It took a question from the Conservative Party in the House of Commons to bring to light a controversial practice that many suspected: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police does indeed use spyware in the context of certain investigations.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
And not since yesterday. Since five years. In the greatest secrecy.
This revelation, relayed by Politico at the end of June and by my colleague Mélanie Marquis in our Wednesday issue, should keep us all awake. Two nights rather than one.
Do you think I’m exaggerating?
This software, which makes it possible to spy on everything that happens on a target’s telephone or computer, to spy on conversations, to read e-mails, to activate the camera and the recorder remotely, havoc across the planet.
In July 2021, a major investigation carried out by 17 media outlets in 10 countries revealed that politicians, including French President Emmanuel Macron, journalists and human rights defenders were on the lists of potential targets for the software. best-known spyware, Pegasus, produced by the Israeli company NSO. The survey pointed to countries with less than stellar human rights records: Saudi Arabia, Morocco, India, Hungary, to name a few.
All winter, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal presented a more than disturbing exhibition, entitled Contagion of Terror, which mapped the use of the Pegasus software and gave voice to its victims – all from civil society – or to those who survived them. Because yes, some died, in more than suspicious circumstances, we learned in this punchy museum work.
Several organizations, including Amnesty International, have launched campaigns to demand a moratorium on these poorly regulated technologies.
In the meantime, it has become clear that authoritarian countries have not been the only ones to cavalierly use this technology which can turn your phone into a super pocket spy anywhere in the world.
Talk to Pere Aragonès, President of Catalonia. On Wednesday, the sovereigntist politician filed a complaint against the former director of the intelligence services of Spain and the NSO group after he was spied on using Pegasus in 2020. He was then the vice-president designate of the same region .
An investigation by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab – known worldwide for its expertise in malware detection – revealed in April that the smartphones of 67 politicians – most of them Catalan separatists – had been targeted or infected with the software Pegasus or Candiru.
Since then, the Spanish government has come to recognize that at least 18 politicians had been the subject of this type of surveillance with the approval of justice.
A real attack on democracy. With the approval of the judiciary. Nothing less.
And it is in this disturbing context that we learn that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) also uses this kind of software.
Which ? Mystery and gumdrop. In her response to journalists who have looked into the matter, she does not reveal this information.
The RCMP is content to say that it uses this technology sparingly when investigating serious crimes or related to national security. And she does it with the approval of a judge.
However, the RCMP did not see fit to inform the Privacy Commissioner, whose mandate it is to study this type of practice. Considering the controversy surrounding these new technologies, this is a more than deplorable, even worrying “oversight”.
And, as the Conservative Party pointed out, this oversight also concerns parliamentarians in Ottawa who were unable to debate the use of this software and the guidelines to be imposed. Both the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
We do not know if the Canadian secret services use these same spy tools. On Wednesday, the office of the Minister of Public Security, Marco Mendicino, claimed not to have this information.
The least we can say is that there are a lot of gray areas in an issue that directly affects our rights and freedoms. Our right to privacy. And that is simply unacceptable.
It’s time to put this limitless digital spy through real democratic scrutiny.