The meeting minutes of Develop Nova Scotia are a pretty prosaic affair. Participants discuss their contract with Grant Thorton for auditing services; preparations for the move to a new office location; the ‘lots of progress’ being made with the Queen’s Marque development. In short, they resemble the kinds of meeting minutes you could expect to […]
FOIPOP
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Nova Scotia’s approach to data protection remains stuck in the past
South of the border, U.S. president Donald Trump is facing a barrage of mockery for the fact that his proposed border wall is “a 1st-century solution to a 21st-century problem.” Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to judge, given the way our own government struggles to implement technology. On Tuesday, Catherine Tully, Nova Scotia’s information […]
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Stephen McNeil’s contempt for transparency
It’s been a depressing week for Nova Scotia’s freedom of information. First, premier Stephen McNeil said his 2013 campaign promise to “expand the powers and mandate” of the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner was a “mistake.” Days later it came to light that the premier’s office had blocked privacy commissioner Catherine Tully in her […]
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Auditor General will investigate FOIPOP breach
The Office of the Auditor General has agreed to investigate last month’s breach of Nova Scotia’s FOIPOP website, after a request for help from the province. In a letter asking for the aid of auditor general Michael Pickup, Internal Services minister Patricia Arab writes that the province would “greatly benefit” from the OAG’s support. “As […]
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Nova Scotia’s FOIPOP site won’t be back online anytime soon
Nova Scotians filing a Freedom of Information request will have to do so with pen and paper for the foreseeable future. The province’s defective Access to Information portal is still offline, and provincial spokesperson Brian Taylor says there’s no estimate of when the site will be back up and running. The page was taken down […]
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The FOIPOP breach and the dangers of criminalizing research
Last December, two journalists in Myanmar, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, were invited to dinner by police officers to discuss their research into war crimes carried out by the military. The officers handed them some documents, then immediately arrested them under the country’s Official Secrets Act for possessing the classified material. As absurd as […]
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Province was warned about sloppy database security over a year ago
The government’s cozy and “highly-dependent” relationship with systems service provider Unisys opened up some big holes in Nova Scotia’s IT security. So says a damning auditor general report from 2016 conducted on the same database system used for Nova Scotia’s recently breached Freedom of Information web portal. The purpose of the audit was to investigate […]
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Province just sort of stumbles across massive data breach
With minimal effort, it appears a Halifax teenager was able to download 7,000 confidential documents containing personal information on thousands of Nova Scotians—and the government only found out about it by accident. At a press conference Wednesday, deputy minister of Internal Services Jeff Conrad described how an unauthorized user had—over two days in March—accessed private […]
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Bridge commission impossible
It was late January when I first approached Halifax Harbour Bridges trying to obtain a copy of the Crown corporation’s board minutes. It didn’t go so well. “We really don’t feel like it’s necessary to share the minutes,” says HHB communications manager Alison MacDonald. Halifax Harbour Bridges’ board members—some of whom are politicians themselves—are appointed […]
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Halifax police prep for cyber attacks
The Halifax Regional Police department is on the hunt for a new chief information security officer to develop and then manage its IT security, strategy and operations. Until the newly-created CISO position is filled, HRP’s systems are presumably more vulnerable to outside cyber attacks. Just how vulnerable, though, the department isn’t saying. “The field of […]
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Halifax’s overburdened FOIPOP office wants to go digital
The province’s largest municipality is barely keeping up with the hundreds of Freedom of Information requests it receives each year. But that could soon change. The HRM issued a tender request Wednesday for new software to manage, track and redact FOIPOP requests as a potential solution to the bureaucratic strain. “Right now, the team is […]
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Nova Scotia’s Freedom of Information laws are dangerously toothless
[Image-1] Changes need to be made to Nova Scotia’s Freedom of Information Act. That’s the call being made by critics after premier Stephen McNeil’s admission to using personal phone calls to get around the government’s duty to document. In September, the Office of Information and Privacy (OIP) published a report stating that texts, MMS and Blackberry […]