Cybercrime Response

"I think we've been consistent in recognizing that we are very respectful of the charter and people's charter rights and nobody is recommending that we go any further. But there needs to be some sort of administrative access to basic subscriber information."
"[Children are] being hurt at a pace and a frequency that is alarming. Technology is fuelling that. So now these people can encrypt their communications and they can exploit children for sexual purposes and it's a little harder to get at them from a police point of view."
"Your safety, your family's safety, your financial integrity is at risk and so we need to start having the conversation now. Because fundamentally, ladies and gentlemen, it's hard to keep people safe on the Internet right now. The best advice we can give people is, 'Don't go [on the Internet], which is not really working', or if you go, be really, really, really careful'." 
"And if something bad happens, hopefully we'll be able to help you, but there's no guarantee."
"I'm all for warrantless access to subscriber info. If I had to get a judge on the phone every time I wanted to run a licence plate when I was doing my policing, there wouldn't have been much policing getting done.""
"In the information-management world where privacy now is driving a lot of the concerns around the state wheeling into a community's information, we're just simply not trusted, the police are not trusted to manage that information."
RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson

RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson, seen here at a security conference put on by the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries in Ottawa on Wednesday, says he advocates an administrative scheme that would give police ready access to a customer's name and address while respecting the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)

An Ottawa security and defence industry conference was the venue where RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson spoke of the explosion in Internet crime. He spoke as well of the handcuffing of police by laws that restrict online criminal investigations by police. In 2014 the [social activist] Supreme Court of Canada ruled that police require judicial authorization to enable them to take possession of subscriber data with links to online activities. We're speaking of such basics as an individual's name, telephone number and Internet Protocol address.

Law-enforcement agencies routinely submitted hundreds of thousands of warrantless requests for Internet data to Telecoms, and most voluntarily complied. Now, Telecoms, banks and rental companies among other service provideers demand to see court approval for all such requests from authorities during investigations seeking basic identifying information. Previous to the Supreme Court ruling the requested data was made available without demur. Now, unless a warrant is presented through an approach to a judge, nothing is available.

All of this understandably hampers police work, making it awkward, time-consuming, frustrating and close-to-impossible to obtain a warrant in any but the most egregious concerns. But while the police are hampered in this way Internet crime goes on unabated. According to Commissioner Paulson, criminals now livestream child sexual assaults to avoid leaving digital evidence on the web. Moreover, billions in criminal proceeds are laundered through the Internet by multinational criminal organizations for whom the Internet has become a way of action.

Bank frauds, identity theft, credit-card frauds, extortion, drug trafficking, whatever criminal activities that can be imagined, are conducted through the Internet. The Commissioner alluded to his time as an RCMP patrolman in Chilliwack, British Columbia. "I couldn't keep those people safe if I didn't know who they are, if they went about their business day in and day out with masks on, or driving vehicles with licence plates covered up, or leaving phone numbers that could never be looked up, or living in houses that didn't have addresses, on streets without names, I couldn't do the job of policing in that context."

And 'that context' is precisely what he compares the situation that investigators now face, hamstrung by privacy laws that are meant to protect people's privacy, and in so doing protect the profits of crime and the conduct of criminal offences victimizing the unaware. And when they're victimized, police are hampered in their ability to come to grips with the situation because the data they require is denied them unless they go through the time-consuming legal hoops required, producing a cold case.

What is rather droll about the entire situation is that we live in an Internet world, where the wide-open web is where people post all the details about their lives, accessible to anyone with the curiosity to look at what they write about themselves. This is also a world where people appear on popular television programs to tell all about their lives, irrespective of how badly it reflects upon them for revealing their values or lack of them.

But even though people must have a presence on Facebook and so many other social platforms to prove they exist and whatever occurs to them must be posted for others to see, the minute they are informed that authorities might wish for some benighted reason to acquire the fundamental information identifying them, screams that their civil and human rights are being violated resound from the rooftops.