Here’s a new and potentially explosive twist to our ongoing surveillance saga: according to CBC News, documents obtained by NSA leaker Edward Snowden show that the Canadian signals intelligence agency has been using free airport Wi-Fi to spy on travellers.
This is big because the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) is not supposed to spy on Canadians, just like its partners in the other “Five Eyes” espionage ring – the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand – aren’t supposed to spy on their citizens.
CSEC claims all it’s been scooping up is metadata – details of who called whom and when, if we’re talking phone calls, or which websites the user visits – rather than the content of communications. However, as everyone has come to realize since the Snowden fiasco kicked off almost 8 months ago, metadata is all you need to paint a pretty accurate picture of a person’s relationships, activities, routine and intent.
Frustrating lack of detail
CBC hasn’t published the documents it’s referring to yet – freelance journalist Glenn Greenwald says it will do so shortly — but the report suggests that the documents don’t explain precisely what it is CSEC is doing.
The 2012 PowerPoint presentation apparently refers to a particular yet unidentified Canadian airport, where CSEC was able to somehow use the free Wi-Fi system to “track the wireless devices of thousands of ordinary airline passengers for days after they left the terminal.” This tracking took place as targets subsequently used other public Wi-Fi facilities, in libraries, hotels, coffee shops and so on.
Whatever it is CSEC was doing, it was possibly cutting-edge stuff and it worked. CSEC’s documents refer to the technique as “game-changing” – which may of course be Canada’s spies bragging to their partners – and CBC’s sources suggest it is now operational on a wider scale.
The documents also refer to a separate pilot project, in which CSEC “obtained access to two communications systems with more than 300,000 users, and was then able to ‘sweep’ an entire mid-sized Canadian city to pinpoint a specific imaginary target in a fictional kidnapping.”
CBC’s report quotes Canadian security expert Ronald Deibert as saying CSEC’s activities are almost certainly unlawful under the agency’s mandate, and Canadian privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian – author of the “privacy by design” principles and something of an international guru on the subject – as saying the spying “resembles the activities of a totalitarian state, not a free and open society.”
Turbulent times
While none of the Five Eyes countries has announced any meaningful reforms in the wake of the Snowden revelations – Obama’s recent speech really doesn’t count for much — the heads of a couple of agencies have recently announced they are standing down. Entirely coincidentally, you understand.
The most recent is Sir Iain Lobban, the director of the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). GCHQ announced on Tuesday that Lobban would leave at the end of the year – a move that was apparently “planned”.
Over in the U.S., the White House confirmed on Thursday that Navy Vice Admiral Michael Rogers was Obama’s nominee to succeed Army General Keith “Emperor” Alexander at the helm of the NSA. In October, Alexander announced his imminent retirement this coming March or April, in a move that was also allegedly “planned”. Alexander’s civilian deputy, John Inglis, left his post at the end of December.
The international diplomatic repercussions of the surveillance scandal continue to cause pain for the governments behind it. This week, newly-revealed documents showed the U.S. government used the NSA to spy on participants at the 2009 U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen , strengthening the U.S.’s hand in negotiations. This has particularly irked developing countries that took part in the talks.
And last week, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) decided to fast-track legal action waged against the British government by privacy campaigners, who see GCHQ’s indiscriminate tapping of the world’s internet arteries as perhaps not entirely legal.
FUN FACT: British Prime Minister David Cameron told a parliamentary committee on Thursday that his enthusiasm for surveillance was inspired by cop shows. He said:
” “I love watching crime drama on the television, as I should probably stop telling people. There is hardly a crime drama that is not solved without using the data of a mobile communications device. If we don’t modernise the practice and the law over time we will have the communications data to solve these horrible crimes on a shrinking proportion of the total use of the devices. That is a real problem for keeping people safe. At the start of the next parliament, we have got to build a cross-party case for legislation to deal with this.”
via Gigaom http://ift.tt/1jRqbV6
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