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Ray Boisvert, who worked at CSIS until he retired as the agency’s assistant director of intelligence, said little information about CSIS’s foreign stations has been publicly acknowledged.

“That part of the program has remained confidential,” he said, adding he is still bound by a secrecy order and cannot comment on the accuracy of the information.

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CSIS has grown “from a very parochial security service to a global powerhouse” that divides its resources between domestic and foreign activities. “We will engage the threat wherever it emerges,” Boisvert said of CSIS. “To do that you have to start operating abroad.”

He said the foreign stations operate in an environment of secrecy because they face more “hostile players,” diplomatic sensitivities and counter-intelligence operations from other spy agencies.

“When you’re operating outside your own end, your safe zone, you are much more vulnerable to threats,” he said. However, he said the host countries likely know of CSIS’s foreign stations and work with them as partners.

“You don’t want to spy on your hosts,” he said.

The alleged breached is likely more problematic than the release of the document.

“Think big: Are they still in the network? Without a doubt, that’s their number one priority,” Boisvert said. “And what did they take and what are the risks?”

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He said spy agencies are much more aware of the dangers of leaks after the major breaches in the United States by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency analyst who leaked classified documents revealing large-scale global surveillance in 2013, and Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private who leaked thousands of classified military documents to WikiLeaks in 2010.

Roland Paris, research chair in international security and governance at the University of Ottawa, said the purported hack could be significant.

“It seems some serious crimes may have been committed: theft of classified materials and extortion. If indeed this is a sensitive document there has been a serious breach.”

The document describes $20,626,549 in funding needed to extend CSIS’s “secure corporate network environment” to its foreign stations, which was more than $3 million over budget.

CSIS “collects and analyzes information and intelligence that may constitute threats to the security of Canada from across Canada and overseas,” the document says.

“The tools to access and process intelligence information from these foreign stations have not been updated since the Service’s foreign collection activities began in the mid-1980s,” the document says.

National Post

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