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A sign for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service building is shown in Ottawa, on May 14, 2013.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

When Guy Saint-Jacques was ambassador to China, he always told his Canadian visitors to keep a close eye on their digital devices, and never to leave them unattended in hotels.

"Assume that if you leave your computer in your room, somebody will come in and copy what you have on your hard drive and copy a list of contacts, everything," Mr. Saint-Jacques said in an interview.

Even today, 18 months after retiring from the post, he always makes sure his laptop is within reach whenever he returns to China. That is not paranoia – it is Canadian government policy, according to a document obtained under Access to Information laws.

Far From Home: A Travel Security Guide for Government Officials is circulated by Canada's spy service. The Globe obtained the most recent version of this primer, which is for federal civil servants who journey abroad. "Canadian citizens travelling abroad may be the target of foreign-intelligence collection," it states.

While it is directed at readers who may carry classified information, the guide includes tips that could be useful for everyone, from business travellers to backpackers. "It's a pretty reasonable document that outlines a broad range of potential threats," said Chris Parsons of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, the digital-rights group that last month put out its own security planner to help people thwart surveillance.

Today's reality is that many governments mass-collect information. Not just state secrets, but also corporate correspondence or even people's contact lists. The Far From Home guide refrains from naming the most problematic places, broadly suggesting that government officials carry devices that have been completely wiped of data before they leave Canada.

Foreign spy services, border guards, even criminal gangs are all said to want to copy the contents of travellers' laptops and smartphones. And any phone that is known to a hostile government can be a tracking device. "Your phone has a unique signature that, once brought to the attention of an attacker, can be followed anywhere in the world," the guide says.

The Far From Home guide is published by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, a spy agency that conducts its own digital sleuthing campaigns within Canada.

While CSIS must get approval from judges for its most invasive domestic-spying techniques, travellers do not have the same privacy rights as citizens who stay put. For example, border agents everywhere do not need warrants to search devices. The U.S. government last week said such seizures by its own border guards were up 60 per cent over the past year.

Citing growing governmental use of facial-recognition software and similar tools, the CSIS brochure points out that travellers may even be recognized in places they have never been to before. "A number of countries share the biometric information they collect with neighbouring countries. It is possible this information is readily available in a country you have never travelled to."

The standard warnings against using hotel WiFi connections and Internet cafés are repeated, given that communications sent from these places can be easily intercepted. "Use encryption and Virtual Private Networks (VPN) if you must work using non-secure networks," the guide says.

Foreign hotels are deemed risky places in general because authorities can direct staff to conduct surreptitious searches of unattended safes, phones and rooms.

If a traveller discovers such activity, hotel staff "may deliberately want to mislead you by passing off the operation as a criminal activity," the guide says.

That's one of the reasons the CSIS guide urges government travellers to carry a smartphone or laptop that "contains no information when you leave and that, upon your return, it is completely wiped clean and the operating system re-installed."

The reason for doubling down on data hygiene upon return is that hackers can try to activate microphones on any device compromised abroad and listen in on privileged conversations federal officials would have once back in Canada. Meanwhile, conventional eavesdropping campaigns remain an everyday reality for diplomats stationed abroad.

Mr. Saint-Jacques says he found out all about that on an earlier posting to China in the late 1990s. The former Canadian ambassador vividly recalls his then-teenage daughter telling him about a chat with a schoolmate on an unsecured telephone line. When the conversation turned toward practising conversational Spanish for their class, the two teenagers were suddenly interrupted. "Switch back to French or the line will be cut," an unfamiliar voice said.

A previous iteration of the CSIS Far From Home guide came to the public's attention in 2013, after it was obtained by The Canadian Press. That report highlighted the guide's continued warnings about traditional espionage threats such as "honey traps," which it explained were "the clandestine recording of an intimate encounter" for blackmail purposes.

Born out of the Cold War, Five Eyes is a multinational spy network comprised of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, and the United States. The member states of Five Eyes gather intelligence about foreign countries, sharing it freely between themselves.

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