By Steve Anderson, Open Media
Special to The Post
A secretive Canadian spy agency has been called out for spying on our sensitive personal data - without oversight.
We need to put pressure on the government to stop this, and to tell Canadians exactly what’s going on. Stand up for your privacy by speaking out now while we have the government’s attention.
You probably saw recently on the news that a U.S. government agency has been caught secretly spying on the private communications of millions of people like you – through their cell phones, and through popular online services like Google, Facebook, and Skype.
Now, The Globe And Mail is reporting that Canada has its own agency operating in near-total secrecy that appears to be doing the same thing – recklessly collecting and storing our most sensitive private information in giant databases.
According to The Globe and Mail, Defence Minister Peter MacKay approved a secret electronic eavesdropping program that scours global telephone records and Internet data trails – including those of Canadians – for patterns of suspicious activity.
Mr. MacKay signed a ministerial directive formally renewing the government’s “metadata” surveillance program on Nov. 21, 2011, according to records obtained by The Globe and Mail.
It is illegal for most Western espionage agencies to spy on their citizens without judicial authorization. But rising fears about foreign terrorist networks, coupled with the explosion of digital communications, have shifted the mandates of secretive electronic-eavesdropping agencies to monitor their own citizens.
Open Media is challenging this surveillance and calling on the government to reveal what sensitive private data is being collected and stored, and why.
The key agency collecting sensitive information is called the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), which The Globe And Mail describes as an “ultrasecretive Canadian electronic-eavesdropping agency”.
It is alleged to be systematically collecting the private information of innocent citizens, including Canadians, from around the world.
These revelations followed hot on the heels of news that the U.S. National Security Agency had also been spying on the private phone calls and Internet activities of millions of people around the world. The NSA is a partner of CSEC in the ‘Five Eyes’ program (a long-standing intelligence-sharing arrangement between the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the U.K.) and it now looks like CSEC has been working through the NSA and its ‘Five Eyes’ partners to circumvent surveillance laws that prohibit CSEC from spying on Canadian citizens.
According to online surveillance expert Ron Deibert, CSEC spying gives them the power to “pinpoint not only who you are, but with whom you meet, with what frequency and duration, and at which locations.”
Even the government’s own Privacy Commissioner’s Office has ominously stated, “we know very little specific information at this point, but we want to find out more.”
We need to use this moment—when privacy issues are in the spotlight—to get answers. Tell the government that we deserve to know if our sensitive private information is being collected and stored in giant unsecured databases.
Whether it be pushing back against copyright censorship schemes, Big Telecom’s price-gouging, or threats to our online privacy – we know that when we work together there is nothing we cannot achieve.
Call on the government to stop this secretive spying scheme, and to tell Canadians exactly what’s going on. We deserve to know.
For more information go to OpenMedia.ca - a network of people and organizations working to safeguard the open Internet. Our campaigns are citizen-driven, and our small team relies on grassroots donations to make our work possible. Support us at http://openmedia.ca/donate.
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