(Ottawa) Instant access to mobile device cameras and microphones, photos, videos, text messages, calendar entries, financial documents: the RCMP has been using spyware for more than five years to give it access to this data for people the subject of investigations.
The federal police have just quietly revealed that they use these methods – and that they do so without consulting the Privacy Commissioner of Canada first.
Created in 2016, the program is managed by the Secret Access and Interception Team (EASI) of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
This division is equipped with “on-device investigation tools”. Installed on “a targeted computing device”, these tools allow “the collection of electronic evidence from the […] secretly and remotely, ”explained in documents tabled in the House of Commons before the adjournment, and whose existence was first reported by the web media Politico.
Make no mistake: an “on-device forensics tool” is spyware.
“I am not surprised to learn that Canadian intelligence agencies are using malicious software [spyware] to hack devices. I would have been more surprised otherwise,” comments Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs in Toronto.
What is imperative, according to him, is to obtain more transparency from the RCMP on the suppliers of these technologies.
“It is in the public interest to know who agencies are doing business with. Why ? Because there are companies, like the NSO Group, which are associated with some of the worst human rights regimes in the world, which use software to track dissidents, journalists, lawyers, members of civil society – including here in Canada,” he explains.
The NSO Group developed the Pegasus spyware, which has been used for exactly these purposes in several countries around the world.
According to the documents provided to elected officials – they were prepared in response to questions from a curator – the data that can be collected includes text messages, emails and private communications sent or received through the targeted device; photographs, videos and audio files stored on or accessible by the device; as well as notes and calendar entries.
“Serious individual and collective risks”
The RCMP did not respond to questions from The PressTuesday, even though she had been approached by Politico for the same reasons almost a week ago.
Impossible, therefore, to know which software is in its toolbox, or if there is more than one.
A silence that the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) expected.
But what she perhaps criticizes above all else is that the RCMP carried out its operations using these “extremely invasive” tools, in the absence of “any form of public debate or of consultation”, and without seeing fit to seek the advice of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
“He must be consulted and given the opportunity to provide recommendations before such tools are deployed, before a potential invasion of privacy occurs,” said Brenda McPhail, director of the technology program and CCLA Privacy Watchdog.
In the documents, the RCMP acknowledges that it “did not communicate with our Office” prior to the implementation of the program in 2016, but that in 2021 it “began to write an assessment of the factors relating to the privacy”, and that she is awaiting feedback as part of this drafting process.
The federal police also note that the tools and techniques of the EASI “are not used to carry out mass surveillance” and that their use is “targeted and limited” for “serious criminal and national security investigations […] only after obtaining judicial authorization.
However, there is nothing reassuring about that, says the CCLA.
People who are even remotely informed about these tools know that they pose serious risks for those under surveillance, but also for our society more broadly, because they alter the balance of power between the police and the citizens, who have the right to be presumed innocent.
Brenda McPhail, Director of CCLA’s Privacy Technology and Monitoring Program
The office of the new Privacy Commissioner, Philippe Dufresne, points out that “the use of this type of technology raises important privacy considerations”.
And we “await” the federal police to explain “how this technology will be used, as well as the measures the RCMP plans to take to ensure that its use remains in compliance with the Privacy Act wrote spokesperson Vito Pilieci.
The government is reassuring, the opposition is worried
“These tools are used extremely rarely,” insists the office of the Minister of Public Security, Marco Mendicino.
PHOTO PATRICK DOYLE, THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVES
Marco Mendicino, Minister of Public Security
However, the government expects “the RCMP to work with all relevant Agents of Parliament to ensure that they meet their obligations to Canadians with respect to on-device investigative tools and other technologies of this gender,” noted Alexander Cohen, director of communications.
Precisely: among the Conservatives, MP Pierre Paul-Hus says he is “extremely concerned by the fact that the RCMP is using new investigative powers without consulting either the Privacy Commissioner or parliamentarians”.
PHOTO SEAN KILPATRICK, THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVES
Pierre Paul-Hus, Conservative MP
And these revelations, he added, only raise further questions: “What kinds of investigations are being conducted with this power, and why doesn’t the Privacy Commissioner have any?” was he not informed? »
In the NDP camp, MP Alistair MacGregor affirms that this justifies “the need to ensure better control of what is happening within the RCMP”, which has the “bad habit” of acknowledging the facts after the fact. .
The Bloc Québécois declined to comment on the matter.
While it is not ‘illegitimate’ for the RCMP and other intelligence agencies to deploy such investigative methods, the government must stop ‘sleeping on the gas’ and rein in the surveillance industry, insists Ronald Deibert from Citizen Lab.
