Information illegally held by Canada’s spy agency over the course of a decade should be deleted from CSIS servers, according to Ontario’s former information and privacy commissioner.
Ann Cavoukian said metadata – the information included in a communication, such as a telephone number or email address – never should have been gathered because it included details on Canadians who didn’t pose a security threat.
“As Justice (Simon) Noel made perfectly clear, there was no authorization whatsoever to collect that type of unrelated metadata. That was completely unanticipated, unauthorized and should never have happened,” she told CTV’s Power Play on Friday.
The Federal Court judge ruled that CSIS should not have kept metadata regarding people who didn’t pose a direct threat to national security, and said the agency breached its duty to inform the courts of the data-collection program because the information was gathered under judicial warrants.
The ruling was made public Thursday.
Cavoukian said a major concern about metadata is that it could be crunched by sophisticated algorithms to form data profiles and help track people.
“What machine learning algorithms excel at are predictive analytics – predicting future behaviour based on the data collected, and it can paint a very, very deep, involved picture of these individuals,” she said.
“That was never authorized, and that’s (why) we have to ensure this information is deleted.”
CSIS has not said whether it plans to destroy the information. CSIS director Michel Coulombe said Thursday that the agency had stopped all access to, and analysis of, the metadata in question as it fully assesses the court decision.
Cavoukian said the spy agency’s response on Thursday “didn’t address the major concerns” of the scathing ruling.
“They said, ‘OK, we’re not going to do it anymore.’ But they didn’t say we’re going to destroy the 10 years of metadata that we collected, contrary to having any legal authority to do so,” she said.
In his ruling, Justice Noel suggested that’s it time for the federal government to revisit the CSIS Act of 1984, which he wrote is "showing its age."
A former director for Canada’s CSIS watchdog echoed that call for reassessment.
“The Act is now more than 35 years old,” said Jacques Shore, former director of research and investigation for the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), who now works as partner with Gowling WLG.
“Clearly with new technologies, we have to address it.”
Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said Friday he was taking the finding “very seriously” and following up with CSIS top brass.
“(CSIS) has confirmed to me that it is taking immediate steps to address the court’s decision,” Goodale said. “It has blocked all access to, and analysis of, any associated data while it considers its next steps to comply.”
