CIPPIC and the Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic are excited to release a report today on the impact of the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) on intermediary liability laws in North America. Click here to download the report.

Article 19.17 of the new USMCA contains provisions modeled on Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act that protect platforms like Facebook and Google from being held liable for harmful or unlawful content posted by their users. While the liability shield the USMCA provides is quite similar to CDA § 230, the provisions differ in that the USMCA permits courts to order injunctions requiring platforms to take down content.

Given the ongoing debate in the U.S. regarding the future of CDA § 230, our report suggests that the USMCA’s approach to intermediary liability could serve as a model for amending CDA § 230, given the balance the USMCA strikes between addressing online harms and protecting platforms.

Our report also outlines how current Canadian intermediary liability laws are inconsistent with the USMCA, as are some recent proposals advanced in Canada to hold social media companies liable for the content they host. Correspondingly, we recommend that careful consideration be given by federal and provincial parliamentarians to introducing legislation to align Canadian law with the USMCA, and that clarifies whether Canadian and third-country intermediaries are entitled to the protections provided by the USMCA.

Our report is the product of an unprecedented cross-border collaboration between technology law clinics in Canada and the United States on a legal issue of significance to citizens of both countries. We hope to expand the coverage of our report to include Mexico in the near future.

CIPPIC has joined Mozilla, Access, Reporters Without Borders, and several other organizations in an open letter calling on Facebook to live up to its transparency promises. The letter calls out Facebook for blocking transparency tools employed by ProPublica, demanding that the platform provide API access to its promised political transparency tools.  As is now widely acknwoledged, Facebook and its various communications platforms have been leveraged by a wide range of political actors-both foreign and domestic-in their efforts to disrupt democratic processes in a number of jurisdictions around the world. Disinformation campaigns have become an instrumental force, evident in the UK's 'Vote Leave' referendum, the 2016 US Presidential elections, and the 2018 Brazilian elections which propelled far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency.

Against this backdrop, Facebook has undertaken various efforts to address these challenges. This has included a third-party academic body empowered to provide select academic researchers with access to elements of its content under controlled conditions. Among these is a novel 'open advertisement' mechanism designed to let individuals see all advertisements sent by a single entity through its platform. This tool is designed in part to address so-called 'dark advertising', where political actors send highly individualized and micro-targeted messages to different people based on their data-intensive profiling. Currently, only intended recipients see any given advertisement, allowing political actors to send conflicting or even discriminatory messaging with relative impunity. The problem is that Facebook has refused to provide API access to its open advertising platform, making it functionally difficult if not impossible to conduct the type of meaningful analysis necessary to meet the challenges posed by its services to democratic processes. Not only has Facebook refused to provide API access, but it has actively blocked existing tools used by ProPublica to supplement the shortcomings of its own transparency mechanisms. Meanwhile, a recent CBC study, which leveraged Twitter's API-enabled political messaging transparency tool, analyzed over 9 million tweets to demonstrate significant foreign influence in Canadian discussions surrounding pipelines and immigration. With upcoming federal elections in 2019, Canada cannot afford to be complacent about this issue.

UPDATE: Facebook has responded by committing to develop and roll out an open API for its political advertising archive. This positive step towards transparency has been met with cautious optimism.

• Read the Open Letter, penned by the Mozilla Foundation and endorsed by 37 organizations around the world, including CIPPIC: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/eu-misinformation/

Image Source: Yomare, "Hand Puppet Snowman", May 22, 2015, Pixabay, Pixabay License

CIPPIC has helped organize letters from over 40 prominent individuals and organizations supporting Chelsea Manning's legal team in its bid to reverse her refusal of entry into Canada. As CIPPIC points out in its own letter of support, the whistleblowing activities which formed the basis for Ms Manning's sentence in the United States have been integral to debates surrounding many matters of public interest—including a casual disregard for civilian life in the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars and a program of extra-judicial assassination targeting senior Taliban and Al-Qaeda officials. These disclosures could not be shown to have caused any direct damage, and Ms Manning's sentence for her crime of conscience has since been commuted by former US President Barack Obama. Refusing Ms Manning entry into Canada on the basis of her conduct is an injustice that should be reversed. The campaign was spearheaded by independent researcher Lex Gill. CIPPIC's letter can be read here: https://cippic.ca/uploads/20171012-LT_GoC_re_Chelsea_Manning.pdf

Image credit: CC-BY 2.0, Jackie: Flickr

Creative Commons accueille les francophones et publie les traductions françaises officielles des licences « CC 4.0 »

Creative Commons (CC) a publié les traductions françaises officielles de la version 4.0 de ses licences. CIPPIC est fier d’annoncer que Nicolas Jupillat, l’un de ses anciens Google Fellow, a pris la direction de cet important projet de traduction au nom de CC Canada, apportant ainsi une contribution clé à cet effort de deux ans qui permet aujourd’hui à la traduction française de voir le jour dans le monde entier.

L’annonce de CC (traduit) :

Creative Commons has published the official translations of the 4.0 licenses in French.  CIPPIC is proud to report that Nicolas Jupillat, one of CIPPIC's past Google Fellows and the lead of the CC Canada translation effort, took this important initiative on and made valuable contributions to what ended up being a two-year effort to bring the translations to the world.

Creative Commons reports:

The French language translation involved two face-to-face meetings in 2016, the first in Paris and the second in Ouagadougou. Unique to this translation is that participants from both civil and common law legal traditions converged on a common translation of the six licenses. CC thanks the tireless efforts of translation leads Nicolas Jupillat of CC Canada, Daniele Bourcier of CC France, and Patrick Peiffer of CC Luxembourg. These three were supported in their efforts by many over the course of the translation work, including Esther Ngom from Cameroon and Prof. Tonssira Myriam Sanou from Burkina Faso, who co-organized the Ouagadougou meeting.

The translations and the face-to-face meetings would not have been possible without funding by Wikimedia Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie.

CIPPIC and the Citizen Lab, released a report today that describes and analyzes a class of covert electronic surveillance devices called cell site simulators (typically referred to as IMSI Catchers or by brand names such as 'Stingray'). IMSI Catchers operate by impersonating cell phone towers in order to trick mobile devices within range into transmitting digital identifiers, which are then used to track mobile devices or identify the otherwise anonymous individuals associated with them. The report (Executive Summary, FR) argues that the devices are inherently invasive. The geo-location and identification they facilitate engages sensitive privacy interests and, moreover, they are inherently coarse - for each target they are deployed against, the privacy of thousands of non-targeted mobile devices within range is collaterally affected. IMSI Catchers are also intrusive for their interference with the operation of mobile devices, which cannot receive or transmit any phone, text or data communications while engaged with an IMSI Catcher. This can include interference with critical communications such as emergency 911 calls.

Exacerbating the intrusive features of this electronic surveillance tool has been the cloud of secrecy that pervades its use. The report describes significant efforts by journalists and civil society, in Canada and abroad, which sought to uncover use of this device in Canada and the heavy and unnecessary yet persistent resistance these efforts have experienced. The resulting secrecy, which appears to be encouraged by non-disclosure agreements imposed on Canadian agencies by IMSI Catcher vendors, has delayed important public policy debates regarding the appropriate use of these devices, while eroding public confidence. The report calls for the imposition of a range of transparency, proportionality and mitigation measures, modeled on regulatory frameworks adopted by other jurisdictions for IMSI Catchers, by Canadian courts and legislatures for comparably intrusive electronic surveillance tools and by international normative frameworks for digital privacy protection.

TITLE

• Introduction
• F.A.Q.
• Resources

Introduction

The Canadian Government is moving towards treating its data as "open by default”. An exception to this default data that is "personal information" must be removed or masked before being disclosed as open data to any third party. However, these steps are not always enough to protect privacy in data, and information about individuals can be reidentified after the open data is released. This FAQ examines this conflict between privacy and open data.

F.A.Q.