts of monitoring going on," says Kerr. "There's all sorts of ways of gathering information and at the moment the law is unclear as to what's legal and illegal so you can imagine that private sector corporations would push it to the limit."
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