Propaganda Video Released to Sell Warrantless Wiretapping Bill

A Canadian government official has released a propaganda video trying to sell warrantless wiretapping legislation.

The Canadian government wants to invade your privacy, peer into your daily life, and take a fun little look around like the creepers that they are. They wanted to do this in secrecy, somehow, but people like us just can’t stop talking about it. This infuriates the government because there’s no real defence of this legislation in the first place.

Now that there is considerable pushback for things like the retention of data and lowered thresholds for police to get a complete profile of your online activities, the government is seemingly admitting that people are opposed to this. In response, Public Safety Minister, Gary Anandasangaree, released a propaganda video trying to sell this legislation. The video itself riffs off of some of the “greatest hits” that have been used over the last two decades including how this legislation is oh so badly needed now and how the Canadian government is ending your privacy because they need to go after the bad guys. The video even goes so far as to suggest that this legislation is needed to stop carjackings and hate crime – as if to say that if they just passed this legislation, things like that would magically go away (spoiler alert: it won’t make a difference).

The hilarious part is the fact that the video argues that warrantless wiretapping won’t impact your privacy. This is about as believable as a peeping tom you just caught peering through your window saying that he was doing it just to ensure that you aren’t having a medical issue. This while arguing that the bill somehow ‘strikes the right balance’ between privacy and security. That balance, of course, being that they ended your personal privacy and police can spy on anyone they darn well please.

While the video implies that such a system will only be used to go after ‘the bad guys’, the reality is the fact that law enforcement can easily abuse this for their own personal reasons that go well beyond law enforcement. What’s stopping the police from getting wiretap records of their ex partners, for instance? Nothing. Before anyone says that this is merely a hypothetical, this very scenario played out in the US recently. From TechDirt:

The cops never change. Only the tech toys do.

That’s the upshot of this report from the Institute for Justice, which has been tracking what cops have been tracking now that they have always-on access to massive networks of security cameras, including Flock Safety’s controversial offerings, which also include automatic license plate readers (ALPR).

The proliferation of police surveillance has led to repeated abuse. One shockingly common form: police officers using ALPR camera networks to keep tabs on their romantic interests, including current partners, exes, and even strangers who unwittingly caught their eye in public.

An Institute for Justice review of media reports has identified at least 14 cases nationwide of officers allegedly abusing ALPR data this way, with the bulk of those incidents happening since 2024.

This is the same stuff that cops have been doing for years. Access to criminal databases, drivers license info, and anything else swept up by government entities has resulted in numerous cases of abuse.

A common thread that runs through most of these cases are the targets of this abusive surveillance, which are almost exclusively women. In some cases, officers are targeting random women to pursue as sexual conquests or, just as disturbingly, utilize a wealth of personal info to gain access to their online accounts for the sole purpose of obtaining sexually explicit content.

This is the very abuse that the Canadian government is setting up for police here in Canada. It’s not a hypothetical by any means, but rather, an obvious outcome out of all of this.

Michael Geist points the obvious out, the video will do nothing to save the public credibility of warrantless wiretapping:

With opposition to Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, mounting, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree has turned to social media with a video defending the bill as one that “respects Canadian privacy and Charter rights.” The video signals that the government has noticed the growing public concern. But the case against the bill, which I argued in committee testimony last week and in a series of earlier posts, raises at least four issues on which the government has not engaged: mandated metadata retention (which is ignored in its Charter Statement), a lower threshold for access to subscriber information that hurts privacy, security risks now alarming Canada’s closest allies, and an oversight architecture the oversight body itself says is incomplete.

The mandatory metadata retention obligation in the bill would compel providers to retain transmission data, including the date, time, duration, and type of communication, the identifiers of the devices involved, and information identifying device location, on virtually every Canadian for up to a year, without any individualized suspicion. As I set out in this post, the government’s own Charter Statement on the bill remarkably says nothing about this provision. That silence is striking given the Spencer and Bykovets decisions that recognize the informational privacy interest in data that links online activity to identity, and given that the Court of Justice of the European Union struck down precisely this kind of regime in Digital Rights Ireland and extended that reasoning to mandated private-sector retention in Tele2 Sverige. Robert Diab has reached the same conclusion on the Charter Statement’s silence on metadata retention. The refusal to address the most Charter-vulnerable element of its own bill leaves the government unable to credibly insist that the bill respects the Charter.

Further, claims that the bill respects privacy ring hollow in light of the reduced threshold for access to subscriber information. Bill C-22 creates a new, dedicated production order for subscriber information, but sets the standard at “reasonable grounds to suspect”. This is the lowest evidentiary threshold in Canadian criminal law and below the “reasonable grounds to believe” standard that has governed subscriber data production orders for more than a decade. Law enforcement has used the production order hundreds of thousands of times, yet now wants to reduce the standard, thereby undermining the privacy balance.

It’s unclear what the government hopes to accomplish with this video, but at the very least, it shows that the government is, in fact, feeling the heat. So, I’ll just invoke the grumpy cat meme as my response.

Ultimately, not listening to experts on this file is going to burn the Canadian government just like it has already burned them on the Digital Services Tax and continues to burn them with the Online News Act and Online Streaming Act. Maybe they’ll learn on the fourth time, maybe not. It’s entirely possible they’ll repeat history by battening down the hatches, demonize all who criticize their right and holy legislation, and ram this bill through the legislative process (something they are already doing). At that point, Canadians can get to the business of litigating this legislation into oblivion for the unconstitutional mess that it is. Ultimately, the choice is for the government: do they listen to Canadians on this or ignore them? The House of Commons part of the process will be the ultimate sign of which way they’ll go on this one.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.