Last year the Senate passed Bill C-51 into Canadian law despite opposition from hundreds of thousands of Canadians and the country’s top privacy experts (via Tom’s Hardware).
Close to 18 months after that historic moment, which broadened the authority of Canadian government agencies to easily share information about individuals and join other governments adopting similar laws requiring mandatory decryption and backdoors, Public Safety Canada has launched a “Green Paper” to prompt discussion and debate about Canada’s national security framework.
That framework would mandate companies to build some sort of backdoor to bypass end-to-end encryption (such as the one Facebook Messenger allegedly uses, or the Signal app often mentioned by Snowden) and much more.
In addition, the Canadian government is complaining about a storage problem: Some service providers don’t store records for long enough, and some companies, such as VPN providers, don’t keep logs and don’t even have servers in Canada, which means the Canadian government can’t request user data and force them to install backdoors. The government is seeking a way to require them to store customer data for a longer period of time.
If you didn’t made your voice heard a year ago, or did but saw the voice of hundreds of thousands of Canadians wasn’t enough for the Senate to hear, you can so it again by filing in a form on the Public Safety Canada’s website.
