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The CSEC chief’s testimony on Monday comes after a series of leaks by Mr. Snowden, the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor who stole thousands of sensitive documents on government surveillance programs and provided them to select media outlets.

Some of the documents have cast a shadow on CSEC, linking it to questionable electronic eavesdropping activities and leading to questions about whether Canada’s security and intelligence agencies have adequate oversight.

The latest allegations came last week in the form of a CBC report claiming that CSEC had used airport Wi-Fi to track Canadian travellers, but Mr. Forster provided Senators with an unusually candid explanation of what he called the “exercise” in question.

He said CSEC had collected “snapshots” of the airport metadata over a two-week period in order to better understand what Internet communications looked like in public areas.

As a result, CSEC was able to develop a model to help identify — from amidst the data in the air at any time — foreign terrorists, hostage-takers or intelligence agents, whom he said sometimes prefer to use public communications networks in order to “hide in plain sight.” He said the model had been used twice so far.

“So this was not an operational surveillance program. That was not the result or the purpose of the exercise. We were not targeting or trying to find anyone or monitoring individuals’ movements in real time,” he said. “The purpose of it was to build an analytical model of typical patterns of network activity around a public access node, like an airport, and that’s what you see in the document [leaked by Mr. Snowden].”