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TORONTO — A previously unknown unit of Canada’s intelligence service has been illegally keeping data unrelated to national security threats, the Federal Court disclosed Thursday.

In a hard-hitting ruling that was partly blacked out, Justice Simon Noel rebuked the Canadian Security Intelligence Service for not telling the court about a secret metadata program launched in 2006.

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The Operational Data Analysis Centre was unknown even to the judges who had been issuing the warrants to collect the information it mined, according to Noel’s ruling.

While CSIS had intended to notify the court and seek its input, that never happened. Judges only learned of its existence recently when CSIS acknowledged what it was doing.

“The CSIS has breached, again, the duty of candour it owes to the court,” Noel wrote, adding that the agency had operated outside its legal authority.

Although the judge ruled retaining the metadata (data derived from the data) was illegal, he did not to order its destruction.