CANUSA Agreement declassified

In 1949, Canada and the United States signed the CANUSA Agreement, codifying the extraordinarily close cooperation between the two countries on communications intelligence collection, processing, and dissemination.

The agreement was laid out in a Top Secret codeword-classified exchange of letters between G.G. (Bill) Crean, the Chairman of the Communications Research Committee (the interdepartmental committee that governed Canadian SIGINT policy), and Major General Charles P. Cabell, the Chairman of the equivalent U.S. body, the United States Communications Intelligence Board.

It was based closely on the U.S.-U.K. BRUSA Agreement of 1946, which was later renamed the UKUSA Agreement and is considered the foundational document of the Five Eyes SIGINT alliance.

The UKUSA Agreement was declassified and published online in 2010 along with most of its appendices and annexures, although some had significant redactions.

The CANUSA Agreement, by contrast, remained classified—until now.

Here is the full text of the agreement, minus as many as 83 pages of appendices and annexures, as released under Access to Information request A-2016-00131.

Kudos to the Communications Security Establishment for finally releasing this important historical document.

I usually leach off other people's access requests for the documents I cite on this blog, but in this case I put up my own five bucks to make a formal request since the public shaming I tried in January didn't seem to be working any better than the gentle persuasion I tried in November.

And, to be clear, the five bucks was only partly successful.

I asked for the appendices and annexures to the agreement to be released as well, but evidently that proposition was too great a shock to the system over there. This, despite the fact that (as I pointed out here) the 27 March 1953 version of Appendix B has been available online since 2015.

That particular horse probably got out by mistake, but it's not going to go back in the barn, pardners. Why pretend otherwise?

Another point: I also asked for the release of "all subsequent modified or amended versions of that agreement up to the present day."

We know from this document that the agreement was "revised slightly in 1960", but we don't know in what way.

And we still don't. Maybe the 1960 version was somewhere in those 83 pages that CSE redacted.

On the plus side, the Dominion is safe from whatever ill consequences would ensue if that specific 57-year-old horse ever got out.

But enough with the nay-saying.

At the risk of riding my metaphor off in all directions, I shouldn't look a gift (or, technically, five-dollar) horse in the mouth.

The CANUSA Agreement has finally been released into the wild. And that's a good thing.


Update 31 March 2019: See here for a substantial part of the appendices.