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Recently disclosed Edward Snowden documents have detailed a program called “EONBLUE,” which is designed to monitor, analyze and modify Internet traffic in real time. EONBLUE monitors data traffic at 200 or more sites around the world and, as the CBC reported last Monday, there were plans to massively monitor both international and domestic traffic alike as part of the CASCADE system.

In effect, EONBLUE wasn’t designed to just target terrorists or radicals or other threats to Canada; it was designed to analyze the contents of as many communications as possible and then extract metadata or modify the communications themselves. And much of this analysis and extraction system was meant to take place on data traffic moving into, or exiting, the Canadian Internet.

Documents released by the CBC last year showed that CSE could, and did, collect domestic Canadian metadata linked to airports, coffee shops, businesses, libraries and universities. Our information was used as part of a CSE experiment, turning the Canadian citizenry into 35 million Canadian lab rats — none of whom consented to having their personal information collected, tracked and experimented on by our signals intelligence agency. It might have been EONBLUE that collected our information that CSE experimented with or it might have been another program. Regardless, the federal agency is aggressively hoarding Canadians’ personal information for its own secretive purposes.