 So, we're back with Jess Littlewood of the Norman Patterson School of International Affairs, Kurt Jensen from Political Science, and Jeff Salitt from the School of Journalism. And we've now got some opportunity for some questions, and I'd ask each of our questioners to identify yourself first and direct your question to a single person, and then we'll get other members of the panel who may want to respond as well. Yes, please, just direct it to one person first, and then other members of the panel can respond and answer as well. OK, my name is Barry Wright. My name is Barry Wright, and I have a question for Jess. I'm wondering what sort of obstacles are related to the discussion of accountability in legislative oversight. I'm wondering what obstacles there are to expanding the Security Intelligence Review Committee, which of course is very, very carefully crafted, coming out of the McDonald Commission and creation of CISIS. We know with the Anti-Terrorism Act amendments that came in 2001 that at least CISAC was recognized and acknowledged that it didn't really have a legislative mandate. We know the Official Secrets Act was amended. That of course was long overdue, it was very charter unfriendly. The amendments in New Security of Information Act really don't address the sorts of issues that we're talking about. I'm wondering what obstacle is there to creating and broadening the mandate of the Security Intelligence Review Committee. There are purpose-built committees, it could be expanded, it's a way of enhancing accountability. It would allow for greater coordination between what CISAC, RCMP, and CISAC are up to, make things more transparent. I understand in the UK that I may be wrong, but there is an umbrella for MI5, MI6, and GCHQ. So what's preventing that from being followed through on here in Canada? I think it's probably a mindset approach to this issue. It's a mindset approach to this issue in the sense that the Security Intelligence Review Committee's CERC was established to cover CISIS. Now certainly in the wake of the O'Connor Inquiry which dealt with the incident involved in the O'Connor Inquiry, there was some notion of updating the accountability structure which included what we essentially became known as the super CERC, where CERC would start taking some responsibilities or have responsibilities for the intelligence community a bit large. This would include the RCMP's National Security Criminal Investigations Branch. There's still a logic to that which might be worth exploring, but the danger is that we start thinking about CERC and we start to forget that in actual fact for the accountability agency or structure to work, it needs expertise within it that deals very much with a single portion of the pie. So we need experts who deal with CISIS and we need experts who deal with CISEC and we need experts who might for example know National Security Criminal Investigations for the RCMP. Each of those has a different mandate, each of them has different responsibilities. So bringing all that together in a single structure risks creating an organisation which is unwieldy, which I won't say will become overly bureaucratic, but will have problems at least in legislation where how do they share information? How do they do their discrete task at one point in time, yet have the ability to share information when they have to follow an investigation or an intelligence issue across numerous organisations? So I think if you go down the route of a super CERC, some very careful legal and organisational thinking needs to occur. It sounds attractive, my fear would be it would be very complex. The counter to this has been the notion of what we call statutory gateways or the ability for the different discrete agencies to co-operate and work with each other when it is required. And I don't think any system is going to be perfect, but some more detailed thought has to be given to what the roles will be. I think Jess is absolutely correct. It's not impossible, but there are substantial difficulties that really boil down to the mandates and the rules of operations of each of the organisations. Like something like CESIS is subject to or should be subject to much more stringent control and oversight simply because it is dealing with Canadian nationals. Military intelligence and foreign intelligence, which operates largely outside Canadian borders, do not impact directly on Canadian citizens. CPSA does and has a substantial intelligence organisation. Transport Canada has a very large intelligence organisation and also has an impact on Canada. But each of them have different operational mandates and they have different tradecraft. And it's the tradecraft that must be reviewed and studied to make sure that you're working playing within the rules, if you will. And I simply don't believe that a single organisation could do it. One of the discussions that have taken place is that you have a certain type entity that is responsible for all the administrative stuff that is associated with this, but then you have units within that that is focused on each of the different streams of intelligence collection. That could work. So I might just jump in directly in response to that. I'm not entirely confident that signals intelligence doesn't have an impact on Canadian citizens. You have the five eyes when you have intelligence sharing and you have, for instance, the events, revelations around what happened in Toronto. There is a concern about these operations having a spillover effect on Canadian citizens. Most of the stuff that happened in Toronto with the G20 is what I assume you're talking about. Well, frankly, the media got it wrong. If you read the memo, it basically reads like hundreds of others, both Canadian, Australian, American, whatever, that basically set out what is going to happen in Toronto in terms of keeping the President, in this case, informed. Whenever the President travels, he travels with a unit from NSA that basically has the portable sighing equipment that can communicate back and forth to headquarters so that the President can be updated on events. A lot of the memo was tied to what threat and what he would encounter once he arrived in Canada. Nothing was talking about what NSA would be doing in Canada. This is all something that was created by the media because it's a good story. Whether or not it's true is a different matter. Jeff, any thoughts? Yeah, I don't know the particulars of the G20 and the documents. I don't write those stories anymore, but I'll tell you, we would be very naive to think that the Americans have not spied on our government. I know, for example, during the free trade negotiations, Canadian officials would come down from Ottawa to Washington and elaborate steps were taken to make sure that computers were secure, that hotel rooms were not bugged and so on. Is that because of lack of trust in our partners or is it perhaps a little bit of larceny in our own soul that we would do it ourselves if we could get away with it? The only fundamental rule about spying is don't get caught. We're seeing now that the leveling effect of leaks coming from people with access to databases is making that much more difficult for the spies. May I add one quick note on that? It is quite true that the Americans had information about Canadian negotiation strategies, but they were often or almost certainly based on what other nations that were being collected against what they were interpreting the Canadian positions to be. This is quite common that you will target everyone who's not a member of the Five Eyes community and some of them have very exceptionally bright diplomats that more or less get it right most of the time. And there's enough public information that becomes available in these negotiations that someone who actually has a good insight can probably draw the right conclusions. That kind of material, I'm sure that the Americans had, just as I'm fairly sure that the Canadians had. Let's go to our next question. I'll direct this question at Jess. And your name is? Alex. Okay. I'm from the Department of Sociology. So in recent years we've seen CESIS taking an interest, greater interest in these generally nonviolent social movements like animal rights, environmentalist protests, and even the Occupy movement. Basically they're generating intelligence on them, sharing it with ERCMP, other agencies, and at times classifying them through this notion of multi-issue extremism, which basically groups them together with terrorism. So my question is, should CESIS be taking an interest in these groups, or should it not? Good luck. It's a great question in terms of the multi-issue extremists. One of the challenges faced by CESIS and those involved in security intelligence is partly to be aware of to what extent are individuals or groups or loose organizations involved in perfectly legitimate political activity. They may be involved in lobbying, they may be involved in legitimate civil actions. But one challenge the intelligence community faces from a security perspective is even if 99% of the people involved in that are law abiding, do not pose a serious threat to Canada, are there individuals within those communities who feel more radical and may tip over into violence? And so for the community in one sense has to at least be aware of the size, scope, scale, and interests of an issue group, an advocacy group writ large, which it can in fairness do by a lot of open source information, press releases, just listening to the activities of groups. But they also have a mandate to advise and warn government to say, okay, I'll just pick one randomly. There might be individuals involved in animal rights who may feel that legislation has not gone far enough, that the Canadian public is not interested enough in this, and more radical activities needed to put this into the public's eye to get action, to get a reaction. Some of those may, and I'm just being hypothetical here, may be thinking about violence or been involved in violence elsewhere. The Canadian community has to take on some role in thinking about and being aware of that. It therefore has to have some knowledge of the scope and scale of that group. The challenge is sorting out, in one sense, the wheat from the chaff and trying to work out where as the legitimate activity, which is almost certainly in the Canadian case where the vast majority of it occurs, versus those who may tip into occasional or potentially sustained violence. And to be aware of that, you have to be aware of the group. And this in one sense means that they have to be able to advise the RCMP or provincial authorities or other authorities to say, okay, you've got a meeting occurring. Is there a threat of violence to this meeting? They might say no. But in order for them to say no with confidence, they have to have had some level of activity, which means they have to have looked at this group. Anyone else on the panel? I would just add to what Jess has pointed out that, first of all, he's absolutely correct, but it is a really difficult area. And the simplest example, and perhaps it's a bit of an oversimplification, is the anti-abortion movement. Perfectly legitimate of absolutely no interest to CESIS or the FBI in the United States or any other security agency. However, a very small number of individuals in their numbering handful became involved in going around and killing people that operated abortion clinics. Should we not look for those people? Should we simply in the interest of all of the other anti-abortionist individuals who are perfectly legitimate in their concerns, should we ignore the potential that there are a few people who can cause tremendous damage to society? Follow-up question or...? That's great. That's it? Okay. I think that's the end of our questions. Oh, we've got another question. Yes, sorry. Just come on up. Great. My question would be for Jeff. Generally speaking, the security intelligence agencies and cryptologic agencies have two mandates. The first being to protect domestic communications and security intelligence, as well as to collect, analyze, and disseminate foreign intelligence communication. However, recently the Stone and Revelations have revealed how the NSA has actually broken and weakened the technical infrastructure of private corporations, for example, Google, where they broke the SSL encryption. My question would be what are reasonable expectations of online privacy today? Well, I'll tell you what I tell my journalism students. Don't do anything digitally that you're not prepared to have viewed by somebody else, someplace else, at some other time. I don't think there is a safe area for your activities if it's being done digitally. Somebody is going to find a new algorithm to break the Google firewall, and in many ways just throwing computing power against the other side and then finding it doubled over there and so on. So that's a losing proposition. I think this raises some very interesting thoughts, though, about old-fashioned kinds of communication. We saw this with the bin Laden takedown. He was communicating with his followers with a US beak key that a courier was taking back and forth, and he was able to evade the notice of the United States in that little town in Pakistan for quite a period of time because he wasn't making himself vulnerable to that kind of an interception. So I'm sorry for having to say this for people who are very concerned about privacy, but we are going to have to rethink what privacy really means and how frightened should we be about it if it is being invaded for good purposes by good people. Kurt and Jeff, are you going to comment? Absolutely correct. We need a whole different approach to look at privacy and it will come probably not for a decade or more because it is a complex issue that hasn't really reached the end of its current path. I might add to what Jeff was saying about Osama bin Laden, his concern with his privacy was actually a factor in him being captured. It was the only house in that place that had absolutely no phone, no TV, no internet, no nothing. And that became one of the building blocks in the American assessment that this was probably a bad guy. So it works both ways. Jeff, talk about privacy. I think the concern about the partly coming out of the Snowden revelations is what we might consider to be the chilling effect. Are the intelligence agencies writ large, this all-seeing, all-knowing organization where your information is captured by default and therefore you have no privacy in one sense. I think what will change with our understanding of privacy is a recognition of the amount of information we willingly share or we offer our consent to share it given the fact that we use the likes of Google or the forms of social media. And it's becoming, we'll have to come to some understanding about what the role of the intelligence organizations are as they collect various portions of this information and what they can do with it legitimately under a warrant or under the existing legislation. I would be extremely nervous if someone was to come out saying, as a citizen, I have no right to privacy anymore because of technological capabilities. I think that's completely the wrong way to go and I don't think that's going to wash in any democratic society. But equally, we're going to have to get over as individuals the notion that an email I share with Jeff is never going to be seen or read or stored by anybody else because that's not the case. It can be read by somebody else if necessary and it's certainly been stored by somebody else because I'm transmitting it over somebody else's infrastructure. Now to what extent an intelligence agency has a right to see that and access it and can they read it and do they just have to happen to know that, oh yeah, that's just a little what is sharing an email with Jeff Salad. It's a slightly different issue. So I think we're going to have to grapple with this just as we're going to have to grapple with many other issues such as accountability. And this for me is the most important implications of this note in discussion, is it should open up the debates which will have to be thoughtful and measured which really do provide the foundation for the next five to ten years about okay, how do we share information, who has access to it and what are the rules of the intelligence organizations. Follow-up question or? No, no, thank you. Okay, we have one more question. Hi, my name is Jonathan. I'm from Nipsia and my question is directed to Professor Lilwood. It's regarding Canadians who go abroad to engage in extremism. What's the current approach of Canadian intelligence agencies in terms of information sharing on these people? Do we, let's say hypothetically, Canadian of Somali origin goes and joins Al-Shabaab? Do we give that information to the United States who then use that to carry out a drone strike which kills and ends up killing this Canadian citizen? Is that something that might be currently done or what's your opinion on that maybe? The short answer is I think I don't know and I don't think we know in the public domain. It's clear in one sense, one thing we have to get our heads around is that intelligence, particularly this is a challenge for the Canadian community, that we think about CISIS as being, for one of the better term domestic intelligence, it's internal, and we think about CISEC as far on signals intelligence being outside. We know those boundaries, the external internal boundaries of security have become very blurred across a number of areas, including in the terrorism and violent extremism area. And so our intelligence by necessity because information has to be shared is in one sense crossing what we might consider to be internal and external borders and boundaries. There are rules and procedures in place for doing that but in the public domain, to pick up the foreign fighter indication, it's not clear to me how it's working in practice but if we have an individual, and I'll talk hypothetically here, if we have an individual in Canada who is suspected of being on the road to violent extremism and then it becomes known that that individual is planning to leave Canada and go to another country and Syria is the hotbed at this point in time for attracting foreign fighters. Then the government of Canada has some responsibility there because it's a Canadian citizen who may be potentially conducting violence abroad. How they deal with that in terms of potentially alerting other countries that an individual with what were suspected to be violent intentions and may be traversing their borders has to be considered. What that individual may or may not get up to in a country or a stage of conflict also has to be considered and then ultimately if that person returns back to Canada then again we have some security issues or intelligence concerns there which are legitimate and say okay well this individual now pose some level of threat to Canada. I'll go a little bit out on a limb but be clear that I don't know this. I would not anticipate that the Canadian intelligence community will be sharing information with the Americans or with anybody else about a Canadian national abroad in thinking about terms of drone strikes. That said, I think that's a very good question to ask that we should actually be thinking about in one sense a structured exercise to understand what are the limits of what can be done how do we deal with some of these issues and how is intelligence working in practice. We probably won't get to the nitty gritty answer the granular level detail but it would assist us to understand the role of intelligence if we did think about some of these hypothetical questions in a measured way. The foreign fighter issue is one that is coming down the line well it's here now but it's coming down the line and we're going to have to give that some consideration. Thoughts from anyone else? It's not really a hypothetical issue we've had instances of Canadians travelling abroad and getting scooped up because of information that was shared with another government the Behar Arar case is the most infamous case in this regard. Canadian agencies in this case the RCMP provided bad intelligence to the Americans and as a result Behar Arar was sent in the middle of the night from New York City detention cell there to the Middle East where he was eventually transferred to Syria and spent a year being tortured in Damascus because of bad intelligence. I think if Canadian agencies are going to share and I think we have to it would be really naive to think that that couldn't occur we have to also make sure that the people we are sharing it with understand what the limitations are on our intelligence and we need to know what is the limit of what our foreign partners are going to do. I'm sure nobody in the RCMP really thought the whole thing out before they shared questions to be raised with Behar Arar when he was stopped at JFK airport in New York City. I'm sure that there were people who might have suspected this kind of thing would go along but they would never have turned a blind eye to it if they do for sure. So we have to be careful. The quality of information I tell young reporters as well they are very excited because they've gotten a document that's been leaked to them they've gotten a document through access to information and I say look a document is just another source you don't really know whether the information contained here is true or not. The document in fact may have been written to throw people off the trail or it's incomplete and you can't interrogate a document to ask those questions to determine the quality of the information. So on issues involving the privacy of individuals I think an abundance of transparency is probably the way we're going to have to go so that people will have a right to know exactly what is in government files and records about them in the same way they have a right now in Canada to their credit records. Kurt did you want to comment and then just comment on this one. This is a real messy area that will probably get worse before it gets better. There are a lot of difficulties in it you have two conflicts the protection of the individual, the Canadian and the protection of people at large that this guy may be aiming at killing. How do you reconcile the two? There are no rules in place right now and will sharing occur? Almost certainly because they will focus on the protection of human life as much as they can. The main thing with sharing of information is that caveats are usually should be placed on what can be done with that information. In the case of the Iran inquiry or Iran situation there were no caveats and the information was shared by people that had not been properly trained and had really no intelligence background. There were very excitable RCMP officers that went beyond the rules of their own organization in sharing information with the United States and that too horrendous consequences. Geoff. Geoff raised a very important point. I was a very important point that we have had past instances of this where it has had extremely detrimental impacts on individuals and he's absolutely right there. I was thinking in terms of the drone strikes if you like or UAV strikes. But information sharing, intelligence sharing is a fact of life now, particularly for a country like Canada both as providing it and also being the recipient of it. The key to it is having individuals who are well-versed in the existing procedures or whatever new procedures may be offered to act as safeguards and the crux of that is having organizations and individuals who can handle information in a crisis environment. There are some indications certainly going back to the Iran instance that it happened at a period of time when people were extremely worried a lot of new people were brought in who were inexperienced and people were thinking in crisis mode and not thinking through the implications of what they're doing. But it all harks back to having that sort of structure and bureaucracy and well-trained individuals in place who can deal with a situation on a day-to-day basis but also deal with it on a crisis level as well. So you don't get the kind of huge mistakes with massively detrimental impacts on an individual that we saw near our case and we've seen in other cases in Canada too. Can we go to our last question now? Yes, George Jacoby retired Foreign Service with some service abroad in intelligent sensitive areas such as the Middle East, Latin America in company with other Canadian officials for instance from the Department of National Defense, National Revenue, CESIS and others also engaged in intelligence such as the Diplomatic Corps engages in. And I'm just wondering if considering the current Canadian capacity in this area whether Dr. Jensen thinks we need a designated foreign offensive intelligence service such as the CIA, MOSAD, MI6 or do we have sufficient capacity now to carry out Canada's best interests and national security interests? Thanks George. Do we have enough capacity to do what should be done? No. Will we ever have it? Probably not. Canada does not have a dedicated foreign intelligence service. In 1951 I think it was we made the decision that the nation would not go that way that was at the time when the British were helping the Australians to establish their clandestine foreign intelligence service. What Canada does have is a small group of individuals that do collect intelligence both inside Canada that's so today and certainly outside Canada. They don't use clandestine methods, they simply use unconventional approaches to gathering information in somewhat similar ways to what diplomats do. There is information in the public domain that as of now 24 of those officers stationed abroad they're part of something that's called the Global Security Reporting Program. They were created in 2002, 2003 can you remember? It's a small group, they work openly they're not declared as intelligence officers nor do they maintain clandestine sources. They do not pay sources for information, they approach individuals and you'll be surprised how easy it is to get information. It's not difficult at all to get most of the information that a nation such as Canada requires. What we require is probably not in the same league as what the United States looks for. We have different interests. What Canada needs in terms of foreign intelligence is more strategic information to understand what is happening in a foreign country. The tactical information that occupies a lot of American interest is really beyond our capability to deal with it. What we need is enough understanding on what is occurring in a foreign nation to be able to inform the minister of foreign affairs and the prime minister as to what can be expected in a given situation and what are the factors that influence decisions in that environment, what are the caveats that might determine different decisions and so forth. It's a different league of intelligence from what the United States is after. It's not great nation intelligence, it is an understanding of what is taking place on the ground. Jeff, for Jeff, any thoughts? Just a kind of a footnote about domestic versus foreign intelligence gathering. I used to think that Canada did need its own separate foreign intelligence agency. I've changed my thinking on this because we've seen too many instances where stovepipes, not just in an intelligence area but in other operations of government have been detrimental to the outcome of events. So I think an agency that has a mandate that could very well take you off to a part of the world and therefore into the world of foreign intelligence, I think we need that kind of organization, particularly when we're dealing with things like counterterrorism where a lot of what is going on flows across borders. Like money, for one thing, money doesn't know any boundaries. We have got large numbers of people who have family attachments and other kinds of economic attachments perhaps in different parts of the world and they live in Canada but they are active in other parts of the world in areas that perhaps they shouldn't be involved in. So just that one thought that we should not build stovepipes, I guess is the way I'd put it. Last word to Jess. I'm not in favour of creating a new organization, the Canadian Foreign Intelligence Service or whatever people might call it. Canada has a foreign intelligence capability. It's predominantly from CSEC. If you think about foreign intelligence, if we think about security intelligence issues, then the mandate of the Security Intelligence Service, CSEC, is not limited to only being operating in Canada. It can and it does operate abroad when there is a security threat to Canadian interests. For Canada, which spends more than a billion dollars, but headline figures if we put CSEC and CSEC together is about a billion dollars, it's really about having an honest conversation about what is Canada's role in the world and what does it want to do, and then thinking through, what are the intelligence requirements of Canada in the next few decades and altering, I think, fine-tuning the existing machinery in place to make sure as many bases as possible are covered. But let's not forget, Canadian security is provided not only by Canadians, but as a result of being enmeshed in multiple alliances and organizations and our intelligence agencies work in that way too. On that note, I think we'll wrap it up. I'd like to thank all three of our panelists, Jez, Kurt and Jeff, and our audience as well for your questions, and we'll be back with another session soon. Thanks, Chris. Thank you.