Canada’s privacy commissioner has found that government anti-terrorist measures since Sept. 11 have threatened privacy and civil liberties. In her annual report to Parliament, Jennifer Stoddart noted numerous examples of the federal government’s security concerns overriding privacy rights. She cited the Public Safety Act, brought in last year, that allows the government to force air carriers, without warrant, to turn over information on their passengers.

And, Stoddart says, the act does not just apply to terrorism concerns. "In other words, the machinery of anti-terrorism is being used to meet the needs of ordinary law-enforcement, lowering the legal standard that law-enforcement authorities in a democratic society must meet," she wrote.

According to the commissioner, there is no evidence that the exceptional police powers granted by the Anti-Terrorism Act, passed in 2001, are effective in "detecting, preventing or deterring terrorist acts."

In the report, Stoddart also expressed concern about the threat to privacy caused by the trend toward freer sharing of information between government departments and with other countries, and the outsourcing of data operations across borders. "All these factors have fundamentally shifted the relationship between national security, law enforcement and information privacy, with a corresponding loss of privacy and due-process protection for individuals."

Overall, Stoddart wrote that "Privacy threats seem to be multiplying like a bad virus, threatening to overwhelm us." She said a main cause is a "voracious appetite for personal information and surveillance that has sprung up in the post-9/11 environment."

Her report emphasized the long overdue need to modernize the Privacy Act, a first generation privacy law which has not been substantially amended since its inception in 1983.

"The privacy landscape is infinitely more complex today than it was a decade ago. Faced with increased globalization and extensive outsourcing of personal information processing and storage, Canada’s Privacy Act lags woefully behind."

In addition to pointing out the flaws of the act, the commissioner also called for a more comprehensive and consistent approach to managing privacy in the federal government.