Eyes on the Spies: Canadians Deserve Accountability
Yet while surveillance budgets balloon, watchdogs starve. Last in a series.
In just the past few weeks, for example, we learned that the CSE actively exploited security holes in a popular mobile web browser. We also learned that the U.K. government passedquiet legislation granting Government Communications Headquarters (Britain’s version of CSE) immunity for hacking into our computers and mobile phones. And we’ve seen the U.S. National Security Agency implicated in extensive spying on European citizens and private companies, in ways that go far beyond national security.
As leading privacy expert professor Michael Geist wrote last week, “nothing surprises anymore” when it comes to surveillance.
What these reports reveal about our spy agencies’ activities are indeed disturbing. But the seemingly unending stream of revelations also point to a larger problem — the striking lack of accountability, transparency and oversight that people have over what are, at the end of the day, government agencies operating with taxpayer dollars.
Canadians are clearly unhappy with this state of affairs. Concerns about lack of accountability were expressed again and again by those who took part in our crowdsourcing work for Canada’s Privacy Plan, the pro-privacy action plan launched recently by OpenMedia.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
