International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group

The ICLMG is a national coalition of Canadian civil society organizations that was established in the aftermath of the September, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. The coalition brings together 43 NGOs, unions, professional associations, faith groups, environmental organizations, human rights and civil liberties advocates, as well as groups representing immigrant and refugee communities in Canada.

The mandate of the ICLMG is to defend the civil liberties and human rights set out in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, federal and provincial laws, and international human rights instruments in the context of the so-called ‘war on terrorism’ in Canada. The ICLMG’s areas of work and concerns include anti-terror legislation, drone strikes, criminalization of dissent, torture, surveillance, security certificates, the oversight of police and intelligence agencies, the North American Security Perimeter, No-Fly lists, etc.

You can visit their website at iclmg.ca to learn more.

Our Fair Deal

Right now an international agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is being negotiated by Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Peru, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States. The changes to copyright required by the TPP would reduce our access to information and restrict our ability to innovate, both on and offline.

Changing our copyright laws in ways that restrict the open Internet and economic opportunity are unfair to citizens, businesses, creators, and civil society organizations. Not only could such changes raise prices for users of copyright works, but they could also stifle our knowledge economy and chill innovation.

Starting at first in New Zealand and then connecting with organizations and people internationally, a group of individuals from the fields of Internet policy, art, information technology, and law got together to discuss a TPP campaign with a copyright focus. What resulted was the idea of a fair deal, one that opens up trade opportunities for TPP member states but doesn’t force copyright and other IP-related changes on us that could damage our future.

Find out more at The Fair Deal Coalition.

Protect Our Privacy

A broad-based coalition of citizens, experts, organizations, and businesses have come together to defend our right to privacy based on a common statement of principle.

The government has been caught engaging in secretive, expensive, and out of control spying on our private lives, and is trying to push through a new law that will provide immunity to telecom companies that hand over our sensitive information to authorities even when they don’t have a warrant.

• Secretive: The government has been caught tracking law-abiding Canadians and collecting our sensitive private data.
• Expensive: The government is about to spend $4-billion of our tax dollars to house new spying operations.
• Out of control: In recent years there have been over 3,000 breaches of sensitive citizen data, affecting approximately 725,000 of us.

The Protect Our Privacy Coalition endorses the following Statement:

“More than ever, Canadians need strong, genuinely transparent, and properly enforced safeguards to secure privacy rights. We call on Government to put in place effective legal measures to protect the privacy of every resident of Canada against intrusion by government entities.”

Find our more at Protect Our Privacy Coalition.

Lean about straightforward privacy tools to help prevent government spying on your computer and phone at Reset the Net.