Bryan Carney Is a Disrupter... of Closed Government and Secretive Institutions

Bryan Carney has the kind of patience that I dream of having.

With an understanding of technology, a drive to unearth the truth and a sense of humour, he files government freedom of information requests and waits to see what they’ll unearth. Then he waits, waits, re-files and waits some more.

The title of “disrupter” is often used to describe a tech company that works “differently,” displaces market leaders and takes over a sector, sometimes leveraging a lag in policies or laws that don’t always keep time with technological advances. (Think Uber calling their drivers “independent contractors” in the gig economy to avoid the responsibilities they would have to employees.)

Carney is a different sort of disruptor. He questions and probes institutions about their accountability to citizens. Poking the government for information is a slow process that can occasionally lead to nothing usable for a story, a mostly redacted document, or government officers stalling (though some are helpful), Carney says.

All that waiting can pay off however, as Carney has shown with his investigation into how police "proactively" use social media to monitor citizens with no real oversight policies in place, or his detailing of the Alberta government’s clumsy pro-TMX pipeline PR strategy that included blacklisting ads on Grindr. You can find a list of his stories here.

Last year, along with Tyee reporter Andrew MacLeod, Carney was honoured with the Surveillance Privacy Award from the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association for his reporting.

For his Three Things interview on Wednesday, Carney will dig into information and technology issues that affect how we are policed, our privacy and our democracy.

More specifically he’ll discuss how police technology accountability is broken but can be fixed, the crisis of freedom of information and how Facebook, Amazon and Google’s power has become even more concentrated because of our increasing reliance on the internet during COVID-19 — and what we might do differently in our online lives as a response.

When he isn’t writing up FOIs, Carney works on a host of creative projects that range from salvaging a clear fibreglass dome to use as an outdoor workspace to building a garage-spa to refurbishing an old ambulance into an RV. Like I said, he has the kind of patience that I dream of having.

If you have questions for Carney, tune in and ask them! This Three Things conversation will livestream on Wednesday, Aug. 19 at 1 p.m. PST and will be hosted by yours truly. Click here to register or catch it on Facebook and YouTube.