C-216 – the Promotion of Safety in the Digital Age Act – makes some tweaks to existing legislation to make the law a bit more clear when it comes to online crimes.
This is Part 2 of C-216, you can find Part 1 here.
Part 2 – Mandatory Reporting of Child Sexual Abuse
So the first part we’re going to look at today makes some changes to An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child sexual abuse and exploitation material by persons who provide an Internet service, starting with expanding the definition of an “internet service”. Currently an internet service is providing internet access, content hosting, and email services. Michelle wants this expanded to cover content regardless of how it’s accessed and all online communication services. This would make sure online games and chat services are included in the legislation.
C-216 makes a small change to who companies are expected to contact about child sexual exploitation from the police to any organization designated in regulations, and the reporting now needs to include any transmission data involved. Transmission data is basically anything that could be used to identify who’s been sending messages or posting content.
Finally there’s some changes to some of the timeframes around reporting. Any company that reports child exploitation will need to keep any data around the report for 1 year (up from 21 days) and the amount of time that charges can be made is increased to 5 years (up from 2 years).
Part 3 – Criminal Code
The last bit of C-216 makes changes to the Criminal Code.
The first change is the punishment for publishing intimate images of someone without their consent. Currently you can be sentenced up to five years in prison for this. Michelle wants to increase this to 10 years if the person in the images is engaged in explicit sexual activity, and 14 years if the person publishing the images should have known aggravated sexual assault was happening in them.
The next big part of C-216 involves including fake images in basically any crime involving intimate images. Releasing images without consent, child sexual exploitation material, voyeuristic images, in all of these cases having or publishing fake images is just as severe as having real ones. This includes digitally modified images and AI generated ones.
Author’s Note: There’s a good chance this part doesn’t actually mean anything. The courts already view altered and fake child sexual exploitation material as being child exploitation material, and the existing laws are broad enough that even fake images of people could qualify as being illegal.
Finally C-216 specifies online harassment as being the same as physical harassment, and makes harassing someone anonymously an aggravating factor for sentencing.
Author’s Note
So I just wanted to mention here the reason why I decided to cover C-216 in two separate parts. As I mentioned, the first part is a bit of a read, but also it doesn’t feel much like it belongs with the rest of this legislation. The parts covered above are minor tweaks to existing laws to add more clarity to them. The part I covered last time imposes significant new requirements on social media platforms that are absolutely going to result in some heavy censorship. (Remember that they’ll be expected to determine your age through algorithms and decide if you should be under the heaviest parental controls based on that.) These should absolutely be two separate pieces of legislation and you can bet anyone who opposes the first part is going to be accused of supporting AI-generated porn and allowing online harassment.
Progress of C-216
C-216 is currently outside of the Order of Precedence.
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