Crazy Canucks

What’s not to love about Canada, eh? Amazing scenery, great food, Neil Young, its total ban on nude sunbathing – the list is nigh on endless.

So it came as a surprise last Friday to read about a Superior Court in Ontario ruling that Canadian police can now use Internet Protocol addresses to find the names of people online, without need of a search warrant.

Justice Lynne Leitch was ruling on a child pornography case in which Bell Canada released the IP address of a south-western Ontario man to police as part of a child sexual exploitation investigation without a warrant. Leitch apparently accepted the Crown’s argument that there is ‘no reasonable expectation of privacy’ in cyberspace and that an IP name and address are not ‘biographical information one expects would be kept private from the state.’

Whilst I support the need to prosecute suspected child sex perverts to the fullest extent of the law, Canadian civil libertarians are justified in being up-in-arms about the implications of Justice Leitch’s ruling. Everyone’s ten-digit IP address is the key to not only their online identity, but the entire history of where they’ve been on the web. Nature-lover that I am, you can be certain I’m never going to Google the words ‘Canada’ and ‘beaver’ ever again!

With a mass surveillance, ‘super database’ still apparently on the UK Government’s ‘To Do’ list this year, developments in Canada this past week unfortunately make me all the more pessimistic about privacy rights – both here and abroad.