Canada

For Tia Dafnos, an associate professor at the University of New Brunswick, the records reinforce, at minimum, the optics that national security police resources are being used to protect corporations and their financial interests.

What makes a piece of infrastructure "critical" is not well defined, and that looseness gives national security units broad discretion to "pre-emptively keep an eye on people," she says.

"That power of discretion is significant because there's always a way to just end up justifying that surveillance," she said.