Canada Temporarily Drops Out Of Five Eyes Spying Coalition, After Realizing It Wasn't Properly Protecting Information

Of course, by now you know about the "Five Eyes" coalition of the signals intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand all sharing certain intelligence information between them. Some of the Snowden docs have made clear that this collaboration helps the various countries get around restrictions on "domestic" surveillance by effectively offshoring it to other "friendly" electronic spy agencies. Well, at least for now, it appears that that the Five Eyes effort has lost an Eye. Canada's signals intelligence agency, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), has stopped sharing data with the other Four Eyes after realizing that it hadn't done a particularly good job of protecting the metadata it collected on Canadians.

"While I was conducting this current comprehensive review, CSE discovered on its own that certain metadata was not being minimized properly," Plouffe explained in the report. "Minimization is the process by which Canadian identity information contained in metadata is rendered unidentifiable prior to being shared …." "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."

I guess it's nice that the CSE figured out that it had screwed up on its own, but really, it makes you wonder just how much information the Canadian gov't was sending abroad on its own citizens. Of course, the sharing will start back up again at some point in the future, once they've decided that they've properly "minimized" the data. And while Canadian politicians seem to be accepting the very Canadian apology of the CSE and saying that this was all an accident, shouldn't this kind of "mistake" lead to a bit more than a "sorry" and "we'll make sure it's better next time"? Shouldn't we be examining why such mass surveillance and data sharing are happening in the first place? Permalink | Comments | Email This Story