Two parts that stuck out for me were:
“There’s no hiding from it. They can turn your phone into a camera. They can turn it into a microphone. You can turn the power off, they can still use the device. It’s the most intrusive thing that exists in the world today.”
and
He also learned from the April 2023 affidavit that the RCMP had ordered an ODIT on his union phone during the time he was engaged in collective bargaining conversations that year. He says this breached not only his privacy, but the privacy of some 19,000 union members.
I have zero problems with legal surveillance related to investigations of serious crimes, including the specific issue mentioned in this article — foreign interference in our electoral process.
With any surveillance it’s important to have safeguards to ensure it’s not abused and to ensure that unrelated private data is not exposed — such as the union conversations being called out in your snippet here. But this is not unique to phone-based surveillance, the same would be true for conversations recorded in an old fashioned bug or wire recording.
What’s important to me here is legal oversight to ensure the collections are warranted, and safeguards to prevent abuse of the collected data.