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Canada's ultra-secret eavesdropping agency said Thursday it has stopped sharing intelligence with international partners after revealing it had illegally collected Canadians' metadata in sweeps of foreign communications.
In a report to parliament, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) said the breach was unintentional and had been discovered internally in 2013.
A CSE official blamed a software flaw that resulted in sharing of metadata, used to identify, manage or route communications over networks that could identify Canadians.
The agency said the likelihood of this leading to any abuses was "low."
But as a precaution, the CSE suspended its sharing of metadata with its Five Eyes intelligence partners—Australia, Britain, New Zealand, and the United States—until it finds a fix to the problem.
Canadian Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan said he was satisfied that any data that had already been shared with the intelligence alliance before the software glitch was discovered "did not contain names or enough information on its own to identify individuals."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 01 2016, @09:56AM
I thought the entire purpose of this "sharing" arrangement is to sidestep the laws about spying on your own citizens. Instead you get a sharing partner to spy on your citizens and you spy on theirs... and "share".
So instead of breaking the spirit of the law they are actually breaking the law.
It's quaint that they don't want to actually break the law...