I just finished reading the book entitled “All the Light We Cannot See.” I highly recommend it if you haven’t already read it. For those who haven’t, it’s set during World War II and one of the themes of the book centres around radio communications and, in particular, the interception of those radio communications.

If you read the Digest below, you’ll see that this same theme is still with us, decades later, but perhaps even in a more profound way today because of the ease with which our communications can be intercepted. It is so easy to spy on us, that everyone seems to be doing it. If it’s this easy to spy on everyone, and if everyone is doing it, are we simply saying that we can’t communicate privately anymore? That we have lost our reasonable expectation of privacy?

The article I’m referring to below is about how officials at Correctional Service Canada employed a contractor to spy on cell phone conversations taking place in jail. While we can debate whether inmates have privacy rights, I think it’s pretty safe to say the guards and other personnel who work at the jail shouldn't have to give up their ability to have a private conversation at some point during their work day. Apparently the spying even picked up conversations by guards who were in their cars in the parking lot! 

Shockingly, the contractor who was hired to do the spying got paid very little and when asked about it said simply that he was trying to make a living and that he understood nothing of the legalities of what the government hired him to do.

With stories like this, doesn't it give you that extra resolve to help ensure that privacy remains a valued right in our society?