The RCMP has been lobbying the government behind the scenes for increased surveillance powers on the faulty premise that their investigative powers are lagging behind those foreign police services.

The centrepiece of the RCMP’s pitch is captured in an infographic that purports to show foreign governments are legislating powers that are more responsive to investigative challenges posed by the digital world. On the basis of this comparison, the RCMP appears to have convinced the federal government to transform a process intended to curb the excesses of Bill C-51 into one dominated by proposals for additional surveillance powers.

The RCMP’s lobbying effort misleadingly leaves an impression that Canadian law enforcement efforts are being confounded by digital activities.

For example, in its comparative sample (which includes Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States) Canada is presented as the sole country lacking a legal obligation compelling Internet companies to design their services around state surveillance requirements.

In fact, Canada already imposes this obligation on mobile service providers in spectrum licenses. Furthermore, communications providers demonstrated to the government in 2013 that their networks are generally becoming intercept-ready even in the absence of a legal obligation to do so.

The RCMP also misrepresents the legality of foreign surveillance powers. For example, a proposal to require the retention of communication interaction data is presented as “under discussion” in the U.K. In fact, this power has been found unconstitutional by the U.K. divisional court and is currently on appeal to the EU’s highest court, which has already struck down its predecessor legislation.

Also absent from the RCMP’s lobbying efforts is a reference to the preservation powers it received in 2015, by which it can compel any communications provider to keep certain data on an “on demand” basis and could preclude any need for a data retention obligation once fully utilized.

In fact, the impact of recent comprehensive surveillance modernization initiatives (Bill C-13 and Bill C-51, adopted in 2014 and 2015, respectively) are generally absent from the discussion.

The RCMP presents privacy as an absolute right underpinning the several “digital roadblocks” claimed to obstruct its investigative activities. Yet privacy is never an absolute.

For example, the RCMP claims it only wishes to conduct surveillance of citizens engaged in criminal activity. Yet privacy-respective surveillance powers do not ban all access to data. Rather they create a capacity for state access to data associated with reasonable suspects of crime.

The RCMP’s proposal to bypass the courts — historic front line watchdogs of our policing agencies — in favour of direct police access to sensitive digital identifiers is reducible to a desire to save “time and paperwork.”

In other instances of online crime, particularly involving online abuse, the problem is often a misunderstanding of available investigative powers rather than a lack of such powers. Remedying these problems is achievable, but by allocating more resources to law enforcement and improving procedural mechanisms, not by wholesale privacy erosion.

In other contexts, RCMP lobbying efforts appear prepared to sacrifice general security and innovation for relatively marginal gains in surveillance capabilities. A call for extending interception obligations to new and emerging Internet services, for example, has been rejected in the United States because it constrains the ability of Internet services to innovate, while undermining the general integrity of communications networks by introducing security holes that can be exploited by anyone, including criminals, hackers, and foreign actors.

In the majority of instances to date, Canadian police appear to be generally achieving their interception objectives. Calls by other policing agencies — rightfully rejected by the RCMP — for undermining the general encryption protocols that protect the security of our online banking, our soon-to-be self-driving networked cars, our increasingly electronic voting, and our digital interactions with the government are equally disproportionate.

Collectively, the RCMP lobbying efforts paint an image of crisis where none exists. Surveillance capacities of other countries are overstated, while the formidable powers already available to Canadian agencies are disregarded.

Far from “going dark,” the amount of data available to policing agencies in Canada and abroad is at historic heights, making this truly the golden age of investigative surveillance.

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Against this backdrop, it has not yet been made clear why Canadians should sacrifice more privacy and digital security where protection of these objectives is increasingly critical to daily life.