As promised in the last blog and in the spirit of looking at the two agencies responsible for intelligence and counter intelligence in Canada, we now turn to the Communications Security Establishment (CSE). With 3,232 employees, this “cryptologic” agency is about the size of CSIS, which we last wrote about, but it has a slightly larger budget of $948 million (2022/23). If CSIS prides itself on its emphasis on privacy and secrecy the CSE with also a serious level of investigative powers, seems to be the very poster child for staying hidden.

This agency does not report to the Minister of Public Safety but rather to the Minister of Defence. There are also two sub-agencies which fall under the CSE umbrella; the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security and the Cyber Emergency Response Team. Simply put this group’s job is to supply the “Government of Canada with information technology security and foreign signals intelligence”.

One significant difference between CSIS and CSE is the fact that they have somewhat different operational targets. Established in 2019 the CSE Act established that the CSE could not “target Canadians or anyone in Canada, interfere with the course of Justice, or interfere in the course of democracy”. They are there to be “defensive” and counter the cyber threats which may threaten such things as the energy grid, telecoms, health care databases and the “elections infrastructure”. They are also there to target foreign terrorist groups, cyber criminals, and state sponsored hackers. Their operations are divided into two parts, the second part being to gather foreign intelligence through signals intelligence (SIGINT) which involves the “interception, decoding and analysis of communications.” When signals intelligence started in the 1900’s it was basic and involved the interception of radio and telegraph transmissions. In 2026 with the advancement of technologies, we are now talking about the interception of text messages, phone calls, and computer and satellite traffic.

Furthermore there is a research directorate inside the agency, partly made up of the Tutte Institute for Mathematics and Computing (named after Dr William Tutte, a codebreaker and mathematician credited with breaking the Lorenz code during WWII).

This type of mandate requires a different candidate for the job and their recruiting initiatives focus on mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers. A prospective employee such as a mathematician needs to be familiar with cryptography, number theory, linear algebra, and data mining. Starting salary, in case you are thinking of applying is $78,000 but can go up to $178, 000.They do also advertise a generous maternity allowance of 93% of pay.

The CSE is currently headed by Caroline Xavier. She is a thirty year Federal servant having worked in several different departments, usually with an emphasis on IT and infrastructure. She also served in the Privy council office for three years as an assistant to the Cabinet, Security and Intelligence from 2017-2020. It would be fair to say that she comes from the more political arm of the government than a long term hacker investigator. There should be no mistake that like every Federal government department, throughout their annual report there is the obligatory references to “integration”, “working together” and “working with our partners”, and providing “timely guidance”.

Armed with my high school calculus, this is indeed a world outside my realm of comfort and expertise, but it is a field that with the advancements in Aritificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) quickly developing into a most pressing need. It is on the conscience of all the world powers and the Five Eyes group in particular. Because it is part of the Defence department in Canada, CSE is also now an agency which has received or is receiving greater funds going forward under the current Liberal government, having been pressed to raise defence spending up to 5% of GDP. In its 2026 annual report, they confirm that they are in the process of increasing their work force by 8.1% for a total of 4,178 employees.

In that same annual report, in an effort to try and gauge a level of CSE success or effectiveness, we are pointed to case studies where numbers are thrown at you, but as a layman they are quite meaningless and obscure to the point the level of the CSE response or involvement in any singular investigation can not be determined. The organization says that they handled 14,700 “general inquiries”; that they responded to 3,216 cyber incidents of which 2,252 they notified the organization and “provided support”; and they sent out 97,000 security alerts to 1363 subscribers. Under the foreign signals intelligence banner they said they also sent out 3,926 “foreign reports”. All meaningless and indisputable but clearly designed to be impressive.

The CSE relies on Ministerial authorizations to conduct foreign cyber operations and in 2026 they were given 13 of these authorizations. Again, little is said about what these operations involved. One being the exposure and curtailment of a large “phishing” campaign which had targeted Federal institutions. The second they allude to is the countering of a Ransomware as a service (RaaS) cybercrime group.

They speak of their Communicatons Operational Production and Co-ordination Centre which runs 24/7 with cooperation from the Five Eyes and other “Federal partners”. The CSE in justifying their all night shifts say that there were 121 cyber security “incidents after hours”(I would have assumed that an organization such as this would have to be open for business 24 hours a day); and that they “co-ordinated response to 220 significant terrorist or global incidents this year”. When reading this document it always seems to raise the question as to whether the CSE is more an information funnelling operation or a pro-active cyber community.

Unfortunately it is difficult to measure their effectiveness when there is little to compare. The counterparts to CSE is the National Security Agency (NSA) in the U.S. and the GCHQ in the United Kingdom. But they are unfair comparisons, much like comparing CSIS to the CIA. Whether Canadians want to believe it or not, Americans and the Brits, are playing in the NHL of the spy world, Canada and its agencies are in the lower tiers of Junior hockey. For instance the NSA has 32,000 employees and its budget in 2013 was around $14 billion. Thanks to the exposure by Edward Snowden, we learned that at that time, the NSA was intercepting and storing information on over 1 billion people, and just through cell phone technologies were tracking hundreds of millions of people.

The CSE is structured and set up like an NSA, but the capabilities and reach of the organizations is pointless. Apples and oranges. One suspects that much that is reported and utilized by the CSE originates from these much larger and offensive orientated agencies.In the eighties as a point of interest, when I was with Security Service, even then, the Americans didn’t trust the Canadians because of our socialist leaning governments. Nevertheless there is a level of cooperation, and the CSE points to “Salt typhoon” which targeted the networks as one where they worked with CSIS, the FBI, and NSA.

When some criticism raised to the surface and became public, it inevitably was because “inadvertently” CSE had collected information on Canadians which was originally gathered or utilized from foreign intelligence agencies. They also got caught improperly sharing data on Canadians to international partners. Personally the idea that CSE cannot target Canadians, while CSIS can makes little to no sense. If Canadians are wrapped up in intelligence gathering or sharing with the enemy, should they expect to be safeguarded from scrutiny of CSE? The CIA works with the NSA and have no such allusions.

The problem I see with both CSE and CSIS is the rather weak looking and arbitrary screening of their activities. Maybe it is living in this era of often weak kneed and woke sycophants to a Federal government which makes me suspect of what is being monitored and which targeting is being approved. Admittedly the Federal government’s reaction to the trucker convoy and the declaration of the Emergencies Act has shaken my confidence. The revelations of Snowden in the U.S. also shook my once solid belief in patriotic efforts when left in the hands of the unscrupulous politicos when I expected better. It should be noted that the Snowden revelations were front and centre and part of the era of both the Bush and Obama presidencies. So it is a dilemma.

I admired the American efforts in finding Bin Laden, but that trust gets usurped by then learning of the random collection of once thought to be considered private information of its own innocent citizens. We need these agencies, but control of their technological powers clearly needs to be harnessed and they need to be to assure us that they can distinguish the enemy from the innocent. In Canada can this be done by a handful of Parliamentarians whose first loyalty is to their political stripe?

In many ways we are living in ominous times brought about by rapid advancements in the same technologies that could also do unbelievable good. Do we leave it NVIDIA, Google, or Meta to decide where the power is utilized and then in turn provided or sold to groups like CSE? Big questions, few answers coming from our governments, as we are forever told to be content with trusting in our Federal institutions. It is a big ask.