Category Archives: Technology
Lawful Access, Its Potentials, and Its Lack of Necessity
Police and other authorities should not be permitted to infringe upon Canadians’ rights and further erode expectations of communicative privacy, associative privacy, or basic dignities on the basis of cross-jurisdictional envy. Continue reading
Mobile Security and the Economics of Ignorance
Commissioners and regulators must demand that device manufacturers either provide APIs that comply with Canadian law or change existing APIs in the face of prevalent privacy issues. Where neither of these conditions are met, OS vendors should be forced to suffer significant penalties. The only way to secure devices’ security and citizens’ privacy is to erode the economics of ignorance that application vendors and device manufacturers alike depend on to cheat Canadians out of their personal information. Continue reading
Towards Progressive Internet Policy in Canada
In this post I want to first perform a quick inventory of a few ‘key issues’ that ought to be weighing upon Canadian policy bodies with authority over the Internet. I then transition to focus on what CIRA could do to take up and address some of them. I focus on this organization in particular because they are in the process of electing new members to their board; putting votes behind the right candidates might force CIRA to assume leadership over key policy issues and alleviate harms experienced by Canadians. I’ll conclude by suggesting one candidate who clearly understands these issues and has plans to resolve them, as well as how you can generally get involved in the CIRA elections. Continue reading
Online Voting and Hostile Deployment Environments
Elections Canada cannot secure an online electoral process, and that process is too important to risk to the Internet. Paper voting is annoying. It’s not necessarily as convenient as using a smartphone to move your money around. It takes time. It’s also one of the very few political expectations/hopes that are put on Canadians every few years. It is not too much to mail in a vote, go to a polling station, or (quite reasonably) abstain from voting for political, personal, or other reasons. It is too much to expect that we would endanger the entire electoral process just to attract those who are already unwilling to take a half-hour of their time every few years to cast a ballot. Continue reading
