Canada’s CBC network reported Thursday that the country is slamming on the brakes when it comes to sharing some communications intelligence with key allies — including the U.S. — out of fear that Canadian personal information is not properly protected.
“Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan says the sharing won’t resume until he is satisfied that the proper protections are in place,” CBC reported.
Earlier on Thursday, the watchdog tasked with keeping tabs on the Ottawa-based Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Jean-Pierre Plouffe, called out the electronic spying agency for risking Canadian privacy in his annual report.
Plouffe wrote that the surveillance agency broke privacy laws when it shared Canadian data with its allies without properly protecting it first. Consequently, he concluded, it should precisely explain how Canadian citizens’ metadata — information about who a communication is to and from, the subject line of an email, and so on — can and can’t be used.
“Minimization is the process by which Canadian identity information contained in metadata is rendered unidentifiable prior to being shared,” Plouffe wrote in his report. “The fact that CSE did not properly minimize Canadian identity information contained in certain metadata prior to being shared was contrary to the ministerial directive, and to CSE’s operational policy.”
Defense Minister Sajjan said in a statement that the data sharing in question was the result of “unintentional” errors and didn’t allow for specific Canadian individuals to be identified.
The concern for Canadian metadata began shortly after disclosures made by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.
Plouffe’s predecessor told then-Defense Minister Rob Nicholson that the other countries in a secretive surveillance pact called the Five Eyes Alliance — the U.S., the U.K., New Zealand, and Australia — might not be sheltering Canadians’ telephone data the way they should.
The CSE has admitted since the Snowden revelations that it sometimes sweeps up domestic data when keeping track of foreign intelligence communications. When any of that information is shared abroad, “these activities may directly affect the security of a Canadian person,” the previous watchdog, Robert Decary, wrote at the time.
Canada’s decision to temporarily stop sharing information comes at a time when the U.S. is scrambling to come up with a new data-sharing arrangement with the European Union before a January 31 deadline. Europe’s top court decided in October that European privacy isn’t sufficiently respected by the American government or its spying agencies.
Top photo: Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada.
According to some conversation I heard on CBC’s Power and Politics, the Harper gov ostensibly abruptly shut this activity down roughly around the same time that Glenn Greenwald was collaborating with CBC News on some Canuck-related Snowden stories.
Trudeau hits reality that Canada is not a country he suppose to run but that true bosses are on Wall Street and in D.C.
Just few months in the office he broke his pre-election promises he could not keep such as Canada out of Syrian war or out of Five Eyes or to stop training and supplying fascists in Ukraine in preparation to war with Russia. That’s typical for silver spoon fed child, who never encountered reality of 99% imprisoned, behind the walls of a social class ward.
Justin , your country has been made a playground for world commodity speculators, greedy Wall Street oligarchs , killers of native people true owners of all Canadian land, rapists of nature for meaningless gadgets, trinkets made by enslaved global south , exploiters of people who are working for living all over the word.
And none of your metro sexual look and the pretty face covering this abhorrent regime you are a puppet of will make any difference for ordinary Canadians.
Man up, stand up against people like you father who betrayed his confessed values and sent tanks and military against young peoples who demand their dignity and refused to be slowly murdered by his oligarch friends.
That would be step one back to humanity.
The spy agencies knew they were breaking the law and they will continue breaking the law because they can. There will be no real penalties to the spies or their syndicates for breaking domestic laws and that is the way it is. If there were to be consequences we would see people getting fired and people getting charged with a criminal offense, we all know that will never happen within the Five Eyes.
Well that all depends upon how much of their chocolate got stuck in our peanut butter and the butter of the other eyes. How much their PHI got caught up with our protected health information and the yada dada of the except “intelligence, counter-intelligence, and other national security activities.” Tell them to ask one of their Academics on Patrol. Their list of disinformation and so forth spreading like a virus and so forth didn’t even mention the Acadian Diaspora. Not one word of the poor expulsion of the Acadians in all their list of Diaspora to exploit and so forth and so on. Right in their own door snatched yanked out again by the Brits. I was always so glad to find out that the French were not of the five eye monster.
Wow. Sometimes I really miss the good old days.
Blame Canada – South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut
“We must go fight the source of it.” “But what is the source?
It was Positivism Psychology, silly rabbits. Positive shortened it. Like all their other shortenings and acronyms. APA style. Though PP is good. It works either way. Simple logic of the old saying, “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it is raining.” Should have went with the Critical Theorist into Practice instead of the structural-functionalist. Thank goodness for just some good old fashioned German dialectic.
“The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can any one conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.” (Werner Heisenberg, Nobel laureate quantum mechanics)
Well, and there we have it.
U.S. SOS- World Leaders please endorse Bernie Sanders before our Primaries. No War Hawk Hillary Clinton! PLEASE- We are all in this together like it or not.
Why don’t you request Pope? It will be more effective if he endorses than if Putin or that Chinese fellow endorses.
Or even better, get Abu Baker Al Baghdadi to endorse Hillary Clinton.
Test.
Minor stylistic point but – as Canada uses Commonwealth spelling – Harjit Sajjan’s appointment is Minister of “Defence”. You may write about the “defense” of Canada, but his title is a proper noun and should be spelled with a “c”. Most US publications commit the same error, but I’m hoping for better from The Intercept.
So when the Intercept reporting about Ministry of National Defense of the People’s Republic of China they should use “Zh?nghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó Guófángbù”? As long the Intercept consistent using English-US spelling it’s just fine.
This is a test.
Good. While we’re at it, I’d also like for the Canadians to stop looking at our electronic health records at the border. The amount of people I have personally seen turned away at the border (for fear that they might burden the medical system in Canada) has only been increasing year after year (I live in WA state). On the US side agents busily look at Canadian health records and turn Canadians away for mental illness (yes they have access to those records). This entire thing is getting absurd…. health data provides at best an incomplete picture of a person that never seems to work in the traveler’s favor and just goes to feed into even more intrusive lines of paranoid questioning based on the agent’s “hunches”.
I’m not surprised that health records are being accessed at the border. We here in B.C. entered into an agreement with an American corporation to have them provide ‘server’ services for the health records of our province’s citizens. There was significant public opposition, in large part due to the ‘server’ being situated in the U.S. and as such vulnerable to the Patriot Act. However, at that time, those concerns were disregarded by our government perhaps due in part to our government’s inability to see any interest that American national security concerns would prompt or provoke in our health records.
But fast forward to Snowden and we find that health records were/are an interest to the NSA and its mission to store information on everyone, just in case it is ever needed, -likely because of the treasure trove of information that we provide to doctors and hospitals. And on top of this, we find that terrorism and national security definitions have been creatively expanded to include domestic political activism and also domestic criminality. Now who’d have ever thunk!
Uh oh. Is Canada now one or becoming one of those countries that don’t ‘co-operate’ with the US? If so, it may not be long before the US President declares Canada’s health care oppressive and unjust and that the Canadian people need to be liberated…
They are welcome to try and liberate us…. but how well did that go the last time they tried?
Ill let you in on our number one defense, a wall of beer and pancakes with maple syrup. the liberators wont get too far after that, but if they do, we just freeze all of our roads and get out the skates and sled dogs.
lets face it, if the US is so much better than Canada, why don’t they prove it by taking the Quebecois first.
LOL Why don’t we all just calm down here Mike. The US and Canada going to war is just laughable.
Not only will that not happen, but a lot has changed since the last time America tried to invade Canada, it wouldn’t even be a contest with today’s advancements. But let’s just take a step back and realize how close our two countries are to begin with. I doubt a few spying allegations will change much. Especially since all developed countries have spies. Friends and foes spy on each other all the time.
“Take the Quebecois,” heheh if their telephone manners are any indicator, no one wants ’em.
A wall of beer and pancakes with maple syrup!? Now, this is an obstacle worthy of being cleared by an elite force… even if the US has to crawl on it’s belly for a mile – dagger and fork in clenched teeth – to reach it only to have to eat all the way through! …one delicious bite at a time..
I wish they would take the Quebecois, we’ll see how long the french language survives outside of Canada. Tired of them holding a gun to Canada’s head every couple of decades with separatism, tired of their legalized anti-anglo prejudice. Just go, they don’t belong in Canada.
Notwithstanding a few seasonal fishing outposts maintained in Newfoundland by the English in the early to mid 1500’s, the French were established here first, …..and had a significant presence in from what is now Newfoundland to Ontario by the 1600’s. Until the creation of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670, the English had put their efforts into their American colonies.
Further, France had a huge swath of territory from the Canadian border to the Caribbean with the Mississippi River in the centre. This was sold to the Americans in 1803 and is termed the Louisiana Purchase.
The first whites of any number on the Prairies were French, hench the significant Metis population. Manitoba has French communities to this day. Saskatchewan also. Alberta to a lesser extent. French Canadians are not just in Quebec. They are across Canada including even as far west as B.C. (We here in B.C. have French Immersion schools.) A thumbnail estimate would have between 30 to 40 percent of this country to be of French origin to some extent, with a lesser percentage fluent in the language. They are Canadians with significant bonafides, I’d say. ….And that entitles them to participate in the democratic process to get their share of the Canadian pie just the same as the rest of us do.
Meanwhile, the data sharing with the U.S. to protect bankers and their interests will continue.
Now will Canada throw FATCA out the window and protect its Canadian-American citizens from financial slavery and terrorism imposed by the big bully? Will Mr. Trudeau step in an save the lives being ruined by America tax policies? Will he stop the flow of money south, a clear piracy of the Canadian economy that affects all Canadians?
Um, you do realize that most of our money flows east and west? look at the dollar, consumer money is leaving from our shores, not our southern border.
Corporate funds on the other hand are flowing south, and your argument implies that as Canadians we wouldn’t be able to run those companies our selves or have anywhere for those companies to export to. well with great claims come a great burden of proof.
Personally i would love for that to happen, yes it would adversely effect Canadians in the initial moments. but what you fail to understand is that the majority of Canadians are a hearty bunch. We will be able to push through it and recreate our own economy, thus becoming a much stronger country in the geopolitical realm.
I think what people miss is that while yes there are a lot of outside countries that rely on the US, the US relies on us for a lot of things as well.
I am so frickin’ proud of Canada right now.
It would be good if they asked Maher Arar what he would
like to see happen.
General Hercules and millions of Americans just can’t get past racism. You really should have let the South go, now the whole US is the south as Malcolm X used to say.
The latest Canadian defense minister himself looks like a terrorist. I think the new Canadian government with rookie playboy prime minister is doing funny stuff and playing games with us. They should learn from what we have done to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Packies and a lot of other useless countries out there, and should realize that we can easily create the same situation there with so many ISIS agents who have entered Canada in the guise of refugees.
Some people never seem to learn. Alas!
Turns out even The Intercept has its share of racists. Calling Minister Sajjan kinda reminds of that time an American shot up a Sikh temple (AKA Gurdwara) because he confused the worshippers with Muslims.
The terrorists who blew up the Air India jet were all Sicks. One of them was released from jail recently, I believe I read somewhere. Their appearance is also same as the Talibans and Al-Queda, but usually they are not shy so they don’t wear kijab or berqua.
Since Timothy McVeigh was a white dude, by your standards I suppose on could say that all but one of the US 2016 Presidential candidates “looks like a terrorist”.
BTW, isn’t it true that no one was convicted for the Air India bombing?
Your generosity to exclude one is appreciated, but it’s not necessary. Timothy McVeigh was an albino from Kenya.
Yes, all the Sicks terrorists who bombed the Air India flight were declared not guilty, but one bloke was put in jail for perjury. I believe he has just been released so that he can train ISIS in this technology.
An old Ottawa cop once said, “Listen, if you want to learn, talk, if you want to inform.
The balls of Harjit Sajjan!
“Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan says the sharing won’t resume until he is satisfied that the proper protections are in place,”
Oh this should put ALL Canadians fears (of their privacy being demolished -and shipped overseas and to the NSA) to rest, just like Americans fears were put to rest with James Clapper (“the least truthful answer).
Maybe you don’t get the obvious Sajjan, the cat is now out of the bag you jackass! The ship has sailed! You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. You can’t untell the ‘five fucking eyes’.
We get it.
You’re playing the “I’m just stupid” card.
First law: Whenever a spy program becomes publicized, it will be discontinued, because spies don’t make a business of doing things that aren’t secret.
Second law: When spies discontinue a program, it means one thing and one thing only: they’ve initiated some other program doing the same thing far more extensively.
It has been amazing to watch the shift over time from authorities only collecting data on person suspected of committing crimes, to collect everything on everyone but “only looking when suspected of crimes” to “collect everything and minimize for those not suspected of committing crimes”.
I suppose it’s surprising that Canada has been willing to do even this sort of minor tinkering around the edges, but I doubt it will result in anything other than a short term PR boost for the new government, while serving to further obfuscate how really far we’ve slid down the track of omniscient government surveillance of entire populations irrespective of criminal intent or activity.
I will be more than happy should I prove wrong.
The saddest part is that the ceasing of sharing metadata actually happened 2 years ago in 2014 (according to the CBC) under the old government but we’re just finding out about this now. So even the PR boost is misplaced.
Building a ‘haystack’ to find a ‘needle’ makes no sense, imo. It’s not logical.
*Something along these lines seems much more likely (via benitoe, h/t.) … https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/the-new-way-police-are-surveilling-you-calculating-your-threat-score/2016/01/10/e42bccac-8e15-11e5-baf4-bdf37355da0c_story.html
Thanks for linking to that article. Good grief…I imagine I’d come up as a “red” because of my many Facebook and other online comments that are critical of the current ruling Establishment. Let’s hope that system stays in Fresno (although it probably won’t unfortunately).
Yeah.
Supreme Court rules Supreme Court Rules!
Wait… is the article about the Onion?
No.
Oh, then-
Guilty until proven innocent!
A