The Canadian government has taken a step limiting privacy and requiring monitoring by ISP's in Canada without judicial intervention.  As noted here and here, the Canadian government has proposed legislaiton entitled Investigative Powers for the 21st Century (IP21C) Act.  The IP21C aims to mandate Canadian ISPs to implement monotoring capabilities of its subscribers, force Canadian ISPs to disclose subscriber's PII, such as names, addresses, and the like, and it grants the police much broader powers in obtaining transmission data while requiring ISPs to preserve the data.

Michael Geist, one of my favorite technology law bloggers has posted comments and summarized the bill here.  What is interesting, is now that governments are enacting more and more data privacy, preservation, access, and related information, it is going to prevent companies such as Google, or really any ISP that has offices in multiple locations from compiling their data sets across the entire spectrum.  The EU has required that Google, MSN, Yahoo, and others restrict the amount of time that the preserve data without anonymizing it, and in general preserving that data as a whole.  However, it appears that IP21C may require ISPs to maintain data, in its identifiable form much longer than a lot of countries laws would allow or require.  Now, we realize that more than likely the legislation will require a police notice indicating the required preservation, but without court intervention being required, and really without final legislation proposals being granted public access, it appears impossible to determine the scope which this new law might take.

One thing is for certain, the benevolent brother might not be so benevolent.

TrackBack URI for this entry

0 Comments

Show/Hide comments