Showing posts with label Government. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Government. Show all posts
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Canada's No-Fly list could be linked to biometrics
Canada new “no-fly” list, to be known as “Passenger Protect”, takes effect on June 18th and according to an Ottawa Citizen report, the federal transport minister isn’t ruling out linking the names to biometric data in the long term. The Canadian no-fly list will have hundreds of names, rather than the tens of thousands on the U.S. list. Names will be added to the list based on information supplied by CSIS and the RCMP.In an earlier post, I wrote about the risks associated with biometrics and DNA-enabled travel documents, data security and the potential impact on individual privacy. The first steps toward collecting biometric data are already underway in both the U.S. and Canada:
Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart has spoken out against the no-fly list, along with other privacy advocates such as Pippa Lawson, director of CIPPIC. Citizens could be the subject of mistaken identity and personal information collected by governments could make citizens vulnerable when traveling abroad or if their information is stolen or abused. The potential for abuse was highlighted at the Air India inquiry, where a Transport Minister acknowledged that the no-fly list could be shared with foreign governments.The United States already scans the fingerprints of foreign visitors entering the country and stores the information in a database. Visitors from Canada and some countries are excluded from the program.
Meanwhile, Transport Canada has bulked up security at airports by issuing biometric ID cards to staff who work in "restricted areas."
While airlines could be fined up to $25,000 if they disclose personal information about individuals on the list, there appear to be little safeguards provided to prevent foreign governments from using or abusing this information. Passengers who feel they have been mistakenly placed on the no-fly list can appeal to the Office of Reconsideration, but are not allowed to know why their name was originally placed on the list.
Canadians are entitled to strong and rigorous guarantees from their federal government about the uses and limits of the collection and dissemination of personal information. The implications of misuse and abuse are far too serious for anything less.
Saturday, June 9, 2007
More Local Reaction to the Arivaca Tower
A tip of the hat to Otto at Otto's Random Thoughts, who alerted me to Southwind Dancer, a blog by local Arivacans about the Arivaca Tower. Along with Arivaca AZ Online , this blog provides good insight to the issues facing residents living in the shadow of the Tower. The image at right is a copy of a poster from the Arivaca AZ Online site, which I hope they won't mind me reproducing here. Arivacans appear to be well-organized in their protest against this Department of Homeland Security pilot project (click the "Secure Border Initiative" label at the end of this entry to see all of my previous posts on this topic).As Otto is leaving Arivaca soon to take the post of Associate Professor of International and Comparative Politics at American University of Central Asia, I wanted to thank him for pointing me to these local resources and wish him all the very best in his exciting new role. I'll be continuing to follow developments on the Arivaca Tower in future posts.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Government Bans Facebook … but MySpace is still okay
Employees with the Ontario government who tried to log in to their Facebook accounts this morning were met with an “access denied” message. Even most members of parliament and cabinet ministers have been blocked from Facebook, which joins a list along with online gambling and porn sites. The ban took everyone by surprise, including Public Infrastructure Minister David Caplan, one of the few cabinet ministers with a Facebook page.The rationale for the ban was rather vague:
When even the Canadian Prime Minister has a page on Facebook, it obviously is considered an important way for politicians to get their message out. Any employer has the right to restrict the sites that employees access from employer networks and governments are accountable to taxpayers for ensuring that employees are productive on the job. Most public sector employers have policies in place which outline appropriate use of the Internet, and in many cases, employees are required to sign a document that goes into their permanent record."The staff determined it's not as directly related to the workplace as we'd like it to be so we're restricting access to it," Government Services Minister Gerry Phillips told the Toronto Star.
"Our IT (information technology) people are pretty broadly familiar with the marketplace and they said, `Here's a website that's going to be increasingly more popular for the OPS (Ontario public service). Is this an appropriate website to be spending time on?'" he said.
"It's the ministry making these decisions on trying to ... restrict access to ones that are inappropriate and then to anticipate where one may grow in popularity and we may end up with a lot of OPS time being taken (up) on it."
The vague rationale for this ban and the fact that other social networking sites, including MySpace, are still accessible to government employees and ministers does raise questions. One has to wonder if the Ontario government was really concerned about the amount of time that employees and elected officials were spending on Facebook or if they were actually more concerned about what information might be shared on a popular public forum.
Either way, it seems that it will become increasingly difficult for employers to stay on top of the many ways that employees can become distracted by online activities from the work they’re paid to do. In the meantime, I suspect many employees will move along to MySpace or other social networking sites … until the Ontario government denies access to those as well.
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