Good News?

Canada Temporarily Drops Out Of Five Eyes Spying Coalition, After Realizing It Wasn’t Properly Protecting Information
by Mike Masnick, Tech Dirt
Thu, Jan 28th 2016 3:33pm

Some of the Snowden docs have made clear that this collaboration helps the various countries get around restrictions on “domestic” surveillance by effectively offshoring it to other “friendly” electronic spy agencies. Well, at least for now, it appears that that the Five Eyes effort has lost an Eye.

Canada’s signals intelligence agency, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), has stopped sharing data with the other Four Eyes after realizing that it hadn’t done a particularly good job of protecting the metadata it collected on Canadians.
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I guess it’s nice that the CSE figured out that it had screwed up on its own, but really, it makes you wonder just how much information the Canadian gov’t was sending abroad on its own citizens.

Of course, the sharing will start back up again at some point in the future, once they’ve decided that they’ve properly “minimized” the data. And while Canadian politicians seem to be accepting the very Canadian apology of the CSE and saying that this was all an accident, shouldn’t this kind of “mistake” lead to a bit more than a “sorry” and “we’ll make sure it’s better next time”? Shouldn’t we be examining why such mass surveillance and data sharing are happening in the first place?