Michael and David are all over this – but its an important enough issue that I want to mention it as well. Public Safety Canada and Industry Canada have begun a consultation on how law enforcement and national security agencies can gain lawful access to customers’ information. In other words, they want to make is easier for law enforcement to get our phone and Internet records without court orders.

While we should not impede what is necessary to fight crime, carte blanch access to our personal info makes it far too intrusive from a privacy perspective. Michael points out that until this consultation process became publicly known, it was just going to be with a few selected participants. Not a great way to instill public confidence in either the consultation process or the overall fairness of the result.

This issue never really goes away – see “lawful access” in my tag cloud for earlier posts.

Read Michael Geist’s original and second comment

Read David Fraser’s comment

UPDATE: David has posted a good article detailing the background behind this issue