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.