We have a number of parliamentary groups, like NSICOP and NSIRA, that are able to receive information from our national security intelligence services that is confidential in nature. However, I very much appreciate your comments about the challenge in a public forum of discussing sensitive matters of security.
Your question is a very important one. We've looked very carefully at this activity. I want to provide you and Canadians with assurances that information is always handled according to our privacy laws. No application or biometric collection data is stored at the visa application centre; all databases containing personal information must, by our rules, be located in Canada. There are also safeguards in place to ensure that personal information is collected, stored and transmitted securely using hard end-to-end encryption. The visa application centres provide only administrative support to IRCC applicants.
I want to assure you that we take the privacy of Canadians very seriously. We're aware of reports that previously an error led to a data breach, but it's important to note that this was through a different VFS client government, on a separate system. I want to assure you that we have our own system, which VFS operates with rigorous safeguards in place.
If there's any more detailed response to that, I would invite the director of the CSE to provide additional insight if she has it available.