Internet Online Data Smartphone Criminal Defence Lawyer Canada Ontario Ottawa Newmarket Brampton Milton Kingston
Why Retain Our Firm to Fight an Internet Online Data Investigation?
The firm’s Principal Barrister Gordon S. Campbell served as Canada’s Director of E-Business Development with Industry Canada, where he directed online privacy and cryptographic export control policy, and collaborated with the UN, OECD, and APEC on Internet governance. He also served as a Federal Crown Prosecutor with the Department of Justice Canada, and has published three books that address Internet online data investigations. The firm is well qualified to fight for your rights in protecting IDS privacy from state intrusion, and defend those who might be charged as a result of IDS evidence gathering.
What are Internet Data Smartphone (IDS) Investigations?
Internet Data Smartphone (IDS) investigations comprise any kind of electronic evidence gathering by law enforcement involving Internet-connected devices, cloud storage, electronic communication not involving voice calls over traditional telephone networks, and cellular telephones with significant photo taking and data storage capabilities. The data referred to in IDS could be photos, videos, text messages, emails, instant messaging, PDF/Word documents, spreadsheets, presentation decks, or rawer forms of information involving IP addresses, sites visited, geolocation, or online platform usage. In other words, IDS combined is your entire electronic life, which increasingly tends to mirror our entire physical lives, and then some.
About the only parts of your life clearly excluded from IOD would be your movements when you are not within view of online video cameras or carrying an electronic device, your spoken words when not using internet-based communication devices, and your writing and drawing on paper. In other words, not a whole lot.
Why Challenge an Internet Data Smartphone Investigation?
The problem with IDS is that there are very few rules in existence in Canada protecting electronic privacy. Canada enacted strict wiretap protection laws in the 1970s, making it very difficult for police to listen in on telephone conversations or meetings, because that was essentially the only way to then communicate electronically for the vast majority of people.
Fax machines and dial up computer servers of the 1980s didn’t dramatically change the IDS dynamic, and even the Internet of the 1990s and early 2000s didn’t change much until the smartphone explosion of the last few years where the online world went from something you did at a desk (and which the police mostly needed a warrant to enter your house or business in order to access), to something you constantly carried around in your pocket involving every aspect of your life.
Never before in human history has law enforcement had such easy access to all aspects of a person’s private life through a device a person carries in his or her pocket, where traditionally there always been claimed to be a lesser expectation of privacy than there would be in a place of business or especially in a residence.
The result is that police will now commonly produce IDS evidence claimed to show a person’s location, communications, reading habits, family life, and innermost thoughts in aid of proving alleged offences ranging from harassment, to fraud, to conspiracy, to pornography, to threats, to theft.
How to Challenge an Internet Data Smartphone Investigation?
The legality of any IDS remains a moving target giving the governing legislation is mostly a 1974 Plymouth Fury that’s run out of gas, and the Supreme Court of Canada possesses brilliant jurists who mostly graduated law school before the invention of desktop computers. So until there is new political will and a new generation of judges at the highest levels, we may be stuck with a case by case approach to the law of Internet online data privacy.
The upside to this legal uncertainty is that it permits lawyers to be creative in challenging the legality of such IDS investigations. Potential challenges include:
a court issued warrant was needed to search and seize the Internet/data/smartphone;
the wrong kind of warrant was used to search and seize the Internet/data/smartphone;
the search and seizure exceeded the scope authorized by the warrant;
a wiretap was actually needed to search and seizure the Internet/data/smartphone, or some kind of other special judicial authorization beyond the warrant obtained.