American whistleblower Edward Snowden may be living in exile in Moscow, but he is the gift that keeps on giving and Canadians should be thankful of that. His ongoing release of secret U.S. intelligence documents is allowing us a glimpse at one of the most threatening legacies of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Largely in secret and well beyond the reach of overseers, a secret surveillance state is developing among western countries, and the Canadian government, it appears, is an enthusiastic charter member.

READ MORE AT THESTAR.COM:

Canadians need answers on domestic spying powers

Brazil spy flap shows we need to tighten scrutiny of CSEC, our offshore spy agency: Editorial

Snowden, a former contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency, was the source of the documents that revealed one of Canada’s intelligence agencies has been spying on Brazil’s mines and energy ministry. According to the documents, which were made public in a Brazilian TV report on Sunday, Canada used a spying program code-named Olympia to track emails and phone calls within the Brazilian ministry. Not without irony, this type of espionage allegedly done by China is routinely denounced by western leaders.

The TV report was a collaboration with Glenn Greenwald, an American reporter with The Guardian newspaper. Before he fled to Russia, Snowden gave the Rio-based journalist the secret intelligence files.

In an interview on Monday with CBC Radio’s Carol Off on As It Happens, Greenwald indicated he would be releasing more documents implicating the Canadian government: “There’s a lot of other documents about Canadians spying on ordinary citizens, on allied governments, on the world and on their co-operation with the United States government.”

What is significant about these disclosures is their source. Even though Snowden and Greenwald have provoked rage and controversy, their accuracy has been remarkable. And the portrait they draw of the growing intelligence system is quite chilling.

In his CBC interview, Greenwald said this was an example of how leaders of western countries, including Canada, “routinely mislead not only the world but their own citizens about what this spying system is actually designed to achieve.”

Snowden’s disclosures about Canada fit into the same pattern as his earlier leaks. They reveal a scale of eavesdropping that is far greater than previously known, which is now done in tandem with private corporations and is largely allowed to operate totally in secret and beyond the normal political or parliamentary oversight. It has the contours of a new “surveillance state” that is virtually unregulated and unknown.

As with so many developments in the past decade, the catalyst for this growth was Sept. 11. It was the Al Qaeda attack on the U.S. in 2001 that triggered the dramatic expansion in intelligence agencies. In several countries, including Canada, the budgets for intelligence agencies have more than doubled since 2001, even though other parts of governments suffered cutbacks.

Several things have changed since 2001. With Barack Obama now U.S. president, the so-called “war on terror” has been eased, if not ended. There have been dramatic breakthroughs in technology, allowing today’s spies to be much more intrusive. And many of the safeguards initially imposed on intelligence agencies after 2001 have fallen away.

What hasn’t changed is the size and scope of this intelligence world. Once created, it can’t easily be uncreated. And in an effort to justify its existence, there are increasing signs that its work is extending well beyond issues of “security” and “terrorism,” and becoming a tool for government to use in other ways, such as its economic rivalry with other nations.

That is where these latest disclosures regarding Canada fit in. But as investigative journalist and author Andrew Mitrovica reminded us on Wednesday in an essay in the Toronto Star, this was not the first time the Canadian intelligence agency embroiled in this controversy — the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) — was revealed to be breaking the law.

In the mid-1990s, the CSEC was found to be routinely collecting commercial secrets from Canada’s trading allies and breaking the law by intercepting the communications of Canadians. The oversight agency created as a reaction to those disclosures, Mitrovica wrote, has since proven “to be limp, underfunded and understaffed.”

As I am sure both Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald would say in response: “That is exactly our point.” And therein lies a solution.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Tony Burman, former head of Al Jazeera English and CBC News, teaches journalism at Ryerson University.

Read more about: