Canadian researchers explore privacy issues

By Douglas Powell

As electronic transactions and records become central to everything from commerce and tax records to health care and even basic research, new concerns arise for the security and privacy of networked information. These concerns, if not properly resolved, threaten to limit networking's full potential in terms of participation and usefulness, according to a US Office of Technology Assessment report, Information Security and Privacy in Network Environments, released in September. While a vigorous and public debate has developed in the United States, Canada has been relatively quiet, although the same issues challenge the Canadian research community.

However, the nascent electronic privacy debate in Canada has been kick-started by the formation of Electronic Frontiers Canada (EFC) and a recent conference that grappled with the sometimes competing interests of free speech and individual privacy.

Computer science professors David Jones of McMaster University and Jeffrey Shallit of the University of Waterloo formed EFC last January to protect Canadian rights and freedoms on the new electronic frontier. Richard Rosenberg of the University of British Columbia joined the Board of Directors in September.

In November, EFC and several other organizations brought together some of Canada's best-known pundits to weigh the issues and move the debate onto the larger public stage.

Computer users (noticeably more libertarian than the general public) clamor for complete freedom of communication, sometimes without recognizing the accompanying responsibilities, Shallit said. Others have legitimate worries about the new technology exacerbating society's existing inequities. A survey conducted in September of 2,648 Canadians found that the country increasingly is divided into the information haves and have-nots. Computer pornography is spreading and the potential for computer crime and terrorism is increasing. Worse, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, enacted in the Constitution Act of 1982, is conflicting with the Internet.

"Do we control the medium or does the medium control us?" Shallit asked. As noted in the OTA report, appropriate safeguards must account for--and anticipate--technical, institutional and social changes that increasingly shift responsibility for safeguarding information to the end users. Laws currently governing commercial transactions, data privacy and intellectual property largely were developed for a time when telegraphs, typewriters and mimeographs were the commonly used office technologies, and business was conducted with paper documents sent by mail. Technologies and business practices have changed dramatically, but the law has been slower to adapt.

Justice John Sopinka of the Supreme Court of Canada said at the conference the Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects freedom of expression. But he added that there is no specific protection for privacy, although the Supreme Court has hinted several times there should be. Further, the charter applies only to government action, not the private sector, which controls much of the information highway.

"The more that technology affords opportunities to reach wide audiences, the more society may come to resent any attempts to restrict free speech," Sopinka said. "It will not be easy searching for an appropriate middle ground."

Jay Weston, a professor of mass communications at Carleton University and a founder of the Ottawa Freenet, said that community networks nudge along the process of democratic self-representation, where more groups and individuals gain a public voice.

"Mass media is content-driven, where the Internet is relationship-driven," Weston said. He also aimed some barbs at the Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry and Education (CANARIE), which is establishing itself as the national electronic backbone. "CANARIE, as its name implied, assumed there were no people in Canada," he said.

But with more people on the Net, there are more opportunities for electronic tinkering. Henry Spencer, an independent consultant and author who worked for many years as a Unix systems programmer at the University of Toronto, said that although it is increasingly difficult for the government to monitor private conversations (through programs such as PGP--pretty good privacy), most electronic communications are not going to use it and remain exposed.

Spencer, whose system was the first Usenet site in Canada and the first outside the United States, said freedom of the press exists as long as the media does not make the government too angry. "The presumption of innocence is an area where organizations usually blow it," he said in reference to several cases where electronic messages were monitored or confiscated. "Your employer expects more control over you than governments, with a whole lot less in the way of due process."

That view was expanded by Canadian journalist Parker Barass Donham, who said universities, with newsgroup bannings and speech codes, "have become the most censorious institutions in our society." Repeatedly, the discussion returned to newsgroup bannings and other electronic restrictions imposed by university administrators.

Shallit noted the similarities between the banned discussion of details surrounding the Paul Teale and Karla Homolka murder trials and the 100-year-old murder of Reginald Birchall. Banned discussions of the Teale and Homolka trials were easily circumvented using the Internet newsgroups and then listserves. In the Birchall case, an entrepreneur installed a microphone above the judge's bench in the Woodstock, Ontario, courtroom, and the trial proceedings were relayed by telephone to his tavern, where patrons could listen in at the rate of 25 cents an hour.

"As we decide on what policies are best for the communications world of the future," Shallit said, "let us reflect seriously on the mistakes and successes of the past."

Ursula Franklin, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto where she taught in the Department of Metallurgy and Materials Science, proposed a public health model to regulate--in the same way cigarette smoking is regulated in public spaces--when and where potentially offensive material such as pornography could be viewed.

"The information age is an environment," Franklin said. "One that needs regulations and management, like the regular environment."

That suggestion brought a sharp rebuttal from several speakers. "Human expression is not the moral equivalent of smoking and toxic waste," Donham said.

For more information about Electronic Frontiers Canada, send E-mail to efc@graceland.uwaterloo.ca.

Douglas Powell is a graduate student at the University of Guelph in Ontario.