From the community's perspective, it's particularly shocking. As I said at the outset, it's not just that the gravity of the threat was consciously hidden from the community and public. It was also the existence of this threat and how it operates in the first place.
We talked about how foreign interference by India has been happening for decades. In 2018, after the Prime Minister's trip to India, NSICOP published a special report that was meant to look into allegations of disinformation, particularly by Daniel Jean, who was the national security and intelligence adviser at the time. That report was meant to be a transparent mechanism for talking about and dealing with national security and intelligence issues. It talks about Indian intelligence targeting Canadian officials with disinformation in order to pressure the government to take law enforcement and security actions against Sikh activists in this country based on that disinformation. The report is significantly redacted and doesn't divulge very much detail about the nature of that disinformation campaign. It doesn't appear there was any assessment of the potential efficacy of that disinformation campaign in terms of manipulating or pressuring Canadian security and intelligence agencies. From the community's perspective, we have felt significant unwarranted activity on that front.
The more concerning part is this: After that, the 2019 NSICOP annual report is all about foreign interference and Canada's capacity to combat it. There are case studies dealing with Russia and China. For those cases, there's a summary of two to three sentences describing the nature of the information that was redacted. There's a case study of Russian foreign interference and one of Chinese foreign interference. Then there's a second section that talks about Canadian operations to counter that foreign interference. There's a third section that is completely redacted. All it says is that another country is targeting Canada for foreign interference.
Based on media reporting, I believe that Sam Cooper, in September of last year, reported getting access to an unredacted copy that outlines how, in 2016 and 2017, CSIS observed an Indian intelligence network operating and proliferating in Ottawa and Vancouver. Intelligence operatives were developing assets in those areas, engaging in intimidation and—