#10 - Freedom of Information

Like many countries around the world Canada has a law which allows for citizens access to information that would otherwise be unknown to them. The aptly named Access to Information Act serves as useful tool so that journalists and citizens can be more informed on the goings on of their own government. The requested information would then be examined for anything that could be security concern and be distributed to the person who requested it. The information that was requested would now become a public record and could be accessed. 

David Fraser

Since this is such a common practice it is surprising that a 19 year old Halifax, Nova Scotia man's home was raided by police on April 11th. Why was he raided well he had downloaded all 7,000 documents from the Nova Scotia freedom-of-information web portal. Some of those 7,000 documents contained personal information that the local Halifax government said he "illegally accessed". Now, he is facing the charge of "unauthorized access of a computer" which carries a sentence of up to ten years. A charge that David Fraser a privacy lawyer said was "jumping the gun, unless the police got a statement from him at the time that did in fact have some fraudulent or nefarious purpose". 

Evan D'Entremont

The question then is what exactly was the 19 year-old's intent. As it would turn out according to the him their was no nefarious intent. He says that he was interested in a labor dispute involving teachers. This led him to the freedom-of-information web portal and after looking through many documents with no success decided to just download them all. This was done by creating a simple script and using the number at the end of every URL on the website and copying the data. A process that software engineer Evan D'Entremont says he has done "hundreds of times" in security research. It is apparently so common that Fraser even said that it is used by search engines and online archives.

The raid and his charging has led to outrage with D'Entremont saying that the 19 year-old is being "railroaded" to cover for the government. Fraser had a very similar take saying, " It certainly does have the appearance that charge was laid in order to appear that they were doing something about this. Obviously, this was something that's particularly embarrassing to the provincial government and I can imagine that there is a fair amount of pressure to find a scapegoat, point the finger and press some charges".


Link to CBC.ca article on initial story here.
Link to from BleepingComputer here.
Link to article with Fraser and D'Entremont here.