Questions remain about CSE public info use, Cambridge Analytica

OTTAWA — Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan couldn’t tell MPs or reporters whether the data collected by Cambridge Analytica would qualify by the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) as “publicly available information” the agency would be able to collect on Canadians Thursday. “I can't answer something that I really don't know too much about,” said Sajjan during a media scrum, after his appearance at the House public safety and national security committee. “We’ll always stay in the legal parameters,” Sajjan added. These questions come after reports over the weekend that data analytics company Cambridge Analytica pulled the data of millions of Facebook Inc. users without consent. Cambridge Analytica was founded by Steve Bannon, who ran part of Trump’s presidential campaign, and Robert Mercer, a billionaire donor to the Republican Party. The Canadian privacy commissioner is investigating whether Canadians were affected. Sajjan said the same thing at committee after being asked about the topic by NDP MP Matthew Dubé. “As far as the minister is concerned, just nothing except stalling and not really addressing the substance of the issue. So we remain concerned about publicly available information,” Dubé told The Wire Report in an interview after the meeting. The question of what exactly constitutes “publicly available information” has dogged the committee as members have studied Bill C-59. As it’s currently written, the CSE, normally limited to only collecting information on foreign targets and not Canadians, has an exemption to that rule when collecting information that the agency considers “publicly available.” Critics have said that term was overly-ambiguous since the bill was unveiled in the summer last year. CSE chief Greta Bossenmaier told committee that “mandate matters” when she was questioned on the topic by Dubé. “We can only use publicly available information if it is related to our mandate,” said Bossenmaier. She added that privacy protections found in the law already are sufficient in protecting Canadians from surveillance from the CSE. Bossenmaier declined to answer questions as she left the committee meeting at the end of her testimony. Later in the meeting, when pressed on the topic by Dubé, CSE deputy chief Dominic Rochon pointed to the need for the agency to use information collected from day-to-day web search services to justify the exemption wording in the law. “If they’re saying they just need to be able to conduct basic public research without running afoul of the limit against ‘directing’ activities at Canadians and people in Canada, then the bill should be dramatically amended to reflect that,” wrote Lex Gill, research fellow at the Citizen Lab, in an email to The Wire Report. Adding that it’s unclear why the exemption is even needed in that case, Gill continued, “if the government is opposed to such an amendment, then in terms of their stated justification, something is simply not adding up.” Earlier this week, Scott Brison, acting minister of democratic institutions, said the government had asked the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the CSE to engage on the topic of social media data use and to remain “vigilant on an ongoing basis both working with social media platforms” and other governments. Dubé brought this up with Bossenmaier during the meeting and the CSE chief explained that the agency had been tasked with investigating threats to the democratic process in the summer, and had released a report on the topic in June. “That's the kind of work that we expect to be doing over the coming weeks, to review our threat assessment based on information and activities that have occurred over the past year,” said Bossenmaier. — With reporting by Bryson Masse at bmasse@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

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Questions remain about CSE public info use, Cambridge Analytica

News | March 23, 2018

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