Canada's Surveillance Network

[concernie]

To concernie ...

Do you actually know the history of our Canadian CSIS and why it was removed from the RCMP under PET and completely reestablished as a completely civilian organization? Do you know why CSIS have extensive investigative ability but have to rely on the RCMP (a completely separate organization) to carry out any active operational police enforcement duties? I think you would be a lot more reassured if you knew that information. Perhaps not, but I think so.

I wouldn't have such a problem with CSIS if they were actually loyal to the country in which they operate. But because they are transnational, a complete violation of Canadian sovereignty as far as I am concerned, there is nothing that will convince me to trust them. And the whole concept of intelligence is based in black operations, which are deceptive and exploitative, no matter what the justification. JFK knew this and attempted to shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces during his tenure. CSIS, also, should be disbanded. A waste of tax dollars and a threat to the individual security of every Canadian.

[Donald G]

CSIS is strictly Canadian.
CSIS is not transnational.
CSIS is prohibited from running OVERT operations in other countries.
CSIS is prohibited from running Black Operations.
Since CSIS is Canadian and only permitted to operate in Canada how could they ever be a danger to Canadian Sovereignty?
JFK had nothing whatever to do with CSIS. He used the CIA as much, if not more, than any President (ie Bay of Pigs, Cuban blockade)

[concernie]

CSIS is strictly Canadian.
CSIS is not transnational.
CSIS is prohibited from running OVERT operations in other countries.
CSIS is prohibited from running Black Operations.
Since CSIS is Canadian and only permitted to operate in Canada how could they ever be a danger to Canadian Sovereignty?
JFK had nothing whatever to do with CSIS. He used the CIA as much, if not more, than any President (ie Bay of Pigs, Cuban blockade)

I wish this were true. But with garbage like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, NAFTA, the UN, the phoney War on Terrorism, and the biggest smoking gun, the integrated North American Security Perimeter, common sense says otherwise.

[concernie]

Global Smart ID For All UK Citizens

http://www.activistpost.com/2013/09/glo ... izens.html

The thing is, the next stage is forcing people to sign up with an Identity Provider (IdP) to prove they are who they say they are, when they use government services which are only available online. It was supposed to start next month, i.e. the transition to Universal Credit (the new benefit which will replace most of the current ones) was meant to introduce identity management to the UK, by requiring all claimants to authenticate themselves online by using an IdP.

Can Your iPhone Thumbprint Be Used Against You?
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/09/12/ ... /?mod=e2tw

[Woodenhead]

In this slide from a National Security Agency presentation on “Google Cloud Exploitation,” a sketch shows where the “Public Internet” meets the internal “Google Cloud” where user data resides. Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing.

The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.

By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.

According to a top-secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, the NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from internal Yahoo and Google networks to data warehouses at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records — including “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, as well as content such as text, audio and video.

The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency’s British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters . From undisclosed interception points, the NSA and the GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information among the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants.

The infiltration is especially striking because the NSA, under a separate program known as PRISM, has front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts through a court-approved process.

The MUSCULAR project appears to be an unusually aggressive use of NSA tradecraft against flagship American companies. The agency is built for high-tech spying, with a wide range of digital tools, but it has not been known to use them routinely against U.S. companies.

In a statement, the NSA said it is “focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets only.”

“NSA applies Attorney General-approved processes to protect the privacy of U.S. persons — minimizing the likelihood of their information in our targeting, collection, processing, exploitation, retention, and dissemination,” it said.

[...]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nat ... story.html

[A_Britishcolumbian]

i found the stark difference in 'mechanism' of/in 'canada' as opposed to the other of the 'five eyes' to be enlightening.

How CSEC became an electronic spying giant
COLIN FREEZE
The Globe and Mail
Published Saturday, Nov. 30 2013

It is known as “Camelot,” and it is believed to be among the most expensive government buildings Canada has ever built.

Next year, the analysts, hackers and linguists who form the heart of Communications Security Establishment Canada are expected to move from their crumbling old campus in Ottawa to a gleaming new, $1-billion headquarters.

It is the physical manifestation of just how far the agency has come since Sept. 11, 2001. Before those attacks, it was known as Canada’s other spy agency – an organization created to crack Communist codes more than seven decades ago, but rendered rudderless after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The agency’s biggest victory of the 1990s, insiders say, was its behind-the-scenes role in the seizure of a Spanish trawler during the Turbot Wars, a 1995 fishing dispute off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.

But now, where it once focused on vacuuming up Russian radio signals from Arctic bases, its surveillance reach is global: Its leaders now speak of “mastering the Internet” from desktops in Ottawa. In 1999, it had a shrinking budget of $100-million a year and a staff of about 900. Today, CSEC (pronounced like “seasick” ever since “Canada” was appended to the CSE brand) has evolved into a different machine: a deeply complex, deep-pocketed spying juggernaut that has seen its budget balloon to almost half a billion dollars and its ranks rise to more than 2,100 staff.

Canadian taxpayers spent $300-million a year on the nation’s two intelligence agencies before the attacks of Sept. 11, but the bill for spying is now coming in at more than $1-billion. That’s because the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has also been bulked up into a $535-million-a-year agency, up from $180-million in 1999.

There are key differences between the agencies. CSIS’s “human intelligence” spies are like stay-at-home defencemen – they work largely in Canada to generate reports about security threats to Canada. CSEC’s “signals-intelligence” spies can go as far as their computers can take them and are afforded an open-ended curiosity to explore issues far beyond Canada’s borders.

An increase in intelligence investment was inevitable after 9/11 – no government wanted to risk a reprise of an al-Qaeda strike. Yet Canadian spending is continuing to rise, even as the terror threat arguably fades.

That kind of arithmetic is being thrown into sharp relief by the ongoing leaks from former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, whose disclosures are spawning an unprecedented global referendum on spying. As Canada and its allies seek to bolster national security, they are raising eyebrows among defenders of personal freedom at home and risking long-term damage on the diplomatic stage.

The strains wrought by the Snowden slides are showing. This week it was reported that CSEC may have invited its closest ally, the U.S. National Security Agency, to come to Canada to spy on world leaders attending the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto.

In October, Brazil’s President accused Canada of “cyberwar” after CSEC was revealed to have spied on that country’s energy sector. That same month, a European Union summit was dominated by calls for U.S. President Barack Obama to explain why the NSA had been targeting the mobile phones of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French Prime Minister François Hollande.

Canadian officials won’t answer questions about operations. But the opacity surrounding CSEC is high, even by the standards of Western spy agencies. Some of its key architects say the current level of secrecy is unsustainable.

‘It’s the public’s bloody money’

You don’t have to understand the technology of modern spying to grasp the motivations behind it.

“When our Prime Minister goes abroad, no matter where he goes, what would be a boon for him to know?” said John Adams, chief of CSEC from 2005 through early 2012. “Do you think that they aren’t doing this to us?”

The retired spymaster is among the agency’s biggest boosters. But in an interview with The Globe and Mail, he said even he is warming up to the idea of more outside scrutiny – or what’s called “review” in Ottawa parlance.

“What I’m saying is you either get some more review or you’re going to run out of money,” he said. “You’ve got to get the public engaged somehow. It’s the public’s bloody money. And it is getting to be not-insignificant amounts of money.”

CSEC is only going to continue to grow, said Mr. Adams, who doubled the budget from $200-million to $400-million during his seven-year run. When he headed the agency, he made a point of bringing important civil servants in for show and tells about CSEC capabilities.

“This is what we got. They said, ‘Holy … this is the best-kept secret in NATO,’ ” Mr. Adams said. “And I said, ‘Now, what you’ve given us is good – but it’s not enough. We need more.’ ”

Electronic spying is expensive. Keeping hackers out of Canadian government computer systems, running some of the world’s fastest supercomputers and storing data in bulk costs money. Mr. Adams even made a point of hiring top mathematicians, with salaries exceeding his own, so CSEC could better crack encryption.

“We wanted to play with the big boys,” said Mr. Adams, who tends to measure CSEC against the much larger NSA.

Despite the vast discrepancy in size, the relationship between the two agencies has always been very close. The partnership is so cozy that CSEC analysts in Ottawa can sift through massive databases of logged telecommunications traffic first assembled at the NSA headquarters in Fort George G. Meade, Md. – repositories with code names such as “Marina” and “EvilOlive,” according to materials seen by The Globe.

CSEC also has a hungry clientele strewn across the federal bureaucracy. An internal document obtained by The Globe names a few of the customers: “CSEC provides intelligence reporting to over 1,000 clients across government, including the Privy Council Office, DND, Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Treasury Board Secretariat, CSIS and the RCMP.”

Then there are Canada’s allies. While a relatively small collector compared to the NSA, CSEC has always tried to fill in blind spots for allies and to come up with better ways to sift through reams of raw intelligence.

“The NSA is intercepting the equivalent of four Library of Congresses every hour,” U.S. military historian Matthew Aid said. “One of the things Canada does very well is analysis.”

Since the 1940s, the two agencies have also worked closely with British, New Zealand and Australian counterparts. This is the spying collective known as “the Five Eyes.”

“Canada benefits tremendously” from this partnership, reads a CSEC PowerPoint presentation obtained by The Globe.

“It is precious,” a slide says. “Treat it with Care!”

‘I couldn’t possibly talk about it’

In Britain and the United States, committees of trusted, watchdog politicians are afforded a peek inside their surveillance machinery.

Canada has no mechanism for this.

“We’re the only country out of the Five Eyes that doesn’t have that kind of body,” said Liberal MP Wayne Easter, who this month introduced a private member’s bill for such a mechanism. (A 2005 piece of legislation for the same sort of body had broad approval, but then the Liberal government of the day fell.)

Parliament’s only insights into CSEC now come via a proxy. Since 1996, a retired judge with a small staff is cleared to look at CSEC. No laws have ever been found to have been broken, according to the annual reports submitted to Parliament.

A former top security official said the parameters may be too narrow. “All he’s asked to do is say, ‘Are they following the law?’ ” the official said. “And that’s an important question. But you have to ask yourself: Is that sufficient?”

In Britain, nine trusted parliamentarians are cleared to keep state surveillance in check. In the United States, the NSA faces scrutiny from House and Senate select committees on intelligence. Specialized judges who sit on foreign intelligence surveillance courts also vet NSA programs.

Yet the NSA is an incredibly aggressive agency. And its political masters have been known to do end runs around all the watchdogs.

For example, on March 12, 2004, U.S. President George W. Bush reined in a secret NSA Internet-metadata collection program that he had managed to keep secret for three years. He relented only after his top law enforcement officials learned of the program, deemed it illegal and threatened to resign en masse.

What many Canadians don’t know is that secretive surveillance authorizations can also happen north of the border, with the blessing of the Minister of National Defence.

Records obtained by The Globe show that on Monday, March 15, 2004 – three days after the U.S. program was peeled back – a “ministerial directive and a ministerial authorization” regarding a Canadian Internet-metadata collection program was signed in Ottawa.

Just what this program would do remains unclear. The Globe, which has previously reported on similar CSEC directives signed by later ministers, only knows about the 2004 program through a highly redacted document obtained under the Access to Information Act.

Nearly a decade later, no one will speak to the program. “Even if I remembered the full details, I couldn’t possibly talk about it,” said David Pratt, the former Liberal defence minister who signed the document.

Now a defence lobbyist with a picture of himself and former U.S. counterpart Donald Rumsfeld in his office, he won’t spill secrets.

“You swear an oath as a privy councillor on these things …”

‘CSEC had gone blind’

For several decades, the very existence of CSEC was considered classified. Canadians first learned of the spy agency in the 1970s through a TV newsmagazine exposé.

In 2001, Parliament passed the omnibus Anti-Terrorism Act that ensconced CSEC in law. The statute states that its surveillance “shall not be directed at Canadians,” but some wiggle room was quickly added – the spy agency was placed beyond criminal laws that ban the warrantless seizure of Canadian telecommunications.

So while police have to get a judge to sign off if they want to eavesdrop on a Canadian, CSEC doesn’t necessarily have to do so. Instead, the agency can get the defence minister to sign off on a spying dragnet, so long as the minister is convinced that it is being cast predominantly at foreigners. Any Canadian calls and messages that are sucked up in the process can be sorted out later.

This legal cover allowed CSEC to get into the business of “bulk” data collection. Within the agency, this was huge. In the 1990s, “CSEC had gone blind. They were deaf and dumb,” said Mr. Adams, the former chief.

The agency, he said, had risked becoming a relic because it hadn’t yet figured out how to spy on the Internet without breaking laws.

“They couldn’t monitor Osama bin Laden in 1999 … they didn’t know that they were not going to hit a Canadian,” he said. “And if they would have hit a Canadian, they would have gone to jail.”

The Anti-Terrorism Act also formalized an arrangement where other federal security agencies could enlist CSEC’s unique skills to advance domestic investigations. Records obtained by The Globe show that CSEC now gets 70 to 80 such requests each year, from the RCMP, CSIS and other agencies.

This week it was revealed that a Federal Court judge has ruled CSIS “breached its duty of candour” in enlisting CSEC for one such case. The issue appears to be that the court was not told that CSEC’s Five Eyes allies would be brought in on the case, an international terrorism investigation focusing on two Canadian suspects. The surveillance on them lasted for a year. It’s not clear what happened to the tandem.

The future

CSEC has never had a higher profile. If recent months are any indication, there will be more Snowden leaks coming and more news about questionable spying operations run in partnership with the NSA and other Five Eyes allies.

CSEC officials decline to say anything of substance about their operations. They say only that they have never been found to have done anything unlawful.

Meantime, parliamentarians are raising questions about CSEC. Out West, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association is suing CSEC for alleged illegal search and seizure. The lawsuit – the first of its kind – threatens to crack open key details about CSEC’s activities.

For critics, this all adds up to a good thing. “It’s up to the government and up to courts and up to citizens to ensure there are adequate measures in place to ensure some degree of accountability and transparency,” said Steven Penney, a University of Alberta law professor. “If we are going to have a new paradigm … then we ought to have a debate about that – and that hasn’t occurred.”

For his part, Mr. Adams said there are places for proper debates – mostly behind closed doors. “You can’t have the debate in the public. The best you could hope for is if you have a [parliamentary] review committee – it’s been talked about for 10 years.”

Maybe it’s time to do more than talk, he said. “How do you get that debate? You get that, I hope, by clearing people, so you can actually tell them what the hell is going on.”

CSEC by the numbers

$96.3-million – CSEC’s budget in 1999

$460.9-million – CSEC’s budget in 2013

900 – Number of employees in 1999

2,124 – Number of employees in 2013

1,000+ – Number of “clients” in the civil service cleared to read CSEC material

59 – Minimum number of CSEC “ministerial authorizations” signed since 2001

69 to 80 – Requests for legal assistance received annually by CSEC from other federal agencies

$15-billion – Combined budget of the “Five Eyes” signals-intelligence agencies

Sources: Lux Ex Umbra blog, Globe and Mail Access to Information files, BCCLA lawsuit

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/pol ... /?page=all

[Donald G]

To A_Britishcolumbian ...

Your last relatively lengthy comment sounds like ONE person with an opinion. In fact ONE person with a great many opinions. Whether their multitude of opinions matches reality is IMO another matter entirely.

[erinmore3775]

The Colin Freeze article quoted above seems to match the limited "published" information available about CSIS and CSEC. The most notable difference in the two agencies remains their oversight. CSIS has mandated oversight. It is possible to get information about a case through court order or through a freedom of information request. There is no oversight of CSEC. There is no way to get information about the agency or its activities either through the courts or freedom of information requests. Up until now they have been cloaked.

[A_Britishcolumbian]

while this article describes tools used by the nsa, i believe it can reasonably assumed that 'canada' uses the same tools.

Infected iPhones, radar wave devices, and more: Activist pulls curtain back on NSA spy gear

BY RAPHAEL SATTER, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS DECEMBER 30, 2013

LONDON - A well-known privacy advocate has given the public an unusually explicit peek into the intelligence world's tool box, pulling back the curtain on the National Security Agency's arsenal of high-tech spy gear.

Independent journalist and security expert Jacob Appelbaum on Monday told a hacker conference in Germany that the NSA could turn iPhones into eavesdropping tools and use radar wave devices to harvest electronic information from computers, even if they weren't online.

Appelbaum told hundreds of computer experts gathered at Hamburg's Chaos Communications Conference that his revelations about the NSA's capabilities "are even worse than your worst nightmares."

"What I am going to show you today is wrist-slittingly depressing," he said.

Even though in the past six months there have been an unprecedented level of public scrutiny of the NSA and its methods, Appelbaum's claims — supported by what appeared to be internal NSA slideshows — still caused a stir.

One of the slides described how the NSA can plant malicious software onto Apple Inc.'s iPhone, giving American intelligence agents the ability to turn the popular smartphone into a pocket-sized spy.

Another slide showcased a futuristic-sounding device described as a "portable continuous wave generator," a remote-controlled device which — when paired with tiny electronic implants — can bounce invisible waves of energy off keyboards and monitors to see what is being typed, even if the target device isn't connected to the Internet.

A third slide showcased a piece of equipment called NIGHTSTAND, which can tamper with wireless Internet connections from up to 8 miles (13 kilometres) away.

An NSA spokeswoman, Vanee Vines, said that she wasn't aware of Appelbaum's presentation, but that in general should would not comment on "alleged foreign intelligence activities."

"As we've said before, NSA's focus is on targeting the communications of valid foreign intelligence targets — not on collecting and exploiting a class of communications or services that would sweep up communications that are not of bona fide foreign intelligence interest to the U.S. government."

The documents included in Appelbaum's presentation were first published by German magazine Der Spiegel on Sunday and Monday.

Appelbaum and Der Spiegel have both played an important role in the disclosures of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, but neither has clarified whether the most recent set of slides came from Snowden.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Inf ... story.html

[Donald G]

To A_Britishcolumbian ...

IMO listing articles that apply to countries other than Canada and INSINUATING that the same applies to Canada is dishonest.

If you want to live in Canada and write about Canada it is best you learn something about Canada first.

[A_Britishcolumbian]

i think i have been very clear in my participation here that i do not believe in or recognize the so called 'federal government of canada'. the actions of this criminal gang is beyond my tolerance, and from what has been shown to us, their membership as one of the 'five eyes', tech sharing and such, as well as their role in that same quintet, i cannot believe that this tech would not be utilized by 'canada'.

i recognized the corrupt nature of microsoft and apple right away back in the 70's, and i was very much a 'canadian' tech supporter from the beginning of the pc age choosing to support commodore systems and products.

when we began utilizing graphic user interfaces, as is the standard today, we did so by porting atari software to commodore machines.

why the so called 'federal government of canada' chose not to support the same tech i have no idea, but i suspect they were paid not to.

the crystallized idea of the so called 'government' being anti 'canadian' science and tech is finally coming to the public light.

given that i, in the form of my family, was here long before the notion of 'canada' ever was, i feel that it is they that should be done away with.

[fluffy]

Personal attacks and off-topic comments have been removed - fluffy

[NotNorthAnymore]

Personal attacks and off-topic comments have been removed - fluffy

Just thinking that this and a few other discussions brought forward by the self professed freeman should be moved into the conspiracy forum.