And? Give Us A Break!

"In the course of targeting foreign entities outside Canada in an interconnected and highly networked world, it is possible that we may incidentally intercept Canadian communications or information."
Revelatory statement published on the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSE) website.

Welcome to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service

This is the agency, Canada's foreign electronic intelligence organization, that works in very close collaboration with Canada's spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. They are in the business, as federal government agencies, of securing intelligence in aid of protecting the country internally and externally from exploitation or violence by sources intending to do harm.

The statement, according to a CSE spokesperson, represents an initial response to media attention that has focused on the organization, particularly in the wake of the disclosures by former American National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden who infamously and illegally lifted secret data and documentation, then fled the United States, claiming himself to be a loyal American distressed by the covert screening activities of his own country's spy and surveillance agency.

Those documents, released to newspapers in Britain and the U.S., have been incrementally and dramatically released for optimum impact, in essence betraying the trust placed in an American citizen acting as a professional IT contractor in security issues whose loyalty to his country's best interests most certainly is under question. But whom some in the United States claim to have acted as a patriot, guiding the U.S. to a better, finer place through his revelations.

He has himself found a better, finer place, having absconded with his treasure first to Hong Kong, then to Moscow, both countries considered to be less than stalwart supporters of American interests.
Both countries, China in particular and Russia bringing up the rear, conducting continual surveillance and control of their own populations, and engaging in cyber-surveillance of all other countries. They do this in their own best interests.

And surprise, most countries do, and always have, conducted secret intelligence programs of one kind or another to apprise themselves of the activities that may or will impact on their own. The domestic issue for many people, spurred on to grave indignation over agencies of their country's intelligence security apparatus capturing and storing millions of Internet users' online contacts -- metadata; through browsing history to email activity -- is anger.

Not necessarily outrage over someone in a trusted position absconding with privileged and highly secret data whose release could and most certainly has been deleterious to the country's interests -- and that of those countries being spied upon as well -- but at the very suggestion that their government has undertaken to exercise a covert protocol that might result in their personal data being collected and perused.

This, at a time of unrestrained, voluntary social online contact and personal revelations of a kind that should only be whispered behind closed doors to secure confidantes. Whipping up public reaction of dissatisfaction with 'betrayal' by government of the public's 'right to privacy' is an especial delight of newspapers. The indignation sells well, and the revelations are greedily gobbled up by people who take great pleasure in expressing their umbrage.

CSE has informed that it intends to post additional information about the manner in which it operates, in the coming months, "to share more information about our organization in as transparent a manner as possible while still respecting our security obligations", perhaps in the naive but very human and accommodating hope that by being as frank as possible they will succeed in forestalling public annoyance.

"It is no longer an adequate response to reproduce 'Surveillance Law 101' boilerplate summaries and to refuse to address the astonishing facts. The question is not whether CSEC and CSIS know the law. It is whether they followed it", thundered Craig Forcese, a leading scholar on national security law at the University of Ottawa, whom no one in the public may have ever been aware of, but now, will be.

We can be assured that Canadian courts are more than capable of assessing whether the two agencies have followed the law.

There are those others in the public, however, who likely view all of this rather askance. They place their trust in the actions of those professionals tasked and trained to do their jobs in support of national security. Should they be trusted less than those who conduct their scurrilous jobs of agitating for public irritation at revelations that aren't exactly earth-shattering?

The alternative, of course, is to believe that terrorists who aspire to infiltrate the peace and serenity of societies such as ours are to be trusted to do so in a civil manner. Most people would pass on that one. Kind of ridiculous, aren't we?