Privacy concerns flare up

By Dan Hilborn
Published Sept. 1, 2004


An American company that provided computer data recovery services to the B.C. government had its contract terminated earlier this year due to privacy concerns with the U.S.A. Patriot Act, provincial Management Services Minister Joyce Murray confirmed this week.

The data, which filled a number of magnetic tapes and covered a "broad sample" of information from a variety of government ministries, will now only be handled by companies that can guarantee the information will be kept in Canada, Murray said.

"I have already pulled back information that had been stored temporarily in the U.S.," Murray told the Burnaby NOW.

"I've instructed the ministry to pull that information back and find suppliers in Canada to do the emergency exercise back-up data handling.

"We're going to limit the information to being in Canada so that heretofore, it will be only be handled by Canadian companies with Canadian boards of directors," she said.

The U.S. company in question, Sungard Data Systems, had been subcontracted to conduct an annual data recovery exercise for the B.C. government, a service that would be essential in the event of a catastrophic computer shutdown in Victoria, said the minister.

The decision to terminate the contract was made in May, around the same time that B.C. privacy commissioner David Loukidelis announced that he would be conducting an inquiry into the ramifications of the U.S.A. Patriot Act in B.C. Loukidelis' report, which was originally scheduled to be complete in mid-August, is now due to be made public next week.

Murray said the termination of the Sungard contract, which was part of a larger management services contract with Telus, is evidence that the B.C. government already has the strongest privacy protection laws on the continent and that it will err on the side of non-disclosure, even if it means higher cost for some services.

"I believe people can be confident that we're acting in their best interest," Murray said Thursday. "U.S. legislation that allows their agencies to reach around legislation is not acceptable to me."

Murray noted that the data recovery exercise is an annual event, and involves information from a wide variety of government agencies and ministries. In this case, it may include wildlife inventories, land registry technical data and information on clients of the Ministry of Children and Family Development, she added.

At the time of the exercise, Murray was advised that the information would be kept in Canada. "I was assured that Canadian employees of Telus, the primary contractor, had custody of the data for the entire time. It was down in the United States for a very short time, so I did not feel it was a very significant risk."

In an earlier interview with the Burnaby NOW, Murray said that future contractual arrangements with the government will have to be with Canadian companies that have Canadian directors.

"We're doing everything reasonable to protect personal information, and we're going beyond that," Murray said on Aug. 31. "I think it's a fact of life today that there is no 100 per cent guarantee about your information, whether you use the Internet, or whether you are buying drugs at Wal-Mart. Whether it's vulnerability or identity theft, there are some risks out there in electronic media today."

However, Murray also said that the risk of identity theft is "far, far greater" than the possibility of U.S. law enforcement agencies using the Patriot Act to access information on British Columbians.

"We're going to make it infinitely more difficult for them to do that, and infinitely greater penalties should any employee share that information with the FBI through the Patriot Act," she said. "We are going to have the toughest protection here in B.C. and we are in the lead on this issue."