Thank you.
It's of critical concern to civil libertarians that the public understand that collection, incidental or otherwise, of personal information into national security agencies is not innocuous. In part because we do have these alliances, information sharing does flow in ways that are potentially problematic for those individuals, even with the notion that perhaps we're not exploiting it and perhaps we're not using it.
We're going to try to give assurances, but we don't know what's being used in terms of exploitation. We know it's everything from network mapping to profiling, which has been identified as a huge problem. It definitely resonates with Canadians as a threat to their own personal security. All those aspects of trying to figure out what the jeopardy is for this collection, use, retention, and exploitation are critical. It's critical to figure out those tentacles and ensure that we have mechanisms that are not merely paper mechanisms when we say we have measures. What are those measures? How do we know where they work? Do they cover off all the aspects?
Those are aspects behind the curtain that goes on with national security that most Canadians cannot see. We've come to have reason to distrust, because we haven't seen, for example, the simple definitions for things that would allow us to have the insight that we should have for democratic accountability.
When we see failures of definitions in Bill C-59 around things like publicly available information, to pick up my colleague's point, and a national security agency can acquire data through a data broker using the kinds of techniques that were just being described and ingest that into a system in which information may get shared with allies abroad, you can see the magnification effect of the impact on security of individuals—not national security, but personal security—in relation to all of those data practices.
People are not as alive as we would like them to be to these threats, but they're increasingly alive that these are the problems, as you illustrate.