Spysplaining

Leaks on Five Eyes spy network are fuelling ‘misinformation,’ CSEC chief says reads the G&M headline.

Actually it was the CSEC watchdog and not the CSEC chief who fretted to a senate committee today about CSEC info being made public, but you can see how the G&M headline writer could have confused the two. Lone CSEC watchdog commissioner Jean-Pierre Plouffe, appointed two months ago to ensure CSEC stays within the law, talked a lot more like a chief defending his outfit than an independent watchdog holding it to account.

Plouffe is worried about "sensational" docs leaked to the media being "taken out of context" and turned into "myths" and "misinformation", and sees it as his job to correct that.

One of the *myths* Plouffe will presumably soon be spysplaining for us is last night's CBC story bylined by Glenn Greenwald :

Snowden document shows Canada set up spy posts for NSA

Canada has set up covert spying posts around the world and conducted espionage against trading partners at the request of the U.S. National Security Agency in "approximately 20 high-priority countries."

"Co-operative efforts include the exchange of liaison officers and integrees," the document reveals, a reference to CSEC operatives working inside the NSA, and vice-versa.

It notes the NSA also supplies much of the computer hardware and software CSEC uses.

Other Snowden-leaked docs from Glenn Greenwald in need of Plouffe's corrective touch will include :

• CSEC partnering with the NSA to conduct spying operations on Canadian soil during the 2010 Toronto G-20 summit to "support U.S. policy goals" .
• CSEC spying on Brazil's Ministry of Mines and Energy.
• CSEC using its trusted position as overseer of the standardization of cryptography to allow the NSA to build a “back-door” into the encryption, allowing the USA to secretly spy on 163 ally nations for years.

It was a puppet head trifecta today - the new CSEC *watchdog* defending NSA puppet CSEC to the PMO puppet Senate.

No mention as to whether CSEC got to join the NSA and GCHQ in infiltrating World of Warcraft and Second Life.

For much more in-depth CSEC coverage : Lux ex Umbra 

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Paul Calandra attacks Glenn Greenwald and CBC

I think Calandra read off his bit of paper from Steve rather well today, don't you? 
Love the bit about how :

"CBC only admitted to their cash-for-news scheme after The Wall Street Journal forced it out of them"

...  by cleverly reading Greenwald's byline alongside those of Greg Weston and Ryan Gallagher at the top of the CBC article.

A byline that has also graced the pages of The Guardian and the New York Times, where, presumably, Greenwald also got paid as a journalist.

And I'm sure the actual subject matter of the CBC article :

New Snowden docs show U.S. spied during G20 in Toronto 

"Stephen Harper's government allowed the largest American spy agency to conduct widespread surveillance in Canada during the 2010 G8 and G20 summits.  

An NSA briefing note describes the American agency's operational plans at the Toronto summit meeting and notes they were "closely co-ordinated with the Canadian partner."

had nothing at all to do with monkeynuts using his parliamentary privilege to refer to constitutional lawyer/author/journalist Glenn Greenwald as a "Brazilian-based former porn industry executive". 

Transcript ... for Steve's scrapbook : 
Mr. Paul Calandra, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister :

Mr. Speaker, the CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices make clear that and I quote : 

To ensure we maintain our independence, we do not pay for information from a source in a story.  

When CBC’s The National aired a report about U.S. activities during the G8 and G20, neither Peter Mansbridge nor Greg Weston disclosed that they had paid their source, Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald is a Brazilian based former porn industry executive, now assisting Edward Snowden leak national security information.  

CBC only admitted to their cash for news scheme after The Wall Street Journal forced it out of them. CBC is trying to justify the violation of their own ethical standards by claiming that Greenwald is a *freelancer*. 

Mr. Speaker Greenwald has strong and controversial opinions about national security and of course, that's his right, but when CBC pays for news, we have to ask why furthering Glenn Greenwald’s agenda and lining his Brazilian bank account more important than maintaining the public broadcaster’s journalistic integrity?

h/t Canadian Cynic for this link to Greenwald's blistering debunking of the unfortunate WSJ article referred to by Calandra :
 http://utdocuments.blogspot.ca/2013/11/wall-street-journals-alistair-macdonald.html
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Lockheed Martin : "We never forget who we're working for"

That famous LM motto ... which in the main of course refers to their $47.2 billion client, the US government. 

Not just an arms manufacturer anymore, LM builds spy satellites for the NSA, plus surveillance and information processing for the CIA, the FBI, the IRS, the NSA, the Pentagon, the Postal Service, and the US Census Bureau.

Lockheed Martin - counting some people, blowing other people up.

Rather infamously up here in Canada, Lockheed Martin developed and supplied the data-analyzing software to Statistics Canada that scanned the 2006 census forms using “optic recognition” software and helped rework the program for the 2011 count - sparking fears that famous motto meant census info about Canadians would be funnelled to their biggest client via the Patriot Act.

Today, 89-year-old WW2 war veteran and peace activist Audrey Tobias is in court for refusing to fill in her 2006 and 2011 census. If convicted, Tobias will refuse to accept a fine or community service on the grounds that either would be an admission of guilt. It's jail for her or nothing. 
Her refusal is based on her dislike of LM and their cluster bombs :

“Giving it to a foreign military company sends a message to the Canadian people from our prime minister and cabinet that he supports military solutions. I didn’t like that,” she said.

She doesn't care about the possible invasion of her privacy by the NSA via Lockheed Martin but her lawyer will. 


Lockheed Martin press release, April 2013 :

"Lockheed Martin is a leading provider of cyber security technology and services to the NSA and a number of defense and intelligence agencies."

From 2008 : 

"American officials are pressuring the federal government to supply them with more information on Canadians, says an influential analyst on Canada-U.S. relations."Not only about routine individuals, but also about people that you may be looking at for reasons, but there's no indictment and there's no charge," Christopher Sands of the Hudson Institute told a security intelligence conference."

Back in 2006, President of Lockheed Martin’s Americas Region and former Pentagon advisor to Dick Cheney, Ron Covais, was succinct on the subject of integrating corporations like his into the US and Canadian governments :

"We've decided not to recommend any things that would require legislative changes," says Covais. "Because we won't get anywhere."

A LM presser on its relationship to Canada refers to "the development of a North American defense industrial base" :

"Beyond our defence partnerships, Lockheed Martin Corporation stands ready to continue and grow our support to Canada's Census, health care management, information technology, as well as infrastructure and border security to ensure the safe, secure and efficient transit of people, goods and services between Canada and the US."

Health care management? Yeah, they do that too. 

And didn't you guys just get hacked by China a couple of years ago?

In 2010, Tony Clement announced he would "introduce legislation this fall to remove threats of jail time for persons refusing to fill out the census and all mandatory surveys administered by the federal government." But then he didn't.

Fun juxtaposition  : The witness for the Crown against Tobias -Yves Beland, operations director at Statistics Canada - says he has never heard of Edward Snowden and testified that all Canadian census data is completely safe from Lockheed Martin.

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Wed. Oct 9 Update : Tobias acquitted!

"The judge also described the Justice Department's decision to prosecute Tobias, a Second World War veteran, as a "PR disaster."

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Get Your NSA On, Romulans!

Techdirt: NSA Chief Begs His Public To Help Agency 'Get The Facts Out'

Apparently sitting in the captain's chair on the bridge of the USS Surveillance* has lost its thrill.  

Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency, called Wednesday on the public to help defend his agency's powers as Congress mulls restrictions aimed at protecting privacy. 

He warned that if Congress hampers the NSA's ability to gather information, it could allow for terrorist attacks in the United States similar to last week's massacre in a mall in Nairobi, Kenya. 

"If you take those [surveillance powers] away, think about the last week and what will happen in the future," he said. "If you think it's bad now, wait until you get some of those things that happened in Nairobi." 

Yeah, just you wait. 'Some of those things' like the Boston Marathon bombing or the Navy Yard shooting - things like that. 

Meanwhile here at home, it has now been two weeks since Canadian media declined to make any mention whatsoever of an NSA agreement purporting to share raw data with Israel  - data which 

"includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content."

So - likely emails and phone calls as well then.

Not to worry though. 

The Israelis were required to “destroy upon recognition” any communication “that is either to or from an official of the US government“. Such communications included those of “officials of the executive branch (including the White House, cabinet departments, and independent agencies), the US House of Representatives and Senate (member and staff) and the US federal court system (including, but not limited to, the supreme court)”.

So that's the important USians taken care of. What about the rest of us?

The doc specifies that US citizens are not to be targeted and that the NSA has agreements with its Five Eyes partners - Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK - to protect information on their citizens and that Israel should respect those privacy agreements when looking through the data.

That must be why our media wasn't fussed enough to mention it.

Get Your NSA On, Star Trek Fantasy Spy Centre

Get Your NSA On, Zombies

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CSEC presents Hackfest

Nope, not a photoshop this time. It's CSEC, the Canadian government's version of the NSA, presenting a hacker conference for computer security enthusiasts this November in Quebec. [h/t Lux ex Umbra] 
Events scheduled for Hackfest Strikes Back include :

• Hide yo Apache, hide yo SSH cause they backdoorin’ everybody out there
• Bypassing Security Controls with Mobile Devices
• Bypassing whitelisting/blacklisting, anti-virus, and other preventative technologies
• Bypassing Security Defenses – Secret Penetration Testing Techniques - $995.

And a panel discussion : "How can researchers make money selling vulnerabilities? Should they or is it extortion?"

A talk titled Why the NSA should have every vulnerability by now explains :

"High budgeted intelligence organizations, such as the NSA, will not help fix vulnerabilities, only find as many as possible. The intention is to use these vulnerabilities for offensive operations and fixing them is counter-intuitive to that goal."

Difficult to escape the irony here.

In 2006 CSEC was entrusted with overseeing the global encryption standards process for 163 countries. CSEC handed those keys to the NSA, which promptly used them to insert vulnerabilities and backdoors to allow them to spy on foreign companies and governments. The NY Times quotes an NSA memo on how they pwned CSEC:

"... beginning the journey was a challenge in finesse. After some behind-the-scenes finessing with the head of the Canadian national delegation and with C.S.E., the stage was set for N.S.A. to submit a rewrite of the draft … Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor.”

And now CSEC presents workshops and panel discussions on the efficacy and ethics of profiting from those same backdoors and vulnerabilities. 

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Update : Dear CSEC : Stop bullshitting us.
When Clapper was asked by the US Congress if the NSA spies on Americans he said no.
When CSEC was asked, CSEC chief John Forster answered :

“CSEC does not direct its activities at Canadians and is prohibited by law from doing so."

which completely ignores Part C of CSEC's own 3-part mandate in law [emphasis mine] :

1. to provide technical assistance to CSIS and Canadian law enforcement agencies;  

2. to assist CSIS under s. 16 of the CSIS Act; and  

3. to assist CSIS and Canadian law enforcement agencies by intercepting the communications of a Canadian/person in Canada that is subject to a CSIS warrant or authorization from law enforcement agencies.

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Get Your NSA On - Star Trek Fantasy Spy Centre

NSA director modeled war room after Star Trek's Enterprise

"When he was running the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, [Gen. Keith] Alexander brought many of his future allies down to Fort Belvoir for a tour of his base of operations, a facility known as the Information Dominance Center. It had been designed by a Hollywood set designer to mimic the bridge of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a "whoosh" sound when they slid open and closed. 

Lawmakers and other important officials took turns sitting in a leather "captain's chair" in the center of the room and watched as Alexander, a lover of science-fiction movies, showed off his data tools on the big screen.

"Everybody wanted to sit in the chair at least once to pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard," says a retired officer in charge of VIP visits."

Detailed photos of the Star Trek Fantasy Spy Center. 

Can't say I recognize the ubiquitous logo though. Anyone?

Glenn Greenwald : Inside the mind of NSA chief Gen Keith Alexander

Wired : The Secret War 

Foreign Policy Mag via Cryptome : The Cowboy of the NSA

Meanwhile, up here in Canada - there's this morning's G&M :

Wireless firms agree to give Ottawa ability to monitor calls, phone data

"For nearly two decades, Ottawa officials have told telecommunications companies that one of the conditions of obtaining a licence to use wireless spectrum is to provide government with the capability to bug the devices that use the spectrum...

 ... including eavesdropping, reading SMS texts, pinpointing users’ whereabouts, unscrambling some encrypted communications, phone logs and keystrokes. ...

Carriers that help their customers scramble communications must decrypt them. "Law enforcement requires that any type of encryption algorithm that is initiated by the service provider must be provided to the law-enforcement agency unencrypted."

 This in addition to Canada's CSEC partnering up with the NSA to weaken Internet encryption standards.

Yet somehow the real Pierre Poutine still eludes them.
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Get Your NSA On, Zombies!

NYTimes: New iPhone's Fingerprint Scanner : "Coming just one day after leaked documents suggested that the National Security Agency is able to hack into smartphones, the unveiling of a new iPhone with a built-in fingerprint scanner prompted dismay and mockery..."

Business Insider : NSA Slides Refer To iPhone Owners As 'Zombies'

Cryptome/ Spiegel Online: How the NSA Accesses Smartphone Data

See the NSA slides at both links above.

Tech Dirt : The NSA impersonates Google Servers

Reuters : Google Streetview captures emails, usernames, passwords

And, as noted by Agent Smith above, it's all turning into a giant hairball :

The NSA Machine: Too Big For Anyone to Understand ... including the NSA

Ok, the Canadian CSEC connection ...

The NSA has deliberately weakened encryption on the net by, among other attacks, introducing encryption vulnerabilities and an NSA backdoor into the standards set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and used by banks, corporations, governments, and individual people to protect sensitive data sent over the internet.
NY Times, Sept 10 :

"Canada’s Communications Security Establishment ran the standards process for the international organization, but classified documents describe how ultimately the N.S.A. seized control.  

"After some behind-the-scenes finessing with the head of the Canadian national delegation and with C.S.E., the stage was set for N.S.A. to submit a rewrite of the draft,” the memo notes. “Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor."

Bill Robinson at Lux ex Umbra, a Canadian authority on CSEC, does not believe CSEC was duped into this by the NSA but rather 

"CSE and the NSA worked hand-in-glove to game the standards process."

Update : CSEC responds to Jesse Brown at Maclean's and declines to deny that they were "finessed" by the NSA into betraying global encryption standards.
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Get Your NSA On - Five Eyes and an Ear and A Mouth

The NSA is breaking the internet

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The Washington Post reveals that the NSA spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year paying private companies for access to large fiber optic communications backbones - part of the agency's Corporate Partner Access Project.

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NSA is breaking the internet

Testifying before the US Senate last month, NSA Deputy Director John Inglis conceded that the bulk collection of phone records of millions of Americans under Section 215 of the Patriot Act has been key in stopping only one terror plot.

But then it never was just about phones and national security, was it?

In his 2013 Budget Intelligence Request, NSA director James Clapper - who lied to the US Congress under oath about the scope of secret surveillance and was then appointed by Obama to an independent review board to investigate his own agency - advised :

“We are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic." 

"The SIGINT Enabling Project actively engages the US and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products' designs. These design changes make the systems in question exploitable through SIGINT collection with foreknowledge of the modification. To the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems' security remains intact."

"the consumer and other adversaries"

Under a section for release to Five Eyes - that's us!

Insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems, IT systems, networks ...
Collect target network data and metadata via cooperative network carriers...

The joint Guardian NYTimes ProPublica release yesterday doesn't tell us who those "co-operative" network carriers and IT systems are - publish the names! - but the NSA is pretty clear about their own role - weakening encryption standards and writing code with backdoors in them for security vendors . 

The NSA/GCHQ help them build the locks to keep your data safe; then the government gets one key and you get the other one.

The possibility for corruption and breaches of security built into a system that includes scoping out cell phones, tablets, Facebook, emails, web searches, medical and banking data are endless - industrial espionage, blackmailing political figures, fixing elections, corrupting markets, internet scams ...

"Snowden, one of 850,000 people in the US with top-secret clearance..."

And have any of these other 850,000 top-secret clearance people in what is already a massively corrupted security system taken it one stage farther and facilitated an internal black market for information about stocks, patents, trade deals, etc. within the larger market? Would there be any way of knowing? The NSA wouldn't know - they've already admitted to having no clue what Snowden took.

9/11 changed everything.  The Five Eyes govs upped the spying on their own citizens and started locking up whistleblowers while simultaneously supplying AlQaeda et al with arms, training, and money.

Nothing in the Canadian media about yesterday's release yet.
Update : National Post : NSA has now cracked common Internet encryption, including personal email and online banking
CBC : NSA cracked most online encryption says report

My fear is that we'll agree to ignore this assault on our privacy as long as the roving supply of cat videos doesn't dry up.

Ok - gotta go.  Some adversarial consumer Windows security patches have just automatically downloaded themselves onto my computer and I have to reboot for them to take effect. hey wait a minute ...

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Outsourcing to surveillance mercenaries

Claudio Guarnieri @ Big Brother Awards 2013 from Bits of Freedom on Vimeo. opens his talk with an ad from a surveillance company billing itself as "The hacking suite for governmental interception". 


Obama's first question from the press in Sweden today was on NSA spying.
Barry still going with :

"What I can say with confidence is that when it comes to our domestic operations, the concerns that people have back home … we do not surveil the American people or persons within the US. There are a lot of checks and balances in place designed to avoid a surveillance state. 

"We." Does that include the surveillance mercenaries that collect data for you?

"And I can give assurances to the public in Europe and around the world that we're not going around snooping at people's emails or listening to their phone calls. What we try to do is to target very specifically areas of concern."

"Specific areas of concern" apparently include alleged snooping the email correspondence and listening in on the private phone calls of the presidents of Mexico and Brazil.

Last month Obama appointed NSA director James Clapper- who lied under oath about the scope of secret surveillance - to an independent review board to investigate his own agency.
Hoo ha.
In his last budget request Clapper wrote : 

 “We are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic."

Also today WikiLeaks published 249 documents from 92 global intelligence contractors.

"These documents reveal how, as the intelligence world has privatised, US, EU and developing world intelligence agencies have rushed into spending millions on next-generation mass surveillance technology to target communities, groups and whole populations."

If you click on the handy map provided at WikiLeaks, you can check out the three Canadian companies named.

I've written before about US corporate surveillance of Creekside here.

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Surveillance theatre

Given the sheer pointlessness of :
1) destroying the Guardian copy of Snowden hard drive data after being informed there were two other copies in existence elsewhere anyway, and 
2) detaining Greenwald's partner Miranda for 9 hours under a terrorism statute when they knew he isn't a terrorist
we are reliably inclined to view this as a clear intent to intimidate the Guardian and Greenwald, as well as any other media with the audacity not to equate journalism with terrorism. 

But there may be another possibility.

In this Guardian article published earlier this month based on Edward Snowden's cache of docs, we learned the USA has supplemented the GCHQ's budget to the tune of 

"£100m over the last three years to secure access to and influence over Britain's intelligence gathering programmes" 

It contains a number of quotes from GCHQ officials wittering on about whether they were "seen to be pulling their weight" and doing enough to keep the NSA happy. The US is apparently pleased with the GCHQ's "selling point" as a "light oversight regime compared to the US", and also presumably with the UK's laws of prior restraint, not available in the US, to muzzle the British press. However the US had 

"raised a number of issues with regards to meeting NSA's minimum expectations". It said GCHQ "still remains short of the full NSA ask".

UK's biggest fear is that "US perceptions of the … partnership diminish, leading to loss of access, and/or reduction in investment … to the UK" 

GCHQ said that by 2013 it hoped to have "exploited to the full our unique selling points of geography, partnerships [and] the UK's legal regime" 

So as successful as the seemingly pointless tactics against Greenwald and the Guardian may yet prove to be as intimidation, it's possible the actual intent here was two acts of detain and destroy surveillance theatre designed to display GCHQ loyalty and usefulness to their heavy maintenance NSA investors. 
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News from Homelandia

There was a bit of a stink in the media a few days ago after US Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein tabled this map "produced by the NSA" purporting to show "the disruption of potential terrorist events at home and abroad" due to its vacuuming up of phone call logs.

At issue is the designation "Homeland" which includes Canada, Mexico, Central America, Cuba and Greenland. 
Commenters were quick to point out that the NSA was in fact using a pretty standard map of the seven continents here, but I notice that Europe, Africa, and Asia got to keep their continental designations while the NSA stuck the descriptor "Homeland" on North America. 

"Homelands" was the way the US described the 2008 Canada-US deal to allow each other's militaries to send troops across each other's borders during an emergency :
"USNorthCom : Defending Our Homelands"

USNORTHCOM’s AOR [area of responsibility] includes air, land and sea approaches and encompasses the continental United States, Alaska, Canada, Mexico and the surrounding water out to approximately 500 nautical miles.

Meanwhile, in Beyond the Border : A Shared Vision for Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness news, a Next-Generation pilot project would permit teams of cross-designated officers to operate on both sides of the border, but there's a glitch...
The Star, July 30 :

"The United States wants its police officers to be exempt from Canadian law if they agree to take part in a highly touted cross-border policing initiative, an internal RCMP memo says.

The debate over whose laws would apply to U.S. officers working in Canada raises important questions of sovereignty and police accountability, says the briefing note prepared for RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson. "

... a highly censored memo, btw, that's from October 2012 and only came to light under an Access to Information request.

Back in 2004, the FBI announced in an internal audit that it was giving :

agents in its Buffalo field office clearance to conduct "routine investigations" up to 50 miles into Canadian territory. 

and that 30% of those agents didn't get approval from Canada first. 

In 2006, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day proudly added that hey sometimes its even more than 50 miles and it's all legal.

Canadian officials say they have made no protest to the U.S. government about FBI agents operating without permission on Canadian soil.

Anyone still unclear how we got from FBI agents operating freelance in Canada as far back as 2004 to being asked to give FBI agents accredited as police officers in Canada immunity from Canadian law in 2012?
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Bonus : On May 16 this year Harper gave a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, that US bastion of Manifest Destiny, and took a follow-up question from former US Ambassador to Canada Gordon Giffin. Giffin said he wasn't suggesting outright "political or currency integration", but given it's been 10 years since NAFTA,
"Is there a chance at doing a bigger deal going forward?
Harper runs through the Beyond the Border achievements and blames the US for further lack of progress :

"Could they lead to something systemically more integrated? Look, I think on our side, they could. I think on our side, they could.  [...snip...]
I think the real barrier to making some of these arrangements broader and more systemic in terms of the integration are actually on this side of the border."

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NSA : At Microsoft, your privacy is our "team sport"

Feel free to drop by this Microsoft ad and give it a thumbs down.

"At Microsoft, your privacy is our priority." 

Indeed. About that ...

Guardian : How Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages

• Secret files show scale of Silicon Valley co-operation on Prism  

• Outlook.com encryption including Hotmail unlocked even before official launch 

• Skype worked to enable Prism collection of video calls 

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian. 

• In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;

• Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a "team sport".

US lawmakers, along with Microsoft, Skype, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Yahoo all initially attempted to deny knowledge of PRISM or that the intelligence agencies have back doors into their systems, explaining they are very occasionally under a legal compulsion to cough up customer data to comply with "existing and future lawful demands" in Microsoft's happy phrase, but this tiny ISP company bucked it and won.

Meanwhile ...

NSA Writes Code Used in Google Phone  [h/t West End Bob]

The tech giant Google has confirmed the National Security Agency furnished some of the code installed in its new Android phone. The NSA says the code is intended to enhance security against hackers and marketers, but will not confirm whether it also aids the agency’s PRISM program monitoring the global Internet.

Back to the Guardian :

"Blanket orders from the secret surveillance court allow these communications to be collected without an individual warrant if the NSA operative has a 51% belief that the target is not a US citizen and is not on US soil at the time."

That's us.

Michael Geist Feb 15 2012 on the situation in Canada : 

"[W]ith ISPs and telcos providing subscriber data without a warrant 95 percent of the time, there is a huge information disclosure issue with no reporting and no oversight. This is a major issue on its own, particularly since it is not clear whether these figures also include requests to Internet companies like Google and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.  

The RCMP alone made over 28,000 requests for customer name and address information in 2010. These requests go unreported - subscribers don't know their information has been disclosed and the ISPs and telecom companies aren't talking either."

If you'd like to opt out of the NSA and their "team sport", there are other options :

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Related from Saskboy : PRISM : Oliver Stone vs NSA and Checkpoints

"The question is not Do you have something to hide? The question is whether we control government or the government controls us."

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Did Canada spy on journos at the Toronto G8/20 summit?

Image from leaked UK Government Communications Headquarters briefing slide featuring the logos of Canadian, US, and UK signals intelligence spying agencies.

Ten days ago The Guardian published GCHQ briefing slides, courtesy of former NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden, revealing :

Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian. This included:
• Setting up internet cafes where they used an email interception programme and key-logging software to spy on delegates' use of computers;
• Penetrating the security on delegates' BlackBerrys to monitor their email messages and phone calls

The inclusion in the docs of the Communications Security Establishment Canada logo along side those of NSA and GCHQ, and the mention of bugged internet cafes and BlackBerrys, put me in mind of Canada's $2-million indoor fake lake built for the G8/20 the following year so that 3,000+ Canadian and foreign journos could, in Greg Weston's words at the time :

"file their reports ... their feet dangling in the water ... from only cottage dock in existence with bar service and high-speed Internet connections."

And according to Weston, they were all provided with free "special summit edition BlackBerrys" too.