A problem the Stazi didn’t have
Section 3 of the Act defines personal information as information about an identifiable individual that is recorded in any form including, without restricting the generality of the foregoing, information relating to race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, marital status, education, medical, criminal or employment history, identifying numbers, fingerprints, blood type, personal opinions, etc.It was a lousy ruling but a good summary of the Privacy Act.Section 4 of the Privacy Act provides that personal information collected by a government institution must relate directly to an operating program or activity of the institution. Privacy Commissioner’s Findings
Let us consider the coward Lynch’s file. Would it contain information about an identifiable individual’s personal opinions? Well, if I’m in it it certainly will.
Now, what possible relevance would my personal information have “to an operating program or activity of the insititution”? You can search in vain through the Canadian Human Rights Act for a section authorizing the Commission to collect information about its critics.
So it appears that the coward Lynch’s 1200 item file prima facie violates the Privacy Act.
Just one more example of the cowboy culture of the CHRC
June 22nd, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Since some of these files contain death threats levelled against CHRC employees, I can’t see how they don’t effect the operation of the agency.
(This will turn out for you like your “file Kinsella” campaign. You realize, right?)
June 22nd, 2009 at 6:34 pm
Jay,
Maybe you’d like to quote from the statute, where its says the definition of personal information includes, “(e) the personal opinions or views of the individual except where they are about another individual or about a proposal for a grant, an award or a prize to be made to another individual by a government institution or a part of a government institution specified in the regulations.”
Some prima facie case you got there. Again, UofT called—they’d like the degree back .
June 22nd, 2009 at 7:18 pm
tw, that is a stretch even for you.
bcl, “some of these files contain death threats levelled against CHRC employees” really, have you seen them?
June 22nd, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Sorry, Jay, but that’s not a stretch. That’s the law. Again, complaining about the CHRC collecting blogs posts it’s like lighting your hair because they maintain clipping files. What reasonable expectation of privacy does someone sets up a blog to broadcast his asinine opinions possibly have?
June 22nd, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Well, well, well, I’ll be darn. Are you trying to imply that she has broken the law? Say it ain’t so, Jay.
All kidding aside, she IS a danger to our democracy and needs to be fired. Now, if only we could get a real conservative PM in this country, that’d be just grand.
June 22nd, 2009 at 8:08 pm
tw, given the CHRC track record it is not in the least unreasonable to want to see what is in the coward Lynch’s file, how it is annotated, what information from other sources are appended and who has access to it. That would be the FOI request.
As to the Privacy Act, it is not up to the complainant to demonstrate a reasonable expectation of privacy but rather to the Agency to prove that its data collection relates directly to a program or activity it is legitimately empowered to engage in.
June 22nd, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Jay,
Nobody said you couldn’t make an FOI request. But your take on the Act is from outer space. You are, for the purposes of that act, indistiguishable from the Toronto Star or Time-Colonist. You are a publisher operating in the public sphere. Claiming that your published opinions are protected by privacy act is simply perverse.
Good things there are folks like Werner around to make you look less crazy.
June 22nd, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Jay –
I think you’re barking up the wrong tree here. This blog is public. Anyone can read it, including the “human rights” activists at the CHRC. Your comments about the CHRC have generally related directly to the (mis)use of the CHRC’s (censorship) powers under Section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act – something that it (unfortunately) is legitimately empowered to engage in. I can’t see how the Privacy Act applies.
That the CHRC is keeping a file of those who publicly comment on their agency’s misdeeds isn’t all that surprising. From a PR prospective, it looks terrible for a government agency with the power to censor to do so, especially if the bureaucrats there are spending a lot of their time and taxpayer’s money worrying about what bloggers say mean things about them. But I can’t imagine it’s illegal for an agency to read the public writings of its critics in order to reform or defend themselves.
If the CHRC is opening up formal investigations on its critics, trying to out anonymous bloggers or anonymously commenting on critical blogs in their official capacity, that’s another story.
June 22nd, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Depends what’s in the file tw and for what purpose the file has been compiled. I’ll let the Privacy Commissioner make those determinations.
June 22nd, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Jay hasn’t stated that his published opinions are protected under the privacy act, he is contending that his personal data is.
June 22nd, 2009 at 9:20 pm
Arnie gets it right.
Let’s put it this way cinyc, if the CHRC has taken the benefit of my published reflections on their corrupt tactics and recorded them for future reference they are, of course, smarter than I gave them credit for. On the other hand if my unpublished address, SIN, partner’s middle name or my political affiliation (and good luck with that) appears anywhere in their file they are in breach of the Privacy Act. And I use the term “file” broadly.
As well, and here is where it will become interesting, if material I have published which is not directly about the CHRC appears in their file – say my views on mass immigration or Islamofascists – I would argue that they are in serious breach of the Privacy Act.
Finally, it is not at all clear what legitimate program or activity per the Privacy Act collecting such information furthered.
Now that the coward Lynch has let the cat out of the bag it is important to know what sort of cat it is and whether, like the Hate Speech unit, it is rabid.
The many FOI requests plus several Privacy complaints should tell us a good deal about what breed of cat we are dealing with here. (Though I suspect I am hearing the sound or shredders and NSA grade encrypted write over software running as I speak. “File, what file…I mis-spoke/can’t remember/don’t know”. Or smell the volatiles of the black Sharpie as all but the page number is redacted for no good reason.)
June 22nd, 2009 at 9:30 pm
Jay,
Nice to see you’ve invited your friends along to help. Pity they are even more confused than you about the law.
Next up, the howls of outrage from bloggers because they have to pay several hundred dollars in photocopying charges to get copies of stuff that appeared on their own blogs.
June 22nd, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Well, Jay, that’s not what you said in your initial post. You said “it appears that the coward Lynch’s 1200 item file prima facie violates the Privacy Act.” If it solely includes items discussing the CHRC’s Section 13(1) activities, that’s probably not true. And as you said in the previous response, if the CHRC is filing everything you and its other critics write, including non-CHRC related postings, or compiling a dossier of your personal information, maybe it does violate the act (I’d equate that with a formal investigation).
The problem is that until an Access to Information request is filed and filled, we can only assume what’s in the CHRC’s file. And if Free Dominion’s information requests are any indication, we likely won’t even know what’s in them afterward because what’s handed over will be so heavily redacted to be useless.
June 22nd, 2009 at 10:13 pm
We’ll see won’t we cinyc. I have written the Access to Information and Privacy Coordinator for the CHRC alerting her to the fact both a FOI and a Privacy Act complaint have been or will be filed and requiring that she set about preserving the evidence. And remember, it is not just the file that is the subject of the FOI it is all the surrounding documentation.
June 23rd, 2009 at 3:03 am
It should be an interesting request Jay.
What may actually turn up is some interesting actions as well as information.
In days gone by, “Press Clippings” (especally in the NCR) was pretty much contracted out to 1 main firm. The name of that firm (if one is still being used) and it’s sub contractors/ employees might be the Mother Load. If CHRC does that, it should show up in the list of Contracts on their Website. That, in and by itself could be an interesting FOI request of the CHRC.
As we know that certain employees and ex-employees have planted and then found material before, it would be no surprise if such skullduggery is being promoted. Seems to me if any of the previous staff have engaged in this against targeted bloggers” – a form of targeted and organized 13.1 has in fact, been occurring.
June 23rd, 2009 at 3:16 am
Here is but 1 example, and perhaps how the CHRC was able to gather so many references. Now it will be interesting to see what “search terms” / “Keywords” they provided.
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June 23rd, 2009 at 5:22 am
Jay at 9:20 wrote:
Let’s put it this way cinyc, if the CHRC has taken the benefit of my published reflections on their corrupt tactics and recorded them for future reference they are, of course, smarter than I gave them credit for. On the other hand if my unpublished address, SIN, partner’s middle name or my political affiliation (and good luck with that) appears anywhere in their file they are in breach of the Privacy Act. And I use the term “file” broadly.
While Ezra wrote:
How the Canadian Human Rights Commission violates the rule of law
http://ezralevant.com/2008/03/how-the-canadian-human-rights.html
June 23rd, 2009 at 5:25 am
And if Warman used information collected in these files for his own defamation cases? The assumption has been that he’s aquired information on bloggers and their john doe commenters through his own deductive research. If that hasn’t been the case, then what?
June 23rd, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Well my friend over at the Spy agency was able to take time off watching Dawg so he did give me some information which might suggest Lynch May NOT have had at least staff doing the stuff. Now the search terms, keywords, parameters are of course set by the techies. The End Use may well fit into Leanne’s concern.
For what it is worth:
“Then in about 1995-96, the Ministry developed a computer application called News Desk which downloaded all major newspapers across the country and allowed you to do your own key word search for all X, XX XXX, p… and s… related stories from coast to coast. This application eventually caught on virtually government wide and is still being used by the majority of departments today. (The program was actually developed by a guy named [Redacted] who was… at [Redacted]... [[now renamed something else I am sure]])!
No pictures are available at this time but the above is true to the best of my knowledge and my advisor advises that there is indeed an electronic trail, even if connected through another server as could be the case of a employee working from home or even from another connection.
Proprietary rights could be an issue?
June 23rd, 2009 at 3:28 pm
I wish you would not call her a cowboy. Cowboys are good folks “The Good Guys”. If you want to refer to her in a derogatory way call her a rustler or a lawyer.
July 19th, 2009 at 5:31 am
Some of the people responding fail to make note of one slight difference on the issue of the dossiers. Whereas your blog most certainly is in the public domain and people can read it. As I imagine you hope they will and pass along to friends what you have written. I will hazard a guess that none of them are keeping dossiers on what it is you have written. That makes the actions of Jennifer Lynch highly suspect as to what uses those dossiers will be put towards when,” the truth is no defence”, in Canada if she gets her way.Parliament must be recalled and Ms. Lynch must face the music.