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How Canada Can End Mass Surveillance
How Canada Can End Mass Surveillance
Third chapter in OpenMedia’s crowd-sourced privacy plan.
Some may remember East Germany’s Stasi spy agency, or reference China’s extensive Internet censorship. But few would express fear that western democratic governments like the U.S., Britain, and Canada were engaged in the mass surveillance of law-abiding citizens.
That all changed in June 2013 when Edward Snowden, a contractor at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), blew the whistle on the spying activities of the NSA and its Five Eyes partners in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K. Since then, we’ve seen a long stream of revelations about how Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE) is engaged in extensive spying on private online activities.
To give just a few examples, we learned that CSE spied on law-abiding Canadians using the free Wi-Fi at Pearson airport, and monitored their movements for weeks afterward. We learned that CSE is monitoring an astonishing 15 million file downloads a day, with Canadian Internet addresses among the targets.
Even emails Canadians send to the government or their local MP are monitored — up to 400,000 a day according to CBC News. Just last week we discovered CSE targets widely-used mobile web browsers and app stores. Many of these activities are not authorized by a judge, but by secret ministerial directives like the ones MP Peter MacKay signed in 2011.
CSE is not the only part of the government engaged in mass surveillance. Late last year, the feds sought contractors to build a new monitoring system that will collect and analyze what Canadians say on Facebook and other social media sites. As a result, the fear of getting caught in the government’s dragnet surveillance is one more and more Canadians may soon face.
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CSE worried about how its use of Canadian metadata might be viewed
Questions over spy agency’s definition of ‘tracking Canadians’
Canada’s electronic spy agency fretted over how its collection of cellphone and email metadata might be perceived even before CBC published a story on the agency using Wi-Fi data to track airport passengers, new documents obtained by CBC reveal.
A Communications Security Establishment employee warned in an email several days before the CBC story aired that public knowledge of the top-secret experiment, which followed passengers at a major Canadian international airport using their electronic footprints, “would be damaging” to the agency by “putting into question” its collection of the metadata belonging to Canadians.
“There was some internal squirming by CSE around the fact that they had used Canadian metadata to build the analytical model, and had done so over a protracted period,” says national security expert and University of Ottawa professor Wesley Wark.
The electronic surveillance agency came under increased scrutiny in the weeks following the Jan. 30, 2014 airing and publication of the CBC story, which was based on a document obtained by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden and analyzed in collaboration with the U.S. news site The Intercept.
- CSE used airport Wi-Fi to track Canadian travellers
- Wi-Fi snooping experiment prompts calls for review
- Canada’s Snowden files: More stories
Now, new documents obtained under the Access to Information Act, provide insight into how the spy agency prepped for Senate committee hearings and media scrums, as questions rained down about their use of the metadata collected about passengers at the Canadian international airport.
Care must be taken, said an email dated Feb. 3, 2014 — the day CSE chief John Forster spoke at a Senate committee — not only to make sure the agency didn’t mislead, but also to make sure “we don’t limit the scope of any future activities.”
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Edward Snowden tells students mass data collection can hamper attempts to foil attacks
Video appearance of NSA whistleblower sparks debate at Upper Canada College
U.S. National Security Agency whistleblower and international fugitive Edward Snowden told students at Upper Canada College that the mass collection of data by government spy agencies can get in the way of foiling terrorist plots.
Such programs can sometimes take resources away from targeted data collection of specific threats, Snowden, told students at the private school in Toronto, where he was invited to speak.
- CSE tracks millions of downloads daily: Snowden documents
- Canada’s Snowden files: CBC’s stories on the revelations
The problem with mass surveillance is when you collect everything, you understand nothing,” he said during the video conference Monday evening.
Snowden, who exposed the NSA’s domestic spying program in 2013, was the keynote speaker at the World Affairs Conference, which is co-organized by Upper Canada College, where he also took questions from students.
The title of the talk, which also included journalist Glenn Greenwald, was “Privacy vs. Security: A Discussion of Personal Privacy in the Digital Age.”
He told students that electronic spying programs constitute a threat to democracy and ought to be subject to more public debate about limits on how information is collected and used.
“This fundamentally changes the balance of power between the citizen and the state,” he said.
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CANADA CASTS GLOBAL SURVEILLANCE DRAGNET OVER FILE DOWNLOADS
CANADA CASTS GLOBAL SURVEILLANCE DRAGNET OVER FILE DOWNLOADS
Canada’s leading surveillance agency is monitoring millions of Internet users’ file downloads in a dragnet search to identify extremists, according to top-secret documents.
The covert operation, revealed Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, taps into Internet cables and analyzes records of up to 15 million downloads daily from popular websites commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files.
The revelations about the spying initiative, codenamed LEVITATION, are the first from the trove of files provided by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden to show that the Canadian government has launched its own globe-spanning Internet mass surveillance system.
According to the documents, the LEVITATION program can monitor downloads in several countries across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and North America. It is led by the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, Canada’s equivalent of the NSA. (The Canadian agency was formerly known as “CSEC” until a recent name change.)
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CSE tracks millions of downloads daily: Snowden documents
Global sites for sharing movies, photos, music targeted in mass anti-terror surveillance
Canada’s electronic spy agency sifts through millions of videos and documents downloaded online every day by people around the world, as part of a sweeping bid to find extremist plots and suspects, CBC News has learned.
Details of the Communications Security Establishment project dubbed “Levitation” are revealed in a document obtained by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden and recently released to CBC News.
Under Levitation, analysts with the electronic eavesdropping service can access information on about 10 to 15 million uploads and downloads of files from free websites each day, the document says.
“Every single thing that you do — in this case uploading/downloading files to these sites — that act is being archived, collected and analyzed,” says Ron Deibert, director of the University of Toronto-based internet security think-tank Citizen Lab, who reviewed the document.
In the document, a PowerPoint presentation written in 2012, the CSE analyst who wrote it jokes about being overloaded with innocuous files such as episodes of the musical TV series Glee in their hunt for terrorists.
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