Canada News: Ottawa to eavesdrop on travellers entering/exiting Canada – thestar.com.
Civil liberties – dropping and dropping…)
A Halifax privacy lawyer says Ottawa has no business eavesdropping on the conversation of travellers at Canadian airports and border crossings.
David Fraser was referring to the decision by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) to install high-definition camera and microphones across the country to listen in and some day record what travellers are talking about as they enter or exit Canada.
“Covertly monitoring . . . all of their conversations, that’s pretty intrusive . . . I think that’s a little extreme,” said Fraser, a privacy expert at the Halifax law firm of McInnes Cooper.
He predicts that anything collected by this monitoring system that leads to charges will be challenged under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms on the basis that their rights were infringed.
“You could totally imagine somebody saying (something innocuous) and it being misconstrued and that bad things happen as a consequence,” Fraser told the Toronto Star Monday, adding however, that information from the CBSA is rather sketchy at this point.
According to reports, conversations are not being recorded yet but it’s only a matter of time before they are. (insert a few grains of salt here..)
