FW: Reaching out to religious organizations about privacy issues
Nik Beeson
Hello EcuCommers
The next email I opened after sending Jim’s notice from the Zimbabwe Human Rights Bulletin was from David Christopher of Open Media.
Many of you will remember Reilly Yeo, Managing Director at Open Media (https://openmedia.ca/), giving us a talk at the last Ecumenical Communicators meeting hosted by KAIROS at the Centre for Social Innovation. Open Media is working on a ‘Privacy Coalition’
calling on the Cdn gov to “put in place effective legal measures to protect the privacy of every resident of Canada against intrusion by government entities.” They have “brought on board quite a wide range of groups from across the political spectrum - however
we would really like to reach out to religious organizations across Canada to invite them to join.”
Please see invitation below.
If you know of any groups or orgs that would consider joining Open Media’s coalition please contact:
David Christopher
Open Media Communications Coordinator,
(778) 232 1858
da...@openmedia.ca
Gracias.
Nik @ kairos
From: David Christopher [mailto:da...@openmedia.ca]
Sent: October-03-13 8:16 PM
To: Nik Beeson
Subject: Reaching out to religious organizations about privacy issues
Dear ___,
We cordially invite you to join the Protect Our Privacy Coalition.
Canada has recently seen several large data breaches by the federal government, along with legislative initiatives that threaten the personal privacy of Canadians and come a steep economic cost to taxpayers. Unchecked online surveillance also erodes trust in online service providers, which is bad for commerce and our digital economy.
Concerns over privacy been compounded by recent revelations that the private data of law-abiding Canadians is being collected by our federal spy agency. The agency, the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), is about to receive a new taxpayer supported $900-million, 72,000-square-metre compound in Ottawa.
The Protect Our Privacy Coalition has come together to launch non-partisan campaigns to ensure governments only use personal data in a manner that respects our right to privacy. The Protect Our Privacy Coalition is made up of a network of public interest organizations, businesses, experts, privacy advocates, and concerned citizens.
To join the coalition you or your organization simply needs to endorse the following statement of principle:
“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.”
While all members agree to the key principles of the campaign, individual organizations are not expected to cross-endorse the specific positions of others.
Our breadth is our strength. We now believe that it is time to take our call for stronger privacy protections to a higher level by building a broad, cross-Canada coalition.
We aim to avoid political partisanship and encourage Canadians from across the political spectrum to support our call for stronger privacy protections
Our Coalition seeks to: raise public awareness about privacy issues, provide educational resources, and stimulate robust conversation in social and mainstream media channels. We hope the campaign evolves in an organic, distributed nature, becoming a conversation on social media.
We hope to ensure that any future privacy-impacting federal legislation, regulations, programs, or activities protect the privacy of people in Canada and respects their Charter-protected rights. We also hope to help develop new privacy safeguards pertaining to the government’s access to and use of citizen data.
To sign on, please respond to this letter indicating your endorsement of the above statement of principle.
David Christopher
Communications Coordinator,
Some early members of the Coalition:
Agentic
Amnesty International Canada
BC Civil Liberties Association
BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association
BC Library Association
Canadian Media Guild
Free Dominion
Greenpeace Canada
OpenMedia.ca
Privacy & Access Council
Individual members of the Coalition:
Lisa Austin
Colin Bennett
Andrew Clement
Norman Landry
David Lyon
Kate Milberry
Christopher Parsons
Chris Prince
Leslie Shade