Gerrymandering the National Security Narrative: A Case Study of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s Handling of its Bulk Metadata Exploitation Program

In November of 2016, the Federal Court of Canada published a scathing ruling pertaining to some of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s (CSIS) big data surveillance activities. Among other charges of wrongdoing, the ruling accused the agency of not having been forthcoming with the Court about the existence of its “Operational Data Analysis Center” (ODAC), an advanced analytics bulk metadata exploitation program that had been operational since 2006. The ruling also revealed that a significant portion of the metadata collected by CSIS should not have been retained in ODAC, a practice that the ruling declared illegal. Drawing from the ruling, a series of classified CSIS documents obtained via requests made under the Access to Information Act, various public reports from both CSIS and the Security Intelligence Review Committee, as well as a Senate Committee hearing transcript, this article examines CSIS’s conduct, justifications, and statements relating to its bulk metadata retention activities spanning from the year of ODAC’s inception in 2006 to the publication of the ODAC ruling in 2016. The paper demonstrates how CSIS engaged in various forms of secrecy and how it successfully constructed and disseminated its own big data related language to effectively “gerrymander” the national security narrative, thereby ultimately ensuring its tight control over the knowledge that the Court would have of big data surveillance and CSIS’s engagement with it. This would enable the Service to keep its metadata exploitation program out of sight and operational for ten years until the Court ended up declaring a significant portion of ODAC illegal in 2016.