Canadians, Too, Should Demand Surveillance Answers

An anonymous reader writes "Privacy and surveillance have taken centre stage this week with the revelations that U.S. agencies have been engaged in massive, secret surveillance programs that include years of capturing the meta-data from every cellphone call on the Verizon network (the meta-data includes the number called and the length of the call) as well as gathering information from the largest Internet companies in the world including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple in a program called PRISM. Michael Geist explains how many of the same powers exist under Canadian law and that it is very likely that Canadians have been caught up by these surveillance activities."

Comments

Absolutely

[Phrogman]

Guaranteed that our country is willingly sharing all of our data with the US. I don't doubt it for a minute. And its likely been doing it since Echelon was first built, now just more efficiently than before. I have zero faith in Steven Harper's credibility or integrity at any rate.

Re:Absolutely

[Trepidity]

I, too, have zero faith in Steven Harper generally and would prefer him and his party out of office, but on this particular issue I'm worried the consensus is quite cross-party, at least between the Conservatives and Liberals. It's not like the practice of shoveling data to the US wholesale started only in 2004: the previous Liberal government under both Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin also maintained strong security & intelligence collaboration with the US.

Chrétien was more publicly skeptical of US foreign policy than Harper is (e.g. opposing the Iraq war), but I'm not sure his government was in practice different when it came to behind-the-scenes things like how the intelligence services were operated.

5 Eyes

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the 5 Eyes problem.

The USA, UK, Aus, NZ and CAN have reciprocal intelligence agreements.

Canada spies on US citizens, gives the intelligence to the US. And vice-versa.

It's been going on for years.