5-Eyes
I’m glad the US is for once restricting it’s laws around mass data survelliance. Well for US people anyway, because there is nothing about anyone. Nothing about the approx. 6.8 billion other people on the planet for whom mass data survelliance from the NSA will happen anyway.
That’s me, all my family, most of my friends and probably a majority of the people reading this blog are still being spied on by the NSA.
But hey, don’t worry US people, you aren’t safe. Canada will spy on you. We recently reduced the amount of oversight on our intelligence agencies, so we aren’t really sure what they are doing.
The term "judicial oversight", as used by members of the Conservative Party in this debate, is truly a perversion of reality. It is one of the most offensive sections of the whole bill.
What can Canada do? Share it with the US as part of 5-Eyes.
Until now, it had been generally understood that the citizens of each country were protected from surveillance by any of the others.
But…
The NSA has been using the UK data to conduct so-called "pattern of life" or "contact-chaining" analyses, under which the agency can look up to three "hops" away from a target of interest - examining the communications of a friend of a friend of a friend
But hey, its not just Canada, there’s the UK, Australia and New Zealand who are all part of 5-Eyes and will share it back with the US. So that means you are still screwed. And then there’s China and other countries that will spy on you and not share the data with the US.
So you are pretty screwed, we are all pretty screwed.