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3. CREATING NEW POLICE POWERS TO OBTAIN COMMUNICATIONS DATA

Without a warrant, police could make a “preservation demand” requiring telecommunications and Internet service providers to single out a customer and preserve for 90 days what Dwayne Winseck, a Carleton University communications professor who has studied the Internet for two decades, called “meta data.” So-called meta data is communications information generated during the creation, transmission or reception of a communication including the type, time, duration, origin, and destination of the communication. Police would then have to ask a judge for a “production order” to actually obtain the preserved information. Once police get the court order, they could, for example, find out who a person called on their cell phone, the duration of the call, and when the call was placed. Importantly, the proposed legislation excludes the actual content of the conversation. Once police have a copy of what they want, the service providers must destroy the information. The warantless provision is a welcome one, Mr. Stamatakis said, because it acts as a stop-gap measure while police work to obtain a warrant — a lengthy, labour-intensive process at times.

4. CUSTOMERS MAY NEVER KNOW IF, OR WHY, THEY WERE TARGETED

The proposed surveillance legislation says authorities could prohibit telecommunications and Internet service providers from telling a customer that he or she was the subject of information disclosures. The potential cumulative effect of all this legislation, said Mr. Geist, is self-censorship: “What we’re creating is nothing like the Chinese firewall … but I think it could have a chilling effect in terms of people’s willingness to express themselves online, even if they’re not doing anything illegal.”