RCMP slammed for private surveillance use to trawl social media, “darknet”

The RCMP has been quietly using private surveillance companies to trawl through social media accounts and “publicly available” information on the internet since at least 2015, a new report by Canada’s privacy watchdog reveals.

And the national police force is rejecting the federal privacy commissioner’s recommendations on making their use of “third-party” surveillance vendors more transparent.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) found that the RCMP “failed to conduct due diligence” to ensure that the information they were receiving from a specific product, called Babel X, was legally collected under Canada’s privacy laws.

The Mounties previously argued that the Privacy Act does not require them to confirm the information, harvested from social media accounts and the “public internet,” was collected legally by their contractors – just that the police force adhered to privacy rules when they used that information.

“There has been an exponential growth in the availability of personal information about individuals over the last two decades,” Privacy Commissioner Philippe Dufresne’s office’s special report, released Thursday, read.

“The idea that the government could collect and use any personal information that can be purchased or accessed online without a fulsome assessment of the legality of the vendor’s practices cannot be accepted, as it would fail to recognize and give effect to the privacy rights of Canadians.”

The report was about “Project Wideawake,” a RCMP initiative first revealed by the independent news outlet The Tyee in November 2020.

Law enforcement “projects” usually refer to specific investigations or operations. But Project Wideawake instead referred to a “particular procurement vehicle used