Origins of CSE

CSE's role in the collection of SIGINT spans several decades. In 1925, under the direction of the British Royal Navy (the Admiralty), the Royal Canadian Navy established Canada's first high-frequency direction-finding (HF/DF) station at the Esquimalt naval base on Vancouver Island. In subsequent years, a series of stations were set up across Canada, and HF/DF intercepts served as a means of assisting the Admiralty to track ships in the Pacific Ocean; the Admiralty already had stations covering the Atlantic.

Canada's assistance to Britain grew during the late '20 and '30s. At that time, SIGINT activities encompassed not only locating and monitoring foreign transmissions via HF/DF, but expanded to include the monitoring of wireless intercepts by Canada's Army and by the Department of Transport's Wireless Service. With the onset of World War II, Britain sought Canada's continued participation in providing direction-finding and raw intercept information which was used, for example, by the British Royal Navy and Britain's Radio Security Service.

As the war progressed and as the volume of raw data increased, Canada's need for its own code and cipher-breaking capabilities was discussed and debated among various government officials, including those in Canada's military services, the Department of External Affairs (DEA), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and the National Research Council. During this period of debate, US and UK allies expressed their view that Canada ought to become an active participant and develop its own expertise in this area.

In 1941, at the urging of the Department of External Affairs, the government established a national signals intelligence bureau known as the Examination Unit (XU). The XU was located in the National Research Council and included participation from the RCMP, DEA, and the three military services. Under XU coordination, raw intercepts and decrypted traffic were used by Canadian intelligence consumers, and were relayed to and from SIGINT allies in Britain and the United States. Intercepted traffic included messages from the Soviet Union, Germany, Italy, South America and Asia. By war's end, the XU was renamed the Joint Discrimination Unit and was a fully-functioning signals intelligence service.

Deliberations commenced in 1944 (principally among DEA, Army and Navy officials) to determine the need for, and the structure of, a possible post-war organization, as well as the role it would play in meeting the intelligence requirements of the government of the day. It was at this juncture that the two programs that evolved into CSE's current mandate began to take shape.

First, it was determined that continued signals collection was necessary for the protection of Canada's foreign and defence interests. The government's decision was influenced by requests for continuing intelligence assistance from the United States and Britain, and by Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko's identification of Soviet intelligence activities in Canada and the United States. This gave birth to CSE's SIGINT mandate.

Second, it was clear that federal government departments and agencies now required advice and assistance to protect classified information from interception by unfriendly parties. This led to the creation of CSE's defensive mandate, then known as Communications-Electronic Security (COMSEC), and now referred to as Information Technology Security (ITS).

In 1946, this new peacetime national cryptologic organization was established by Order in Council and renamed the Communications Branch, National Research Council (CBNRC), with responsibility for both SIGINT and COMSEC. In 1975, an Order in Council transferred CBNRC to the Department of National Defence and named the Minister responsible for designated activities pursuant to section 4 of the National Defence Act. At the same time, the organization was renamed the Communications Security Establishment.

Through CSE, Canada has maintained collaborative relationships with some of its close and long-standing allies in exchanging foreign intelligence and sharing sensitive information technology security. The allies are the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, and each has an organization that is analogous to CSE.