A borderless Internet allows PRISM to access the personal information of Canadians
At the beginning of this month, whistleblower Edward Snowden released a Power Point containing details about the NSA (National Security Agency) program PRISM, and how it has been used to collect the personal information of millions of American citizens. With the release of this information there has been a shift in focus towards the issue of privacy and the security of personal information.
In his interview with The Guardian, Snowden stated that people working at the NSA have access to anyone’s personal information at any time. He further discussed databases filled with irrelevant pieces of people’s online history that can be used to create suspicion if that person is ever called into legal question.
For many Canadians, this new leak regarding government surveillance brings into question the security of personal information north of the border as well. Both Canadians and Americans use the companies mentioned in the scandal alike, and most of them are headquartered in the United States. This means that when a person creates a Facebook profile in Canada, their information is relayed back to a server in the U.S. where it is stored at the main databases of Facebook’s head office.
The NSA was given the power to participate in random surveillance with the onset of the War on Terror. This was done to help deal with potential “foreign threats,” a move that gives PRISM the ability to access the personal information of internet users across North America, regardless of their innocence or guilt.
Now even in Canada there are political motions occurring in Parliament to give more power to government agencies doing surveillance on citizens in the interest of national security. On June 10, The Globe and Mail released a PDF of a top secret document, approved by Defense Minister Peter MacKay, detailing the new efforts to “mine global metadata” in 2011. What this means is that the CSEC (Communications Security Establishment Canada) wants to create a system in which they randomly collect information in hopes of potentially narrowing down the location of security threats.
On the fifth page of the document there is a line stating that MacKay authorized the CSEC to“… engage in activities which risk incidental interception of private communications, which would otherwise be considered a violation of the Criminal Code.”
This boldly states that although such surveillance would be inexcusable in any other circumstance, the CSEC wants access to the personal information of random Canadian citizens. This sounds eerily similar to what happened with the NSA scandal, and with the support of Parliament it could be just as bad. If you are a University of Guelph student that uses Google, Apple or Facebook, your information may have already been collected by the NSA, and with recent developments regarding the CSEC, the Canadian government could be doing the same.