CTV Publishes Misleading Video Report on Bill C-22

Mainstream media has been a bit more careful with Bill C-22, but a CTV report ended up being misleading for viewers.

Bill C-22, Canada’s Lawful Access bill, is the latest terrible internet bill being considered by the Canadian government. It basically sets up a warrantless wiretapping system with the fig leaf that it’s only about “metadata”. This despite the reality that the “metadata” can often be more revealing than the contents of the message themselves – something the Canadian government is trying to pretend “strikes the right balance” with privacy and security. The reality is that this does no such thing and, in the process, requires all companies to retain logs of all of their users activity while breaking their encryption in the process among other things.

Throughout all of this, I’ve been monitoring how the mainstream media reports on all of this. For broadcasters, the media has been largely refusing to talk about this at all based on what I’ve seen. Online publications, however, have been not that bad. The media companies aren’t exactly pushing messaging to say the bill is great and wonderful. This is unlike the potential age verification legislation for both social media and AI, the Online Streaming Act, the Online News Act, and the Digital Services Act which saw the mainstream media trying to sell all three bills and act as propaganda outlets for the government in the process. Something that has immensely frustrated me for reasons that should be obvious. While the lack of talking about it from a broadcasters perspective is a bit annoying – especially when they are talking endlessly about the non-story of the dead on arrival Alberta referendum on separation which has a snowballs chance in hell of ever passing even the simple majority test of the referendum on the referendum. All this does is make the Alberta premier extremely unpopular thanks to her knack of pissing pretty much everyone off.

Anyway, there hasn’t been a particularly huge reason to go after the mainstream media directly on Lawful Access since they aren’t actively pushing false messaging like other bills out there. So, I’ve mostly left well enough alone on that front. That was until today when I learned of a CTV report that was extremely misleading on the facts. You can see the report here. It’s a short video, but in a nutshell, the report says that Bill C-22 would force “tech giants” to “update their systems” to help law enforcement to help police and CSIS in their investigations and access digital evidence. It does acknowledge that there is outcry from those companies (which there is for very obvious reasons).

This is probably as close to being a false statement as you can get without actually technically being false. That is to say, this is extremely misleading. What Bill C-22 is asking these companies to do is, among other things, break their encryption and collect and store personal information for a year regardless of whether or not the person in question is suspected of committing a crime. That is by no means an “update”. An update is finding out about a zero day vulnerability that needs to be patched and adjusting the code to close that zero day flaw with said patch. That is an update. What is being asked is a complete overhaul of what the digital services (not just the tech giants) to weaken their security. This is exactly why VPN services are threatening to leave the country altogether or saying that they won’t comply with the law if passed. They know the government is demanding that they should neuter the effectiveness of their services which is obviously a nonstarter for them.

In addition, “digital evidence” implies that a crime was already committed and that police are simply retrieving what they can from the scene of the crime. This is not what Bill C-22 is asking. If a crime is being committed, there are already systems in place to assist police with their investigations. Large tech companies respond to requests from law enforcement to decrypt things like a persons smart phone. Apple, for instance, already provides such services in multiple jurisdictions. If a warrant is out there, then that cell phone information gets handed over to help police solve a crime.

What Bill C-22 is demanding is what is referred to as “dragnet surveillance”. That is a system where everything is collected regardless of suspicion of a crime. Then, that information gets collected and stored in massive data storage systems that could open the company up to hacking since this would be considered hugely valuable to black hat hackers everywhere. Even worse, Bill C-22 removes requirements for judicial oversight – namely removing the requirement of getting a warrant first before collecting that data on individuals. This opens up a huge can of worms because not all law enforcement have the best of intentions when getting information. It’s precisely this why we even have judicial oversight in the first place. If an officer wants to start gathering personal information on an ex-girlfriend, that officer better have a very convincing case to make before a judge first before getting that information – even in that scenario, a different officer can take over said investigation in the first place given the potential conflict of interest.

Over top of this, what I take issue with in this report is the fact that the reporter effectively makes light on what is being asked of the companies in question. This gives people with less knowledge on this matter reason to falsely think that the tech companies are just being lazy and uncooperative. That is absolutely not what is happening here.

While it is easy to assume that this report was done out of malice, what I personally think that what is happening here is that CTV reporters involved let the “dumb it down” mentality to run amok. In that lens, it is easy to see how this story got reduced down to this misleading and inaccurate state. So, I can see a thought process of “well, people won’t understand what encryption is, so let’s just say “systems”. People also won’t understand the concept of “data retention”, so let’s just say that the laws asks for an “update”. In addition, people won’t understand what “metadata” is, so let’s just say “digital evidence”. So, let’s just say it is about asking tech companies to update their systems to help police gather digital evidence.” Since there isn’t anyone apparently working at CTV who understands technology, no one was present to point out why that is not an accurate assessment of the story and just ran with it.

Knowing how internal thought processes end up working sometimes within a news room, I’m also willing to bet that if they find out how bad their report is, their response might also be, “well, it’s out there. Sure, it’s probably wrong, but who cares? It’s out there now, so let’s just move on to the next thing.” This mentality drove me nuts and is one of the contributing factors for me to leave the mainstream media in the first place. Arguments for quality reporting is met with indifferent shrugs from reporters who consider quality an afterthought/talking point rather than something to strive for.

At any rate, CTV deserves to get slapped up the back of the head for that bad report. I’ve said it a million times, but if mainstream media keeps wondering why people don’t trust them, well, it’s moments like this that contribute to that distrust.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.