Oh, well, if the government denies doing something I guess they pretty much have to be telling the truth, right? Unfortunately, the photo accompanying this Toronto Star article doesn’t show if Peter MacKay is crossing the fingers on his left hand:
The Conservative government flatly denies Canadian spy agencies are conducting any unauthorized electronic snooping operations.
After facing questions from the NDP Opposition about how far he has authorized Ottawa’s top secret eavesdropping spy agency to go, a terse Conservative Defence Minister Peter MacKay left the Commons, telling the Star: “We don’t target Canadians, okay.”
A former Liberal solicitor general says that doesn’t mean other allied spy agencies don’t collect information on Canadians and share it with the Canadian spying establishment.
Liberal MP Wayne Easter, who was minister responsible for the spy agency CSIS in 2002-03, told the Star that in the post-9/11 era a decade ago it was common for Canada’s allies to pass on information about Canadians that they were authorized to gather but Ottawa wasn’t.
The practice was, in effect, a back-door way for sensitive national security information to be shared, not with the government, but Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) and, if necessary, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
CSEC is a new bit of alphabet soup in the public sphere … I’d never heard of the organization until yesterday. Tonda MacCharles explains what the agency is empowered to do:
The CSEC, an agency that is rarely in the public eye, has far-reaching national security powers to monitor and map electronic communication signals around the globe.
It is forbidden by law to target or direct its spying on Canadians regardless of their location anywhere in the world, or at any person in Canada regardless of their nationality.
The National Defence Act says CSE may, however, unintentionally intercept Canadians’ communications, but must protect their privacy in the use and retention of such “intercepted information.” The agency’s “use” of the information is also restricted to cases where it is “essential to international affairs, defence or security.”
CSEC’s job is to aid federal law enforcement and security agencies, including the military, in highly sensitive operations. It was a key component of Canadian operations in Afghanistan, for example.
