Canadian Armed Forces members used their own personal social media accounts, computers and networks at home during the COVID-19 pandemic and gathered information about Canadians, violating intelligence-gathering rules, according to a newly released report.
The internal military report obtained by CBC News provides a new look behind the scenes at how a controversial military operation went so wrong.
“Everything you could imagine in a military operation went wrong in this case,” said national security expert Wesley Wark.
“This is really an amateur effort. It was a badly conceived, badly managed operation that should have never come into existence at all.”
Military members without training and enough oversight gathered intelligence without even knowing it constituted intelligence, the report said.
Multiple units were tasked with collecting information about public opinion, including to help with decision-making during Operation Laser — the military’s domestic response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
That data-mining effort, first reported by the Ottawa Citizen, was part of a series of problematic activities involving an influence campaign that then Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Jonathan Vance verbally shut down in April 2020, but some activities carried on for another six months — until Vance issued a written edict.
The newspaper’s extensive reporting found senior military leaders viewed the pandemic as a chance to test out propaganda techniques on Canadians and head off civil disobedience by the public.
Senior defence leadership launched a series of internal investigations into a range of practices and conceded the forces went too far and eroded public confidence.
The Defence Department recently released one of the investigation reports to CBC News more than four years after an access-to-information request was filed.
The report contains new details about what exactly unfolded.
A compliance assessment report by a directorate with the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command found three military units were non-compliant with directives while gathering intelligence during Operation Laser between March to July 2020.
Wark said the military, at that time, was excited about trying to influence how people think. This influence campaign, he said, was aimed at trying to make sure Canadians understood the threat posed by COVID-19 and to boost support for the military. It was also a way of trying to create a new doctrine of soft power to counter Russian information activities, he said.
But when details about the efforts were publicly exposed, it made the military look “foolish,” Wark said.
One of the units involved was called the “Precision Information Team,” with the 4th Canadian Division in the Greater Toronto Area, who didn’t have a background in intelligence.
There weren’t enough government-issued laptops, Office 365 licences and virtual private networks (VPNs) available, so they had to use their own from home, the assessment found.
The team was tasked with scouring Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook and other websites to measure public opinion about the military’s work in Canada to help with planning and decision-making, the report said.
Without enough oversight or training, the team gathered information about Canadians that the government and military’s top commander didn’t explicitly ask them to collect, the report found. The team also didn’t immediately delete the information as required, the report said.
The report also flagged this team went beyond what the mission required by monitoring the Black Lives Matter movement.
The team was informing commanders about possible disruptions, including protests in southern Ontario near Canadian Armed Forces facilities, that could pose a risk to military personnel or the operation, but went too far, the report said.
“These products were intended to provide information to commanders regarding possible protests, disruptions and other activities which could impact the conduct of CAF’s Op LASER mission, or which could pose a force protection risk to nearby CAF facilities or personnel,” the report said.
“Nevertheless, in some instances, the scope of analysis exceeded that which was necessary to answer these questions and a clear nexus between the products and the requirements of the mission was difficult to discern.”
Another team — under Canadian Joint Operations Command — wrote more than 50 reports, including about political discourse around COVID-19, misinformation and non-government statements about the pandemic online, the assessment report said.
The team was told to create social media accounts to “monitor key regional actors,” but “deliberately disregarded” an order and used their own personal accounts instead, the report said.
This unit failed to log information it inadvertently collected about Canadians, the report said, when capturing Twitter screenshots of official statements from Canadian political leaders.
All three units gathering intelligence failed to use tools that concealed their identity, which risked exposing the military’s work and trade secrets, the report said. The investigation found the units also didn’t conduct risk assessments like they were supposed to.
“It was a nonsensical operation from beginning to end,” said Wark, who is a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI).
Wark said while he can’t imagine something so “gross” could happen again, there is a risk because the federal government still hasn’t acted on a recommendation made by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians in 2020.
The committee urged Ottawa to introduce legislation governing the military’s defence intelligence activities, including what it is authorized to collect about Canadians.
“This operation took place in a kind of legal vacuum,” said Wark. “And whatever lessons have been learned, the legal vacuum still fundamentally exists.”
Retired Col. Brett Boudreau, a former senior military public affairs officer, said he believes the non-compliances happened unwittingly because of outdated policies, poor organization and challenges from working from home during the early days of the pandemic.
But the larger failed effort involving other activities at the time to change the military strategic communications scheme is what “showed willful negligence,” he said.
“Defence can’t afford a negative balance in their public trust account,” said Boudreau, now a fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, in an email to CBC News.
“An institution like Defence that wants big budgets and big expensive equipment, and large numbers of recruits, needs to be significantly more open and transparent about its intent, activities and operations, or it risks its reputation and credibility.”
CBC News asked the Defence Department for a response and to share if there were any breaches of Canadians’ privacy on March 25. Despite repeated requests, the department still has not provided a comment.
