Canada

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.

It's pretty fishy when they're hacking phones of union officials, especially during negotiations. If it can be proven they used that info for the negotiations, that should be criminal charges against the officers conducting such surveillance, because it is very obviously not appropriate.

The only time tools like this should be used is for actual national security incidents, and there needs to be an independent oversight board involved in every case. Just allowing police to determine when they should or should not do it is insufficient, and we need to have actual laws that determine these procedures.

Every use of these tools (I'm sure it's NSO Group's stuff, which is why they won't say who the supplier is) needs to be reviewed and people that should not have been surveilled need to be notified so they can determine proper legal action.

Governments aren't in control anymore.