National security adviser plays down CSEC airport data surveillance

Above: A Senate committee wants to know why passengers were being tracked through public Wi-Fi at Canadian airports. Mike Le Couteur reports.

OTTAWA – Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s national security adviser says an effort by Canada’s eavesdropping agency to track wireless devices at airports did not compromise the private communications of Canadians.

Stephen Rigby told a Senate committee that Communications Security Establishment Canada was merely collecting metadata – essentially, data about data.

READ MORE: CSEC tracked travellers using Wi-Fi at major Canadian airport: report

A document obtained by CBC indicates the pilot project was intended to locate kidnappers and terrorists.

WATCH: CSEC practices under fire once again in the House of Commons

The agency’s slide presentation says information was taken from wireless devices using an unidentified Canadian airport’s free Wi-Fi system over a two-week period.

The May 2012 presentation suggests the project could help security officials zero in on a kidnapper based in a rural area who travelled to a city to make ransom calls.

WATCH: Canada’s interim Privacy Commissioner Chantal Bernier speaks with The West Block‘s Tom Clark on the implications of CSEC’s actions.

Ottawa-based CSEC monitors foreign computer, satellite, radio and telephone traffic of people, states, organizations and terrorist groups for information of intelligence interest to Canada.

READ MORE: Canada played central role in NSA attempt to crack secure web data

It is a key player in the Five Eyes intelligence network that includes partner agencies from the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

Spokeswoman Lauri Sullivan said in a statement last week that the agency is legally authorized to collect and analyze metadata – technical information used to route communications – but not the actual contents of a phone call or message.

Some civil libertarians say such metadata monitoring is worrisome because the material can still reveal a lot about a person, such as their location and who they are contacting.

Sullivan said all CSEC activities “include measures to protect the privacy of Canadians.”