The Conservatives killed a bill that would have created a new national security committee of parliamentarians, a private member’s bill by Liberal public safety critic Wayne Easter introduced in November, which would have given committee members access to top-secret information – unlike existing panels of MPs and senators.

The CBC published a top secret document obtained by Snowden showing that CSEC has collected, for two weeks, in 2012, information on passengers at a major Canadian airport using the airport public WiFi network in order to follow people and their mobile devices, sometimes up to a week after they left the airport. CSEC was able to follow the passengers when their mobile devices would appear on the WiFi of some public places. The doc shows that CSEC had so much information on the passengers that it was able to track their location days before they arrive at the airport, which shows incredible capacities. The agency was testing a new technology which, the document shows, was to be shared with the Five Eyes and is most likely now fully implemented and operational. CSEC defended itself by saying they are allowed to collect metadata and that “no Canadian communications were targeted, collected or used”. As we all know now, metadata, which includes among other things a person’s location and who they are talking to, can contain more information on a person than the content of their communications. With this information, and the fact that CSEC has the same spying equipment as the NSA, we can easily conclude that CSEC is spying on Canadians. And if this practice is supposedly “legal” because they are collecting metadata and not communications, or because they use overreaching ministerial authorizations, then it is the laws, and not only the practices and oversight mechanism, that need to be changed.

Documents obtained by the Globe and Mail showed that, on March 15 2004, a “ministerial authorization” was signed by Ottawa to authorize a Canadian Internet-metadata collection program, three days after the US program was peeled back. Even though the government and the agency spokesperson keep telling us that it is illegal for CSEC to spy on Canadians, it is allowed to do so in joint operations with the RCMP or CSIS, and when they believe the government information network is threatened. Moreover, whereas the police has to obtain a court warrant to spy on one individual, a simple ministerial authorization allows CSEC to collect as much metadata and/or the content of communications as they want as long as the minister of Defense is convinced that the collect is directed at and will mainly touch non-Canadians.

This was confirmed on January 7, 2014, when CSEC admitted on its website that “in the course of targeting foreign entities outside Canada in an interconnected and highly networked world, it is possible that we may incidentally intercept Canadian communications or information.”

The CBC revealed – based on Snowden documents – that CSEC allowed the NSA to spy on global leaders at the G20 summit in Toronto in June 2010 so the US would have an advantage in the negotiations and to support US political goals.

The Federal Court took CSIS to task for using CSEC and the international “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance to monitor the electronic communications of two Canadian terror suspects when they were abroad because CSIS failed to mention they were going to do that when they ask the court for a warrant.