This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
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In an iconic ruling announced by The Supreme Court of Canada on Friday, it concluded that police acquiring telecom subscribers’ information without a warrant to identify a child pornography suspect is violation of Canadians’ constitutional privacy rights. According to the 8-0 ruling written by Justice Thomas Cromwell, the information obtained by the police in the case of one Saskatchewan man could be used to uphold his conviction on possession of child pornography, and the suspect might be entered in a new trial on distribution charges that he’d earlier been acquitted of.
However, it was the case only because of the seriousness of the offenses as the court found that police was acting in good faith at a time when the law was uncertain and so the evidence gathered in the search should be admitted, whereas if it was exclude, it would bring the administration of justice into disrepute. However, the Friday’s ruling in principal embraced the notion that Internet users have a reasonable expectation of privacy that may only be intruded upon with a court order.
Judge Cromwell noted that “the disclosure of this information will often amount to the identification of a user with intimate or sensitive activities being carried out online, usually on the understanding that these activities would be anonymous. A request by a police officer that an ISP voluntarily disclose such information amounts to a search.” He added that “in this case, the police request that the ISP disclose the subscriber information was in effect a request to link Mr. Spencer with precise online activity that had been the subject of monitoring by the police and thus engaged a more significant privacy interest than a simple question posed by the police in the course of an investigation.”
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