Spy agencies need more oversight, privacy watchdog says

Canada’s privacy commissioner has issued several recommendations to improve oversight of the country’s spy agencies, as well as to ensure that Canadians’ privacy is protected, saying recent revelations of domestic espionage in the United States has raised serious questions about activities on Canadian soil as well.

In a report issued Tuesday, interim commissioner Chantal Bernier says that as spy agencies battle “pluralized and dispersed” security threats using an array of new surveillance technologies and tools, rules governing intelligence gathering must be updated.

Bernier notes in her report that in the Internet age, terror threats are not restricted by borders and are bolstered by online communication tools. However, new surveillance tools, from monitoring of online activity to closed-circuit cameras, cast a wider net and give intelligence agencies more information than ever before.

“The right to privacy is fundamental in Canada. It is central to personal integrity and essential to a free and democratic society,” Bernier writes in the report.

Bernier told CTV’s Power Play on Tuesday that the top-secret documents released by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in June was part of the impetus of the report.

“We’re concerned about it because clearly there have been revelations since June that have alerted us to the challenge about protecting privacy in the context of national security agencies,” Bernier said. “And what our office has observed since then is what I would call an accountability gap -- in the sense that Canadians, experts, analysts, the media are raising a lot of questions that remain unanswered.”

Bernier’s report includes 10 recommendations, including several changes to the operations of Communications Security Establishment Canada, which conducts surveillance on foreign targets.

Documents obtained by Snowden and released to Canadian media in November revealed that CSEC was a “partner” in an American spy operation that was run out of the U.S. embassy in Ottawa and held during the G8 and G20 summits in Toronto and Huntsville, Ont., in 2010.

The documents said that the NSA and CSEC were intercepting phone calls and hacking into computer systems around the world, though the exact targets of the espionage were not revealed.

Among its recommendations for CSEC, the report suggests that the agency disclose when it assists other federal agencies with requests to intercept communication, produce an annual report for the Defence Minister to table in Parliament, and expand reporting requirements on its surveillance activities.

“We understand they need to remain secretive to a certain extent, but we believe they could produce much more information and be more accountable without jeopardizing their operations,” Bernier told Power Play.

The report also says the powers of federal agencies that oversee national security operations should be bolstered, including the Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP (CPC) and the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC).

“The aim of renewal in this area should be to protect privacy in a complex threat environment; oversee collection so that it is reasonable, proportionate and minimally intrusive; ensure appropriate retention and access controls (among both public and private actors); ensure accuracy of analysis; and control the scope of information requests and disclosures through specific safeguards, agreements and caveats,” Bernier writes of her recommendations.

Bernier also recommends that specific guidelines be developed for the collection, analysis and dissemination of intelligence gleaned from online sources, particularly social networking sites.

Bernier writes that “the public availability of personal information on the Internet does not render personal information non-personal. It is our view that departments should not access personal information on social media sites unless they can demonstrate a direct correlation to legitimate government business.”

The report notes that surveillance of social media sites “has the potential to become the predominant collection channel.

“However, information online is often shared with an expectation of privacy – whether that is reasonable to expect or not – and moreover, can be inaccurate.”