Public Safety Committee on Nov. 15th, 2016

[Tony Clement, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

—but I only have 15 seconds and I want to hear from Mr. Plouffe as well. I do get your point.

[Ian McPhail]

Okay. We can work with the provincial oversight bodies and with others.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

I'm afraid that's the end of your time.

[Ian McPhail]

Oh, I'm sorry.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Ms. Damoff, for five minutes.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you very much.

My colleague would like to ask a quick question as well, so I'll share my time with him. I probably have time for only one question.

To both of you, we know how important public trust is in our policing bodies. How do you believe this committee can work with your agencies to build on that trust and to make sure that the public is well equipped to understand the balancing of public safety with our rights and civil liberties? Is there anything in the bill that could be improved to build on that?

[Jean-Pierre Plouffe]

I think one of the principal challenges to restore and enhance public trust will be transparency. The committee and also the expert review bodies must strive to provide as much information as possible to Parliament and to the public in general, so that there can be a better understanding of what is being done, why, and, particularly, what safeguards are in place to protect the privacy of Canadian citizens.

With regard to CSE, which I'm reviewing, I've been pushing this concept of transparency for the last three years and trying to convince the agency to release more and more information to the public, because for transparency, releasing more information is part of that concept. I think the emphasis should be put on transparency.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Mr. McPhail.

[Ian McPhail]

Ms. Damoff, I would agree with Justice Plouffe with respect to every point that he has made.

I would also add that there is a constant tension, as you point out, between not just our desire for but our commitment to civil liberties, and also to the protection of Canadians in terms of national security issues. Exactly how that balance should be reached I would see as being one of the key purposes of this committee, because the review bodies aren't able to perform that function. The committee, provided there's not undue partisanship, should be able to do so.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Mr. Graham.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Thank you.

I have one quick question for Mr. Plouffe, but I think it's an important one.

CSEC is an integral part of our national security establishment and deals with a much higher level of technology than most government departments, and overseeing mathematicians and cryptographers whose full-time job is obfuscation is necessarily difficult. It's one thing to have total access to everything; it's another to interpret that data. In signals intelligence, data mining, and so forth, and in the deliberate compromising of targeted machines, who conducts the accountability code audits?

To give you an example of what I'm wondering about, WIRED magazine reported that last year the Kaspersky Lab turned up a pretty fascinating operation called the “Equation Group” that remotely flashed hard-drive firmware and is believed to come from a Five Eyes partner of the National Security Agency. This is low-level assembly language-type work and requires very specific expertise.

What processes are in place to interpret this level of sophistication in oversight capacity, and how is it achieved or how could it be achieved?

[Jean-Pierre Plouffe]

Well, I suspect that this is why we are called expert review bodies. We have experts who work for us. I agree with you that it's not always easy to understand what CSE is doing and, believe me, I was appointed three years ago and I'm still trying to understand exactly, in all the details, what they are doing. It is very complex, but I rely on experts. I have eight or nine experts in my office working for me, and those experts have worked either for CSE beforehand, or for CSIS, or for the security department, whatever, so they are experts.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

These are people who get into weeds of the code and the actual technology of the stuff and not just the records that come out of it.

[J. William Galbraith]

If I may, Commissioner...?

[Jean-Pierre Plouffe]

Yes.

[J. William Galbraith]

You're at a very granular level, a very deep level. We—

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

It's an area that doesn't get talked about, and I want to make sure it does.

[J. William Galbraith]

When we determine the activities that are to be reviewed and the priority of those activities, we're looking at risks to compliance and risk to privacy. For those that we go through, we receive the briefings from CSE, and where we identify activities, something like that may be part of those activities. We go down from there and determine what are the risks to privacy in that and what are the risks to compliance generally. We then determine what priority will be placed on that.

If there's a requirement to get into the kind of granular detail that you're talking about, we go to, as required, under the commissioner's authority, under-contract computer engineers, for example, to ensure that we're understanding what is going on. CSE, I have to say, is quite co-operative and transparent with the commissioner's office, as demonstrated in the metadata issue of last year.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you very much, Mr. Galbraith.

That brings our meeting to an end. Thank you, everybody, and thank you to our witnesses for your time with us.

I'll ask you to clear the room fairly quickly, because I'd like to have a brief subcommittee meeting.

The meeting is adjourned.