A New Mandate

For the past four years I have had the responsibility of reviewing the activities of the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) and reporting to the Minister of National Defence on the lawfulness of those activities.

My initial three-year mandate was set out in a 1996 Order in Council of the Government of Canada under the Inquiries Act. On June 15, 1999, the Minister of National Defence announced that the government had renewed my appointment for another three years and enhanced my mandate by increasing my authority to respond to complaints about CSE. A copy of the new Order in Council appears as Annex A of this report.

This Annual Report - my fourth - covers the first year of my second mandate, up to the government's fiscal year end of March 31, 2000.

The task of reviewing CSE is an important and necessary one in a democratic society. An agency of Canada's Department of National Defence, CSE provides the Government of Canada with foreign signals intelligence (SIGINT), which it obtains by gathering and analyzing foreign radio, radar and other electronic emissions. Through its Information Technology Security program, CSE also provides advice on the security of the government's information technology.

To fulfil its mandate, CSE has, over the more than five decades of its existence, developed highly sophisticated technological capabilities. One of my functions is to review CSE's activities to ensure that the organization does not use its capabilities in ways that contravene the laws of Canada.