Inside Politics

Vikileaks30Watch: Vic Toews requests House investigation into "misguided attempt to gain political advantage"

by Kady O'Malley Posted: February 19, 2012 2:22 PM Last Updated: February 19, 2012 3:32 PM
For those following the ongoing saga of the public safety minister, the online surveillance bill and the anonymous twitter account that was purportedly inspired by the latter to post possibly embarrassing personal revelations regarding the former, here's the letter that was sent to House of Commons Speaker Andrew Scheer on Friday. Letter from Vic Toews, MP (Provencher) to House of Commons Speaker Andrew Scheer  

Although the letter appears to categorically claim a direct connection between "an Internet Protocol address associated with the House of Commons" and the public transmission of "details of [his] personal life," and asks for the matter to be investigated based on the fact that the latter involved the use of House resources, that connection has not, in fact, been definitively established. 

It's important to note that the media sting on which Toews' claim appears to rest does not, in fact, prove that a House of Commons-linked computer was used to administer -- or, indeed, even log into the twitter account at issue. 

What the Ottawa Citizen was able to do was bait a user checking an email account that was linked to the twitter account into clicking on a link that went to a unique web address -- set up by the Citizen -- that was being monitored specifically to see who would show up in the logs. Whether or not that same "taxpayer-funded" computer can be directly linked to the operation of that (now defunct) twitter account, however, is not yet known; however, if it was not directly used to run that account, it's not clear what, if any, rules would have been breached by a user who simply checked the inbox of an associated email address, even if done from a House of Commons machine. 

In any case, it may be tricky to narrow down the list of suspects beyond anyone with a Hill pass -- staffers, volunteers, journalists and HoC employee included -- and access to a computer within the precinct intranet. The IP address in question is one of just four public addresses that will appear in outside logs when any one of the 4,000 or so users on the HoC network access a website. 

Here's what the Speaker's Office had to say about the matter:

The HoC, like many organizations, uses a series of private IP addresses for its internal network.  Having said that, when users are using the internet, they are only identified with one of our four public IP addresses. To support this approach we use a concept called NAT (Network Address Translation). All users, on the Parliamentary Network (over 4000), when using the internet,  are publicly identified with one of these four unique addresses.  

As an example, if we had 100 users using the internet at once from the HOC, they would all be identified with one of the four addresses. Hence, just by looking at the IP address that is used on the internet you cannot correlate this to a person from the organization.  

 Further research and tools are required to correlate a person to an Internet IP address.

The House is well aware of the allegations and looking into the matter.

Finally, neither the minister nor anyone else is suggesting that the dissemination of information contained in publicly available court documents is, itself, a potential criminal offence. Given the above-noted difficulty in conclusively proving that the operator of the account used House resources to do so -- remember, the sting only caught him/her checking an email address -- it's not entirely clear on what grounds the House of Commons would be able to carry out more than a cursory investigation. 

Further updates, as always, will be posted as warranted. (No pun intended.) 

Tags: blackberry jungle, online surveillance, vic toews