 Welcome to the first in a series of the Faculty of Public Affairs Hot Pursuit panel discussions on issues that are in the news. We're trying to capture issues when they're out there being talked about by people and bringing in members of Carleton's faculty from different departments and schools to talk about those issues and provide a little bit of insight and background to them today. Today we're going to talk about spying, the NSA revelations, Edward Snowden and some of the media reports that have been out around that lately, and we're joined by Gess Littlewood, who's the Director of the Canadian Center of Intelligence and Security Studies at Nipsey. Kurt Jensen, who is a former diplomat, long service in the Canadian Foreign Service, also teaches in political science at Carleton. And Jeff Salot, who is a member of the journalism faculty at Carleton and also a long time journalist for the Globe and Mail covering security issues. What we're going to talk about is looking at basically to try to get a sense of when you're sitting at home watching and listening to stories that have been out there lately about the NSA, about spying in Canada. What should we be thinking about them? What should the public know, and what's the context of those discussions and those issues for general consumption? So we'll ask each of our panelists to talk for a couple of minutes to open them. We'll have a bit of a discussion and then we'll follow that with some questions from our audience. So, Gess, go ahead. Thanks, Chris, and thanks for the invitation. I think the revelations that we see pretty well on a daily basis now could also come somewhat hot on the heels of the WikiLeaks cable revelations from a few years ago. What's different this time around is the scale and scope of them that Snowden is revealing ultimately through his media partners or those who are working with him. Perfectly legitimate, I would add. And the Canadian angle to this has become quite interesting since over the last sort of six to eight months, the communication security establishment of Canada or CSEC, because it tends to be known, has appeared more and more in the media briefs and has raised questions of, you know, Canada is involved in spying, some of it related supposedly to commercial espionage. Canada is working with international partners, including the NSA, and we have revelations from last week about the involvement in the G10 and G8, sorry, G20 and G8 summits. And for the public at large, I think these are unknown agencies or unknown organisations who are now on the front page of the media, and there's a very reticent or almost in one sense non-existent government response to this. And my takeaway at least at this stage is we have a huge hole in our knowledge and information. And because that information or that hole is not being filled by either government responses to it or by sort of what we might consider an ongoing informed dialogue, there is a tendency to fill it with speculation to make more of some of the thin documentation we've had about Canada than perhaps is relevant or evident. And in the wake of that, we see this sort of jumping in and out on issues, which are the hidden Canadian media, which is raising issues, but then we're not sort of getting any detailed responses or thoughtful responses to them. And it's this portion of that discussion, which is partly interesting to me, but also partly worries me, that no sort of ongoing thought about what does this mean for Canada, what are the implications for the future, and once it's how should Canada react, I think is the familiar key issue in this. Kurt? Well, I agree with everything that Jess has said. This is something that has been going on for a long time in Canada. I think we would have been better served if the government had made a decision at some point to start informing the Canadian public about the role of intelligence gathering in the affairs of state. But it's important to remember that at the end of the day, intelligence activity is merely a tool of statecraft. It is no different from conventional diplomacy, the policy research that takes place in all governmental departments, the sort of scientific and statistical research that takes place. It is just done in a different way. And because it's done in a different way, it is subject to much greater secrecy that may not be obvious to the public in terms of the need, therefore. But in fact, the priority in intelligence work is to protect the methods that are employed and the sources that are used to gather this information. But it's unfortunate that this gives the whole activity a much more sinister sense than it really deserves. Intelligence is, you know, there are days when it is God-awful boring. And there are days when it, once in a while, when it is quite exciting. But I can assure you that, and I've spent a number of years doing this, there has been virtually no moments when you're living anything like the born identity. No fast women or cars, no guns. They don't let us play with dangerous toys. Jeff? Yeah, I think what's happening in the public discussion of this is that there is a murkiness about intelligence gathering activities on behalf of statecraft, diplomacy, and anti-terrorism or other criminal activity. The kinds of powers that have been employed to disrupt terrorist activities in Canada, we've seen this and so on, I don't think you get a lot of dissent in Canada among citizens on that. The concern about the privacy of other people who are collateral damage or collateral vacuum sweeping material from an organization like CSCC, that kind of thing doesn't resonate much in Canada and it is a real sharp contrast to what's happening in Europe. Europe seems to have a greater privacy ethos that, so when Angela Merkel gets mad about her cell phone being tapped, she gets mad on behalf of all the Germans and we don't have that in Canada and certainly not in the United States. And I'm not quite sure what the reason is there. But at any rate, you have to, as you are discussing these things going forward, you have to kind of make that distinction. One of the things you pointed out and it's interesting to pursue is how much understood or how well understood is laws that might exist around privacy, around what you can do, around what spying is, I don't want to say what spying is legal or not legal, but it's a little bit of that. Kurt, is there much of a sense that the public understands that or even that the people who are doing the spying necessarily understand that? I don't think the public really has good grasp of it. I think the agencies that are involved have a phenomenal grasp of it, bolstered by the phenomenal army of lawyers that work for all of these organizations and the relatively few things that are launched that are not subject to the reviews of several legal minds that look at whether or not this falls within the ambit of what you're permitted to do. At the same time, there are probably not as many rules in place on what you could do, rules in the sense of statues. That actually has, I think, had the effect of making, of enhancing the consciousness of some of the organizations, that because, I remember from my own experience, there were things that we were concerned about doing simply because we were taking it on ourselves and the political support that we had before this. But part of it involves oversight, I guess, one way or another. Are we confident enough that there's enough oversight, Jess? I think no. The answer to that, if we talk to people who follow the intelligence community, whether from a legal perspective or those of us with other perspectives, the answer is now there is decreasing confidence in the ability of the existing oversight and accountability mechanisms to serve the proper purpose. One of the challenges here is that 25 years ago, 30 years ago, when Canada had its last huge change with intelligence legislation, security service activities, which gave birth to the security intelligence service, CISIS. And Canada was at the forefront of oversight and accountability there by establishing, among other things, the security intelligence review committee. CISEC, as signals intelligence, was somewhat behind there, but we also have an officer of commissioner. The challenge from the Canadian perspective is the accountability structures are, by and large, focused on a single agency at a single point in time. So CIRC, which looks after CISIS, its mandate deals only with CISECs, the information commissioner who looks after CISEC, focus on CISEC. And yet we know, certainly over the last decade in the Canada terrorism environment, that intelligence, integration and information sharing is of paramount importance. And so our accountability structures need to move, if you like, from a silo mentality to a more holistic approach. And one of the portions on that, if you like, at the top end of that, if we think about this as a layer, is an increasing number of calls for a parliamentary role in this. And I mean, certainly the ability to sharing information and those sorts of things, you go back to things like Air India and events like that. And that was one of the big criticisms then, and we're maybe not much further along than some of that. I think in some ways we are further along, but it's equally important to understand that we can often have a response to a crisis, an intelligence failure or something that shocked us. And understandably, the reaction to it will be, I want to focus on solving that problem. Incomplete intelligence sharing, or intelligence sharing of information which should never have occurred in the first place. That's understandable, but to do this, you need one sense need to make the legislation or the procedures in place very future proof. Because the Canadian history is very clear. We only have a look at these things every decade or so. And if we think about how far technology has gone, how the security environment has changed even over the last decade, then we need procedures in place which deal with known problems, but are also somewhat anticipatory. And we also have to be willing to give the services and the agencies themselves some room to maneuver and do their tasks and work on the basis that they are almost certainly aiming to operate within the confines of Canadian law. But for the Canadian public to be assured of that, if you like, you require some buffer between that, whether it's an independent agency, whether it's an inspector general role. And so we're going to have to, I think we have to rethink this in a more sustained manner over the next months, come years. And Jeff, is part of that the media's job too? Well, absolutely. We understand, I think, that there are certain legitimate secrets for governments to keep. We don't want premature disclosure putting anyone's life at risk. We don't want it to spoil an anti-terrorist operation. So we look, our job is to look at the watchdogs. How effective are they? Do they have the power to do things? And there's a lot of question about that. I remember it took me weeks of badgering the commissioner, who is the CSE, Oversight Commissioner, a retired judge, a number of years ago, it took me weeks of badgering him just to get him to allow me in to take a look at their operation. It was a pretty small operation. He had a couple of admin staff, and that was it. And I thought, well, is this really enough? And another thing that concerns me about this, in terms of oversight, we expect in our system that there is going to be political oversight. And we are seeing in the United States, for example, it sounds like Barack Obama was caught off guard. I didn't know what was going on when the story first broke about NSA intercepting communications of Europeans and particularly European leaders. So if the president of the United States is being caught out on this, you've got to wonder, well, what's going on? I mean, who is mining the store? Well, Kurt, you were in the diplomatic service for a long time, and also involved in intelligence. How much political oversight was there of the work that you were involved with? There's always political oversight. Nothing takes place without the consent of the minister, depending on what it is, you know, not the everyday stuff. But that is, I mean, it's really, it's good oversight, but it's not adequate. You can never have enough accountability structures. And the main thing that you have to have in good oversight or accountability is arms length, a totally objective way of assessing an activity without being influenced by the outcome. At the end of the day, if an apartment or agency screws up, the minister is the one that has to stand up in parliament and explain why. And no minister will be really encouraged to do that. Do we have enough oversight or accountability? No. Nobody does. And oversight is the wrong word. It's really after sight or review of what is going on or has gone on. You can never actually have active oversight that works. That involves, first of all, it slows down everything. And it involves participation of the accountability structure in the decision-making, which probably is something you want to avoid. Do we have enough? No. Right now, we have accountability structures for CESIS and CSEC. We don't have anything for the small foreign intelligence entity that exists, military intelligence. And I think we did collapse some of the CESIS oversight in that there was an inspector general or CESIS. And also the security intelligence review committee, and they were combined as the government claimed you didn't need to have both. Yeah. To my view, in my view, that was a mistake. It was a very inexpensive operation and generally effective. And to some extent, the inspector general did work that CERC never did and probably will never have the resources to do. One of the issues that's come up in the last little while, as we've seen the revelations from Mr. Snowden and from Glenn Greenwald, was the question of Canada doing spying for commercial reasons rather than for security reasons. Do we do commercial spying at the moment? And is that the right thing to be doing, Jess? I don't think based on the revelations which are related to Brazil. It's not clear to me, reading what's been put in the public domain, that Canada is involved in commercial espionage. Now, I think in fairness, my default position would be, I would not be surprised to find out that Canada is involved in commercial espionage. But I can't, in all honesty, read the Brazilian revelations and give a short answer to that. Because there's a fairly thin base of information from which we're extrapolating because we're in the dark. But taking it away slightly from the Canadian context, we do know that many countries, including many democracies, are involved in espionage activity, which involves a scientific and technological base and economic issues. China's often been accused of that among us. Yeah, but even among some of our closest allies, we know that occurs or has occurred historically in the past. So as I say, my default position is I would not be surprised if we get incontrovertible evidence that Canada is involved in something related to commercial espionage. But I would equally, if that is offered, if you like, to me, my question would be then the real question for me is, OK, to an extent, how big a slice of the pie is that? Are we talking about 5% of activity, 1% of activity, or something, boy? Because I understand why that may be of interest to people, particularly to the government. But at the same time, predominantly for me, our intelligence community is there to deal with security threats, or foreign policy issues, which will assist decision makers in dealing with problems coming down the line. Great. Commercial intelligence? Well, there are a couple of things to bear in mind. One is a couple of things I want to say. First is something that you hear very often when this comes up in the context of the CIA, where CIA officers respond that it's one thing to be asked to lay down your life for your country, and it's a totally different thing to be asked to lay it down for General Motors. I don't think that there is any commercial espionage. There's a lot of economic espionage, not as much as we would like, but we just don't have the resources. One of the reasons that you don't get into commercial espionage is, who would you be helping? I mean, in a multinational world, what's a Canadian company? Do you help Ford of Canada? Well, is Ford of Canada really a Canadian company, or is it a multinational? And plus, you get into that. If you help Ford of Canada, do you help GM? Do you help Toyota? That assembles cars in Ontario? I think it's a common sense and just logistics that would prevent this. The countries that are involved in commercial espionage are the ones where there is a great deal of state involvement in the commercial field, or where a greater number of the companies that would benefit much more national than our companies are. I've got one last question for this section, and then we'll have some questions from our audience. But start at the far end with Jeff. What we've seen so far from Mr. Greenwald, from Mr. Snowden, from the NSA revelations, what surprised you the most from it all, or one or two things that might have surprised you the most? I was surprised at the volume. And I don't know why I should be surprised, but just the pure volume of material that is intercepted, captured, retained, run through computer meat grinders, or whatever it is, it's staggering. And I think just the numbers frighten people, even if you're telling them it's just the kind of information that you'll find in a phone book. Remember phone books? But people get nervous because information in a database, in digital form, can be stored forever and can be later manipulated to produce different kind of data that you may not want the government to know about you. Great. I can't remember the exact statistics and Jess helped me, but every hour, as I recall, the FIFI second community collects data equivalent to the Library of Congress. Yeah, and that's Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain and the United States. Yes, right. That's the bad side. The good side is that probably 99% of that is dumped. It's stuff that does not meet a requirement that is captured when it should not be captured, you know, a national, or it's simply garbage that is scooped up. And then when it gets scooped up, is it then ultimately get... It's just deleted. It's not stored, unless things have changed in the last couple of years. I mean, the cost of storing is just prohibitive. Jess? I think that the sheer, the revelations are indicating the sheer volume and the scope and scale of what is or can be collected has been a shock to people. Part of me is surprised that people are surprised at that. Not least, because if we move this out of the intelligence realm, if we think about what social media, what Facebook, Google, among others know about us, just from our email and things like that, it's, you know, the digital footprint of many others is huge. And so in one sense, it shouldn't be too much of a surprise. But what is also, in one sense, a surprise to me is has been it's a very sort of cat and mouse response, almost based on I have this snippet of information. I'm going to push it as far as I can. The government's only going to answer or the US government predominantly is only going to deal with that thing in isolation. And we're not really standing back from this saying, OK, what does this actually mean for the next five, 10 years, and what do we need to do about it in terms of a broader picture in terms of, OK, from a Canadian perspective, what's our intelligence community for? How good are our accountability systems? And to an extent, where should we be focusing or not focusing? And how does the Canadian public feel about this? These, I think, are the more important detail questions, which for me I would like to see come out of this discussion and yet are only really appearing very much on the margins. You mentioned earlier that we've had these kind of flare-ups about every 10 years or so. I could probably say that what you would like to see come out of this one is what we'd like to have seen come out of each of the last ones that have happened, too, and we haven't really very much. So do you have any more confidence that something might happen this time? In fairness, I have very little confidence that we will see this in Canada. I think that, you know, for understandable reasons, not that I'm supportive of it, but for understandable reasons, the government probably just wants this to blow over and hopes no one's going to pay too much attention. The media will follow this as far as it's interesting, but once the public loses interest, they will tail off as well, and business will continue. And at the level of principle, I'm actually quite supportive of a role for parliamentarians in intelligence accountability and oversight. But at the level of detail, I think parliamentarians would have to seriously up their game to do this correctly, properly, in a sustainable manner. Do any of you think the United States has the ability to do that and might actually try to do it as a result of what's going on? Jeff? The capability is there. The technical capability is there. They have had a much more extensive experience with political review in the intelligence committees of both the House and the Senate. There are members who are sworn to secrecy, who get regular briefings on things, including real operations that recently have been carried out. Consequently, you've got a small group of legislators who understand all of this. Sometimes they may not understand it as completely as, as, or have misinterpreted it. I think Nancy Pelosi, who was the chair and then now vice chair of the Washington committee, has indicated in some of her responses that she didn't really understand what it was that the NSA was doing vis-a-vis our allies. Kurt, last word. The weakness in the American system, and it's not a bad system, but there is a weakness, and that is that all of the people that sit in the committees are subject to term limits, and they cannot discuss anything that they learn, which is the kiss of death for most politicians. So there's not a great deal of interest among elected officials in the United States to serve on these committees. It's paying your dues, in a sense, I think. In Canada, I think we're about the only country among the, we're the only country among the Five Eyes, and among many other Western nations that don't have a parliamentary oversight structure. I think it's coming. It has been discussed by Hugh Siegel, and, but. Well, he may not be too much favorite with the current government. Well, that's true, you know, but. The Senate did have a structure under Kenny at one point where they held a fair number of hearings. I appeared before them a couple of times. The main difference, or the main concern with having a parliamentary accountability structure is what we actually get. And there are two forms in place right now, and one is a committee of parliament that reports to parliament, or the British structure, which is a committee of parliamentarians who report to the Prime Minister. And I know that the second version, the parliamentarians reporting to the Prime Minister, is the model that has, that seems to have the most favoring in Canada, partly because there's a lot of British experience. And it has not cost any difficulty. It's just a different way of doing it. I'd like to respond to a point that Kurt made just a few minutes ago, in terms of politicians not being able to get any political capital out of serving on these committees where they can't talk publicly about what it is they see. I think in the US there are lots of unofficial ways that the public becomes aware of these things. And I think you don't have to be a genius to figure out that a lot of the stuff that is appearing under Charlie Savage's byline of the New York Times, or Dana Adamson, Washington Post and so on, was leaked, if not from the politicians directly, from their staffers, from the staffers of the committee. And so this is always the great equalizer in terms of the ability of the journalists to keep the public informed and the natural shyness of intelligence agencies about their activities. The great equalizer is that every once in a while, in Washington with some regularity, somebody's gonna come out with it. And it may not be just a lowly corporal like Manning or a contractor like Snowden, but it might very well be the opposition council, a legal council to the Senate committee. Kurt, did you wanna add something to that? Yeah, and I agree with you. The main difficulty or the main concern that I have with the leaks is that they're selective. They usually have a political agenda, which means you don't actually get the truth. You get whatever serves, whatever a person is interested in. Historically, most of the leaks seem to have come from the White House, am I that? They've done some studies. The other difficulty is that they tend to focus on their sensational, same as, in effect, the Snowden stuff. And this has caused a great deal of problem in terms of the literature and the reviews and the public perception of intelligence organizations. In the 1970s, mid-70s, when they had all the revelations about the crown jewels, about all the nasty things the CIA had done, all of which were true, it constituted less than 5% of the CIA budget. And there are books that have been written defining the CIA only in terms of this stuff, which does not add to a public understanding or perception of what intelligence really does. Which comes back to the original question of how much government is prepared to talk about these things and how much the public should be prepared to know. So why don't we take a break for just a moment, we'll come back and we'll have some questions from our audience.