One Canadian company told officials it has installed “what is essentially a mirror” on its network, so that it can send some raw data traffic directly to “federal authorities.”

“Mirroring is when you take a one-to-one copy of a traffic stream,” explained Chris Parsons, an expert state surveillance tools at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. He said that such technology can be used as a tool of mass surveillance, but that in this case it appears to have been used selectively, so as to route lawfully requested information to authorities.

“The more concerning use, which I don’t believe we saw in those documents, would be if they were digging through my [Internet] packets,” he said.

Source: Feds tap telecoms for customer data at ‘staggering’ rate