Social Policy in Ontario

Canadians have right to online anonymity, Supreme Court rules

Posted on June 13, 2014 in Governance Policy Context

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TheGlobeandMail.com – News/National
Jun. 13 2014.   Sean Fine – Justice Writer

Anonymity is key to Canadians’ right to privacy on the Internet, and as a general rule police are not permitted to disrupt that anonymity by asking Internet companies for information on their consumers without a judge’s authorization, the Supreme Court said in a ruling Friday.

“Anonymity is an important safeguard for privacy interests online,” Justice Thomas Cromwell wrote for a unanimous court.

At issue was whether Canadians have a reasonable expectation of privacy over their “IP address” — a unique number attached to any computer that uses the Internet. If they do, police would need a warrant if, as in this case, they were trying to find someone they believe is sharing images of child pornography online.

Police agencies across the country are watching the case closely. It has implications for the ability of police to probe the Internet for the purpose of fighting crime and terrorism — and for the courts, which some say could be inundated with police requests for warrants if the Supreme Court insists they are necessary. The government says IP addresses are no more revealing than a phone number; civil liberties groups say they are a key that can unlock people’s private uses of the Internet.

Matthew David Spencer of Saskatchewan was charged in the summer of 2007 with possessing child pornography and making it available to others through the file-sharing network known as LimeWire. A Saskatoon police detective found his publicly available child pornography using software easily available to anyone. The detective asked Shaw Communications for the IP address. Shaw identified Mr. Spencer’s sister as the consumer holding the contract, and gave her street address. Saskatoon police then obtained a search warrant which led to Mr. Spencer’s arrest.

The Canadian government argued there is no such expectation of privacy, partly because police can’t force Internet companies to turn over the IP address of a suspect — compliance is voluntary — and partly because agreements between those companies and people who sign up with them allow the companies to turn over IP addresses to the police, without a warrant.

“There is no objective reason to think that an Internet Service Provider must keep such basic information as an address and a name private, let alone shield it from a child pornography investigator,” the government argued, in a brief filed with the court.

The federal government’s Director of Public Prosecutions said that the police were not engaged in any form of electronic surveillance. “The information they received, the name and address of an Internet service subscriber and the location where the Internet had been accessed at one moment in time, was a clue towards identifying an unknown suspect.”

The Ontario Attorney General argued that privacy protection does not start when police are seeking an IP address. “An individual retains protection for intimate details at the point at which police seek to access those details.” It said police make similar requests without a warrant to banks in cases of money laundering, car rental companies in cases of fraud and cell-phone companies in cases of murder, for such information as account numbers, phone numbers and street addresses.

Civil liberties groups and the Privacy Commissioner of Canada intervened in the case, calling it critical to the protection of Canadians’ right to use the Internet without government snooping around without a warrant. “This is a watershed moment for the right to privacy,” the Criminal Lawyers Association said in a brief to the court.

“An Internet Service Provider’s records of its IP address assignments are like a cipher key that unlocks Internet privacy by linking individual subscribers to particular IP addresses on specific occasions. Someone armed with this information can easily learn details of a person’s activities on the Internet, which can be extremely revealing.” They said the police should be required to obtain a warrant from a judge before seeking an IP address.

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Tags: crime prevention, featured, ideology, rights

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