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Tuesday, February 9, 2016

The abuses of privacy under Harper carry on

OTTAWA—To learn that our digital surveillance agency broke privacy laws by revealing information about Canadian citizens to our allies is one thing.
To learn that the Conservative government of the day, when apprised of this security breach, withheld the information from Canadians, is quite another.

A privacy breach and a country left in the dark: Tim Harper


But that is where we are today, after learning of a major invasion of Canadian privacy more than two years after the fact.
If our spy agencies, aided and abetted by the government of the day, wanted to fuel suspicion of internal surveillance in this country, they succeeded. If they wanted to ratchet up distrust, they scored.
This despite an effort Thursday to get ahead of this story with the first-ever background briefing for journalists from an official with the Canadian Security Establishment — only 26 months after a software glitch was discovered that was sending metadata on Canadians to our Five Eyes allies without the proper scrubbing to hide identities.
How many Canadians? We don’t know. What did the allies do with the information? We are only left with the assurances of Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan that our relationship with those allies, including the U.S. National Security Agency, was “solid” and they wouldn’t take advantage of a honest mistake.

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