The civil-rights watchdog in sa国际传媒 is leading the lawsuit to rein in sa国际传媒鈥檚 electronic spy agency, and the most recent revelations should yield more evidence for its case.
American whistleblower Edward Snowden, who seems to have a bottomless trunk of secrets, leaked a document that says Communications Security Establishment sa国际传媒 was using airport Wi-Fi services to monitor passengers and track their movements for a week or more after they left the airport.
The sa国际传媒 Civil Liberties Association is already suing the government over the snooping of CSEC, but the airport tracking is a new wrinkle.
The project, which has been characterized as an experiment, has prompted understandable outrage from civil libertarians and from ordinary Canadians who want the government to keep its electronic nose out of their business.
The notion that government watchers could latch onto your cellphone in a public place and then follow you around for days gives most people a feeling akin to be stalked by someone in a shabby raincoat. It鈥檚 creepy.
But CSEC and the government say it鈥檚 not against the law.
CSEC鈥檚 job is to monitor foreign computer, satellite, radio and telephone traffic of people, states, organizations and terrorist groups.
However, CSEC鈥檚 own website says: 鈥淐SEC may not direct any of these activities at Canadians or any persons in sa国际传媒, and satisfactory measures must be in place to protect the privacy of Canadians.鈥�
That part of its mandate doesn鈥檛 seem to figure in the document called IP Profiling Analytics & Mission Impacts, which details in mind-numbingly technical language how the agency used data from an unnamed Canadian airport to study the possibility of tracking people.
The agency selected a Wi-Fi hotspot like the free ones many Canadians use in most airports, and put together a list of all the cellphones or other devices that used that hotspot over a two-week period. It then spread its net to other airports, hotels, transportation hubs, Internet caf茅s and other locations to build a map of where each person went before they got to the airport and after they left it.
The experiment was to create a mathematical model that could be used to help find kidnappers or terrorists, who often use public Wi-Fi spots to communicate anonymously.
John Forster, head of CSEC, told a Senate committee that the agency collected only metadata, not the contents of messages. Metadata is the information about who was sending messages to whom, where and when.
鈥淭his exercise involved a snapshot of historical metadata collected from the global Internet,鈥� Forster said. 鈥淣o data was collected through any monitoring of the operations of any airport 鈥� just part of our normal global collection.鈥�
Forster argues that metadata is a vital tool in CSEC鈥檚 efforts to track terrorists and other enemies.
鈥淲e wouldn鈥檛 be able to find or locate foreign targets without it,鈥� he said.
If it鈥檚 that useful, then gathering metadata on Canadians is not innocuous. It鈥檚 like following someone around all day, but not listening in on their conversations. You can learn a lot about them.
Forster also said the agency does not use metadata to profile Canadians, and if it did, his own employees would blow the whistle. Depending on some faceless person to break his or her oath of secrecy is hardly a reliable system of safeguarding the public鈥檚 privacy.
CSEC gathers enormous amounts of information about us, and the BCCLA lawsuit contends it is already violating the Charter of Rights.
The people at CSEC are trying to protect us, but Canadians need to have a conversation about how far we want our guardians to go. We must not leave it to the government to draw the line.
