OTTAWA—Apple and Google warned Canadian lawmakers that they risk putting their citizens’ privacy and security at risk under a government proposal to give police access to information on their digital devices.
Apple and Google are among the biggest corporate heavyweights to attack the proposed Canadian measures.
Executives from the technology companies said a proposed bill would force them to change their products to allow for more surveillance and potentially compromise encrypted systems.
“Encryption protects Canadians from identity theft, fraud, unlawful surveillance, and data breaches,” Erik Neuenschwander, Apple’s senior director of user privacy, said in testimony before lawmakers on Tuesday. The bill, as drafted, would force companies “to break encryption by inserting back doors into their products – something Apple will never do,” he said.
Jeanette Patell, director of government affairs for Google in Canada, said her company has considerable concerns. The bill “could give the government the power to secretly force companies to redesign products to include invasive surveillance capabilities, and to do so without sufficient safeguards or oversight,” she said.
Apple and Google are among the biggest corporate heavyweights to attack the proposed Canadian measures, which officials in Ottawa argue would give law-enforcement authorities access to digital evidence, something police forces in many western-world countries utilize. Both companies provided proposed amendments to the existing bill for lawmakers to consider, saying this could help address their worries.
Besides Apple and Google, the bill has detractors among messaging services, U.S. lawmakers, civil liberties groups and internet-law experts.
The chairmen of judiciary and foreign affairs committee in the House of Representatives said in a letter this month to Canada’s Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree that U.S. companies now face the choice of “comprimising the security of their entire user base – including U.S. citizens- or [risk] exclusion from the Canadian market. Either outcome harms U.S. national security and economic interests…”
Signal, the encrypted messaging service, said it would rather pull its operations out of Canada than comply with the bill’s requirements. “Provisions that enable the deliberate engineering of vulnerabilities into critical infrastructure like Signal are a grave threat to privacy everywhere,” said Udbhav Tiwari, vice-president for strategy and global affairs at the messaging service. “Encryption either works for everyone or works for no one.”
Canadian officials say the bill gives Canadian authorities modern tools to deter criminal activity unfolding in a global digital environment. “Our laws have simply not kept pace,” Anandasangaree said this month. He added the legislation in no way requires telecommunications companies “to become agents of the government… This bill is encryption neutral.”
The bill also has support of the country’s police chiefs, who said what the government is proposing would help investigators get digital evidence in a timely manner. “Our ability to gather timely evidence and preserve evidence and prevent the escalation of offences is hampered by the inability to access key digital bits of evidence,” said Myron Demkiw, the police chief in Canada’s largest city, Toronto.
