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For interested researchers, here is the City of Vancouver’s Privacy Impact Assessment for its Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) surveillance camera systems, written in 2009. And here’s the City’s CCTV policy guidelines, active as of 2012, but written in 2005. I obtained these through freedom of information requests. For more background on these documents and the contradictions they expose, see my article in Vancouver’s Georgia Straight, which also discusses the 2009 report to Vancouver Council about the CCTV project.

It’s an odd coincidence that secret surveillance by a relative with a nanny cam and a subsequent coroners investigation helped reveal an exemplary case of the mind-boggling lack of standards operating in BC seniors care facilities — a topic that came up in my interview with BC Ombudsperson Kim Carter about her recent mammoth investigation into seniors care in BC. An odd coincidence, I say, because at the same time I’ve been investigating much more dubious surveillance operations by public bodies, like Vancouver’s misleading portrayals to the privacy commissioner of its downtown CCTV systems. There are some other odd overlaps. As I explored last month, the draconian BC Mental Health Act is being used increasingly to forcibly tranquillize seniors. These Ministry of Health statistics show 30-50% increases across the board in British Columbia, and in seniors in certain populated areas a doubling, of the use of involuntary treatment provisions since 2002. And many people who’ve been hit with a psychiatric label are being tracked increasingly through surveillance systems, as I wrote about a couple months ago in my article on automatic licence plate recognition. Of course, there’s no reason to put all this together and get paranoid. Right?

After eleven months of asking for “all documents of all types” about their Automatic Licence Plate Recognition vehicle surveilliance program, and four months with my complaint in process with the federal Information Commissioner, this week the RCMP Access to Information and Privacy staff finally sent me documents!!!

A handful of documents that is… Well, the RCMP had managed to get my request limited to a small number of requests for specific documents. And here’s what I finally got:

• A copy of a report about ALPR written by several professors and already available on the internet.
• Several letters to and from the federal Privacy Commissioner’s office, which the Privacy Commissioner’s office gave to me two months ago.
• A 2-page “terms and conditions” document for use of ALPR which RCMP staff had already given me four months ago.
• One redacted print-out of one ALPR database record, along with a statement that to get the rest of the data records from Victoria alone would cost me $8,660 in search fees.

That’s it. That’s all.

And to top it off, according to RCMP Access to Information staff, do you know how many emails about ALPR have been sent to or received by Sgt. Warren Nelson, the head of the ALPR program in BC, over the last 7 years as the program has expanded from a few cars to 42 cars? ZERO.

That’s right. Apparently, Nelson hasn’t even written those emails about ALPR to me that I seem to have copies of. Or else, RCMP ATIP staff have determined that emails to journalists are not public information…

And guess how many meetings the RCMP have had at which ALPR was discussed in the past seven years? You guessed it: ZERO. Or else, they’ve simply never taken any minutes, even once.

Finally, there is, according to the RCMP, no up-to-date operational manual for the RCMP’s ALPR ...

My article last month on police automatic licence plate recognition programs in BC has been read online by over 17,000 people after being featured in slashdot and elsewhere. This month I follow up with an article that recaps what happened at the Reboot Privacy and Security Conference when my co-researcher Christopher Parsons sat on a panel with Victoria Chief of Police Jamie Graham, and then I went to ask Graham a question and… It also recounts our stunning new findings: What the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada really said about the program. Indeed, you can read the full text of the OPC’s letters to the RCMP about the ALPR program yourself right here.

My new educational video.

Climate scientist Andrew Weaver is fond of (rightly) lambasting the media for generally poor coverage of climate science. For the coverage of his most recent report about the oil sands, though, he has only himself to blame. I had to spend two hours studying and engaging in a back and forth with his co-author Neil Swart to figure out the real facts behind Weaver’s own sensationalist and misleading public claims about his findings.

Let’s get one thing straight, first: Climate change is clearly occurring, and Andrew Weaver is a better climate scientist than I am. He’s also a lot more famous. However, Weaver keeps wading with his opinions into areas of communications, media and politics where, in my estimation, he’s consistently doing a bad job. This latest media storm he’s caused is a perfect example.

Here’s the headline from Weaver’s own February 21, 2012 article on Huffington post: “My New Study: Coal is 1500 Times Worse for the Environment than Oil Sands“. I probably don’t need to tell very many people how much international airplay this has gotten. ‘Gosh, if that’s true, the oil sands suddenly seem squeaky clean!’ Guess who’s loving and promoting that message?

Just a few problems with Weaver’s “science” and “facts” here.

The report he wrote with student Neil Swart, which Swart was kind enough to forward to me in its entirety along with supplemental analyses they’d done, actually only focuses on carbon emissions, not “environment” impacts — they admit that themselves right up front in the report. “It is important to recognize that our estimates do not include greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide and do not address other potentially deleterious environmental, health and social side effects of oil-sand production.” So that means, Weaver has included that word “environment” in his Huffington blog headline merely for sensationalist ...

Read about the Tories incredibly stupid, fascistically dangerous legislation all over the place today, but here’s one to start with, I liked the title, calling it a “creepy valentine from Vic Toews”  http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/02/14/lawful-access-a-creepy-valentine-from-vic-toews/

Here’s a petition to sign against it:

http://openmedia.ca/StopSpying

My article “Hidden Surveillance”, which investigates the RCMP and Victoria Police Department’s Automatic Licence Plate Recognition (ALPR) program, has been released in the February issue of Focus magazine and is now available online here. My thanks to Kevin McArthur of Stormtide and Unrest.ca, Christopher Parsons, along with Kris Constable of PrivaSecTech and everyone at IdeasMeetings for their help, interest, perspectives and encouragement along the way. As a supplement to the article, below are documents attained so far from my provincial Freedom of Information and federal Access to Information requests. (In the U.K., such programs are often called Automatic Number Plate Recognition, or ANPR.)

The RCMP Privacy Impact Assessment (October 2009) for its Automatic Licence Plate Recognition program. (A new PIA is apparently at the draft stage as of January 2012).

Victoria Police Department correspondence and other records on its ALPR program: Pages 1-31. Pages 32-55. Pages 56-101.

The 2011 Letter of Agreement, Terms and Conditions for ALPR use between the RCMP and other police agencies (two pages).

A one-page spreadsheet from the RCMP summarizing police actions taken in response to ALPR hits throughout BC from 2007-2011.

For serious researchers, here are the detailed ALPR hit logs from the Victoria Police Department: June-July 2010. July-October 2010. November-December 2010. January-February 2011. February-May 2011. May-September 2011.

My heartfelt congratulations to the BC Civil Liberties Association for finally updating their mental health policy after 30 years!

I’ve criticized them publicly in the past for their lack of activism on the civil rights of patients, and I want to be the first one to congratulate them now. Here’s the position, written by member of the BCCLA board Dr. Muriel Groves and apparently adopted by BCCLA February, 2011, though not posted on their website until this week:
http://www.bccla.org/positions/patients/12BC-Mental-Health-System.pdf

I wish they’d reviewed the Yukon’s mental health legislation as a comparison instead of Ontario’s, because the Yukon’s is even better, but this position strikes at most of the key issues: BC needs laws that more clearly articulate when you can and cannot be stripped of your rights, and allow you to refuse psychosurgery (like lobotomies), write an Advance Directive, designate a substitute decision maker, and accept incarceration without forced drugging if you so desire.

How can you put your savings into environmentally and socially responsible companies in Victoria? I’ve been helping organize a community investment forum to discuss exactly that issue. You can read my article about it here, or come on out to the event!

I now have a Blog separate from my published Articles. Many thanks to Paul Cooper of Blink Design and Web Services for putting together this new functionality and look. (I’ve already started mucking around with it just for my own fun, though, so don’t blame him for any bad stuff you run across!)

I’ve seen two types of judges while covering courts. Which one bore judgment on the recent teachers’ strike?

One judge checks her ego outside the courtroom. She puts all her energy into absorbing affidavits, thoughtfully probing lawyers and clients, meticulously weighing evidence, and rendering judgments sensitively and creatively. If challenged in her authority, she politely explains she’s only trying to help resolve the conflict.

An experienced judge of this type is impressive to witness.

The other judge’s robes are puffed up with self-importance, and his overpowering sense of moral rectitude make him curt and dismissive of complex arguments. He shows disdain for anything particularly time-consuming, and delivers decisions packaged inside paternalistic lectures and salted with insults. If challenged, he menacingly warns about maintaining “respect for the court”.

During the strike, I for one saw too much of that second judge.

Though the government had simply invented a law declaring the teachers’ strike illegal, for example, many people instantly launched into insulting tirades. The next day “respect for the law” became the dominant public refrain, as if the huffy phrase had some universally-trumping moral rank, like a meta-political gavel hammering the final sentence.

“The law is the very foundation of a civil society,” our Premier proclaimed.

“The very day the union respects the court and returns to work, we will sit down and talk,” insisted Labour Minister Mike de Jong. Ad nauseam.

A lawyer’s op-ed, even while criticizing government, stated “rule of law is critical to a democratic society; without law, there would be anarchy.”

One letter-writer among many affirmed “respect for the law as the fundamental principle of democracy”.

And the presiding judge, stripping the now “outlaw” teachers of many of their basic rights to control their own money or even communicate with each other, parroted this view: “Each and every one of us derives the security and freedom which ...