The lack of institutional respect for Freedom of Information legislation and the public’s right to know in this province is getting ridiculous.
The triple-delete, don’t-commit-anything-to-writing attitude of the provincial Liberal Administration was bad enough.
Then we learned the City of Vancouver was thumbing its nose at the law, contravening deadlines for requests 16 per cent of the time and was four times more likely to take far too long when dealing with media requests.
Now we’ve got the Vancouver Police Department playing silly buggers with requests for information on activities that might be breaching our rights.
This started last July when the Pivot Legal Society filed an FOI request about so-called Stingray devices used by the RCMP and U.S. law enforcement to monitor cellphone communications.
The VPD finally responded late last year by hiding behind a legal exemption to the FOI law saying: “The head of a public body may refuse to disclose information to an applicant if the disclosure would reasonably be expected to … harm the effectiveness of investigative techniques and procedures currently used, or likely to be used, in law enforcement.”
It wouldn’t confirm or deny any records connected to the device existed.
When the department realized initial news reports led people to infer it might be secretly monitoring email, texts and chatter, it clarified its refusal to answer any questions:
“What is important to know is that the VPD does not randomly listen to the cellphone conversations of citizens. Any covert monitoring of communications is only done during serious criminal investigations pursuant to the Criminal Code, and with prior judicial authorization from the courts.”
As a result, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner launched an inquiry to determine if the VPD truly had a legitimate excuse for not responding to the FOI request.
That inquiry was scuttled May 25 because the cops sent a letter to the commissioner saying, in essence, “ha, ha, ha, LOL, we don’t have anything” by stating this: “In consideration of all the relevant circumstances, the Vancouver Police advises that it does not have this device and does not hold records responsive to your access request of July 23, 2015.”
This made any hearing moot in the eyes of the OIPC.
Talk about sophomoric. For nearly a year the force stonewalled over nothing?
The B.C. Civil Liberties Association, the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Assoc., OpenMedia.ca and Pivot wrote to the department last month for clarification; they’re still waiting for an answer.
Micheal Vonn, policy director of the BCCLA, questioned whether we’re really getting the straight goods. She said the issue is not whether the VPD “has” such a device but whether it has access to one.
“That is a distinction that is incredibly important in light of news reports from Motherboard and Vice News that the RCMP has allowed other police departments to use the RCMP’s Stingrays, or has given other police departments access to data collected from the RCMP’s devices,” Vonn pointed out.
“On the procedural side, the question is how it is possible that one of the biggest municipal police forces in the country has ‘no records responsive’ to a request for records about one of the most talked about police surveillance devices in this and many other countries.”
These are important concerns — it’s unclear how such sweeping, indiscriminate surveillance devices can be made Charter compliant outside the realm of national security since they capture all communications not only a target’s, and not just metadata — content as well.
“New technologies that necessitate controls in order to be used lawfully by the police should not be allowed to be hidden and insulated from constitutional scrutiny,” Vonn insisted.
“The media stories on the RCMP’s devices say they have been used for a decade. It is likely that, as with the recent case about cellphone tower dumps that we reference in our submission on Stingrays, we are going to find out that people’s rights were violated for years en mass.”
Asked for comment Friday morning, the VPD said they’d get back to me next week. Of course.
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