Edward Snowden and "dick-pics"

Funny, sad, brilliant. 

John Oliver has done a very clever thing here ... and that's all I'm gonna say - just watch it.

Bonus: Ex-CIA John Kiriakou on Canada's intelligence safeguards: "You're kidding me."

Toronto lawyer Rocco Galati, whose privileged conversations with his clients were wiretapped three years ago : "It’s all a smokescreen. SIRC isn’t there to do anything but make it look like it’s doing something to oversee CSIS. Nobody is doing anything to oversee CSIS. They’re out-of-control renegades."

Andrew Mitrovica on Spies, lies and the myth of ‘oversight’ at CSIS

 "If CSIS can get away with bugging a lawyer’s phone calls with his client, imagine what the spy service will do when Bill C-51 becomes law."

Update :  Anon in comments : The photos of your junk will be publicized 
and also Boris' brilliance from comments below, reposted here. :

"2015 turned out to be a bizarre year for the surveillance state. 

In April, John Oliver interviewed Edward Snowden about the spy agencies spying and used a "dick pic" to make his point. Later, the Canadian government passed Bill C-51 giving its spy agency free reign. 

The "Dick Pic Revolution" began shortly thereafter and by December googling "dick pic" brought up over 500 trillion hits. It was estimated that 25-35% of all the penises in the world were now digitized and that fewer than 1% of searches would now be free of dick pics within the first 25 hits. 

Rebel hacker group Anonymous joined the fray by hacking into government and corporate email programs and installing a virus, later made available freely for any disgruntled government or corporate employee to install at their workplace, that would attach a random dick pic to every email sent from those addresses."

Heh. 
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A Tale of Eco-Surveillance

Ottawa Citizen June 4, 2014  Government orders federal departments to keep tabs on all demonstrations across country

"The federal government is expanding its surveillance of public activities to include all known demonstrations across the country, a move that collects information even on the most mundane of protests by Canadians.

The email requesting such information was sent out Tuesday by the Government Operations Centre in Ottawa to all federal departments.

“The Government Operations Centre is seeking your assistance in compiling a comprehensive listing of all known demonstrations which will occur either in your geographical area or that may touch on your mandate,” noted the email"

G&M Sept 14, 2014 Environmental extremism a rising threat to energy sector, RCMP warns

“Environmental ideologically motivated individuals including some who are aligned with a radical, criminal extremist ideology pose a clear and present criminal threat to Canada’s energy sector,” said the report, written in March 2011. Since then, the RCMP has held regular meetings with energy companies and federal officials to review potential threats to infrastructure

RCMP spokesman Greg Cox denied the force is targeting protesters or environmental groups in general

G&M Feb 17, 2015 : ‘Anti-petroleum’ movement a growing security threat to Canada, RCMP say :

"In highly charged language that reflects the government’s hostility toward environmental activists, an RCMP intelligence assessment warns that foreign-funded groups are bent on blocking oil sands expansion and pipeline construction, and that the extremists in the movement are willing to resort to violence.

RCMP spokesman Sergeant Greg Cox insisted the Mounties do not conduct surveillance unless there is suspicion of criminal conduct. 

“As part of its law enforcement mandate the RCMP does have the requirement to identify and investigate criminal threats, including those to critical infrastructure and at public events,” Sgt. Cox said in an e-mailed statement. “There is no focus on environmental groups, but rather on the broader criminal threats to Canada’s critical infrastructure. The RCMP does not monitor any environmental protest group. Its mandate is to investigate individuals involved in criminality.”

... the report which is stamped “protected/Canadian eyes only” and is dated Jan. 24, 2014."

Global, March 17, 2015 CSIS helped government deal with Northern Gateway protests

"Canada’s spy agency helped senior federal officials figure out how to deal with protests expected last summer in response to resource and energy development issues – including a pivotal decision on the Northern Gateway pipeline.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service prepared advice and briefing material for two June meetings of the deputy ministers’ committee on resources and energy"

CBC March 12, 2015 SFU Prof. Tim Takaro called by RCMP after taking photos near Kinder Morgan site

"A B.C. climate change scientist says he got an "intimidating" call from RCMP because he had taken pictures on Burnaby Mountain near the site of a proposed [Trans Mountain] Kinder Morgan pipeline.

Tim Takaro, a health sciences professor at SFU, says he was having lunch in Tofino with his family on Wednesday when his daughter's [unlisted] cellphone rang. When she answered it, she was told it was the Burnaby RCMP calling and they were looking for her father."

Prof. Takaro works at SFU on Burnaby Mountain. He was taking pictures in a public park.
You can listen to his account at the link.

Some good news ...
Forum Research and VICE have a poll out today on plummeting support for Bill C-51 from 1370 online Canadian voters surveyed March 13 and 14th :

"When asked their approval of a number of specific provisions of bill C51, the majority disapprove of the Bill allowing security services to infiltrate and track environmentalists, First Nations and pipeline protesters (61%)"  

Support for tracking and infiltrating environmentalists, FN, and pipeline protesters came from Alberta (32%) and federal conservatives (56%)

Support for the overall stiffer legislation of C-51 (just under half of respondents) :

"is common to the oldest (62%), the wealthy ($80K to $100K - 62%), in Quebec (72%), among Conservative voters (84%), Bloquistes (76%), the least educated (74%), mothers of children under 18 (65%), Catholics (72%) and Evangelicals (82%)."

Figures.
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Here's looking at you, kid

Nine out of 12 big telecoms in Canada deigned to reply to Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart with info about their disclosure of customer data to law enforcement in 2011

• Law enforcement agencies made 1,193,630 requests for subscriber data in 2011
• Or, one request every 27 seconds
• Three telecom providers alone disclosed information from 785,000 customer accounts
• If each request had been for a different subscriber, that would work out to one in every 28 Canadians including babies
• In 2010, 94% of RCMP requests for name and address were made without a warrant
• Customers are not informed their private info has been disclosed
• At least one telecom appears to have instituted a special law enforcement direct access database

And this info, these figures, are three years old.
Meanwhile the Cons look to expand that cozy relationship with two new bills :

• Bill C-13, the cyberbullying bill, will also give immunity from civil or criminal liability to telecoms coughing up info without a warrant
• Bill S- 4 extends the ability to disclose subscriber info without a warrant to private sector organizations as well

As telecom customers, we're paying them twice to peddle our info - once when we pay the telecoms to collect the info about us and deliver it to law enforcement and again when law enforcement agencies use our taxes to pay the telecoms for the info.

The irony here is how important privacy and anonymity are to the telecoms - their own at least.
Their response to Stoddart included the strategy of having their answers collated by a law firm and delivered to her as a bulk package that doesn't identify which telecom provided each piece of info. Why? To preserve their own privacy and anonymity.

Remember when we were aghast to learn that there was a "Canadian Special Source" providing CSEC with wifi data on random Canadians as part of a 2012 airport surveillance exercise? Ah the good old days of three whole months ago. 

Want to know what your telco has divulged about you? They are compelled by law to respond to you with something if you ask as an individual subscriber to their services.
Citizen Law provides a template letter and the telco contact details to send it to. Takes just a few seconds. When I get my response, I'll post it.

h/t  Lux ex Umbra and Michael Geist
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Dragnet Nation

A lengthy excerpt from Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin, Pulitzer Prize winner, WSJ biz and tech writer, and now an investigative reporter for Pro Publica :
 Here’s How You May Already Be Getting Hacked

It's one thing to take for granted that we are all now being tracked via our cel phones, online banking and forums, voter lists, health file records, Google searches, Whole Foods digital signs that are actually facial recognition scanners,  etc.
Verizon even sells a product that allows businesses to track cell phone users in malls.

But it's quite another to read the stories of innocent people including minors who have found themselves outed, in virtual police line-ups, photographed in their bathrooms and while they were sleeping, blackmailed - all without their knowledge or being sloppy about their online privacy. 
The teenagers who were spied on at home by their school via webcam spyware installed on the laptops given out by the school - neither they nor their parents signed up for or knew about it.

News to me was that if you go online price shopping, retailers vary their prices to you depending on their assessment of your financial worth based on your geographic location.

Angwin's book primarily addresses privacy considerations in the US but as Steve is fond of saying - the War on Drugs and the GWOT, those bullshit policies and programs which fueled these invasions of our privacy right alongside the tech that made that made them possible, know no national boundaries.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association is hosting a symposium : "Helping Canadians Find Pathways to Privacy" at UofT on March 20 and 21. Free to public but you have to register. To be webcast later.
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CSEC : Get Your Plouffe On!

CBC : CSEC exoneration a 'mockery of public accountability'

"The CSEC watchdog, headed on a part-time basis by a semi-retired judge, Jean-Pierre Plouffe, concluded:  “No CSEC activity was directed at Canadians or persons in Canada…that would be illegal.” 

Plouffe’s office says its investigation exonerating CSEC consisted almost entirely of talking to CSEC."

Lux ex Umbra : Q: Why did CSEC spy on Canadian wi-fi?  A: It's all good!
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Edward Snowden interview

Wed. Feb 5 Update : Video removed at source from Vimeo last night, leaving the above note in its place on Creekside. Alternate copy of Snowden interview can be seen here.

Great interview recorded a week ago, including a few choice words applicable to recent revelations about CSEC scooping up Canadians' IP IDs and tracking them across airports, hotels, conference centres, coffee shops, and libraries, and DefMin Rob Nicholson's response.

"What we saw initially in response to the revelations was sort of a circling of the wagons of government ...  Instead of circling around the public and protecting their rights, the political class circled around the security state and protected their rights."

"The Five Eyes alliance is sort of an artefact of the post-WW2 era where the anglophone countries of the major powers banded together to co-operate and share the costs of intelligence gathering infrastructure. So we have the UK's GCHQ, we have the US NSA, we have Canada's CSEC, we have Australia's Signals Intelligence Directorate and we have New Zealand's DSD. What the result of this was over decades and decades was a supranational intelligence organization that doesn't answer to the laws of its own countries." 

"The key is to remember that the surveillance and the abuse doesn't occur when people look at the data, it occurs when people gather the data in the first place."

There have been complaints of this interview disappearing off Vimeo and being entirely erased from Youtube, the latter possibly for copyright reasons. Should this one go down however, here's an alternate copy.
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CSEC : Spy vs. WiFi

So what exactly have we learned here from this 2012 CSEC pilot project that tracked wireless devices across airports, hotels, conference centres, coffee shops, and libraries, starting from a "single Canadian airport WiFi IP address" and "two weeks worth of IP-ID data" from a "Special Canadian Source", using ">300,000 active IDs over two weeks" in a "modest size city" as a control group?

1.  As Defence Minister Rob Nicholson, CSEC, and CSEC watchdog commissioner Plouffe have all now explained to us, CSEC wasn't "tracking" these Canadians because that would be illegal and our privacy is important to them.

2. If you haven't been issued a special decoder ring providing a CSECret definition of the words "tracking" and "metadata", whose fault is that?

3. If you are a hypothetical kidnapper from a rural area coming to the big city to make your three ransom phone calls - carefully spaced exactly 40 hours apart as seen in the nice CSEC powerpoint spreadsheet - at least try to blend in with the rest of the internet by forwarding some cat pictures around as well so your lone ransom calls don't stick out like a sore thumb.

If you don't much care for forwarding cat pictures, use a friggin' payphone.

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Sat AM update : For those of you wondering what the fuck Calandra meant in the House yesterday when he called Glenn Greenwald, co-journalist on the CBC exposé, "a porn spy" - it's the Canadian nonsense version of "espionage pornographer", used two weeks ago by American Enterprise Institute's Marc Thiessen to describe whistleblower Edward Snowden.  

I guess the PMO thought Thiessen's version sounded too elitist.    h/t Techdirt

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Sun AM update : Ryan Gallagher, one of the three journos on the original CBC piece, parses the CSEC and gov reaction. 

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The always incisive Lux Ex Umbra looks at how we should interpret CSEC's mandate now. 

If, as CSEC seems to maintain, its collection of metadata is both legally within its mandate and likely to be upheld by the courts, then it would appear :

1. there is no upper limit to collection of that data
2. the section of its mandate referring to not directing its operations "at Canadians or any person in Canada" does not apply, and  
3. given that part 3 of CSEC's mandate is to assist CSIS, the RCMP, CBSA, and other intelligence agencies, do those agencies require a separate warrant to access CSEC's metadata collection?

And a question of my own - Does this metadata automatically get shared with FiveEyes?

Or to put it more dramatically - is Skynet operational now?

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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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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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CSEC spies on Canadians : watchdog report

While whistleblower Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald have published reports about the USA's NSA and UK's GCHQ joint electronic surveillance of Brits and Americans, we've been pretty much in the dark in Canada about our own government's surveillance of us.

An annual report tabled two days ago from the independent watchdog commissioner for Canada's electronic eavesdropping agency Communications Security Establishment Canada elicited the following timid headlines repeated throughout yesterday's press coverage.

Post Media : Canadians may be victims of illicit spying 

NaPo : Canada’s spy agency may have illegally targeted Canadians: watchdog 

CBC : Security watchdog says agency may be spying on Canadians  

Star : Eavesdropping agency may have spied on Canadians, watchdog says

Whoa. "May be spying on Canadians"? "may"?   Which report did they read?

Several of the articles quote this reaction from a spokesy for DefMin Rob Nicholson :

 "The privacy of Canadians is of utmost importance. CSEC is prohibited by law from directing its activities at Canadians anywhere in the world or at any person in Canada."

Sure. Part (a) of CSEC's mandate** prohibits spying on "any person in Canada" or Canadians anywhere in the world.
Part (b) is a little looser, permitting CSEC to use information acquired by the Government of Canada system owners to protect their computer systems from mischief.

But Part (c) ... Part (c) specifically directs CSEC on when it may spy on Canadians on behalf of CSIS.

Communications Security Establishment Commissioner, 
Annual Report 2012 - 2013

CSEC assistance to CSIS under part (c) of CSEC’s mandate (Page 21)

In 2009 ... the Honourable Justice Richard Mosley*** ... issued the first warrant permitting CSIS to intercept the communications of Canadians located outside Canada using the interception capabilities of CSEC ... from within Canada.This assistance includes CSEC supporting CSIS with the interception of Canadians’ communications if CSIS has a judicially authorized warrant. 

CSIS is authorized to collect threat-related information about Canadian persons and others and, as discussed above, is not subject to territorial limitation.

...  the collection of the information by CSIS with CSE[C] assistance, as proposed, falls within the legislative scheme approved by Parliament and does not offend the Charter.
CSEC’s assistance to CSIS under the warrants may include use of Canadian identity information and the interception of the communications of Canadians.

So what's with these timid headlines, national press? Are you suggesting that while CSEC was permitted to spy on Canadians for CSIS, they didn't actually do any?

No, obviously not. Page 24 :

During the period under review, CSEC responded appropriately to two related privacy incidents it identified involving the unintentional release of Canadian identity information of some of the subjects of the warrants. 

 ... another incident involv[ed] the interception of communications for CSIS for a small number of days after a particular warrant had expired [due to] unintentional human error 

 Page 27 : the amount and treatment of private communications and Canadian identity information acquired by the activities as well as a sample of those private communications and Canadian identity information used by CSEC

Private Communication: “any oral communication, or any telecommunication, that is made by an originator who is in Canada or is intended by the originator to be received by a person who is in Canada"

Page 33 : In 2012, CSEC started using a new on-line secure system to process requests for and disclosures of Canadian identity information. CSEC provided my employees with a demonstration of the system, which is currently used with CSEC’s principal clients. CSEC intends to extend its use to other partners starting in the coming fiscal year. 

Headlines later on in the day gave us the CSEC response : 

Ottawa Citizen : CSEC Says It Is Not Breaking The Rules About Spying On Canadians  

PostMedia : In wake of spying allegations, Communications Security Establishment Canada insists it didn’t break law

No, CSEC isn't breaking the rules but only because those rules allow it to spy on Canadians while working under the guidelines of CSIS. 
But they don't say that, do they? Instead we get weasel crap like this :

“The commissioner’s statement about a lack of records is a reference to a single review of a small number of records gathered in the early 2000s, in relation to activities directed at a remote foreign location,” the agency said in an emailed response.

Yes, part of the commissioner's complaint is directed at incomplete records in "early years". Doesn't exactly address CSEC spying on Canadians since though, does it?

So how did all you reporters at different media outlets all separately decide to downplay the watchdog commissioner's report on electronic surveillance of Canadians to "may be" spying?

Yes, I realize he wrote a nice positive preamble about how he sees himself as working with CSEC on a "complementarity" not an adversarial basis, "more as CSEC’s conscience than as a sword of Damocles" and how he's been quite pleased with the results.   Further he writes that "where I have no mandate to follow-up, I may refer questions to SIRC that concern CSIS".

We recently learned that since 2009, CSEC - as a Five Eyes intelligence partner with the US, UK, New Zealand, and Australia alongside CSIS, RCMP, and CBSA - has been authorized to exchange intelligence with other nations even if there is “substantial risk” that sending info to or requesting info from a foreign agency would result in torture ... just as long as a deputy minister or agency head gives it the ok. 

What happened to Maher Arar - once so shocking to all of us - has a legal basis here now.

So you reporters in the Canadian media can't be letting us down like this.  
Read the friggin report - it's only 46 pages long.


More from POGGE : On watchdogs with no bite.

**CSEC’s mandate [Page 9 from Commissioner Robert Décary's report ]

When the Anti-terrorism Act came into effect on December 24, 2001, it added Part V.1 to the National Defence Act, and set out CSEC’s three-part mandate:  

• part (a) authorizes CSEC to acquire and use foreign signals intelligence in accordance with the Government of Canada’s intelligence priorities;  

• part (b) authorizes CSEC to help protect electronic information and information infrastructures of importance to the Government of Canada; and 

• part (c) authorizes CSEC to provide technical and operational assistance to federal law enforcement and security agencies, including helping them obtain and understand communications collected under those agencies’ own lawful authorities.

***The Honourable Justice Richard Mosley was a primary architect in the drafting of the 2001 Anti-Terror Act and more recently the judge in the six-riding election fraud case.
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Sunday update : Michael Geist :

"Canadian domestic communications that travel from one Canadian location to another may still transit through the U.S. and thus be captured by U.S. surveillance. Despite these risks, Bell requires other Canadian Internet providers to exchange Internet traffic outside the country at U.S. exchange points, ensuring that the data is potentially subject to U.S. surveillance."

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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