"A federal watchdog is attracting howls of protest from some privacy and internet experts after absolving Canada’s electronic spy agency of using data from a Canadian airport internet service to track thousands of passengers for days after they left the terminal.
The oversight body that monitors the super-secretive Communications Security Establishment Canada has concluded that the agency was not involved in “tracking of Canadians or persons in Canada.”
Instead, the oversight body says the spy agency was simply collecting so-called metadata in an exercise “to understand global communications networks.”
By law, CSEC cannot target Canadians anywhere in the world, nor anyone in Canada, including visitors."