Ever wondered if Canada’s spy agency has a file on you?

We know from Edward Snowden that spy agencies are vacuuming up unprecedented amounts of information. That got me wondering if, somewhere in a Canadian Security Intelligence Service database, my name would turn up.

So in January, I asked CSIS to search their records by filling out a form on the federal government’s Access to Information and Privacy website.

The form took less than five minutes to fill out. Beyond basic personal information – like my home address and birthday – I was asked to tell them what I was requesting.

This is what I wrote:

“I’d like to be provided with documents or be informed about the existence of documents related to my identity. This might include but is not limited to, internet surveillance, publication history (I’m a journalist), travel history or any record where my name (“Craig Desson”) occurs.”

My expectation of even having a CSIS record was low. Besides watching a few ISIS propaganda videos on YouTube, I couldn’t imagine how I might have attracted CSIS’s attention.

That’s why I felt a minor panic when a sturdy envelope arrived in the mail three weeks later. It was a plain and brown, and the return address was simply “Access and Information Privacy,” care of a post office box in Ottawa – the same mail box that appears on the CSIS letterhead. (It seems everything about CSIS is wrapped in secrecy, even their mailing address.)

My CSIS file

I tore open the envelope and looked at 15 crisp pages of information printed on some nice heavy stationery. There was a two-page cover letter, a printout of one of my Toronto Star articles, and a scant bit of information – such as employer and date of birth – spread over 12 pages.

The letter was signed by “Ken Benson, Head, Disclosure I,” and included sentences like this: “This is a Program Record and not a Personal Information Bank and thus contains no personal information about you.”

It also had this line: “Some of the information has been exempted from disclosure by virtue of one or more sections. . . as it relates to the efforts of Canada towards detecting, prevention or suppressing subversive or hostile activities.”

The Toronto Star article was about a Chrome plug-in that alerts users to sites that used unencrypted cookies. It didn’t mention CSIS but did allude to the Communication Security Establishment, another Canadian spy agency. I assumed this was collected as part of an internal media monitoring program.

The rest was 11 pages of “SCREENING REQUEST INFORMATION.” This is related, I believe, to a background check I requested from the RCMP before I covered Prince Charles’s visit to Toronto in 2012.

It was pretty oblique. I decided to contact CSIS to see if they could help me make sense of it all.

The cover letter said if I had questions I could contact CSIS using the phone number and address in the letterhead. I called twice but nobody picked up, so I left messages.

I also sent some questions to the email address that was provided when I made my request. Ken Benson replied with an attachment that had answers to the questions I had emailed before.

The one I was most interested in was why some of the information they had about me was exempt from disclosure.

The answer? “Section 21 of the Privacy Act is an exemption that is used to protect, among other things, employee names, certain parts of our organizational structure and other information which may not necessarily be personal in nature. What we are saying is that there is information in the records we processed that we determined needed to be withheld because its release would be injurious to the efforts of Canada toward detecting, preventing, or suppressing subversive or hostile activities.”

In other words, we can’t tell you.

They confirmed that they had my Toronto Star article because they had collected it as part of a CSIS media monitoring program.

“While the article is part of a Program Record (PRN939 – Communications) and is not part of any personal Information Bank, it was provided to you nonetheless as part of our Duty to Assist.”

Well, thanks for that.

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I also asked how long my background check would be kept on record, to which they replied “from six years to 50 years.” And after that? Well, if it’s deemed “historical,” it might be shipped off to the National Archives.

So will the record of me on a CSIS database outlast any other digital mention of my name?

I can only wonder.

On the other hand, CSIS is withholding information about me. Kind of feels like a badge of honour.