A federal electronic spy agency tracked thousands of people who passed through a Canadian airport using information gleaned from free wireless Internet service, reports the CBC.

Citing a secret document leaked by former U.S. security contractor Edward Snowden, CBC reported that Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) collected data from passengers’ smartphones and laptops over a two-week period and tracked those devices for a week or longer afterward.

CSEC is tasked with collecting foreign intelligence under law and can’t target Canadians, or anyone within Canada, without a warrant. CBC quoted several experts who said CSEC’s actions were “almost certainly illegal.”

The document leaked is a 27-page presentation on a “trial run” of the program, dated May 2012, reported the CBC. The technology was to be shared with the so-called “Five Eyes” spy partnership composed of Canada, the U.S., Britain, New Zealand and Australia.

CSEC spokesperson Lauri Sullivan told the Star Thursday night that the “classified document in question is a technical presentation between specialists exploring mathematical models built on everyday scenarios to identify and locate foreign terrorist threats.”

Its unauthorized disclosure puts those techniques at risk, she wrote in an email.

CSEC is tasked with collecting foreign intelligence to protect Canadians, she said. That includes collecting and analyzing metadata, the “technical information used to route communications, and not the contents of a communication.”

“No Canadian or foreign travellers were tracked. No Canadian communications were, or are, targeted, collected or used.”

CBC suggested CSEC got the information from the airport wireless system from a “special source,” though it’s not entirely clear how. The broadcaster reported that Canada’s two largest airports in Toronto and Vancouver did not provide the spy agency with the data.

Ontario privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian said she was “blown away” by the document, likening CSEC’s methods to those of a “totalitarian state, not a free and open society,” according to CBC.

The spy agency has been under fire for its clandestine activities of late, with a Federal Court judge slamming CSEC in December for “deliberately” withholding information from the courts in an attempt to “keep the court in the dark.”

Snowden, who is living in Russia on a one-year asylum while facing espionage charges in the U.S., has leaked a series of embarrassing documents detailing NSA spying activities, some of which are linked to its Canadian counterpart.

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In November, documents revealed that the Canadian government had allowed the NSA to set up shop in the American embassy in Ottawa during the G8 and G20 global summits in June 2010.

Previous Snowden documents suggested Canada worked with the U.S. and Britain to spy on high-powered attendees at the G20 Summit in London in 2009. And another leak in October showed CSEC had been spying on Brazil’s Ministry of Mines and Energy, a revelation that outraged the South American country.

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