The huge and precious flow of public information via Edward Snowden on government spying has gone over a Niagara-sized waterfall and, yes, it’s on the Canadian side. A secret report obtained by the CBC has revealed that Ottawa used airport Wi-Fi to spy on Canadian travellers.

The news, reported by the CBC through its work with Snowden-data journalist Glenn Greenwald, is the first time that the extent of electronic spying has become something Canadians can take personally, so to speak. We’re used to being watched online because corporations already do that. We’re creeped out by Google, by news of Canada allowing the U.S. to spy on our soil. And what gentle soul would trust the snarling Harper government anyway?

There’s another reason Canadians haven’t been more distressed about Snowden’s revelations, and it’s that news about the destruction of personal privacy has been a pile-on.

But everyone has gone to the airport. Everyone can identify with this extraordinary, and likely illegal, intrusion into private life. We were on camera, we were frisked and prodded, fair enough. But it didn’t end, or even begin, there.

The report by the CBC’s Greg Weston is astonishing. For two weeks, as a 2012 tryout, the government tracked travellers as they went to an unnamed Canadian international airport and used its free Wi-Fi on devices like phones, tablets and laptops. From then on, they were trapped.

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They were followed to every Wi-Fi hot spot they visited for a week, whether it was other airports, restaurants, stores, anywhere. What’s worse, the data tracking was so efficient that it could go back in time and track the travellers in the days before they even showed up at the airport.

The secret report itself, which I urge you to read on cbc.ca, is a fairly brief Power Point presentation but giddy in tone, full of charts and exclamation marks about how far and how easily its targets were hooked and tailed.

The intercepts by our electronic spy agency, the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), were almost certainly illegal, the CBC said, because the agency is supposed to track intelligence only on foreigners. It is prohibited from tracking Canadians or anyone in Canada without a warrant.

In Parliament, Defence Minister Rob Nicholson, when asked to categorically deny the story, did not. Prefaced with an “it’s my understanding that,” he repeatedly said the report didn’t show “Canadian communications were targeted,” the same careful and woolly wording as the written CSEC denial to the CBC.

The Tories lashed out at both Greenwald and the CBC, with Stephen Harper’s parliamentary secretary, the complicated and irascible Paul Calandra, asking, “Why is furthering porn-spy Glenn Greenwald’s agenda and lining his Brazilian bank account more important than maintaining the public broadcaster’s journalistic integrity?”

I don’t know what it means either.

The biggest problem is that despite opposition outrage — Liberal and NDP MPs also go to airports — there is little that citizens can do, there being no effective oversight of CSEC, as the CBC explains. CSEC is watched over by a retired judge with a tiny staff who reports to the prime minister as well as to Nicholson, who is in charge of the agency in the first place.

This is as much a clash of logic and ideology as it is privacy. The federal government killed the long-form census because it said it intruded on private lives. This same government’s airport grab — and we don’t know whether it has stopped — means that although Ottawa wasn’t getting a snapshot of our lives every five years, it was in our pocket and purse, it followed us on vacation, it went to the car rental and the gas station washroom with us.

Snowden took millions of pages of documents with him when he left the U.S., essentially saying, “Make of them what you will.” He says his work is done — I still say he does not have long to live — and that means our work is just getting started. The CSEC report is pure theft, our privacy being the loot.

Canada is turning into an East Germany, minus neighbours and families snooping on each other. But note that in the modern age, they don’t need to — your cellphone does it all for you. Spying is in the air we breathe.

It’s up to us to put a stop to this. If you like freedom, if you like information, if you like freedom of information, you should thank Snowden, Greenwald and the CBC for giving us a choice. We can defend our privacy, or lose it for good.

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hmallick@thestar.ca