The RCMP keeps adding new information about its court-approved use of spyware on the wireless phones of criminal suspects, leading some members of Parliament frustrated enough to demand more documents from the force.<\/p>\n
On Monday, an RCMP official told the House of Commons ethics and privacy committee the force has been using what it calls on-device investigative tools (ODIT) to intercept and copy communications and data since before 2012.<\/p>\n
But earlier in the day the committee received a document from RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki saying that since 2017, ODITs were used in 32 investigations involving 49 devices.<\/p>\n
And that was a change from the RCMP\u2019s written reply to Parliament in June that ODITs were used in 10 instances between 2017 and 2018.<\/p>\n
Although Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino \u2014 who the RCMP reports to \u2014 insisted the force has never used Pegasus<\/a> or other spyware tools sold by the controversial Israeli firm NSO Group,<\/a> and the RCMP insists spyware \u2014 like wireline wiretaps \u2014 has never been used without a court order, committee members weren\u2019t satisfied with what they heard.<\/p>\n Nor were they happy to hear new federal Privacy Commissioner Phillippe Dufresne<\/a> testify that his office is still waiting to hear from the RCMP on its privacy impact analysis of its use of ODIT technology. That won\u2019t happen until the end of this month. Dufresne repeated<\/a> that his office only heard about the RCMP\u2019s use of spyware in June, with the force\u2019s written statement to Parliament. Mendicino said it was \u201cunfortunate\u201d the Privacy Commissioner\u2019s Office had to find out that way. He\u2019s since told the RCMP to work more closely with the office.<\/p>\n In fact, committee chair and Conservative MP Pat Kelly said Lucki\u2019s letter to the committee was \u201cdisappointing,\u201d adding said the lack of detail in the letter was \u201ctroubling.\u201d<\/p>\n One result was that Saskatchewan Conservative MP James Bezan introduced a motion \u2014 to be debated Tuesday \u2014 re-affirming the committee\u2019s demand for the RCMP to table more documentation on the kind of information submitted to judges for a court order to insert spyware into a suspect\u2019s wireless device. These documents would have to be vetted by the parliamentary law clerk for sensitive material and only viewed by the committee behind closed doors.<\/p>\n The hearing into device investigation tools used by the RCMP was sparked by the written response in June by the RCMP to a question asked in Parliament about government programs that gather data from Canadians. MPs were caught off guard<\/a> when the RCMP\u2019s part of the answer admitted the existence of a Covert Access and Intercept Team that, with a court order, placed spyware on suspects\u2019 mobile devices.<\/p>\n As Monday\u2019s hearing started, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said court authorizations come under Part VI of the Criminal Code<\/a> for intercepting communications that can\u2019t be gained through traditional wiretaps (see section 186). \u201cThis is only used under judicial authorization for the most serious offenses,\u201d he said. Respecting privacy, accountability and fundamental rights are paramount.<\/p>\n Mendicino said there are \u201crigorous steps\u201d the RCMP has to go through to get a court order from a superior court judge. \u201cit is not an easy thing to obtain,\u201d he said. A specific offense has to be alleged, he said, and there are only a limited number of offenses that a warrant for spyware can be applied to.<\/p>\n Mendicino also said other agencies that come under his department have also used spyware \u201cin or about 2017\u201d \u2014 although he referred to the RCMP for more detail.<\/p>\n When the RCMP\u2019s turn to testify came, Bryan Larkin, the force\u2019s deputy commissioner for specialized policing services, emphasized that applications for planting spyware had to be time-limited, and targeted against one person. It is never used for mass surveillance, he said.<\/p>\n One of the earliest use of spyware was to help catch Navy Sub-Lt. Jeffery Deslisle selling military secrets to Russia around 2012. Mark Flynn, RCMP assistant commissioner for federal policing, national security and protective policing, told the committee that media reports after Deslisle\u2019s arrest said that police had screenshots from his phone as evidence. Deslisile, a Halifax-based naval threat intelligence analyst, was sentenced in 2013 to 20 years in prison. He was granted full parole in 2019.<\/a><\/p>\n Asked by Alberta Conservative MP Damien Kurek about the \u201chesitancy\u201d of the RCMP to disclose documents to the parliamentary committee, and the fact that the Privacy Commissioner was only told by the RCMP of its use of ODITs after its June document to Parliament, Flynn suggested there were no secrets. He noted that the use of wireless interception technology had been discussed with the privacy commissioner\u2019s office and the Justice Department for 20 years. News articles have been published \u201cto bring more public visibility into what we are doing.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe are pulling back the veil,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are trying to do that in a way that\u2019s professional, respectful of the law around the protection of tools and techniques.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt seems like only after details have been revealed \u2014 and it is not limited to this circumstance \u2014 is the RCMP upfront about some of the details about their investigation,\u201d replied Kurek.<\/p>\n Sgt. Dave Cobey of the RCMP\u2019s technical case management program, said the 32 cases where spyware was approved since 2017 involved alleged murders, serious drug trafficking, and breaches of trust (one of which involved a police officer).<\/p>\n Not every RCMP request for the use of ODITs is approved by a screening process. Cobey said an annual report to Parliament says only one in 10 requests are approved and go before a judge for authorization.<\/p>\n The post RCMP: Spyware only used with court approval<\/a> first appeared on IT World Canada<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At a parliamentary committee hearing the force admits spyware has been used since b<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":20701,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,361,16],"tags":[391,402,415,396,611,393,606],"class_list":["post-26678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-government-public-sector","category-privacy","category-security","tag-di","tag-dotgov","tag-government-of-canada","tag-postmedia","tag-rcmp","tag-security-strategies","tag-spyware"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26678"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26735,"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26678\/revisions\/26735"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}