Did you see the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald break a disturbing set of stories last week on the American National Security Agency thinking you might be safe from intrusive government spying because you live in Canada? Or that, if we are being spied on, it would be a huge breaking-news-type story like Greenwald’s were?
If so, you were wrong on both counts.
This morning the Globe and Mail released a story on our friendly Harper Government’s own secret surveillance program, operated by the Communications Security Establishment Canada. It began under Prime Minister Paul Martin in 2005 and was suspended in 2008, only to be restarted in 2011 by a decree from Defence Minister Peter Mackay. The program operates outside parliamentary scrutiny because it is authorized by a ministerial “secret decree,” which certainly doesn’t sound imperial and authoritarian at all.
The Globe’s story is light on specific details, probably a function of the “hundreds of pages of records, with many passages blacked out on grounds of national security” that they presumably used in their reporting.
After summarizing some of what Greenwald learned from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who shared details about the surveillance program Prism and other disturbing stories of government surveillance, the Globe’s Colin Freeze writes that:
in Canada, a similar sensibility – though not the same sweep – appears to have also taken root.
What he doesn’t share is just how vast is the “sweep,” if it is less all-encompassing than in the U.S. After that comes the most informative paragraph in the story, which is also the most bone-chilling.
A regime of ministerial directives – decrees not scrutinized by Parliament – have authorized the broad surveillance programs. How the data is obtained has not been disclosed in the documents obtained by The Globe or in comments from CSEC.
Other than that there isn’t much to glean: we don’t know how many people this program affects, if or for how long the data is stored, what the information is used for, or even how many surveillance programs are currently operating in Canada. While government officials assure us (anonymously) that they do their best to “anonymize” metadata that comes from Canadian communications, we don’t know how often they gather this information while they observe communications globally.
Evidently, when Mackay renewed the CSEC program he authorized “other espionage programs, some of which have been completely censored from the Access to Information documents obtained by The Globe.”
In addition to the program we know next to nothing about, there are an unknown number of other programs we actually know nothing about.
So far this has not proven the hot-button, newsworthy story that last week’s U.S. counterparts were, even among Canadian journalists. It should, though: while we don’t know for a fact that our government is systematically spying on us, like Americans now do, we know they’re doing spying without knowing to what degree it affects us.
[The Globe and Mail] [Flickr]