Op-Ed: The (NSA) debate Canada won’t have

[unhappycamper]

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/op-ed/debate+Canada+have/9412847/story.html

Op-Ed: The debate Canada won’t have
By Wesley Wark, Ottawa Citizen January 21, 2014

President Barack Obama’s recent speech, promising major reforms to the practice of U.S. global espionage, has met with surprisingly little commentary in Canada, and certainly no government response. Perhaps this is because we feel that the global spy business, including the vacuuming up of vast quantities of private data, is a purely American problem and that any reforms don’t really touch us here in the (currently) frozen North. Or perhaps because the Canadian government continues to feel that it is somehow un-Canadian, or simply unnecessary, to talk about espionage. Neither response could be farther from the truth.

The reasons for paying serious attention are not hard to grasp. One is that because a very large percentage of Canadian electronic communications inevitably flows through U.S. telecommunications servers, our data is being swept up in U.S. dragnet surveillance and we all have a huge stake in how the United States government deals with that information.

A second reason is that Canada is a long-established member of a unique intelligence alliance, now known too cutely as the “Five Eyes,” that links its signals intelligence agency, the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), with a small number of foreign partners, led by the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA), and including spy services in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Canada is a junior but valued partner in this intelligence alliance and we have traditionally reaped huge benefit in terms of access to technology and to foreign intelligence from it. But there are hidden costs as well, including operational partnership with an American system of intelligence collection. Since the 9/11 attacks, that system has increasingly felt the need to go it alone and to introduce intelligence methods which its allies might be uncomfortable with — whether it be enhanced interrogation techniques, “black site” detention facilities, extraordinary rendition of terrorism suspects, or in the case of signals intelligence, aggressive programs aimed at collecting vast, undifferentiated quantities of the world’s data. The Obama administration has rolled back some of the more repugnant methods first espoused in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Now, because of the Edward Snowden revelations, it is being forced to roll back NSA dragnet surveillance.

The Conservative government likes to root its foreign policy in the mantra of “not going along to get along.” This same mantra should be applied to our intelligence alliance with the United States. As valuable as that alliance is, there have to be self-imposed limits to Canadian cooperation with the U.S., limits which appear not to have been in place when it was revealed that Canada’s CSEC had engaged in an ill-considered intelligence operation targeting the Brazilian department of Energy and Mines, no doubt at the behest of the NSA.