The former head of Canada's answer to the NSA doesn't have a very high opinion of his fellow citizens.

John Adams, the former chief of Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) told a Senate meeting Wednesday that Canadians are "stupid" and post too much information on social media, according to The Globe and Mail.

"One half is stupid, and the other half is stupid," Adams said about how Canadians are perceived. "I can confirm that. We put more online, [on] Facebook, than any other country in the world."

Adams, who ran CSEC from 2005 until 2011, made the comments at a meeting of Senate Liberals gathered to discuss Bill C-220. The legislation, which Adams supports, would establish a Parliamentary committee to oversee Canada's expanding surveillance state.

And if Adams' own accounts of how CSEC has been operating are true, then it seems more oversight is badly needed. Late last year Adams told The Globe that he was forced to shut down a CSEC program because it was applying practices usually reserved for monitoring foreigners to surveil Canadians.

"Protecting Canada means you’re going to be hitting Canadians," Adams told the Globe. "The trouble with it was they were applying ‘SigInt’ [Signals Intelligence] practices to internal [communications] and it was just a little too loose."

By law, CSEC is not supposed to monitor the communications of Canadians. But the agency has acknowledged this year that it sometimes "incidentally" spies on citizens while targeting foreign entities. CSEC seems to have maneuvered around the legal requirement via a special, and secret, order from the Minister of National Defence.

According to CSEC, "The National Defence Act acknowledges that [surveillance of Canadians] may happen and provides for the Minister of National Defence to authorize this interception in specific circumstances." The Globe reported last year that former Defence Minister Peter MacKay issued such an order in 2011, reauthorizing a metadata collection program that had been shut down over privacy concerns. The Globe does not make it clear whether the program MacKay reauthorized is the same one shut down by Adams.

Story continues below slideshow