Spy agencies eye more wide-ranging partnership
Plan by CSE, CSIS could pose problem for watchdogs reviewing their activities
OTTAWA— Canada’s two main spy agencies are looking to “maximize” opportunities to work together despite continued concerns about watchdogs’ ability to keep tabs on joint operations.
Documents obtained by the Star show the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) are looking for new and expanded ways to align their operations.
But as Canada’s intelligence agencies co-operate more and more, those charged with reviewing the spies’ actions may have a harder time seeing the big picture.
“The intelligence community has become increasingly integrated over the years,” said Lindsay Jackson, a spokeswoman for the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), which reviews CSIS operations. “But there hasn’t been any integration on the review side . . . (that) would allow us to make sure that everything that is being done by the intelligence agencies is lawful, and is necessary, and within the mandates of those organizations.”
The two intelligence agencies have different mandates. CSE is forbidden from spying on Canadians, instead focusing on foreign electronic espionage. CSIS can and does investigate Canadians in efforts to sniff out threats to national security.
CSE is permitted to assist CSIS, however, so long as the service has legal authority to request that assistance. This is known as CSE’s “Mandate C,” alongside the agency’s responsibilities to collect foreign intelligence and defend government networks. “CSE and CSIS have unique mandates but are bound together by similar national security goals,” state the documents, labelled top secret and obtained under access to information legislation.
“While CSIS and CSE work together on specific operational initiatives, engagement through (a working group) thus far has identified a range of opportunities for greater organizational cohesion.”
The heavily censored documents were sent by CSE chief Greta Bossenmaier and CSIS director Michel Coulombe to Richard Fadden, the national security adviser to the prime minister, in August 2015. Fadden was both a former director of CSIS and the former top bureaucrat at National Defence, which is responsible for CSE. Fadden announced his retirement on Thursday.
Bossenmaier and Coulombe suggest the two agencies are trying to “leverage (CSE’s) Mandate C authorities,” and set up a working group to “maximize opportunities for operational collaboration.”
That could spell trouble for the small group of independent watchdogs reviewing the spy agencies’ activities. Both Security Intelligence Review Committee and the CSE Commissioner’s office can review their respective agencies but can’t conduct joint investigations.
That prevents the watchdogs from “following the thread” when opera- tions cross from one agency to another, obscuring the full picture of what the spies are actually doing.
William Galbraith, a spokesman for CSE commissioner Jean-Pierre Plouffe, noted the commissioner told a Senate committee last year that Canadian law should be changed to explicitly allow co-operation between his office, the SIRC, and the RCMP’s civilian complaints commission.
Craig Forcese, a University of Ottawa professor who has been closely studying recent changes to Canada’s terrorism laws, said collaboration between the two spy agencies has been modest in the past.
“But the future is an unknown country in that respect,” Forcese said in an interview Tuesday.
“If you look at the list that CSIS says that it wants to do with their new threat reduction powers (granted under Bill C-51), it includes interfering with financial transactions, interfering with communications, interfering with a Twitter account, those are all technical interventions that one would assume CSE is often better equipped than before.”
The August 2015 memo is the latest step in a long march toward greater integration of CSE’s foreign intelligence gathering and CSIS’s national security investigations.
CSE recently moved into a new, $4.1-billion headquarters nicknamed the “Spy Palace,” located directly across from CSIS’s Ottawa HQ.
The agencies signed two landmark co-operation agreements in 1990, and began to work more closely after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
Separate documents obtained by the Star show a senior CSIS official has been “integrated into CSE as the director of the CSE-CSIS Collaboration Office” during the 2014-15 fiscal year.
The documents, prepared for Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, add the October 2014 attack on Parliament Hill led to greater information sharing between the two agencies. The specifics of that initiative were censored from the documents.