OTTAWA, Canada (LifeSiteNews) – Canada’s national Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) force has acknowledged it uses special spyware to hack into a suspect’s phone without them even knowing it.
According to a Politico report published last week, the RCMP uses spyware to turn on or off the camera or microphone of a laptop or phone at will to eavesdrop on one’s conversations.
While the RCMP says it only uses such techniques in serious matters involving national security when all other means have been exhausted, the revelation nevertheless shows it has been used in at least 10 investigations between 2018 and 2022.
According to a senior research associate at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, the ability to hack into one’s phone in such a manner has been kept “incredibly quiet.”
“This is a remarkable finding and, for the first time, publicly reveals that the RCMP is using spyware to infiltrate mobile devices,” noted the research associate.
The new methods are needed as a result of so-called end-to-end encrypted apps, which make it virtually impossible to hack, said the RCMP.
The spying admittance came because of a House of Commons document which came about after a Conservative Party of Canada MP asked what kind of programs the government was using that track Canadians’ data.
The spyware techniques used by the RCMP to go after criminal suspects are part of its Covert Access and Intercept Team. Information is obtained by the team using what it dubbed “on-device investigative tools.”
The abilities of the spyware are vast. Not only can an individual’s photos be accessed, but also his calendars, financial records, and videos as well as “audio recordings of private communications and other sounds within the range of the targeted device.”
Even more disturbing is the ability of police to use a device’s camera to obtain “photographic images of persons, places, and activities viewable by the camera(s) built into the targeted device.”
According to the House of Commons document, “In less than a generation, a high number of Canadians migrated their daily communications from a small number of large telecommunication service providers, all of which provided limited and centrally controlled services to customers, to countless organizations in Canada and elsewhere that provide a myriad of digital services to customers.”
This decentralization when combined with the “widespread use of end-to-end encrypted voice and text-based messaging services” says the document, “make it exponentially more difficult for the RCMP to conduct court-authorized electronic surveillance.”
Some groups have raised alarm bells in terms of privacy and say the RCMP has crossed a line.
The director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s privacy, technology and surveillance program Brenda McPhail said that her association wants to know which companies are working with the RCMP.
“Many such companies have histories of selling these intrusive and dangerous tools to authoritarian governments,” said McPhail, “where they are ultimately used against human rights defenders, journalists, and others.”
During the COVID crisis, it came to light that the government of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was secretly spying on 33 million cell phone users without one’s consent.
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This prompted calls from opposition MPs for a full investigation into the matter.
The secret tracking program was done under the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), which claimed the tracking was done to understand the “public’s responsiveness during lockdown measures.”
Last year, the federal government of Canada put a contract notice tender out that indicated PHAC was looking to permanently use cell tower tracking for up to the next five years.
It was also recently disclosed that Canadian Special Forces conducted surveillance flights over the trucker’s Freedom Convoy in February in a spy plane capable of eavesdropping on cell phone calls and tracking small movements, contrary to a military directive banning such flights.