Let Me Tell You Why
Someone blows up a bus or a building or a bunch of people, and then everywhere, every time, a universal, almost archetypal cry goes up asking, “Why? Why?! How could anyone do such a thing? What kind of a person would do this? Why?!” And the question is always repeated everywhere in the media, too, even as they splash the blood and guts across every screen and page: “Why?!”
And it’s an understandable question. You might ask it yourself sometime.
When soldiers in airplanes blast your neighbourhood into the stone age and everyone you know and love is mangled or killed, you might ask, “Why?”
When your child is caught under the
City of Vancouver CCTV Policy Documents
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 of Vancouver REM CCTV Policy, 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.
RCMP: We’ve Never Spoken about Our ALPR Program
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
What the Privacy Commissioner Really Said
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.
RCMP & VicPD ALPR Documents Released
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
Is the Rule of Law Even Necessary?
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