Keep the spies in check

If someone, especially someone from the government, barged into your home and rifled through your personal papers, you’d quite rightly be outraged.

Nowadays, there’s no need for anyone to physically break in. As the latest leak of thousands of documents from the Central Intelligence Agency shows, spies (and presumably other sophisticated hackers) have the ability to pore through private information stored on home computers and cellphones. They can even hack into Internet-connected televisions and use those as surveillance devices.

There’s no physical intrusion — and therefore less outrage — but the violation of privacy could be just as severe.

This week’s document dump, carried out by the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, is not as shocking as the information leaked four years ago by whistle-blower Edward Snowden. He revealed that U.S. intelligence agencies were conducting mass surveillance programs on both American citizens and foreign targets.

This week’s revelations simply show that the CIA has developed sophisticated software tools with names like ElderPiggy and AngerQuake to break into smartphones, laptops, TVs and other devices. Its in-house hackers are apparently able to bypass encryption codes and have even left security gaps in devices unreported in order to make spying easier.

The documents don’t show that the spies have actually done all this — either against U.S. citizens or against foreigners. They’ve just developed the ability to do it, if they choose.

This is some comfort, but not a lot. It’s a pretty good rule of thumb that if something is technically possible, it’s more likely than not to be done somewhere, sometime.

Even more worrisome, the track record of U.S. and other spy agencies hasn’t been good when it comes to safeguarding the privacy of ordinary citizens. The drive to build up a robust surveillance state over the past decade and a half has been so strong that countervailing attempts to protect civil liberties are constantly lagging behind.

That has been most obvious in the United States, where the lingering trauma of Sept. 11 fuels a desire for security above all (a trend that is only growing under Donald Trump). But Canada has been part of the same trend, as a ruling last November by a Federal Court judge amply demonstrated.

The court found that for a decade the Canadian Security Intelligence Service spied on people who posed no threat to national security. It retained the data illegally, and was able to draw out “specific, intimate insights into the lifestyle and personal choices of individuals.”

Now, through WikiLeaks, we know the CIA has surveillance capabilities that, in theory at least, give it the ability to pry into the details of people’s daily lives — without them suspecting a thing.

This leads to some worrisome questions. For example: if U.S. spy agencies have those capabilities, do ours? Canada is allied with the Americans in the “Five Eyes” intelligence network, and it’s logical to think that such abilities might be shared. Or that Canadian agencies have developed them independently.

Also: how commonly are these techniques used? The WikiLeaks documents don’t say, but given Snowden’s revelations about widespread illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens, their use in questionable contexts can’t be ruled out.

For too long, Canadian authorities have lagged in making sure that security is balanced with guarantees of civil liberties. In fact, the government is just getting around to establishing independent oversight of our security agencies. This new look at just how intrusive the spying can be makes that all the more urgent.

In the United States, the lingering trauma of 9/11 fuels a desire for security above all