Information & Ethics Committee on Feb. 26th, 2019

[Dan Rogers]

I can try to address the question.

There are a couple of elements that I might suggest highlighting. One of those is that it's much easier to respond to something when we have good information and intelligence closer to the time. As we are continuing our work with the security and intelligence threats to elections task force, CSIS, RCMP, CSE and Global Affairs will look to find out whether there are foreign actors trying to establish fake accounts and trying to pass this information on.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Obviously, those who would attack the electoral system are updating their tactics as we go along. They could very easily plant a bad actor in Canada with a legitimate web address or identity and could carry out the same sort of thing within Canada.

How would you detect that?

[Dan Rogers]

It's a good question, and part of it is a hypothetical. One of the things I can say is, if we are to look at the foreign end of that, if we can find the intentions, plans or any sort of capability being created to create that sort of account within Canada and see the foreign perspective, that will give an edge to the cyber centre and other elements in Canada. That's what we are seeking to do, and we're refining our intelligence collection. As you can appreciate, I can't get into the specifics or the techniques and the tools that we'll be using, but exactly our task between now and 2019 will be to refine our abilities to try to detect things like that.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

With regards to the national cyber-threat assessment 2018, given the contents of that assessment report, does Canada in this election year actively consider Russia to be an adversary?

[André Boucher]

The basis for our analysis is a global trend upwards in threats to democratic institutions. We don't spend inordinate amounts of time trying to attribute where that behaviour comes from. The resources we have we turn towards detecting, finding solutions and turning to prevention as early as possible. I think it's important to realize, and it's in our report, that these threats have been mounting, and Canada being the key player in the world that it is, is likely to be a target of the same threats.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

The Minister reiterated the government's expectation that it expects social media companies to take concrete actions to help safeguard this fall's election. The members of this committee on both sides of the table lack confidence in any of the social media companies to do what they profess. As has been said here today, their focus is on growing their business plans and profitability, not on protecting privacy. We've heard that from the Canadian Privacy Commissioner, the British Columbia privacy commissioner, the U.K. privacy commissioner, and any number of other individuals. The bad faith some of the social media companies have demonstrated in appearing before us I think prompted the question: why does the Minister have to wait six months when we have very little confidence and expectation that they will behave better?

I'll give an example. Last year when Mr. Chan first appeared before us I asked a question. During the course of our meeting a viewer, a follower, emailed and asked about the Russian false posting in Latvia, which used old pictures of an infamous Canadian convicted military officer wearing a woman's bikini. The message on that email warned Latvians that Canadian soldiers leading the battle group task force in Latvia would attempt to encourage homosexuality among Latvians. Mr. Chan said he didn't know anything about that. More than a month later my office communicated with him again and said that the posting we talked about when he was at committee was still up. Although Mr. Chan, and certainly the Facebook employees who were watching the many monitors that he references, obviously did nothing until we prompted again a month later, three days later it was taken down. Again, do any of you at that table really have the confidence in the social media, that I believe members of this committee do not have, to prevent the sorts of things that we fear may well happen during the election process?

[Allen Sutherland]

I have a couple of comments on that. I think the Minister in her remarks stated very clearly that she has expectations of the social media companies and that the discussions are ongoing. What I hear loudly and clearly from this committee is that you have expectations of social media companies and that you've been disappointed by what you've seen so far and you expect more from them. That's a message that the Minister can certainly take away and use in her subsequent discussions with them.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you.

Just be really quick.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

The Minister mentioned elections in Europe this year as well as in Canada, but she didn't mention the recommendations of this committee in a number of reports now that the Canadian government consider implementing some of the very real and tangible measures that the EU brought in with the general data protection regulation in May of last year that goes far beyond. Canada is not anywhere close to having the sorts of protections of Canadian privacy that the Europeans have today.

[Allen Sutherland]

I can assure you the Minister is current on what's happening in the EU.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you.

Next up for seven minutes is Mr. Angus.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

We have looked somewhat at foreign operators, but we have been very focused on the domestic threat and the ease of the manipulation of the platform. From an intelligence perspective, are you seeing any kind of rise in extremist language, extremist groups, extremist behaviour in political discussion in Canada?

[Dan Rogers]

I can say from CSE's point of view that we are mandated to look exclusively at foreign actors outside of Canada by law, so that's where we focus exclusively our foreign intelligence mandate, unless we're working at the request of CSIS under our assistance mandate. With that, I can say that the threats we're going to see are going to be published in the electoral context in the report that André mentioned earlier.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

I guess that's my concern. You're looking at foreign threats, yet we have Sons of Odin and we have people who can't get dates who hate women and call themselves incels. We have white nationalists. We have all manner of people. We have people believing in giant lizard conspiracies and the flat earth. They're not foreign threats, but they are dominating domestic discussion.

Our focus has been the ability of this conversation domestically to be upended. If it's not coming from a foreign source, how are we going to know that the domestic threat is understood, is calculable and that we can actually come out with a credible response without it unfairly impinging on people's democratic rights to say whatever they want about politicians?

[Dan Rogers]

I can comment on that, too.

I should say that the SITE task force the minister mentioned brings together CSE, CSIS, RCMP and Global Affairs Canada and, of course, CSIS and the RCMP will have the domestic mandate to do threat investigations within their mandates. That's going to continue between now and 2019, and any threat-related activity that they see will be brought to the forefront for consideration.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

I have spoken up publicly defending our present Prime Minister against some very vile attacks, because I think we need to have a standard of conversation, and when the Prime Minister does something we disagree with, he should not be hanged. He's not a traitor. He is democratically elected and he's our Prime Minister. I think we need to have that standard across the board.

I was I think very shocked when Michael Wernick, the Privy Council chair, suggested that there's going to be a political assassination. From an intelligence perspective, isn't that something that you don't say publicly?

[Dan Rogers]

From my perspective, I can't comment on the overall views of the clerk, but what I can say is that from a national security perspective we do cover those sorts of threats.

I would also just add for clarity that it's certainly not within our role to decide what is true and false or what type of discourse Canadians would find appropriate. We're really focused on the foreign intelligence and the national security elements of the issue.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Again, under “Guidance to Officials” who are giving testimony from the Privy Council, we have, “Officials must understand and respect their obligation...not to disclose classified information or other confidences of the Government to those not authorized to receive them.” I am concerned about someone actually voicing a potential assassination. To me, that opens doors that should be closed. I would suggest, from the intelligence perspective, that you bring that back, because I think we have to be very careful about this conversation.

I guess my frustration here is that we've seen the ability of third party actors—not foreign threats, but third party actors—within Canada to upend elections by having really good datasets. We've talked about deep fakes by the use of false information. That ability to respond to those operators is going to need really nimble responses, but it seems to me that you're much more in terms of a militarized focus, whereas we're dealing with literally digital gangsters.

What is the reassurance, based on the work we've done in our committee, that the concerns we've raised are actually being heard and can be addressed in a nimble, quick manner, rather than have this election upended?

[Allen Sutherland]

Perhaps I could talk about it a bit from the critical election incident public protocol perspective, just to say that for what determines whether the threshold is reached and whether Canadians are informed of something, the expectation is that—and I think this is fair to say from the intelligence perspective—it's more likely to come from a foreign source. That has been the pattern.

When we look at France, when we look at the U.S. and when we look at the U.K., the pattern has been one of foreign actors intervening, but the protocol is not limited to just foreign interference. The key component is an impact that affects the conduct of a free and fair election. If you are correct and there is something happening on the domestic side of such a magnitude that it impacts the conduct of a free and fair election, then it gets captured by the threshold.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

I guess I'm a little surprised that you think that the threat is foreign when what we've seen time and time again with the 17 countries we dealt with—the domestic threat of the genocide in Myanmar where Facebook was warned again and again about the extremist language against the Rohingya Muslims.

It did nothing about it; ignored it; has been condemned internationally; still it has not really taken steps.

In Sri Lanka, we heard the same thing. In Brazil; we had representatives from Brazil at the international committee warning us. In Nigeria, the ability to use those platforms to spread hate was not foreign; it was domestic. In each case, Facebook failed to respond.

For the 2019 election, we're gearing up to fight a Cold War when what we really need to know is how to deal with third party actors who want to influence elections—100 votes here, blaming people there, attacking immigrants over here and doing it very effectively through the manipulation of the algorithms to the Facebook platform. That's the question that we want to be reassured on, and I'm not hearing that.

[Allen Sutherland]

I appreciate that, and perhaps I wasn't very clear. It doesn't matter the source. If it impacts the conduct of a free and fair election, it's captured by the protocol.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

But you'd have to be really on that. What I'm saying and what we've seen is that this is done by one vote here, one ad there, one black ad here, one comment on a site there, but patterns start to emerge and they're coming from the same few players. You'd need to have a real understanding of how those players operate.

[Allen Sutherland]

I just want to reassure you on one point: it can be a single incident, the culmination of many incidents or the accumulation. I think that's getting at what you're arguing.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Next up for seven minutes is Monsieur Picard.