Dow Jones Newswire reports:
Canada said Thursday it halted sharing certain intelligence data with its western allies until it has addressed a privacy breach discovered by one of its own spy agencies.
The ban on sharing certain data with members of the so-called Five Eyes — an intelligence alliance including the U.S., the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Canada — will remain in place until technology is upgraded and Ottawa is assured Canadians’ privacy will be protected, Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan said.
The breach involved so-called metadata collected by the Communications Security Establishment—a Canadian agency akin to the National Security Agency in the U.S. Metadata is information used to identify, describe, manage or route a communication but doesn’t include its content. The CSE discovered as far back as 2014 that the information it was collecting and sharing didn’t properly protect the identity of Canadians. It decided at that time to stop sharing the information. The breach was made public Thursday in a report on the agency’s activities.
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