IoT to impose ‘incredible’ legal responsibility on telecoms: panel

OTTAWA — The proliferation of internet of things (IoT) devices will foist an extraordinary amount of legal responsibility on telecommunications companies in their encounters with law enforcement, who may compel them to hand over ever-increasing amounts of personal information in investigations, a communications’ lawyers conference heard Wednesday. “The tidal wave of information that is now preserved in relation to is insane to the point where it’s almost impossible to comprehend how much information is out there,” Scott Hutchison, a lawyer at Henein Hutchison LLP, said during a surveillance and cybersecurity panel on the second and final day of the International Institute of Communications (IIC) conference in Ottawa. Noting he’s worried about IoT and its capacity to give governments an eye into Canadians’ private lives “that exceeds anything that’s ever been in place before,” Hutchison said telecoms will now be saddled with a “significant obligation…to act as trusted custodians of that information” and when served with judicial orders to hand over data that is legally questionable, to challenge those. Both Rogers Communications Inc. and Telus Corp. have gone to court in the past asking for clarification on some production orders, known as “tower dump” orders — police request records from certain telecom towers at specific periods of time. For IoT, the data involved can include medical records from a device that automatically uploads and stores information about a patient and intimate devices that can determine what sorts of sexual activities a person likes, the conference heard. The comments followed national security Bill C-59, which was tabled in parliament in June and proposes to enhance the powers of the Communications Security Establishment (CSE). In particular, the panel looked at the “treasure trove” of data that will be produced from IoT, how that could be opened up to uses beyond the intended reason for gathering the data, and its security implications. Hutchison mentioned online crime Bill C-13, which was signed into law in 2014 under the previous Conservative government and which would make it easier for telecoms to voluntarily provide authorities with customers’ personal information. Telecom companies said following the bill’s assent that it would mean surveillance capabilities would become a normal feature on their networks. He noted that metadata, which can include information such as who is talking to whom and when, is available to law enforcement on a “reasonable grounds to suspect threshold, which is a remarkably low threshold.” All the information produced from connected devices leaves a footprint, which is of interest to law enforcement, Hutchison said. “Even those transmissions that don’t leave an immediate footprint can be subject to the collection by the police using various forms of judicial preauthorization,” he added. Catherine Beagan Flood, a lawyer at Blake, Cassels and Graydon and moderator of the panel, chimed in by noting that she’s heard from clients about the responsibility imposed on them when faced with an order that could include a judicial preauthorization to obtain such data. “It’s an incredible amount of responsibility to put on in-house counsel and it’s not only just communications companies,” Flood said, “it’s really any company that has personal information that may be relevant to a law enforcement investigation, having them second-guess whether that is charter-compliant or not is putting an enormous amount of responsibility” on them. Hutchison urged telecoms to think about how the police would try to leverage information they have in their possession, adding that “we all have to be vigilant to monitor the small things to make sure that this doesn’t turn into a comprehensive intrusion into our expectations of privacy.” “All of that is to say that there’s now this huge reservoir of information that’s available to the police, a relatively low threshold that’s in place, huge volumes of information that pass over into state control without individuals necessarily knowing what’s going on, and the question arises: How does any of that find itself being tested in a meaningful way?” Hutchison asked. Also on the panel was Robert Gordon, executive director of the Canadian Cyber Threat Exchange. Gordon fielded an audience question from lawyer Christian Tacit, who raised the concern about the security of IoT devices as a panelist at the ISP Summit in Toronto last week. Tacit said he wondered whether “we’re not going to see a debate in the coming months and year or two about setting technical standards for IoT devices,” which he said Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains has the ability to do. Meanwhile, some United States politicians recently proposed a bill that would set minimum cybersecurity standards for IoT, which the CSE told The Wire Report it was watching. “There isn’t enough being done for internet of things devices,” Gordon said, using the example of an internet-connected toaster to illustrate a point of introspection for consumers and the security questions they should be asking themselves, such as whether a simple kitchen device really needs to be connected to the internet. “I think as consumers, we can drive that point.” “We really need to start to get out in front of this because the proliferation of devices — both from the downside of collecting information for other purposes but just from the safety perspective — for the two reasons, we’ve got to get more organized at it," he said. “There’s a lot more that’s gotta be done that could come through public pressure.” — With reporting by Ahmad Hathout at ahathout@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

IoT to impose ‘incredible’ legal responsibility on telecoms: panel

News | November 15, 2017

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