The Huffington Post 13/07/2016 - Last year, when the Conservative government of Stephen Harper introduced Bill C-51, it didn't expect that Canadians would forcefully oppose it. Was it the "straw that broke the camel's back" effect, a sort of en masse cri de coeur, that clearly expressed the population fed up with the intrusive conservative policies and measures that have been gradually invading Canadians laws over the last decade? Regardless of the interpretation of this massive opposition to Bill C-51, the message was loud and clear: Canadians did not want more powers to be given to security intelligence forces, they didn't want to restrict their freedom of expression and dissent, they didn't want their information to be shared with 17 federal agencies, they didn't want Canadian judges to violate the Charter and allow intelligence officers enter their home or seize their laptops without a judicial warrant. It is worth mentioning that one of the polls conducted last April 2015 showed that 75 per cent of Canadian youth opposed Bill C-51 and that 77 per cent of Canadian who vote for the Liberal party opposed it as well. The Conservative government had a majority and ironically, with the help of the Liberals MPs who were on the opposition, Bill C-51 passed and became the Anti-Terrorism Act 2015.

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The Canadaland Commons 12/07/2016 - A number of Muslim men have reached out to Monia Mazigh after having CSIS show up unannounced at their homes or workplaces. The intelligence agency has been doing this for years and says the discussions are voluntary, but some people see them as intimidation techniques. Monia is the national coordinator for the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group. She joins Supriya and Vicky to talk about these CSIS visits, as well as the government's tabled legislation - Bill C-22 - that would create parliamentary oversight of national security agencies.

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The Toronto Star 10/07/2016 - An increasing lack of public trust, that invasive technologies will be used proportionately by security and law enforcement agencies, is attributed to an excessive attention to privacy rights, encouraged by privacy advocates. What we hear from concerned citizens, however, is not that they prioritize privacy over all else, not that they don't value security, and not that they don't appreciate the need for police to use new technologies to deal with new threats. Rather, they tell us, there is way too much secrecy and way too little accountability surrounding the ways these technologies are used. This is not an invention concocted by privacy advocates, such as CCLA; it's the result of an increasing disjunction between the stories people hear and their expectations of appropriate conduct in the name of public safety. For example, when the Communications Security Establishment used information from the free internet service at a major Canadian airport to track the wireless devices of thousands of ordinary airline passengers for days after they left the terminal, many Canadians felt intuitively it was intrusive and wondered if it was illegal. But it wasn't. That's the kind of situation that erodes the trust that is fundamentally necessary for the social license law enforcement needs to function effectively.

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In privacy victory, Microsoft wins appeal over foreign data warrant

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The Guardian 07/07/2016 - What did Bush say to Blair? The most intriguing parts of Chilcot's report are the private notes sent by Tony Blair to George W Bush in the run-up to war. One sent on 28 July 2002 reads: "I will be with you, whatever." The inquiry was set up to examine the UK's role in the Iraq war, not that of the US. We don't get Bush's replies or learn precisely what he thought of Blair's extraordinary, sometimes handwritten missives. There has been no comparable exercise in the US to the Chilcot inquiry, in which documents and evidence have been sifted in a dispassionate way. The US State Department said on Wednesday it wasn't interested in "re-litigating" the decisions that led to the Iraq war. (The department says its focus is on today's challenges in Iraq and Syria.) Plenty of books have been written on Iraq and the decision-making chain inside Bush's neocon White House, notably Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack. But some of the personal detail is still missing.

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Chilcot lets media off hook for selling Iraq war

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How the U.S. trains foreign soldiers and police with little oversight