up to parliament you really should go and do a tour. It's free, you can get tickets just across the street, look for the Terry Fox memorial, it's right behind there if it hasn't changed location, but it is a stunning piece of architecture, it has great stories behind it. This bit right at the back here, so this is the center block, this is the peace tower,

this is the library dome. If you look at a straight down image of it the two are connected by a narrow hallway and when fire broke out someone from the library closed the doors and that saved the library and all the books in it and so that's the only original part of the

peace tower, everything else was just destroyed and rebuilt. They've got great tours and images of all that stuff that happened and there's just amazing stonework and stuff and the reason I'm mentioning this is I've always had the welcome but this year I decided to add up the home

bit and why I feel it's home is because most of us work remotely, most of us contribute to the project remotely and coming here or any conference like this is sort of coming home, you're with people that you work with all the time, it's very familiar, I find it very rewarding getting

together with all these people and it's a way to recharge your batteries. So welcome to the 14th. Is there anyone here that was at the first BSG can in 2004? Yeah okay so you'll all remember

that I teared up with the final talk and that was mostly a combination of the applause that came out and the sort of holy fuck it's over because that was the most stressful conference. After that it's all gotten easier except for the period right between the call for papers go out

and the first couple of papers come in because it's hockey stick I swear it's like this like this like this oh shit no one's going to give a talk and then bang it all comes in. So about this session we always have to thank the sponsors if you remember BSG can 2004 it was

vastly different to this for the first year and the first couple of years there after we all traipsed up to the Royal Oak to have dinner and one time we traipsed down to the sports pub in the sports yeah no that took a lot of time took two hours for us to go and get our lunch.

We had a good time but it was it was time consuming so we're going to go through some of the points and we're going to have the keynote then we're going to go on to the talks. So our sponsors our platinum sponsors this year we have three ix systems intel and emc not just for these

sponsors but all the sponsors if you have contact with them please tell them thank you there is so much that we can do with sponsors that we just cannot do without sponsors. Netflix, Tarsnap, 3BSD foundation, Verisign, Netgate, Backtrace and NetBSD foundation are contributing this year.

Netskamuna, I was schooled by the Germans last year last night and I'm surprised I remember. Scale Engine, Allen's right here. Blackberry are here. People from outside of Canada may not

be aware of how big Blackberry here is in Canada both as a as an employer and as a company itself. La Trobe, La Trobe Community Health, they're helping out. Ziplink, Demon Security, Microsoft

are here. I know one of the guys working for them I'm glad they're here. Sys5 and Gandy are here again. Everyone knows that Gandy gives discounts to 3BSD developers and I'm sure anyone else that's involved with an open source project I believe you get category e pricing

which is significantly less than category a. A few quick points of order. We'll have a keynote. Lunch is at 12 15 grab it and go into the boss. The boss are listed on the website they should be up to date now. Give me snacks there's doc sprints but now they've been renamed it's now the doc lounge. I'm not sure it's 11 20 tonight I think that's wrong the schedule

is correct my slide is out of date I'm sorry. The hacker lounge tonight will be in Henderson 202 Henderson it's down that way it's on the map follow all the other people. Tomorrow morning don't show up so early show up about nine o'clock there'll be food and drink

there but the tots don't start until 10. Don't get confused by that we start later on Saturday by design. We have not one but two hacker lounges this year so we had l 140 and we couldn't get l 140 Friday

and Saturday night l 140 is a 90 university it's in the ground floor tonight and tomorrow night it's in Henderson 202 Henderson. I saw it I think Henderson will actually be a better hacker lounge than l 140 is it's bigger and it's prettier. They have four blocks of power instead of two. Yep so to the hacker lounge bring your own

extension cord leave it leave it tidy it's Henderson it's Friday and Saturday night last person to leave lock up doesn't really apply because you can't lock up. Boss today there's Tor and the BSGs the person that was going to leave that can't make it someone else can

lead it if they want. It's going to be about building appliances disk images ISO stuff like that with. There's a sponsor's bar for the sponsors have some stuff to tell you there's an amateur radio an SCR buff tomorrow there's a ZFS and a bug buff BFC users group. So if you don't want your registration bag take it back to the registration desk the tote bag

we give it away to the Ottawa mission they use it. If you don't need your lanyard afterwards some people collect them I do but if you don't need your lanyard bring it back I give it away to a friend in Pennsylvania who then takes it to summer camps for disabled kids.

Closing session bring your cash credit card all that stuff who has never who is here for the first BSD can thank you welcome to BSD now. Now did the charity auction start the first year I don't I don't recall but what we know started a couple of years after and what we did

is someone said do you want to auction this off and I said sure and I think every year we've auctioned it off and the proceeds go to the Ottawa mission and it's very interesting the things that we can sell which are which are arguably very little value but highly regarded

by the people buying them. Well the first one will be less value than the second one I'm sure

but as you know when I say is first or second or last or second last it's not always the item you think it is. Yeah you can bid four against the last shirt okay and whoever wins wins but both of you get to pay and it all goes to charity. The closing socials tomorrow night it's

at the red line it's right after the closing charity auction and feedback make sure you go in give feedback on all the talks please that helps both the speakers and the program committee to decide what you want to see next year and Adam hands up Adam Adam's here if you ever have

any trouble booking a hotel if the hotel tells you something different from what's on the website email us please don't feel free to talk about on Twitter and email and stuff but unless you email us we can't get back to the hotel and say you're doing the freaking wrong thing you're not telling that you're not telling our attendees what you told us okay because if it comes from

us we can complain to them and they fix it yes yeah for the recording basically let us know as soon as you encounter the problem because that gives us time to fix it before other people

encounter the same problem any quick questions sir work in progress session work in progress session oh there is is there one set is there one on the schedule yes yes we announced it okay

Michael please send me an email to add it to the schedule I'm sorry I think we've okay we'll add that in good point thank you George George asked where's the chemistry lab George why do you need to know where the chemistry there's curiosity

why is the sky blue yeah any other relevant questions I was told a few months ago not to read get commit uh get commit murder before the conference and I'm beginning to hear why

all right oh wait out of order all right we're gonna change this now I'm sure all the Canadians have heard of Dr. Michael Geist before I know I have I've been a

fan of his for quite some time and if if this is your first time hearing him speak I'm sure you'll come away a fan as well and I want to welcome Dr. Michael Geist for the keynote BSD can 2017 please yeah this one's for the room and we're doing a video record on the CD

recording on that one this one's for the video trying to put it on that work everyone can hear

me okay okay well thanks so much um for the invitation um so I this is this would be my first conference too and you can just feel what a sense of community that exists here

so it's pretty special to have the chance to have been invited into this community and I'm grateful that you've been willing to allocate the start of your conference to hear from a law professor which may not be the usual thing I don't know going back 2004 but nevertheless it's nice that you've given me that time to in a sense make a pitch and the pitch

that I want to make is that there's a ton happening in the law and policy space that is that is directly affecting the future of technology the future of the internet and that we need your voices we need the voices particularly from technology technology community I think we need broadly as many voices as possible on many of these issues

I'm Canadian law professor I work a few buildings away not in the chemistry building but a few buildings away and so naturally enough not many of the issues that I'm going to focus on will will start from a Canadian perspective I've tried to bring in a little bit some of the

international issues as well from the United States and elsewhere but there's a bit of a Canadian flavor I'll start with an announcement that came from the Canadian government just a couple of days ago from our formerly minister of industry now it's called innovation science and economic development in which he announced that the government was delaying the implementation

of a piece of our anti-spam legislation now in the United States there was anti-spam legislation hand spam act going back more than a decade Canada took a long time to debate the creation of its own anti-spam law government created a task force back in 2004 I was a member

of that task force we had recommendations came out in 2005 and it took almost 10 years from the unanimous recommendations that include included a broad range of participants to go from recommendations to implementation now there was one piece in that law that was delayed given some of the concerns that business had and it was a private right of action

and so the private right of action of course would allow individuals companies others to sue those behind spamming activities and this would include not just spam but include spyware include ransomware in theory someone who paid let's say in an instance of ransomware and you identified

the person behind this could sue in an attempt to try to recoup some of the losses that all those people had sustained businesses objected to the to the private right of action the prospect of lawsuits over non-compliance for non-compliance with the anti-spam law and on Tuesday the government announced that they would be suspending until further notice

effectively killing the private right of action I should note that there are differences of views about this anti-spam law I'm supportive of it but not everybody is and that there has been much debate and attempts to try to delay and instead stop many aspects of the legislation

that even predate this particular element of it and so one of the things that was required was that companies were required to ensure that they had an opt-in informed consent before they could send commercial electronic messages for the better part of a decade or more many companies had been been adopting an approach in which people were less than fully informed

I'd say about the fact that their email addresses were being used collected and then would be sent and so why was Canada's anti-spam legislation several years ago creating so much spam was because there were many efforts to actually go back to people and say you know what we've been using your information we'd like to continue to be able to send it and so that

continued for some time and so you had lots of people who expressed concern about it and that debate has been ongoing now I start with this particular example not because that

there's anything not because of the debate itself or even because of the government's decision but actually instead because of a press release that the Canadian marketing association put out on Tuesday welcoming the industry minister I said minister's announcement of killing this legislation and as part of what they said was the Canadian marketing association spearheaded a

business coalition with the chamber of commerce to communicate with government policy makers concerned about the negative impacts and over the past several years there have been a series of submissions leading to numerous meetings with officials in the minister's office to persuade the minister to act now all this is obviously true it's been sort of well known at least behind the

scenes that there has been a very active quiet lobbying campaign though businesses perhaps not so unsurprisingly have been reluctant to go on the record to say we oppose strong enforcement of this anti-spam law the starting point for the chamber and for the Canadian marketing association and frankly for all the business groups who oppose this

is to start to say we really like this anti-spam law but and then the but is can we try to eviscerate this as much as possible now I as I say I reference all this because this is you know lobbying out in the open I mean to me it was in a sense almost remarkable to see one

of the lead lobby groups on this issue not try to hide the fact that they were lobbying on this issue but celebrating it now I talked with the people in the minister's office and I have for me an angriest post yesterday in which I take issue with a lot of what the minister had to say he describes the private right of action as red tape and that it's unfair to put businesses

through red tape I don't understand how an enforcement mechanism can be seen as red tape he talks about charities not having to face this but charities were exempted from the legislation uh several years ago and so there is that he's basically feeding back a lot of what he's heard from just one side of the story now we would not in an anti-spam context expect millions of internet

users to get up and lobby their politicians their members of parliament and say hey keep the law in place and ensure that it's adequately enforced I mean one of the real problems with these kinds of issues is that individually there's very little incentive to ensure that there those

voices get out but if you're a large business group or at least organized around these kinds of coalitions you can make this a top priority you can afford to invest in it you can ensure that multiple people spend lots of time meeting with ministers meeting with ministers of part meeting with members of parliament and so that what comes out at the end of the day

is a minister who is almost repeating verbatim talking points of lobby groups in many instances which are entirely inaccurate now that's just one example of what's taking place but I it's not going to stop you keep going okay no I was going to ask if that's me

I would I'd suggest to you that this is far from sort of a unique situation in fact what's taking place and apparently all these notifications too not you are we good down down to this little it's this guy here

I'd suggest to you this far from a unique circumstance indeed what I think one of the things that has typified much of tech policy making has been really a one-sided conversation and one of the real challenges I'd be one of the most important challenges that we face are the missing voices or potentially really the more voices and really what I would characterize

as missing voices it is particularly striking and it's why I was so excited to have the chance to come and speak that's so often the technology community is almost entirely absent on some of these issues once in a while people rally behind different issues I'll reference net neutrality as an example in a moment but for the most part on many of these kinds of issues

people are busy with whatever they have they happen to do and don't necessarily see a place for themselves in the policy environment and I should note especially for the Canadians it may be less true in other places the ability to participate and to have an impact in all of this is significant I've appeared for I peer regularly before House of Commons committees on all sorts

of issues and I can tell you that in a number of circumstances on security related issues on trade related issues the ability to ensure that your voice is heard if you want to ensure that it is heard is far greater than would otherwise be appreciated in fact I'll go off the what I intended to say just to give you one quick story we were at one point time active on

copyright and I'll come back to copyright towards the very end very active on copyright law I talked to a number of people at in on the hill Parliament Hill here in Canada asking how many letters did it take from constituents before an issue would capture the attention of the member

of parliament I have to say as we were trying to and we be a number of people sort of trying to blend these law technology policy and advocacy as we were talking about this we envisioned the prospect of these mass campaigns because surely we needed hundreds of thousands of people to speak out to their local member of parliament to ensure that it would get attention and one person who's a seasoned veteran having dealt with riding MPs members of parliament

in their constituency for a long time looked us and said well listen where we get letters from people the first thing we do when we get a letter and note that letters at least at that time where people paid attention more to letters than they did to email when we get a letter the

first thing we do is we take a look at the postal code if the postal code is from our riding it gets opened if it's not it goes into the blue bean for recycling because what we are interested in hearing from is from our own constituents because those of course are the people who ultimately vote for us I said okay but how many of those letters do we need

for you to pay attention the answer was two two letters from people from within the riding was enough to get a member of parliament's attention because the notion was that if two people had taken the time to write about this issue there surely were hundreds or perhaps thousands more within the riding that had the same views because of course the reality is people typically

don't get actively engaged in politics or in policy and if people are willing to take the time to do it that sends a message this doesn't take a lot but even getting to that point even getting to the two can sometimes be difficult so what I want to do in the next 30 minutes or so

is sort of breeze through 10 areas that I think are highly relevant in the law technology space again it's a bit from a Canadian perspective but not exclusively so so there's issues around access of course and many of us will take for granted the the the prospect that we have affordable high speed broadband access although there may well be some that live in communities where

even now access represents a problem in Canada we've started to see a shift in this regard we had through our regulator the CRTC the decision last year the basic services obligation which came up with the with the notion that as we switch from what used to be a view of

universal access to telephony that now should move towards universal access to high speed internet to broadband internet setting a target of 50 50 down and I think 10 up is the number is that what should be available to all and the notion that we need to set into in motion policies and

funding and the like to ensure that that is accessible and available to all now that regulator the CRTC has been actively involved in any number of different issues part of it especially in the wireless space trying to find mechanisms to ensure that we can have better levels of competition Canadian market is dominated by three large wireless providers and it has been an ongoing

effort from from successive governments this isn't a partisan political issue trying to identify ways to ensure that we can inject more competition into the marketplace in one way is to allow rivals smaller independent players to begin to roam on their on those networks we've

also seen it take place in some of these debates take place within the context of fiber and whether or not fiber lines ought to be shared when it comes to to broadband and in fact the regulator has moved forward in that direction but once again we saw efforts in this instance unsuccessful to try to lobby back this behind the scenes effort and in many instances the

missing voices is an ongoing problem so when the regulator here in Canada ordered that the the framework that is used for wholesale access that allows independent providers companies in Canada like tech savvy to be able to ride on other networks at least for the last mile purposes to inject inject a better level of competition or greater competition in the

marketplace what you saw was unsurprisingly efforts to try to push back so companies like bell one of the largest one of the large players in Canada appealing to the government and looking to as many people within its ecosystem and that included technology company Cisco for example was one of the companies who sells gear to bell and who was then willing

to write to the government urging them to overturn what the regulator had done and so when you've got companies like the technology companies technology companies like Cisco along with bell along with even basic community groups and charities that have looked to a large vertically integrated company that has large broadcasting properties and telecom properties

and suddenly they turn around and say hey we need your voice to tell the government to turn to to overturn this decision they come forward and they say exactly that in fact we even had mayors of cities including here in Ottawa and in Toronto writing they said on their own behalf

to the government urging the government to overturn that decision now ultimately they chose not to do so there was efforts even in some city councils interestingly in the city of Toronto if there's anyone here from Toronto but you may know that there was an effort within city council upon learning the fact that the mayor there John Tory had written this letter which sure looked

like a letter on behalf of the city but he claimed no it wasn't and as it turns out as you may it's also relevant that he's a former executive from one of the big three and he and so he wrote this letter on he said on his own behalf city council put forward a motion in the sense directly rejecting it which was successful. Ottawa tried to do the same thing and by that

point in time Bell had gone wise to what had taken place in Toronto and was able to successfully lobby against the motion here you know and so that that that particular case where a regulator conducts its hearing recognizes the need for greater access and fostering more levels of competition and yet the level and the amount of lobbying that takes place often without public

voices is truly significant. There's of course the net neutrality issue which we hear about a lot and in some ways provides sort of the crystallizes public engagement at least earlier on on these sorts of issues and in particularly in the United States today as I'm sure many of you will know

in the under the Trump administration we're seeing a significant shift that take place within the FCC and a dramatic move to move away from some of the open internet principles and certainly the approach to net neutrality that we've seen under President Obama. Now it's not limited just to the United States there was in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in the UK

several days ago discussion from Theresa May who didn't do so well last night about what about the kinds of things that she might the kinds of steps that she might take I mean I thought quite remarkably she I believe talked about the notion that if human rights and civil

rights were creating a problem to encountering terrorism then we needed to get rid of human rights and civil those human rights and civil rights to ensure that there was effective security measures it seems like there were plenty of people who preferred to get rid of her. I am that this this takes place on a this is taking place on a global basis

although in Canada we've done very very well with respect to net neutrality and so we've had both the regulator strongly support net neutrality most recently in a decision involving zero rating again standing up for net neutrality and so our regulators stood for it and so too as the government which has consistently talked about the importance of net neutrality

and injected it very frequently into the conversation. As you may know there are efforts to try to push back in the United States on this issue although we'll have to see how successful it happens to be with an event planned for June 12th for July 12th so it's almost exactly a month from now with many of the larger companies taking place and there is an enormous

amount of pressure on these companies not to take those positions just over the last few days fair amount of media coverage over the fact that Amazon is one of the participating organizations here and expressing surprise that they would be that they're they've been willing to do so support I would be supporting those positions and supporting those companies that

have been that are now willing to speak out on these issues and perhaps provide some counter momentum to what we've seen is I think really valuable. There's the security related issues which are pretty significant and I do this one I do want to in a sense to drill down a little bit further especially from a Canadian perspective as illustrative of what may be happening in a lot

of different places we have you may know the terrorist attacks are something that that lots of companies too many countries have now experienced and we experienced one here a number of years ago on Parliament Hill exactly in the in the spot with with the picture that you were shown off the top and in fact when you go on if should you go on that tour I don't know if they've cleaned it up

now but some of the bullet holes because the shooter was able to penetrate into the building some of the bullet holes that took place just outside the library which is where one of the final shootout so to speak took place were still there so this is a serious issue I was on campus on another building the day it happened and I can recall that lots of

of course lots of rumors and stories taking place and the shooter were not very far from there shooter is coming down they're entering campus all of those sorts of things and so unsurprisingly government responds with highly restrictive new security measures and not an uncommon response for many governments surprisingly I think to the government and to others though the public

became actively engaged and at a time when it's very difficult to get the general public to focus on privacy related issues we ultimately found something that people did start thinking about it was called Bill C-51 and in fact the last national election that we had this particular bill and the surveillance measures and the security measures that the government had

introduced became an issue in a national election that probably was the defining issue by any means but it was unquestionably an issue we ended up with a new government the liberal government who took a position in which they said they there were things they didn't like about C-51 they're things that they did like and so what they were going to do was consult the public

they put forward this consultation document last year which was billed I think and viewed by many as being this consultation effort to decide what to do with Bill C-51 and in fact that consultation has now concluded they've actually put forward the summary or the release of what the public had to say and I think unsurprisingly the public largely said they were

uncomfortable with many of the measures that the government had adopted what remains to be seen is whether or not that consultation was consultation theater in which you say we want to hear what the public has to say and then you just go ahead and do whatever you were planning to do anyway or whether or not they actually take this to heart and decide that it's you know

the public has spoken we've got to find a way to better craft the balance between these two issues but what to me what was notable about this particular document was not the fact that the government had gone forward and engaged in this debate it was all of the issues that they actually buried in the document that had nothing to do with Bill C-51 and so in a Canadian

context for example as part of the C-51 debate they now included an issue around what's known as lawful access lawful access speaks to the circumstances under which law enforcement should be able to be obtain information on subscribers internet subscribers often without a warrant so

under what circumstances do telecom companies ISPs disclose information about their subscribers or subscriber activity potentially without court order and there's a couple of other issues there this was also the subject of a long-standing debate in Canada a better part of 10 years it was actually one of for me one of the best instances of where we desperately needed people

with technical expertise to appear before parliamentary committees because I remember I appeared before it as did a bunch of other people focusing on the privacy implications of disclosing metadata and you had members of parliament who simply didn't get it from their perspective they understood why there might be private privacy implications for the

content of a message but they could not get their head around the potential disclosures and the privacy import of the metadata associated with those messages and having more expertise to to make that clear I think would have been valuable now lawful access was put to bed in a piece of legislation that was ultimately passed by the part of conservative government

with fairly restrictive rules although it was an interesting debate it's worth a talk all on its own and yet included within this consultation is the prospect of bringing these same issues back again so for example around the question of should basic subscriber information be disclosed by

ISPs and telecom companies if we go back a number of years one of the early bills in Canada on lawful access included all of these said that basic subscriber information which those supporting the legislation said it's nothing it's just like the phone book that's all we're requiring you to disclose I've yet to see a phone book that includes this much information

and they said this was this was the information that ought to be mandatorily disclosed without any court oversight and so it was name addresses you could say email address IMEI numbers which raises questions about people about law enforcement using stingrays being able to capture IMEI numbers and then going back to providers and saying I've got these lists of device numbers in a sense

tell me who the subscriber is and by the way tell me their address and tell me their email address all information that should be that under this piece of legislation would have been mandatorily disclosed no court oversight of all that was an early proposal it was a proposal that actually ultimately went down over time they slowly started eliminating some of the

lower the stuff towards the bottom and ultimately actually eliminated mandatory disclosure altogether but the government put it back on the agenda and they said we've got to start thinking about this again they did it in part because the supreme court of Canada decision the case known as the spencer decision in which the supreme court of canada after years

of debate around whether or not there really was privacy associated with that basic subscriber information the supreme court of canada said sure there is they said you have a reasonable expectation of privacy not just with the content of your messages but with your identity as well because tying your identity along with things like your ip address or other sorts of

information can tell a whole lot about you and so disclosing that without appropriate privacy oversight and protections is simply about is a violation of the law law enforcement now turns around and says this decision is creating a lot of problems for us because suddenly now we have to go out and get warrants where previously isps were willing

to disclose this information now from my perspective that's a feature not a bug but nevertheless from a law enforcement perspective they would take a look they're looking at this and say what we need is to change if the court ruled this we need to come back and we need to create a system in which information is mandatory to disclose and so it raises all

sorts of issues as to whether or not this will be warrantless information what information might be disclosed and under what circumstances there are a number of other questions that have come up as well questions about data retention how long should providers be required to store information for what purposes and who might have access to that information we had an instance in

Canada here in Ottawa actually just last year in which it was a murder case an investigation on a murder case that had gone cold and so the last time the victim of this of the murder had been seen it was located not far from where I live in the west end of Ottawa near the Costco so I'm there a lot and the last time I like Costco and so the last time this last

time this person was seen was on a Saturday in and around one of the parking lots right right by there I can be seen there a lot as well so law enforcement is sort of reached turned out that the investigative trail had been cold the last thing that they had

a really the only thing they had is this is the last time this person has been seen and so their challenge nine months later is how do you restart this investigation what they're able to do is they go to court obtaining court order so courts involved a court order to go to the big three telecom companies and give us and what what they ask

for is give us the tower dump information give us all the information from your cell phone towers on this particular day at this particular time in this area in other words we want to know from nine months ago everyone who had a cell phone that that had called into that tower at that

particular moment or within that particular timeline companies provided that information law enforcement put out a press release that they were about to send text messages to all the phone numbers that showed up there asking if they had any recollection or any information about this particular person or recall anything on that particular day now that's pretty

tough to expect anyone nine months later is going to remember this on a random basis but that's the other now there were people that were surprised to to see this investigative technique but so be it for me the surprise was telecom companies had basic tower information geographical location based information of users storing it for nine months about who was located about everybody who

had called into that particular tower and we know of course that they this information is retained for a certain period of time the law doesn't speak to how long this information should be retained but the notion that it is there and available months and months later reals raises

i think real questions about what the appropriate standard ought to be laws the prior laws and once again the government puts on questions about network interception capabilities too and so earlier versions of this lawful access included a whole range of requirements and in a sense created a full regulatory framework for network providers talking about interception capabilities talking

about disclosing who was involved in running those networks potential criminal background checks on those people ensuring that information was available to our national police so that in the event they needed access to this information they needed it quickly they'd have the ability to obtain all that now much of this never went forward either in part because nobody wanted to

pay for it telecom company said we're not paying for it the government said we don't have a budget to pay for it and so it didn't move forward in fact they argued that this was necessary to counter terrorism but then recognized that it would be particularly difficult for smaller network providers to pay for this so they said we'll create an exemption for the

smaller network providers for a series of years as if would-be terrorists don't read the news either and couldn't figure out that if you were going to communicate one way to avoid this would be simply to subscribe to to use a network provider that didn't face the same sort of mandates but this issue has also been placed back on the agenda questions about who pays what networks

and what regulation and finally they brought back the issue that many had thought had been put to bed back in the 1990s around the prospect of backdoors for encryption much of this of course coming out of the now infamous incident in San Bernardino California and the efforts to require Apple briefly to provide a backdoor to one of its one of its iPhones and the

same questions raised again questions that have been raised I think repeatedly and I think answered well about the fact that if we create backdoors it's not just the good guys that gain potentially gain access to the bad guys too and yet that possibility

raised again by the Canadian government about backdoors and products and services it's an issue that in certain respects has been percolating behind the scenes we had reference to the fact that Blackberry the research in motion major Canadian major Canadian companies still too as you heard a large employer but of course they for many years faced

many of these kinds of questions as they sought to go into different markets and there were demands behind the scenes for access to those backdoors so lots of kind lots of these kinds of issues playing themselves out now in real time I'm going to go a bit quicker just to highlight the last bunch we have issues in Canada and you see these playing out in Europe especially as well

around around looking to tax internet internet access and internet services often as a mechanism to try to fund to provide new funding for culture-based activity so in Canada we've seen a lot of talk about taxing or putting levies on internet providers or on services like Netflix

and the argument is that that funding would then go to create more Canadian content and so we've seen it raised in the front in the context of internet services which I think it's from my perspective runs directly counter to the objective that I talked about earlier almost off the top affordable universal internet access affordability takes a bit of a hit when you

start layering on to everybody's bills additional fees that will go towards can con we've seen additional we've seen those kinds of efforts play out in a number of different ways also sometimes described as Netflix tax this was an incredibly cheesy video put out by our former prime minister Harper that tried to make himself I think was both a declaration that there would

be no Netflix tax no levy on Netflix and also an attempt I think to seem kind of with it for people or accessible turns out he likes Breaking Bad or at least that's what he said it's his

approval of what you may have seen the meme that went around with Theresa May when they asked what have you done that's been naughty and she couldn't come up with anything until she said running through the wheat fields and so there's been a lot about somebody yesterday said now you've done something that's more naughty than running through the wheat fields and calling for an election in any event so we've had a lot of talk around

that there's also sometimes talk about basic taxes not just cultural taxes but just simply basic taxes and that is a bit more reasonable you pay service taxes on lots of different products the notion that we should exclude digital services I think does raise certain questions but you do see more and more talk around

much more and more talk around taxing and regulating these sorts of online services okay good stuff all right a few more I want to talk about potential liability

for linking and this in fact this moved forward just like yesterday in the European Union from at least one one committee within the European Parliament the idea here for some is that sites that conduct aggregation Google News and the like especially in Europe increasingly elsewhere are seen as taking away revenue from news sites and other kinds of

services and so the bright idea that some of the news services that are struggling had as they say why don't you we force people to pay every time they link into one of our articles now of course especially if you are ad-based it's the link that's actually providing you with the revenue in the first place and so that ability to to to capture that revenue strikes many I think

is poorly thought out but nevertheless we're seeing efforts to move forward with that in Europe and there has been you should know some discussion of doing the same here in Canada our large media organizations are struggling and so at a committee hearing less than a year ago you

had one newspaper association say if you click through the journalist story then perhaps it's then at that point perhaps the journalist and newspaper should receive a payment there are ways to get it so micro payments anytime anybody clicks this is just a terrible idea but nevertheless efforts to either create link taxes or look to things like copyright and we will be conducting a

copyright review in Canada later this year as a mechanism to help save the newspaper industry take a look at where people are spending their time it's obvious what the newspapers industry's problem is just people don't spend as much time reading the physical paper copyright I don't think will save this but link taxes will cause enormous harm to all

sorts of different sites there are similarly targets right now on virtual private networks I'm sure many people not everybody here uses VPNs regularly lots of reasons to use VPNs from privacy and security perspective but we are seeing more and more countries begin to focus on VPNs

especially in the context of people trying to access different Netflix libraries and so Netflix is now available in more than 100 countries here in Canada when they first came the available titles were pretty limited and so people were anxious to use VPNs to make it seem as if they were coming from the United States to access the US Netflix library it has become less of an issue

over time because Netflix has more and more Netflix originals and has created larger libraries but it remains an issue for many as sometimes there's a thing you want to watch that's not otherwise available and people turn to these VPNs Netflix kind of allowed it to happen for

a very long time until they went truly global and rights holders began to push back on the issue saying we could live with Canada Australia and a couple of other countries doing this but if you're going to operate in more than 100 countries worldwide you need to buy a global license not just a license for the United States and what's that what that has meant is that there's more and more talk about regulating VPNs and in fact we're even seeing efforts to pressure

payment intermediaries to stop servicing some of these VPNs so for example PayPal as an example stopped providing payment services to some of some of the VPNs that were seen as facilitating this and there was pressure brought on Visa and MasterCard as well so a lot of pressure on VPNs

and that the implications there regardless of what you think about broader better Netflix access the implications of being able to stop people from being able to access VPN services for all the many reasons that VPNs are invaluable raises significant policy questions there are also questions about whose law applies in many instances this dates back to one of the very early

cases probably one of the earliest internet related cases that many of you may remember it came out of France in which Yahoo had sort of an online auction site trying to compete with eBay there was Nazi memorabilia that was available on that site the French action was brought in France arguing that the mere accessibility of these images in this content violated French law

French court agreed they tried to bring it back in enforcement in the United States and were unable to do so but that early case that dates back as you can see all the way back to 2000 crystallized this question of under what circumstances do court orders or should court

orders be able to be applied on a more broad basis outside of the particular jurisdiction we're seeing lots of different courts grapple with this question in Europe this comes up within the context now of the right to be forgotten in which a case that many of you may know case brought in in Europe where someone said that search results that were damaging to the

individual's reputation were still accessible through Google the results were accurate the information was legal there was nothing unlawful about it but what they wanted to do was make it more difficult to find by ordering Google to remove it from its search index European court agreed and found that there was within the privacy law a right to be forgotten

and ordering in this case the search intermediary to remove it from its index in the aftermath of that decision we started to see some privacy regulators say it's not good enough to limit this just to Europeans but in fact we want to see limitations of access more broadly so that it's done on a global basis and we had the same

issue effectively appear before the Canadian Supreme Court it's another place if we have time it was really worth a visit it's also right beside the parliament buildings they heard in December a case involving Google in which a British Columbia court had issued an order which they said should be applied on a global basis ordering the removal of certain search results from Google globally and the question before the Canadian Supreme Court we

don't have an answer yet the court hasn't issued its ruling is whether or not the court order should be limited just to British Columbia or just to Canada or whether a Canadian court like any other court should be entitled to apply this on an international or broader basis again the signal that there's five minutes so in the last five minutes three more three last things

data localization big big issue increasingly as people take a look at surveillance related activities raise questions about whether or not one way to try to better protect privacy is to ensure that the data remains within the jurisdiction this becomes a big issue especially

in a post-Trump environment not post-Trump in a Trump environment it's not it's not post yet thank you we have to wait a little bit longer for that I hope hey but the issues especially for other people so one of the things you may know one of the first executive orders that Trump signed was one scale rolling back an interpretation that

had tried to provide better levels of privacy protection for non-U.S. citizens and permanent residents and so that issue of where the data is stored and access to it raises real questions and concerns in in Europe there the way to counter that the way that has been captured

has largely been through this fellow max friends he's a lawyer former law student who got interested in privacy related issues from doing a master's in the United States he brought in action challenging the information sharing agreement the safe harbor between the EU and the United States based on the surveillance activities that take place in the U.S. and did so successfully the

European court struck down that agreement there is now something known as the privacy shield but there are ongoing questions about whether or not that those data flows are permissible there's also website blocking Canadians may be surprised to learn if you haven't heard about it that the Quebec government has passed legislation as part of a budget to block

mandating that ISPs block access to unlicensed online gambling sites this is a straightforward cash grab Quebec government has its own licensed online gambling site it hasn't been meeting financial projections and they're pretty open about this and so what they did was they said

well how can we do better one way we can do better is to block the competition and so what they have ordered is a blocking of unregulated websites with ISP ISPs once this takes effect facing significant penalties for failing to follow through the regulator has said you're not allowed to do this there's a legal challenge as well but that question of

government mandated blocking isn't limited to the kinds of countries that you read about the China's of the world we've seen it here too and especially in a copyright context you see it all around the world where copyright rights owners often argue for blocking of access to various kinds of sites finally there's copyright in Canada we had long debates about these issues

we passed laws in 2012 and generally speaking we did really really well this is a list of the many of the various kinds of exceptions that Canada added within the legislation and expansion of fair dealing which would be our version of fair use a whole series of other basic exceptions we have first we have a non-commercial user-generated content exception that protects

people who create remix and mash up both the creator of it as well as the platforms that store that information we've got a an internet exception so in a classroom like this it's materials available anywhere on the internet so long as someone hasn't said they don't want to see it actively used under the exception you're permitted to use it for educational purposes

so we did really well but rights holders aren't happy about that and in a copyright review schedule to start later this year we're seeing headlines like this kids will suffer if the legislation doesn't change it's always thinking about the kids and so in this instance the argument is you've got to roll back or scale back some of the openness provisions around fair

dealing music industry is of course back talking about the so-called value gap Canada's music scene especially non-streaming has done exceptionally well nevertheless not well enough at least according to the industry and of course there are always claims around piracy and claims that somehow Canada is a piracy haven even though the data doesn't bear that out

at all and so there is a need to speak out on this now these are the kinds of issues that happens when you start when law and policy start needing technology and so I will conclude by saying that as we look at all these issues whether you're here or you're in another

jurisdiction where these are taking place we desperately need ideas we need to be able to counter some of these policy issues or at least invoke informed ideas about what kind of policy policies are appropriate we need your expertise but even most of all we need your voice and as consultations happen and there are opportunities to speak out wherever you may happen to be

I'd really encourage you to do so thanks so much for your attention have any questions

yes sir what are your thoughts on compelling password well we're seeing it we're seeing it not just in the courts but we're starting we started to hear about the prospect of the border too just for just when you cross when you cross the border in fact there's a hearing that's taking place right now for the ethics committee private ethics and privacy committee around at the border

compelling that sort of disclosure I think it raises real concerns as well I'm not an absolutist on some of these issues and so my starting point is to say we need to ensure first and foremost that there is oversight around some of these things and then certainly in a border context

you don't get that sort of oversight it's you and the customs official and very often you feel quite helpless in other circumstances one can understand why in certain circumstances there would be a need to disclose but one would hope a that there's this is always done on a warranted basis and that there's an understanding of those within the warrant that create the appropriate limitations both in terms of access and use so I don't know that we can create an

environment where we say there's simply never any access there's no circumstances where law enforcement should be entitled to do it my concern at least the way this has played out in Canada is that we get law enforcement who are doing the best they can in these circumstances too often

arguing that all of these steps to ensure that there is appropriate levels of oversight are simply slowing things down or making it too difficult and what we need to do is eliminate all of that kind of oversight that's where from my perspective the problem lies I saw your hand and then I guess your hand so inside open source communities there's

a lot of passion and enthusiasm for these kinds of issues but maybe not a strong sense of the most effective way to engage so I mean what kind of suggestions would you have for open source communities in terms of practical steps for trying to have our voices be heard that's a great question and so there's what I think you

can do both individually and then as a community and as I referenced earlier on there is that on an individual basis to speak out it can be an intimidating thing to say I want to meet with my member of parliament the reality is they're not expert in almost every circumstance in these areas and you have far more expertise than they will in many instances and so

they're in many instances happy to learn and they are also far more accessible at least sort of harp on the Canadian side of the story but I know I'm talking to some of my US colleagues they say that the ability to get a meeting with the US senator is almost impossible

getting a meeting with even a your local representative from congress requires a nice contribution attending a breakfast and stuff like that it's difficult that's not the case here and I only and I think it's not the case a lot of other countries your MP will meet with you they're in the riding they're they'll stay within the next week or two they will be in the

riding for the better part of the next two months spending times at barbecues and things like that the reality is they're accessible I could in my own circumstance my former MP was John Baird who was our foreign minister or environment minister and I and I kind of recall I was taking my kid to hockey camp to a hockey game on play he played hockey on Saturday morning he was young he was

like eight or nine years old and I saw like he was on twitter or something like that I referenced the fact that Baird was holding a town hall near where we were and I said in copyright was the issue at the time I said told Ethan my son you know what let's go you're gonna see democracy in action we'll go and see if we can get a minute with Baird as part of this

town hall and so I go in we we reduce the average age in the room by at least 15 years because it tends to skew a bit older but we go in and Baird is there and he knew who I was because I knew some columns and things like that he gave me a few minutes and then he said you

more time and I met he gave me 45 minutes in his office a week before he went to Copenhagen at the time he was the environment minister for what was a major conference on the environment it is and I hear these kinds of stories repeatedly that the MPs especially if they know that you're in the writing will give you the time so individually I think it's about frankly

it's nothing more than trying to make sure your voice is heard to your elected representative as a community though it's clear this is a real community and community voices can be really strong on these issues and given that there is some amount of self-organization already the opportunity to try to self-organize around issues that matter from policy perspective

is there. For example, in the copyright context, we helped create the technology law public interest clinic that I established at this university. We established essentially frameworks platforms for a number of different areas for people so that they could coalesce. So we created something known as a digital security coalition. We had a lot of help

from a number of digital security companies in town and said, you know what, some of these issues will directly implicate you, you need to ensure that there is a voice. We helped them do a white paper, letters to members of parliament and then efforts to try to ensure those voices are heard. There's a lot of power ensuring that more stakeholders come out and in a sense provide some of these counters. So there's a lot you can do individually

and then there's of course perhaps potentially even stronger is that kind of coalescing around the community itself and speaking as a community on some of these issues. I'll take the fellow with the two more, two more because it was promised.

I've been following some of these issues over the past. It seems to me, you know, at the root of it, there's an asymmetry of incentives where the major players have legal departments whose job it is, is to actively attack the surface of law. And so as a community, at best we can be reactive, you know, and speaking in the Canadian

context, are you aware of how we can, you know, change footing or like start to become say proactive or how do you, how do you, how do you sustain against an advanced persistent threat? You raised at least a couple of issues there. One is how do you, how do

you do something other than always playing defense? And it does feel like very often almost all we're doing is playing defense. I do think that there is at least within different policy environments the opportunity to do some of that. So for example, I did a piece in the Globe, I write for the Globe now pretty regularly, talked about the need for

a text and data mining exception. And so the government's put a lot of emphasis on the potential for AI in Canada and yet the restrictions of copyright law might create in terms of being able to engage in text and data mining and what those data sets look like creates a real world restriction for our competitiveness. So that's an attempt

to try to put forward sort of proactive positive agenda and we had some of that. I mean, so user generated content exceptions didn't come out of nowhere. It came out of people saying that should I really be liable and face thousands in damages based on a video of my kid dancing or kind of some of my home movies that have some background music? Didn't make any sense to them. The ongoing persistent threat though

is an incredible challenge and I don't have a good answer for that. The groups on the other side play a long game and so we see that let's say in the copyright context where they lost some respect in 2012 but they are back and have been very active for 2017 whereas many of the groups that were successful in 2012 said

job here is done. And it just requires ongoing efforts to have commitment but it's an enormous challenge. So is there anything like say the EFF within Canadian projects whose job it is to kind of push forward the opposite agenda? There is. So thanks. So if you are looking for a place to support

there are at least a couple of those groups. One is that public interest clinic that I mentioned here at the University of Ottawa. It's called CIPIC, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic. They're actively involved in a whole range of issues. They brought the very first complaint against Facebook on privacy grounds anywhere in the world and was successful in doing so. They appear regularly before

Parliament and often appear before the courts on an intervener basis. There is also open media which is a BC based group that has been very successful especially in telecom space and on the surveillance space. So you don't have EFF but at least those two groups have been the most active and plus the traditional civil liberties groups, CCLA and BCLA.

One of the nice things, I think the answer is no. At least not right now. And I think one of the things that has been underrated is that Canada is a pretty good policy environment or has been on a lot of those kind of

issues from privacy to security basis. Encryption is a good example actually. We were far more progressive around encryption exports than the United States was. So you had, at a certain point in time, 20 years ago now, you had certain companies setting up shop or locating here in part because there were fewer restrictions on these issues compared to what they

face in other places. We're pretty good with respect to intermediary liability, not perfect but pretty good generally speaking. And given that we don't have things yet around things like data retention and stuff like that, in some ways it's not a terrible thing not to have that in part because it doesn't set standards and so you can establish

some of these kinds of services without a whole lot of concern. We're part of Five Eyes, there's lots of pressure that's brought to bear and so that doesn't mean things won't change but for the moment it's a pretty healthy environment. In your experience are they savvy enough if you say listen, I'm running core, we're not

responsible, we don't have any control. My experience is that the far bigger problem law enforcement has faced rather than needing lots of new laws has been that there are too many that don't have the resources or sophistication on some of these issues. So there are some that are highly sophisticated,

either within the national police forces or at least in a couple of the major cities. Once you get outside of that, there's far less sophistication and there's not a whole lot of rush time.