Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff (left) welcomes Prime Minister Stephen Harper to Brazil during a trade mission in 2011.

PHOTO: ERALDO PERES

The Canadian chattering class seemed stunned last summer by revelations that Canada’s signals intelligence agency–the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC)—was involved in eavesdropping on Brazil. In the fall came further news that Canada was helping the United States monitor communications in Europe as well. This news was all courtesy of American political refugee Edward Snowden, who stole it from the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA).

No doubt by the time this column is published, there will be even more information not only about the NSA’s wide-ranging intelligence monitoring, cellphone tapping, Internet hacking and other nefarious activities, but also about how its little Canadian brother, CSEC, has been helping out.

These revelations are no doubt true. NSA and CSEC are close allies in the ongoing campaign to gather global intelligence that could reveal possible threats to either the U.S. or Canada from organizations such as al-Qaida which have already proven just how ruthless they can be. Is there anything wrong with that?

Canada has been involved in the collection, analysis and distribution of signals intelligence to close and trusted allies since early in the Second World War. Intercepting and decoding radio transmissions from German U-Boats was a vital activity in the Allied victory in the Battle of the Atlantic. As historians know well today, German signals were first broken by the United Kingdom with help from the Poles and the French and the intelligence was shortly after shared with the United States and Canada.

In the Pacific War, the United States succeeded in breaking Japan’s vital military and diplomatic codes and that information was shared with Britain and Australia. Thus was born the then loose–but today much tighter—“Five Eyes” intelligence community which encompasses the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Put simply, these five nations share responsibility for gathering and analyzing signals intelligence and sharing it. They are not supposed to spy on each other—though it is inconceivable that they don’t to some extent—and they are not supposed to collect commercial information, though that, too, no doubt occurs.

From its beginning, CSEC has been responsible to the Minister of National Defence. That is because signals intelligence is, quite simply, as important for Canada’s national security as is the army, navy or air force. That has always been true. What is new today is the much greater complexity of what was once known as signals intelligence.

In 1940, enemies or potential enemies had very few means at their disposal to communicate with their agents abroad or with their far-flung military forces. They had radio and they had land-based communications such as telegraph and telephone services. Today they have all that plus the Internet, cellphones and satellite communications. Today also, there are many “dual use” technologies that can be utilized by either military or commercial establishments. Canada has very few if any formal enemies (which is also true of the rest of the Five Eyes nations) but geographical, commercial and even military rivals who compete with us on many different levels oftentimes need to be closely watched.

If an energy company from Country X—a political rival—decides to acquire a Canadian company, is there a national interest in trying to determine the real motives of such a takeover? If Canadian technologies are being used by Country Z to develop new weapons systems, should we not know about it? And if we should unearth intelligence potentially damaging to one of our allies, should we not share it with them?

The fine art of developing computer viruses, spyware and other means of mobilizing entire computer networks for nefarious purposes gives foreign governments or non-government actors and terrorists a whole new universe of means to not only gather information from us, but to attack us virtually at will. And there has been plenty of open evidence that such attacks against both governments and commercial entities have taken place and are taking place. Should we ignore these realities and pretend that the world is largely a benevolent environment?

There is nothing inherently wrong with trying to gather as much information as we can to try to know what is going on in the minds of our potential enemies as well as our rivals and what schemes they are cooking up that might affect us. There is nothing inherently wrong with a liberal democracy like Canada spying, or spying in conjunction with our trusted allies.

None of these factors means that our spymasters should have licence to spy without our government’s permission, or should be allowed to continue their top secret activities without constant monitoring by appropriate authorities, judicial or otherwise. And when our government spies on Canadians—which they surely must do when dangerous situations warrant it—there, too, appropriate safeguards must be in place.

We are not alone in needing to put such safeguards into place. But it is a fact easily documented that the now-disbanded Advisory Council on National Security, which worked with the National Security Advisor, had been warning the government to take action on this question for most of its short existence. It is also a fact that little has been done to meet this key challenge.

David J. Bercuson is a former member of the Advisory Council on National Security.