When the RCMP were caught many years ago burning down a barn belonging to a family of Quebec separatists — after a judge refused to grant the force permission to wiretap their meeting — Pierre Trudeau shrugged off the incident.
If Mounties burning down barns was illegal, the prime minister said dismissively, perhaps he should make it legal for them to burn down barns. Mr. Trudeau had a sharp legal mind and so he surely understood the difference between something being illegal and something being wrong. Even if he was being deliberately provocative in public, privately Mr. Trudeau knew full well torching people’s property isn’t wrong strictly because it’s illegal. It is, of course, illegal because it is wrong.
That is a difference apparently lost on the Alberta government. The province is quietly putting together a database for police that is every bit as dangerous to citizens’ liberties as giving police the unwarranted right to destroy private property. The project is called, rather ominously, TALON — as in The Alberta Law Officers’ Network — and it will, according to the solicitor general’s department, allow police quick access to information about “persons of interest.” The trouble is, TALON is designed to keep track not just of Albertans’ criminal records, but also, according to the Calgary Herald, any “speculations, unproven allegations, investigation theories, details of 911 calls — virtually any record of a citizen’s contacts with the police” anywhere in the province. Any officer will be able to dial it up without a supervisor’s permission, warrant, or cause. It is, in other words, a record of any old thing that authorities consider worthwhile keeping track of that can be accessed at any time for any reason by any officer. That kind of police-state-style record keeping might be otherwise ruled unlawful because it is so plainly an unjust violation of citizens’ privacy. To get around that, the province appears to be prepared to simply make gross intrusions perfectly legitimate.
Canadians already tolerate a certain amount of monitoring of personal information by police in the name of fighting the bad guys. The Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC) keeps track of criminal records, pending charges, and lists any acquittals and discharges. Questions for the firearms registry go much deeper, including not only what guns a person owns, but also his or her financial circumstances, personal romantic relationships and any history with mental illness.
But databasing unproven allegations, 911 calls and “theories” appears to be new territory. The average citizen stopped by an officer can be compelled to volunteer a lot of information (notice that officers at drunk-driving checkpoints routinely ask you what you’ve been up to that evening) that could, quite conceivably, find its way into the database. And at least CPIC requires officers to furnish a valid reason for running someone’s name through a check. Not TALON.
And the more intelligence authorities compile on us, the more vulnerable we all are to having such confidential things read by people who have no right to see them, whether inside or outside government organizations. One Albertan health-care worker was recently caught repeatedly tapping into the medical file of her boyfriend’s ex-wife. In Ottawa, an employee with the Canada Revenue Agency a few years back was found digging around the financial affairs of women he met on the Internet. We know CPIC is accessed illegally hundreds of times a year. And MP Garry Breitkreuz has been trying for ages to get the RCMP to take seriously evidence that gun thieves are hacking into the firearms registry to research their targets. Concentrating any and all citizens’ interactions with police into a centralized, real-time database is, as useful as it may be for police, just this side of a very tenuous line of leaking it on the Internet.
Canada’s privacy commissioner has, in fact, been extremely strict with Internet firms like Google and Facebook who dare to record personal Internet habits of their users for purposes of marketing them products and services.
But according to Wayne Wood, a spokesman for Alberta’s privacy commissioner, there is no “mandatory requirement” for public bodies like the solicitor general’s office to consult with the commissioner about privacy concerns, and, the only material obligation the government has to a citizen with this kind of intelligence file is not to share it with third parties.
The province has requested input from the privacy commissioner on the TALON database, Mr. Wood says, but the “privacy impact assessment” that his office provides will, in the end, be non-binding on the government.
Albertans had better hope that they have less to fear from law enforcement agencies misusing their private data than they do from Mark Zuckerberg. The province has been discreetly building the TALON project for five years now, has committed $65-million to it, and is reportedly nearly finished building its “top-secret” headquarters, so it may not be inclined back off its plan regardless of what the privacy commissioner has to say.
The solicitor general’s office maintains this is all about fighting increasingly sophisticated organized crime networks, as if the problem with justice in this day and age has only to do with a paucity of glaringly unreliable hearsay and false accusations.
Already, authorities in Alberta have some pretty wide latitude to sidestep rights in their battle against the gang menace: the province’s Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods initiative, for instance, permits police to seize for 30 days any homes and businesses merely suspected of being used for illegal activities.
Of course, it’s all in the name of protecting Albertans. What terrible things might befall this province’s citizens if it weren’t for authorities legalizing these increasingly intrusive tactics, we are left to only imagine. That’s because, for some reason, the government never seems to tell us.
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/02/14/kevin-libin-alberta%E2%80%99s-dangerous-database/#ixzz0qR4N1nj5
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