Stealing cable and WiFi? New cyberbullying law isn't just about child porn

When Justice Minister Peter MacKay unveiled the federal government's proposed cyberbullying law on Wednesday, he touted it as a necessary tool to combat the often hurtful spread of intimate images. To emphasize the underlying point, he made the announcement during national Bullying Awareness Week.

But legal experts were left wondering why a piece of legislation that is meant to rein in online tormentors is also taking on terror suspects and people who steal cable TV signals.

"There is a much larger agenda at play here," says Rob Currie, director of the Law and Technology Institute at Dalhousie University.

Under the banner of anti-cyberbullying measures, the government is "trying to push through a number of things that have to do with law enforcement but nothing to do with cyberbullying."

Among other things, these new measures include giving police easier access to the metadata that internet service providers and phone companies keep on every call and email.

MacKay has acknowledged that law enforcement did not have the tools to prevent the deaths of Canadian teens such as Rehtaeh Parsons and Amanda Todd, who endured years of torment online. C-13 would give police a greater ability to investigate incidents of cyberbullying by giving courts the right to seize computers, phones and other devices used in an alleged offence.

5 years in prison

Under the proposed legislation, anyone who posts or transmits an "intimate image" of another individual without that person's consent could face up to five years in prison.

Leah Parsons, mother of the late Rehtaeh Parsons, the Nova Scotia teen who died following a suicide attempt, is greeted by Justice Minister Peter MacKay as they attend a roundtable discussion on cybercrime in Halifax in October. (Andrew Vaughan / Canadian Press)

​

MacKay said C-13, also known as the Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act, reflected the government's commitment "to ensuring that our children are safe from online predators and from online exploitation."

Since introducing the bill, MacKay has said that C-13 is also meant to update the Criminal Code to reflect modern communications such as email and social media.

Toronto internet lawyer Gil Zvulony says that it is a necessary step, given that some aspects of the Criminal Code pertaining to communications still refer to outmoded technologies such as telegrams.

"I don't know what the [government's] motivation is, but there is a logical theme to all of this, in the sense that it's trying to modernize [the code] for the digital age," he says. 

Currie, however, raises concerns about the breadth of C-13, which not only addresses cyberbullying, but also gives police heightened powers of surveillance to track terror suspects as well as individuals who use computer programs to gain unpaid access to WiFi or cable TV service.

Currie likens the omnibus nature of C-13 to Bill C-30, also known as the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, which was introduced in February 2012 by then-public safety minister Vic Toews.

"It was supposed to be all about [fighting] child porn, but it had all kinds of other stuff in it," Currie says.

The 'other stuff'

That other "stuff" included lawful access provisions, which would force internet service providers to hand over customer information to police without a warrant. This led to a public outcry and the government's abandonment of the bill.

Although C-30 was ostensibly killed in 2012, Michael Geist, a cyber-law expert at the University of Ottawa, says that the government has been inconsistent about its position on some of the key issues surrounding lawful access to private communications.

Earlier this year, then justice minister Rob Nicholson pledged that the government "will not be proceeding with Bill C-30 and any attempts that we will continue to have to modernize the Criminal Code will not contain the measures contained in C-30."

Still, Andrea Slane, a law professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, says C-13 is in many ways "identical" to its failed predecessor — though one of the key differences is that C-13 emphasizes judicial oversight.

For the most part, the new bill still observes "the checks and balances around what judges are meant to do to make sure warrants are issued" where they are supposed to be.

That said, one thing the new bill does is allow ISPs to voluntarily give customer information to police without civil or criminal liability, Slane points out.  

"That's the one that's most sticky for me," she says, because it was this kind of legislation that led to widespread surveillance in the U.S.

Geist says C-13 gives police greater access to metadata, which is the information that ISPs and phone companies keep on every call and email, and he adds that in some ways metadata can be more revealing than the substance of a phone call or email.

Metadata will enable police to pinpoint a suspect's "geographic location. It will tell who they were talking to, it will tell what device they were using," Geist told CBC.

Currie says that, within C-13, there are proposed amendments to other acts, including the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act, which allows Canadian police to gather evidence on individuals in Canada because a foreign state has requested it.

Jennifer Stoddart, Canada's privacy commissioner, has not had a chance to examine the bill. But her office released a statement to CBC saying C-13 "appears to be a complex bill, and we will be examining all of its privacy implications and preparing to provide our full analysis and recommendations before the parliamentary committee that will be studying the legislation."

Currie acknowledges that the bill strengthens many of the law enforcement tools needed to stem cyberbullying. But he takes issue with the sheer size of the legislation.

"This government has a history of introducing large omnibus bills that have all kinds of stuff in them – unrelated things all under the banner of one legislation," he says.

"The problem with that is it inhibits democratic debate. There are lots of evidence-gathering tools here that we need to have a debate about."

With files from Alison Crawford

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What today's forensic science would say about JFK's murder

The assassination of U.S. president John Fitzgerald Kennedy is remembered today, 50 years after the deadly shooting, in part for the conspiracy theories surrounding it and the possibility of a second shooter in addition to Lee Harvey Oswald, who was charged with the murder.

CBC science columnist Torah Kachur

CBC science columnist Torah Kachur looked into how modern ballistic science and technology would have helped solve the mystery of who shot JFK and whether they could be applied to the forensic evidence that still exists. 

Today, techniques such as multi-detector computed tomography (MDCT) can help trace the path of the bullet to estimate the shooter's angle and distance from the victim, and to determine whether a wound was due to the exit or entry of the bullet. Other strategies such as using a "frangible ballistic head" to recreate crime scenes can also help find out "whodunnit."

But the JFK assassination didn't have these modern techniques and cannot benefit from them now with conclusive proof. Instead, Kachur found, scientists are left with lively and thorough debates in the literature about the metallurgy of the bullet casings, computer simulations of the path of the "magic bullet" and continual analysis of grainy video footage from that fateful day. 

The evidence doesn't point to Lee Harvey Oswald having a partner, Kachur discovered, nor does it conclusively prove he acted alone.  We may simply never know.

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Ancient palace wine cellar held sophisticated vintages

Scientists have uncovered a 3,700-year-old wine cellar in the ruins of a Canaanite palace in Israel, and chemical analysis shows this is where they kept the good stuff.

Samples from the ceramic jars suggest they held a luxurious beverage that was evidently reserved for banquets, researchers said.

"It's not wine that somebody is just going to come home from a hard day and kick back and drink," said Andrew Koh of Brandeis University. He found signs of a blend of ingredients that may have included honey, mint, cedar, tree resins and cinnamon bark.

The discovery confirms how sophisticated wines were at that time, something suggested only by ancient texts, said Eric Cline of George Washington University. He, Koh and Assaf Yasur-Landau of the University of Haifa in Israel spoke to reporters Thursday before their work was presented Friday at a meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research.

The wine cellar was found this summer in palace ruins near the modern town of Nahariya in northern Israel. Researchers found 40 ceramic jars, each big enough to hold about 13 gallons (49 litres), in a single room. There may be more wine stored elsewhere, but the amount found so far wouldn't be enough to supply the local population, which is why the researchers believe it was reserved for palace use, Cline said.

The unmarked jars are all similar as if made by the same potter, Yasur-Landau said. Chemical analysis indicates that the jars held red wine and possibly white wine, Koh said. No liquid was left, and he analyzed residues he had removed from the jars.

Patrick McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania, an expert in ancient winemaking, said the discovery "sheds important new light" on the development of winemaking in ancient Canaan, from which it later spread to Egypt and across the Mediterranean. He said the chemical analysis would have to be published before the ingredients of the wine could be assessed.

Curtis Runnels, an archaeologist at Boston University, called the finding significant not only in showing the sophistication of the wine, but also in suggesting that it was meant specifically for palace use. He noted that the chemical analysis showed each jar held wine from the same recipe, showing the "consistency and control you'd expect in a palace."

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New cyberbullying law has 'larger agenda,' expands police powers

When Justice Minister Peter MacKay unveiled the federal government's proposed cyberbullying law on Wednesday, he touted it as a necessary tool to combat the often hurtful spread of intimate images. To emphasize the underlying point, he made the announcement during national Bullying Awareness Week.

But legal experts were left wondering why a piece of legislation that is meant to rein in online tormentors is also taking on terror suspects and people who steal cable TV signals.

"There is a much larger agenda at play here," says Rob Currie, director of the Law and Technology Institute at Dalhousie University.

Under the banner of anti-cyberbullying measures, the government is "trying to push through a number of things that have to do with law enforcement but nothing to do with cyberbullying."

Among other things, these new measures include giving police easier access to the metadata that internet service providers and phone companies keep on every call and email.

MacKay has acknowledged that law enforcement did not have the tools to prevent the deaths of Canadian teens such as Rehtaeh Parsons and Amanda Todd, who endured years of torment online. C-13 would give police a greater ability to investigate incidents of cyberbullying by giving courts the right to seize computers, phones and other devices used in an alleged offence.

5 years in prison

Under the proposed legislation, anyone who posts or transmits an "intimate image" of another individual without that person's consent could face up to five years in prison.

Leah Parsons, mother of the late Rehtaeh Parsons, the Nova Scotia teen who died following a suicide attempt, is greeted by Justice Minister Peter MacKay as they attend a roundtable discussion on cybercrime in Halifax in October. (Andrew Vaughan / Canadian Press)

​

MacKay said C-13, also known as the Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act, reflected the government's commitment "to ensuring that our children are safe from online predators and from online exploitation."

Since introducing the bill, MacKay has said that C-13 is also meant to update the Criminal Code to reflect modern communications such as email and social media.

Toronto internet lawyer Gil Zvulony says that it is a necessary step, given that some aspects of the Criminal Code pertaining to communications still refer to outmoded technologies such as telegrams.

"I don't know what the [government's] motivation is, but there is a logical theme to all of this, in the sense that it's trying to modernize [the code] for the digital age," he says. 

Currie, however, raises concerns about the breadth of C-13, which not only addresses cyberbullying, but also gives police heightened powers of surveillance to track terror suspects as well as individuals who use computer programs to gain unpaid access to WiFi or cable TV service.

Currie likens the omnibus nature of C-13 to Bill C-30, also known as the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, which was introduced in February 2012 by then-public safety minister Vic Toews.

"It was supposed to be all about [fighting] child porn, but it had all kinds of other stuff in it," Currie says.

The 'other stuff'

That other "stuff" included lawful access provisions, which would force internet service providers to hand over customer information to police without a warrant. This led to a public outcry and the government's abandonment of the bill.

Although C-30 was ostensibly killed in 2012, Michael Geist, a cyber-law expert at the University of Ottawa, says that the government has been inconsistent about its position on some of the key issues surrounding lawful access to private communications.

Earlier this year, then justice minister Rob Nicholson pledged that the government "will not be proceeding with Bill C-30 and any attempts that we will continue to have to modernize the Criminal Code will not contain the measures contained in C-30."

Still, Andrea Slane, a law professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, says C-13 is in many ways "identical" to its failed predecessor — though one of the key differences is that C-13 emphasizes judicial oversight.

For the most part, the new bill still observes "the checks and balances around what judges are meant to do to make sure warrants are issued" where they are supposed to be.

That said, one thing the new bill does is allow ISPs to voluntarily give customer information to police without civil or criminal liability, Slane points out.  

"That's the one that's most sticky for me," she says, because it was this kind of legislation that led to widespread surveillance in the U.S.

Geist says C-13 gives police greater access to metadata, which is the information that ISPs and phone companies keep on every call and email, and he adds that in some ways metadata can be more revealing than the substance of a phone call or email.

Metadata will enable police to pinpoint a suspect's "geographic location. It will tell who they were talking to, it will tell what device they were using," Geist told CBC.

Currie says that, within C-13, there are proposed amendments to other acts, including the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act, which allows Canadian police to gather evidence on individuals in Canada because a foreign state has requested it.

Jennifer Stoddart, Canada's privacy commissioner, has not had a chance to examine the bill. But her office released a statement to CBC saying C-13 "appears to be a complex bill, and we will be examining all of its privacy implications and preparing to provide our full analysis and recommendations before the parliamentary committee that will be studying the legislation."

Currie acknowledges that the bill strengthens many of the law enforcement tools needed to stem cyberbullying. But he takes issue with the sheer size of the legislation.

"This government has a history of introducing large omnibus bills that have all kinds of stuff in them – unrelated things all under the banner of one legislation," he says.

"The problem with that is it inhibits democratic debate. There are lots of evidence-gathering tools here that we need to have a debate about."

With files from Alison Crawford

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Neutrinos from deep space detected on Earth

High-energy subatomic particles called neutrinos from beyond our solar system have been detected on Earth for the first time ever.

The researchers involved say the discovery opens up a new area of astronomy and has the potential to answer a question that has puzzled astronomers for a century: Where do cosmic rays come from?

"It really is the dawn of a new field," said Darren Grant, a University of Alberta physicist, who was part of an international scientific collaboration called IceCube that reported the recent detection of 28 extremely high-energy neutrinos in Antarctica that are thought to have come from space.

The results were published online Thursday in the journal Science.

Astrophysicists had theorized that extremely high-energy extraterrestrial neutrinos – more energetic than any produced on Earth or by the sun - would be blasted out by the same catastrophic events in deep space that are thought to generate cosmic rays.

Now, Grant says, scientists have finally detected some.

"They're the highest energy neutrino events that have ever been measured… It's proof that they came from outside the Earth."

Two of the neutrinos had energies above a whopping petaelectron volt. That's 125 times the 8 teraelectronvolt energy of the record proton collisions generated by world's biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, and billions of times the energy of neutrinos produced by the sun.

Cosmic ray mystery

Cosmic rays, discovered more than a century ago, are extremely high-energy radiation that travels through space and strikes the Earth. Astrophysicists have theorized that they might be produced by extreme catastrophic events in deep space, such as supernovas, black holes, pulsars, or galactic nuclei — the merger of two black holes.

The IceCube detector is a block of extremely clear ice one cubic kilometre in size and 1.5 to two kilometres below the surface. The ice is embedded with 5,160 sensors which were lowered in strings into the ice during construction of the detector. (Image courtesy of Jim Haugen, IceCube/NSF)

But it's hard to determine the origin of cosmic rays because they are made up of charged particles and therefore are deflected by magnetic fields that send them on a circuitous path through space.

Consequently, "everything we know about the universe at the moment is from studying photons" or light, said Olga Botner, an Uppsala University researcher and the official spokesperson for IceCube, in an interview with Science.

Light generally travels in straight lines, but can be blocked matter such as intergalactic dust, or altered in certain ways - for example, its colour may be affected by certain things.

On the other hand, neutrinos have little mass, no charge and interact very weakly with matter, meaning they can theoretically journey billions of light years to the Earth without slowing, stopping or touching anything.

"It really makes them an ideal messenger particle," Grant said.

That means the space neutrinos recently detected by IceCube are almost exactly as they were when they were produced and carry "pristine" information about the event that produced them.

They also likely point directly back to their source — also a likely source of cosmic rays — even if it is millions or billions of light years away.

Creating a skymap

The IceCube researchers have started creating a sky map of the directions that the high-energy neutrinos came from.

So far, while they cluster in certain areas, they don't yet pinpoint specific locations in the sky. Grant said that will happen as IceCube gathers more data.

This is the remnant of Kepler's supernova, the famous explosion that was discovered by Johannes Kepler in 1604. Catastrophic cosmic events such as supernovas are thought to generate high-energy neutrinos and cosmic rays. (Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/NCSU/M.Burkey et al; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

"Then you turn to your favourite astronomer and you say what's in the sky? What's there that could produce these high energy events?" he said.

"That will give us the first definitive identification of what's causing the production of these particles."

That may also provide clues about the origin of the high-energy cosmic rays, which likely originate from the same events.

The reason why neutrinos from space have never been found before is that they are very hard to detect, partly because they rarely interact with anything.

Researchers needed a huge detector in order to increase the chance of interaction with such rare neutrinos.

One cubic kilometre detector

IceCube is a block of extremely clear ice one cubic kilometre in size and 1.5 to two kilometres below the surface, where it is very dark and high pressures keep the ice clear and bubble-free. The ice is embedded with 5,160 sensors that detect very faint amounts of light.

Very rarely, neutrinos will interact with the ice itself as they pass through the detector. When that happens, Grant said, they produce a charged particle such as an electron. Typically, light travels fastest in a vacuum and more slowly in ice. But a particle produced by a neutrino interacting with the ice travels faster than the typical speed of light in ice.

When it does that, a burst of blue light, known as Cherenkhov radiation, is produced. Grant described it as "almost the optical equivalent of sonic boom."

The higher energy the neutrino, the more ice it lights up, and a high-energy cosmic neutrino lights up "an enormous amount of the detector." In fact, a large detector is also needed to capture all of the energy from a single neutrino of this kind.

The IceCube collaboration first looked only for neutrinos above 1 petaelectronvolt and detected the two most energetic neutrinos in April 2012. They then went back and searched through their data and found 26 of slightly lower energies, but above 30 teraelectronvolts that were detected between May 2010 and May 2012. While some of these less high-energy neutrinos may have been produced by cosmic rays in the Earth's atmosphere, the calculations suggest that most of them likely came from space.

The data was analyzed in such a way as to exclude, as much as possible, neutrinos that didn't come from space and other types of particles that may have tripped off the detector.

Canada played a key role in the study by crunching data with a federally funded computer cluster at the University of Alberta called Westgrid.

"One hundred per cent of our reconstructions and simulations were run there, and without it, I don't think we would have been able to do all of the work that was required," said Nathan Whitehorn, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who had presented the preliminary results at a conference in May.

The IceCube collaboration includes 250 physicists and engineers from Canada, the U.S., Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, the U.K. and Korea. The detector cost $279 million US ($290 million) and was completed in December 2010, but had already started collecting data before completion.

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Microsoft's Xbox One hits store shelves

And now it's Xbox's turn.

Microsoft's new Xbox One console went on sale today, one week after the release of the rival PlayStation 4.

Microsoft says the supply of the new $499 consoles is its biggest ever. But with record pre-orders — more than double those of the Xbox 360 back in November 2005 — the consoles may be hard to find.

"We expect the demand to be really high through the holiday (season)," said Craig Flannagan, director of marketing Xbox for Microsoft Canada.

Flannagan says the new console ups the ante on both games and the multiplayer experience, with improved match-making.

"We've made a lot of improvements to that Xbox Live service that our 360 owners already know and love," he added.

There are 48 million Xbox Live subscribers around the world.

Games remain the prime Xbox One draw, although the console offers a wide menu of entertainment around them.

"We've taken games to the next level," Flannagan said. "They look amazing, they play amazing."

Flannagan points to launch titles such as Forza Motorsports 5, a lush racing game. The launch offerings also include Dead Rising 3, the latest instalment of the zombie franchise from Capcom Vancouver, and the new Ryse: Son of Rome from the developer Crytek.

There is also buzz about the first-person shooter Titanfall, due out in the spring from Respawn Entertainment, formed by Jason West and Vince Zampella who were the co-founders of Infinity Ward and creators of the Call of Duty franchise.

"Many people will say that's the most anticipated title. It won a lot of awards at E3," said Flannagan.

Microsoft has also expanded the non-game experience. You can watch live TV on the console, switching back and forth between gaming and TV. You can even have TV on the screen while playing a game.

The Xbox One is billed as an all-in-one entertainment device, but designed to allow gamers to keep playing their game while watching TV or listening to music, Microsoft says. (Associated Press)

"Even the entertainment that we've built, we've built with the gamer in mind so they can always be playing their game while they watch TV, while they watch a movie, while they listen to music, while they surf the web," said Flannagan.

TV on the 360 was on demand or streaming, depending on what app was used. Xbox One takes the feed from your TV provider into the console, which is then plugged into the TV.

Game DVR on Xbox One allows you to record game play and share it with your friends.

An improved Kinect sensor, which allows gamers to use gestures and voice to interact and give commands, is now part of the console and not an extra.

The new PlayStation arrived a week earlier and $100 cheaper. But Flannagan believes Xbox One's entertainment value still leads the way.

The Xbox One console will not play Xbox 360 games, however. Flannagan says a healthy menu of 360 games will continue to be produced as Microsoft looks to service its 76 million-plus installed base.

Titanfall will be also available for the 360 when it comes out. But Ryse is just for Xbox One.

The original Xbox was released in 2001.

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Volcano raises new island in Pacific's 'Ring of Fire'

A volcanic eruption has raised an island in the seas to the far south of Tokyo, the Japanese Coast Guard and earthquake experts said.

Advisories from the coast guard and the Japan Meteorological Agency said the islet is about 200 metres in diameter. It is just off the coast of Nishinoshima, a small, uninhabited island in the Ogasawara chain, which is also known as the Bonin Islands.

The approximately 30 islands are 1,000 kilometres south of Tokyo, and along with the rest of Japan are part of the seismically active Pacific "Ring of Fire."

The coast guard issued an advisory Wednesday warning of heavy black smoke from the eruption. Television footage seen Thursday showed heavy smoke, ash and rocks exploding from the crater, as steam billowed into the sky.

A volcanologist with the coast guard, Hiroshi Ito, told the FNN news network that it was possible the new island might be eroded away.

"But it also could remain permanently," he said.

The last time the volcanoes in the area are known to have erupted was in the mid-1970s. Much of the volcanic activity occurs under the sea, which extends thousands of metres deep along the Izu-Ogasawara-Marianas Trench.

Japan's chief government spokesman welcomed the news of yet another bit, however tiny, of new territory.

"This has happened before and in some cases the islands disappeared," Yoshihide Suga said when asked if the government was planning on naming the new island.

"If it becomes a full-fledged island, we would be happy to have more territory."

The Japanese archipelago has thousands of islands. In some cases, they help anchor claims to wide expanses of ocean overlying potentially lucrative energy and mineral resources.

Japan has plans to build port facilities and transplant fast-growing coral fragments onto Okinotorishima, two rocky outcroppings even further south of Tokyo, to boost its claim in a territorial dispute with China.

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Moose-eating shark rescued in Newfoundland harbour

Two quick-thinking men on Newfoundland's northeast coast managed to save a Greenland shark from choking to death on a large piece of moose hide this past weekend. 

Derrick Chaulk said he was driving down a road by the harbour in Norris Arm North this past Saturday when he saw what he thought was a beached whale. 

When Chaulk went closer to investigate, he realized it was a shark, which he estimated was about 2.5 metres long, and weighed about 115 kg. 

The animal was still alive and had a large chunk of moose hide protruding from its mouth. 
 
"It [the moose] had the fur and all the liner on it — it was about two feet long, maybe."

Two-part rescue effort

Chaulk said another local man, Jeremy Ball, arrived on the scene and starting pulling on the moose chunk.

Jeremy Ball of Norris Arm North, N.L., moves the beached shark into deeper water. (Courtesy Derrick Chaulk )

"A couple yanks and it just came right out." 

The two men then set about getting the shark back in the water. 

Ball tied a rope around the shark's tail, and Chaulk got ready to push.

"He pulled the rope, and I pushed with my boot," said Chaulk, "and between the two of us we got him out into deeper water."

Chaulk said the shark lay in about 30 cm of water for a few minutes.

"Then all of a sudden, the water started coming out of his gills and he started breathing," 

Rare sight

Greenland sharks are rarely seen on the northeast coast of Newfoundland. They are scavengers, and they feed on food found in shallow water. While their diet is usually fish, they have been found in other jurisdictions to have eaten animals that found their way to the water, from polar bears to reindeer. 

Chaulk said people clean and gut moose on a nearby bank of land and throw the scraps of the butchered animals into the harbour.  

Chaulk speculated that the shark bit off more he could chew. 

"He swallowed and got it halfway down and couldn't cough it back up and couldn't get it all down, and then I think the tide brought him in." 

Chaulk said after the shark starting breathing again, the animal lay in the shallow water for about 30 minutes, then headed out to sea. 

'It was a good feeling to see that shark swim out, knowing that you saved his life.'- Derrick Chaulk

"There was a few people up on the bank watching and once that shark swam out and lifted his tail, and then swam all the way out, everybody just clapped," said Chaulk. 

"It was a good feeling to see that shark swim out, knowing that you saved his life." 

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Smart TVs accused of monitoring viewers without consent

LG Electronics Inc. said it is investigating a claim that some of its smart TVs send information on home viewing habits back to the company without consent.

The investigation comes after Jason Huntley, a 45-year-old IT consultant in Britain, detailed in his blog how his LG smart TV logged the channels he was watching and sent the data to LG.

He said the company continued to collect which channel he was watching even after he disabled the information collection feature.

"The (LG) server acknowledges the successful receipt of this information back to the TV," he said in an email. The information appeared to be sent to LG unencrypted, he said.

Also collected were the names of files saved in an external USB hard drive plugged into the TV as well as the TV's unique identification information.

The world's second-largest TV maker said Thursday that customer privacy is its top priority and takes the issue very seriously.

However, when Huntley asked LG about the data collection last week, the company blamed a TV retailer for not disclosing the company's terms and conditions when he made the purchase.

LG introduced an ad platform to target its smart TV users in 2012. The LG Smart AD lets advertisers reach target audiences by utilizing device information, location and details such as age and gender, LG says on its website. (REUTERS)

"As you accepted the Terms and Conditions on your TV, your concerns would be best directed to the retailer," LG said in an email to Huntley that outlined the response from the company's U.K. head office.

LG introduced an ad platform to target its smart TV users in 2012. The LG Smart AD lets advertisers reach target audiences by utilizing device information, location and details such as age and gender, LG says on its website.

However it was not immediately clear which features in LG's smart TVs were triggering the data monitoring.

"All we can be sure of is that the information is being sent," Huntley said.

He said was "very surprised" at the amount of attention he received with the blog post.

"This indicates that privacy issues are becoming increasingly important to people everywhere, as we are so dependent on technology in our everyday lives."

Separately, Samsung Electronics Co. said it does not collect information on files in USB hard drives connected to its smart TVs. But it did not respond to a question about whether it logs users' viewing habits. Samsung is the world's largest TV maker.

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Cyberbullying legislation to be announced today

The federal government is poised to announce new legislation Wednesday that will make it a crime to distribute intimate images without the consent of the person in those pictures.

Justice Minister Peter MacKay and Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney are set to announce the details Wednesday afternoon.

The problem of cyberbullying and the misuse of photos has attracted much attention across the country in the past year. 

In Nova Scotia, the family of Rehtaeh Parsons said she was mocked mercilessly after photos of her being allegedly sexually assaulted made the rounds of her peers.

The 17-year-old committed suicide this spring. Police did not initially lay any charges in the case, but in August did charge two teens with creating and distributing child pornography.

Justice Minister Peter MacKay is expected to announce the details of the legislation on Wednesday afternoon. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)

In British Columbia, the high profile case of Amanda Todd has been in the headlines over the last year.

The Port Coquitlam, B.C., teen took her own life in October 2012.

She'd been tormented online for years after an unknown person had convinced her to expose herself on a webcam. That person blackmailed her, spreading the photos online.

Provinces have brought in a patchwork of legislation to combat cyberbullying.

But earlier this fall, MacKay promised the federal government would also bring in changes to the Criminal Code.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper signalled in the spring that the government would create a cyberbullying law.

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