[ISN] RCMP not charging rights watchdog over hacking allegations

From: InfoSec News <alerts_at_private>
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2008 02:20:41 -0600 (CST)
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/story.html?id=977900

By Joseph Brean
National Post  
November 20, 2008

The RCMP will not pursue charges against the Canadian Human Rights 
Commission over allegations that its investigators hacked an Ottawa 
woman's wireless internet account to conceal their identity on websites 
under investigation for hate speech, the National Post has learned.

A parallel investigation of the same incident by the Privacy 
Commissioner remains ongoing.

The complaint arose in March at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal hate 
speech prosecution of Marc Lemire, webmaster of freedomsite.org, when 
his legal team brought a subpoena against internet service provider Bell 
Canada.

They were seeking the identity of whoever logged on to the neo-Nazi 
website stormfront.org under the name "Jadewarr" in December, 2006, just 
as bloggers were using technical data to reveal "Jadewarr" as the online 
pseudonym of Dean Steacy, a lead hate speech investigator at the CHRC. 
Mr. Steacy later acknowledged this under oath.

In his testimony, Alain Monfette, director of Bell Canada's law 
enforcement support team, read out the name and address of a woman, 
coincidentally a Bell Canada employee, whose computer IP address matched 
that of Jadewarr at the time in question, according to the Florida-based 
owner of stormfront.org, Don Black.

Neither the CHRC lawyers nor Mr. Lemire's team had ever heard of her. 
She has no connection to CHRC investigators, but she did have a laptop 
computer with a wireless connection, and the address Mr. Monfette gave 
for her apartment in downtown Ottawa is near the CHRC offices.

This led to speculation that CHRC staff were illegally using an innocent 
woman's internet account to hide behind her identity when investigating 
target websites, a claim Mr. Lemire made in a formal complaint to 
police, while also posting detailed photographs and schematics of her 
apartment building. That investigation is now concluded without charges.

[...]


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Received on Fri Nov 21 2008 - 00:20:41 PST

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