Sen. Wyden Calls Out Canada’s Surveillance Bill

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) | PHOTO CREDIT: New America/Flickr

​When PPSA last examined Canada’s proposed Lawful Access Act, we described how it could undermine encryption and endanger privacy worldwide. Now Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is warning that the bill could also enable the Canadian government to conscript American technology companies into spying on Americans.

Bill C-22, which has passed Canada’s House of Commons and is now before the Canadian Senate, would grant authorities in Ottawa sweeping new surveillance powers. It would require service providers to retain sensitive user metadata, such as location information, for up to a year. It could also force companies to alter their systems to facilitate government access or install tracking capabilities and security backdoors. 

In a letter to Secretary of State and acting National Security Adviser Marco Rubio and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Sen. Wyden writes that the bill “threatens to weaponize American technology infrastructure by enabling the Canadian government to force U.S. companies to secretly facilitate surveillance of Americans, while systematically undermining the security of their products.”

A foreign government could conceivably pressure an American company to retain special backups of an American target’s data, relocate encryption keys to a jurisdiction where they could be seized, or deliver government spyware through a compromised software update.
The target could be anyone.

As Sen. Wyden warns, “U.S. law does not explicitly prohibit American companies from secretly facilitating foreign surveillance of U.S. citizens – even if the target is the President or another senior U.S. government official.”

“This is not a dilemma of U.S. companies being caught between conflicting international legal obligations,” he writes. “It is a glaring statutory vacuum.” 

Canada is negotiating an agreement with the United States under the CLOUD Act, which would enable Canadian authorities to seek some data directly from American companies. Sen. Wyden urges the Trump Administration to use those negotiations to obtain “ironclad, explicit prohibitions” against Canadian demands that U.S. companies reengineer their products or facilitate surveillance of Americans.

As PPSA has warned, there should be no encryption backdoor reserved for trustworthy governments. Any vulnerability can be exploited by hostile governments, criminals, and increasingly capable artificial intelligence systems.

Sen. Wyden puts the principle succinctly: “Bilateral trust with our closest intelligence partners cannot be built on the secret subversion of American cybersecurity infrastructure.”
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The Trump administration should heed his warning. Canada must not be permitted to turn American technology companies into instruments of secret spying on Americans.

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