Canada Wants To Keep Federal Data Within National Borders (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Stack: Canada has released its latest federal cloud adoption strategy, now available for public comment, which includes policy concerning the storing of sensitive government information on Canadian citizens within national borders. The newly-published [Government of Canada Cloud Adoption Strategy] requires that only data which the government has categorized as "unclassified," or harmless to national and personal security, will be allowed outside of the country. This information will still be subject to strict encryption rules. The new strategy, which has been in development over the last year, stipulates that all personal data stored by the government on Canadian citizens, such as social insurance numbers and critical federal information, must be stored in Canada-based data centers in order to retain "sovereign control."

Comments

Re:Seems logical

[Noah Haders]

I think it is a good start, but you also need to be careful that your data doesn't pass through outside networks before getting to your home. For example, when I get a page from slashdot, it may travel around the world and back again to get into my computer. we need ways to keep control of which paths the datas take.

Re:Start with the census

[tlhIngan]

The government was also able to jail you for refusing to fill in previous long-form census. I refused in writing in both 2006 and 2011, on the grounds that in 2006 some of the questions were inappropriate, and in 2011 because some of the questions required information on your parent's ethnicity, which if they want it, they can ask them directly. Long distance charges will definitely apply since they were long dead.

Threats disappeared after I told them that the census taker had violated the census act by having one of her children along when trying to con me into filling it in. And keeping info stored on an insecure laptop. I also told them that I could prove that the "92 year non-disclosure policy" was a total lie, that researchers are given access to the raw data after a mere 7 years, so please take me to court.

Yes, they are able to jail you. But - over the entire history of the law, there were about 11 people actually charged, and they were just fined - $1000 or so.

The census is important. In fact, there was no long form in 2011 because the Conservative government changed it from mandatory to voluntary. This had the unfortunate side effect that there is no usable data to be mined from the 2011 census.

As for the release of raw data - it's collective data, not individual forms. The 92 year rule is for individual forms - so in 92 years, the complete form is released how you filled it in. But the census data is of importance to many people, groups and organizations, and that's aggregated. After 7 years, the aggregated data is available to researchers who want a snapshot of the Canadian population to study what they need to study. But they don't have access to the individual forms you fill out, only the aggregated data. And only subsets of it - what they need for their research. No one other than Statistics Canada can see the full data set, and once the forms are tallied, no one can see the raw forms or individual data either (until 92 years later).

Before it was gutted by the Harper Conservatives, Statistics Canada is/was one of the most premier data collecting and analysis organizations. It's why the chief statistician resigned after elimination of the long form - he knew that the law would render the 2011 data completely worthless. It's partly why we're in the situation we're in with school closures in one city, school overcrowding in others, etc. Because the only usable data dates back to 2006.