Casey Harper
Daily Caller: April 20, 2015

A detective’s court testimony Monday revealed that Baltimore law enforcement is spying on residents at an incredible rate without a warrant — and doing their best to hide it.

Detective Michael Dressel testified that Baltimore law enforcement have used “sting rays”–devices that track personal cell phone data and location–more than 4,300 times with court orders and an undocumented number of times without them, The Baltimore Sun reports.

“This is scandalous,” Tim Lynch, the Cato Institute’s Director for the Project on Criminal Justice, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Police agencies have misled the public about how the stingray devices have been used and how often. We need to find out what has been happening in other cities around the country. FBI officials and police chiefs need to come clean about this.”

The testimony came in a murder case where law enforcement used sting rays to find a phone involved in the alleged murder. Sting rays are devices used by authorities that act like cell phone towers, intercepting cell phone signals that would normally go to cellular towers. This allows authorities to track where you are, usually without a warrant and often even without a court order. Some sting rays can even detect information about your texts, calls and emails.

Local police departments obtain these devices from federal agencies but only on the condition that they keep the entire project entirely hidden from the public. In fact, police often drop charges or offer plea bargains in cases related to sting rays when pressured by defense lawyers or judges to reveal how they work.

In one Florida case, prosecutors who had what seemed an open and shut robbery case offered the defendant a plea bargain when pressured on police’s use of sting rays.

They would rather drop the charge than expose the practice. Because of this, how the devices work and how often they are used is one of law enforcement’s best kept secrets.

(read the full article at Daily Caller)

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Press For Truth : March 25, 2015

Leaked documents have revealed that the Communications Security Establishment has been “creating unrest by using false-flags” This could include using ‘honeypot’ or ‘watering hole’ techniques as well as disrupting online traffic by such techniques as deleting emails, freezing internet connections, blocking websites and redirecting wire money transfers.

(Source: Press For Truth)
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Communication Security Establishment’s cyberwarfare toolbox revealed

By Amber Hildebrandt, Michael Pereira and Dave Seglins
CBC News: March 23, 2015

Top-secret documents obtained by the CBC show Canada’s electronic spy agency has developed a vast arsenal of cyberwarfare tools alongside its U.S. and British counterparts to hack into computers and phones in many parts of the world, including in friendly trade countries like Mexico and hotspots like the Middle East.

The little known Communications Security Establishment wanted to become more aggressive by 2015, the documents also said.

Revelations about the agency’s prowess should serve as a “major wakeup call for all Canadians,” particularly in the context of the current parliamentary debate over whether to give intelligence officials the power to disrupt national security threats, says Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, the respected internet research group at University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

“These are awesome powers that should only be granted to the government with enormous trepidation and only with a correspondingly massive investment in equally powerful systems of oversight, review and public accountability,” says Deibert.

Details of the CSE’s capabilities are revealed in several top-secret documents analyzed by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, a U.S. news website co-founded by Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who obtained the documents from U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The CSE toolbox includes the ability to redirect someone to a fake website, create unrest by pretending to be another government or hacker, and siphon classified information out of computer networks, according to experts who viewed the documents.

The agency refused to answer questions about whether it’s using all the tools listed, citing the Security of Information Act as preventing it from commenting on such classified matters.

In a written statement, though, it did say that some of the documents obtained by CBC News were dated and do “not necessarily reflect current CSE practices or programs.”

Canada’s electronic spy agency and the U.S. National Security Agency “cooperate closely” in “computer network access and exploitation” of certain targets, according to an April 2013 briefing note for the NSA.

(read the full article at CBC)

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H.G. Watson
rabble: March 15, 2015

[…]Why did you want to travel all the way to Toronto to be a part of the protests against Bill C-51?

Chris Hedges: I’ve been fighting you know the [erosion] of civil liberties in the United States for a long time. I sued president Obama over section 1021 of the National Defence Authorization Act, which permits the U.S. military overturning over 150 years of law to carry out domestic policing on American city streets, to seize American citizens who “substantially support” the Taliban, Al Qaeda or something called associated forces — another kind of nebulous phrase — strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military facilities.

I was also part of the lawsuit that worked its way up to the Supreme Court on warrantless wire-tapping. I covered the Stasi state in East Germany, I spent 20 years in some of the most despotic regimes around the globe as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and I think because of that, understand that this is not the kind of power that you ever want to give to a government. 

We can’t talk about free citizens in the state where everyone has all of their electronic forms of communication not only monitored, but stored in perpetuity in government computers. It doesn’t matter if they’re not using it. History has shown that if the government feels threatened or they seek greater control — and I think that is the trajectory of the corporate state — they will use it. The goal of wholesale surveillance, and something that Hannah Arendt wrote about in The Origins of Totalitarianism, is not to discover crimes but to give information to the government that it can use if it decides to arrest a certain category of the population. I think this is extremely grave.

What I find disturbing is that although the revelations of Edward Snowden are known, we’re not reacting. We don’t understand the danger that’s in front of it, when you talk about a population that is watched and tracked 24 hours a day. The relationship between a population that is monitored on that level and knows that [the government watches] them is a relationship between masters and slaves — you can’t even use the word liberty anymore and we’re already at that point.

I want to go back to the point you mentioned, that we’re not reacting. Why do you think that is?

People are politically passive because they have kind of given up on the system. That’s certainly true — more true — in the United States where Congress has a nine per cent approval rating. Only 38 per cent of the population even bothers to cast a ballot anymore. I think the other thing is that they don’t quite understand how incredibly dangerous handing any government this kind of power is.

So I think it’s those two factors, coupled with the fact [that] our mass radical movements — more so again in the United States, but Canada is not immune to this — have been largely broken. Labour unions are under assault, and I find that frightening. 

That’s why I was willing to fly up here because if we don’t react in a sustained way then we will see cemented into place one of the most frightening dystopias in human history — something that dwarfs anything ever dreamed of by the communist Stasi state in East Germany.

In terms of this particular bill, do you think that this fits into a wider trend of similar legislation in the western world?

Of course it fits into a wider trend — not only into the western world but in Canada. Canadians are monitored as closely as U.S. citizens are as closely as British citizens or any other. This is a global phenomenon and the corporate state — and Harper is representative of the corporate power and the corporate state — seeks this kind of control because they know what is coming with climate change and the inevitable financial collapse that is looming now that global speculators are back on a spree as they were before 2008. With a flick of a switch essentially we have both the legal and physical mechanisms through the creation of massive security forces — militarized police forces — to in essence declare a militarized state both in Canada and the United States. Or should we have another catastrophic act of domestic terrorism anything like that, all the mechanisms are there… we have to fight it now.

So do you think that this bill will actually will do anything towards its stated goal of combatting terrorism?

None of these bills are about terrorism. Terrorism is the excuse. That’s what 9/11 was and that’s what this gunman who carried out this attack on Parliament Hill — they seize on that the same way, for instance, the Nazi party seized on the Reichstag fire to strip away civil liberties in Germany. What people forget is that the next day, after the Nazis essentially eviscerated all civil liberties for the German population, everything appeared normal. Everyone went to work; came home; had dinner. They had ceded to themselves this kind of power in the name of fighting terrorism.

But for most people there’s a kind of normalcy and they don’t quite yet understand what a sea change this has been, and how dramatic this change is, and of course how terrifying it is. Totalitarian systems, they creep forward because they have to break any kind of obstacles or opposition that lie in their path. By the time people grasp what has happened to them, its kind of too late. There are no mechanisms left by which they can fight back. That’s kind of where we’re headed; that’s what is going on.

In what ways can we combat this kind of surveillance?

Well I’ve spent a lot of time with Julian Assange, who believes in encryption up to a point. Even Assange says finally the best encryptors — and he is one of them — will finally not be able to keep channels of privacy open. So he’s kind of optimistic in the short term but not in the long term.

I don’t encrypt. Rather than trying to build a parallel encryption mechanism I think what we have to do is carry out sustained and long term acts of civil disobedience in order to try and force the state to back down. I think that’s the only hope we have left. I think that we have to build radical mass movements and radical alternatives. Political parties I don’t trust. I see with the Democrats, they will, under the bush administration, decry the assault on civil liberties, but Obama’s assault on civil liberties has been far more egregious than that carried out by Bush. I don’t think the traditional political establishment has any intention — I can’t speak for Canada, I’m not Canadian, but that is certainly true in the United States that neither the Republican nor the Democrats have any intention of rolling any of this back 

You’ve written a little bit about radicalization and how it really stems from alienation from society. Do you think Bill C-51 that can contribute to radicalization in Canada?

Of course it does because what you do is you target a certain segment of the population and Muslims have already been targeted in the United States and Canada for harassment and abuse and discrimination even though they haven’t done anything. This breeds a kind of rage, especially among the young who feel caught between two cultures already and then feel alienated from two cultures. This feeds into exactly the propaganda that jihadists hand out, which is why you have roughly 20,000 foreign fighters with ISIS, 3,000 or 4,000 of them from Europe and Canada.

What would you propose as a way of them making sure people don’t feel like they are alienated or isolated?

Don’t take away their rights. Don’t take away their right to privacy; don’t take away their right to dissent.

Don’t take away — you know, a functioning democracy is a mechanism by which reform: incremental and peaceful reform can be carried out. When you [shut down] that mechanism you inevitably radicalize, especially your disenfranchised.

You know, if we don’t win this fight, then we are going to cement into place a species of corporate totalitarianism which will usher in a dystopia of terrifying proportions.

(Read the full article and listen to the interview at rabble)

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John Barber
The Guardian : February 27, 2015

More than 100 Canadian law professors have warned the prime minister, Stephen Harper, that a sweeping new anti-terror law introduced by his Conservative government is a “dangerous piece of legislation” that threatens to undermine the rule of law, human rights and democracy itself.

Although one poll showed that four out of five Canadians supported the proposed law shortly after it was tabled last month, criticisms that originated with scattered human-rights groups have since been amplified by a growing chorus of the nation’s leading jurists, academics, editorial-writers and opinion-makers.

The latest open letter follows an earlier plea to scrap the bill signed by four former Canadian prime ministers, five former supreme court justices and several cabinet ministers.

“Protecting human rights and protecting public safety are complementary objectives, but experience has shown that serious human rights abuses can occur in the name of maintaining national security,” the former prime ministers and supreme court jurists wrote. “Given the secrecy around national security activities, abuses can go undetected and without remedy. This results not only in devastating personal consequences for the individuals, but a profoundly negative impact on Canada’s reputation as a rights-respecting nation.”

The law professors present a close legal analysis of the proposed law, concluding with a sharp criticism of the government’s attempt to speed it through parliament.

“It is sadly ironic that democratic debate is being curtailed on a bill that vastly expands the scope of covert state activity when that activity will be subject to poor or even non-existent democratic oversight or review,” the experts wrote.

Amid growing criticism and a filibuster in parliament, the Conservatives reluctantly agreed late in the week to extend the previously abbreviated schedule for committee hearings on the bill, impeding what had hitherto been its fast track into law.

The move raised hope among opponents that the Harper government will ultimately be forced to accept amendments to curtail the sweeping new police and spy powers contained in the bill.

Drafted in response to two attacks by lone terrorists this year, including one that ended with a hail of bullets in the corridor of the House of Commons in Ottawa, Bill C-51 significantly loosens current restrictions on police and spies seeking to disrupt terrorist activity. But critics claim that it also opens the way for the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) to target legitimate dissent, making criminals of environmentalists, native people and other protesters hostile to the government.

Previously, the prime minister has derided the criticisms as “ridiculous” and critics as members of a conspiracy-addled “black helicopter fleet”. But the latest fusillade from some of the country’s leading legal scholars is the most forceful attack so far levelled against the increasingly controversial new bill.
‘Neither extremists, nor dismissive of threats’

In a letter running more than 4,000 words and covering “some (and only some)” of the terror bill’s alleged defects, the professors warn that the new law would not only do little to fight terrorism, it could actually set back the cause.

“In this respect,” they wrote, “we wish it to be clear that we are neither ‘extremists’ (as the Prime Minister has recently labelled the Official Opposition for its resistance to Bill C-51) nor dismissive of the real threats to Canadians’ security that government and Parliament have a duty to protect.

“Rather, we believe that terrorism must be countered in ways that are fully consistent with core values (that include liberty, non-discrimination, and the rule of law), that are evidence-based, and that are likely to be effective.”

The growing resistance to the new measures has eclipsed the popular approval that greeted the bill when the prime minister introduced it in January, vowing revenge against “violent jihadists” who “want to harm us because they hate our society and the values it represents”.

(read the full article at The Guardian)

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An Open Letter to Canadian Media

Elisa Hategan
Incognito Press: February 19, 2015

My name is Elisa Hategan and I’m a Canadian writer and freelance journalist. Twenty years ago, I was a teenage member of an Ontario-based domestic terrorist group called the Heritage Front. They were a radical white supremacist, neo-Nazi lobby group with ties to organizations that connected into parliamentary politics. After turning against them, collecting information and testifying against group leaders in court, the Toronto Sun broke the story that one of the group’s leaders was a CSIS agent, Grant Bristow. For a period of approx. 4 years, the Heritage Front had been founded and funded in large part by Canada’s own intelligence service, CSIS (Canadian Intelligence Security Service) – the Canadian equivalent of the CIA. They called it Operation Governor.

After the official inquiry resulted in a whitewashed report that was slammed by both left-wing activists and Preston Manning, then-leader of the Reform Party which was essentially destroyed by revelations that Heritage Front members had infiltrated its ranks, I went into hiding and tried to forget what had happened. Over the years, however, I realized it was a story I had to tell. So in 2010 I wrote a memoir titled Race Traitor and entered into negotiations with Penguin Canada over the acquisition rights, but after a month and no solid offer I walked away from the negotiation table. I should add that no other publishers, big or small press, were interested in publishing it. “The issue of white supremacy has had its day” Douglas & McIntyre. “ I can’t see a broad market for the book.” – Random House. Last year I ended up self-publishing it: Race Traitor: The True Story of Canadian Intelligence’s Greatest Cover-Up

In the month after the book came out, I was interviewed by a senior journalist at the Globe & Mail, Colin Freeze, as well as the Director of Programming at the CBC here in Toronto. They both expressed great interest in covering the story, but afterwards came back at me with excuses that senior editors were reluctant to go to print (or, as in the case of CBC, to air) with it – mainly because it was an old, irrelevant story since it happened 20 years ago. Also, there was the pesky issue that in today’s political climate, and according to Minister of Justice Peter MacKay’s own admission, only religion-based violence can be considered terrorism, i.e. only Muslims can be terrorists. In other words – when a Christian massacres almost 100 defenceless youth on Utoya Island in Norway, murders innocents outside a Kansas City synagogue (on the heels of Holocaust-denier David Irving’s talk two weeks earlier), plots a Halifax Valentine’s Day massacre or shoots 3 innocent Muslims in Chapel Hill execution-style, they are not terrorists but misguided, lone misfits.

Just this past month, Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper (who in the 1980s was a member of the extreme right-wing Northern Foundation, which had Heritage Front and Reform Party members, along with skinheads, anti-abortionists, Holocaust-deniers and Conrad Black) has announced a new bill that essentially duplicates the NSA laws of arrest without warrant, anybody can be detained for a week under the pretext of “terrorism”, etc. Bill C-51 is extremely troubling, considering that they will be giving CSIS far greater powers than ever before, turning it into what many have called a “Secret Police” with far-reaching powers.

Given the context of Bill C-51, it didn’t surprise either myself or the numerous activists, anti-racists and aboriginal protesters I’ve communicated with, that we cannot get any mainstream press coverage in Canadian media. Telling the story of how Canada’s own intelligence agency formed a domestic terrorist group that stalked, harassed and assaulted several left-wing activists in the 1990s would be in direct conflict with what Stephen Harper’s government is attempting to pass into law – a law whose definition is so broad, so undefined, that anyone in direct opposition to our government’s interests (such as Aboriginal protesters and the Idle No More movement) would fall into the category of “terrorist.”

Under Bill C-51, ‪CSIS will have the power to: 1) detain people without charges for up to 7 days; 2) interfere with bank transactions and seize bank accounts if they are “suspected” of potential terror activity; 3) order the seizure of “terrorist propaganda” or order it deleted from an online source; 4) stop any passengers “suspected” of travelling overseas to commit a terror offence to be removed from a flight; 5) seal court proceedings; 6) make it illegal to “promote” or “counsel” terrorist activity – the definition of what this constitutes is, of course, left up to CSIS’ interpretation. Using “disruption warrants,” Canada’s spies will do just about anything: “enter any place or open or obtain access to any thing,” to copy or obtain any document, “to install, maintain, or remove any thing,” and, most importantly, “to do any other thing that is reasonably necessary to take those measures.”

Bill C-51 MUST be stopped, or at the very least re-examined. The repeated violations and more violations on the part of the former intelligence unit of the RCMP, which became CSIS, which evolved into CSEC, cannot be overlooked. Neither is Harper’s ongoing use of CSIS as his personal domain pet whenever he wants to keep tabs on anti-fracking protesters, Green Party members, or whoever is opposed to the Conservative Party’s mandate. Such collusion between government and intelligence agencies is insidious at best, and will be used politically to defeat (or even imprison) political opponents.

History has already showed us what can happen when agents run amok: Grant Bristow’s handlers had been inherited from the same RCMP department which preceded CSIS’s inception. Back in the 1970s they were burning barns in Quebec while blaming it on the FLQ. After that scandal ensued and RCMP intelligence was disbanded, they moved over to the newly-minted CSIS and taught neo-Nazis and violent skinheads (some of whom were part of the now-disbanded Airborne Regiment) intelligence techniques, thus contributing to assaults, stalking, harassment and worse. Since they got away with all of the above, I cannot imagine what will happen when they gain autonomy.

(view the full article, documentation & pictures at Incognito Press)

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Derek Broze
Ben Swann : February 20, 2015

New documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal the National Security Agency (NSA) and the British GCHQ hacked into a SIM card manufacturer in the Netherlands and now has access to encryption keys that allow monitoring of voice calls and metadata.

The Intercept released the new documents which detail the existence of the Mobile Handset Exploitation Team (MHET), a team formed in April 2010 to study and target cellphones and hack computer networks of manufacturers of SIM cards. The team specifically targeted Gemalto, a SIM card manufacturer based in the Netherlands that produces SIM cards for 450 wireless companies, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Gemalto has operations in 85 countries around the world.

Internal slides from the NSA and GCHQ show that the team was after encryption keys that “live in” the SIM cards. By possessing these keys the spy agencies are able to access wireless networks without leaving any clues and without the need for a warrant. Beyond simply accessing current communications, accessing “authentication servers” allows the agencies to unlock past encrypted communications they may not have had the ability to decrypt. One agent wrote on a slide that he was “very happy with the data so far and [was] working through the vast quantity of product.”

The 2010 document refers to this as “PCS Harvesting at Scale,” or harvesting large amounts of encryption keys as the data passed between the wireless providers and the “SIM card personalisation centres,” such as Gemalto. The NSA boasted at having the ability to process 12 to 22 million keys per second. The spy agency was aiming to process more than 50 million per second. These keys are processed and made available for use against surveillance targets.

Indeed, the GCHQ specifically targeted individuals in key positions within Gemalto and began accessing their emails in hopes of following their trail into the SIM card manufacturers servers. The team of spies even wrote a script which allowed them to access private communications of employees for telecommunication and SIM “personalization” companies in search of technical terms that might be used in assigning encryption keys to cellphone customers.

Paul Beverly, a Gemalto executive vice president, told The Intercept he believed,“The most important thing for me is to understand exactly how this was done, so we can take every measure to ensure that it doesn’t happen again, and also to make sure that there’s no impact on the telecom operators that we have served in a very trusted manner for many years.”

More than likely the NSA and the GCHQ violated international law every time they covertly accessed the emails of employees in foreign nations. Dutch officials are already calling for an investigation into who knew the American and British agencies were conducting such a program, and if so, under what doctrine is such a policy allowed.

(read the full article at Ben Swann)

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Alternative Free Press

And they will say that this was Rex Murphy’s finest hour.

The CBC freelancer just issued the nation its ultimate call to arms, challenging Canadians to fight Stephen Harper’s new anti-terrorism bill clause by clause, and word by word — and to refuse to cede an inch of freedom beyond what is needed.

“Every clause should be fought over,” Murphy said on CBC’s The National Thursday night. “Every potential advance on the liberty of the citizen should be examined as to its ultimate necessity.”

Murphy added: “The powers and agencies to be granted license to monitor and investigate outside or beyond the protections normally in place must be put to the fullest Parliamentary, media and democratic testing…. We should not abridge our liberties or set up mechanisms to abridge them without the fullest and most strenuous scrutiny and opposition we are capable of.”

Canadians of all political persuasions and all points of view should all find common cause in challenging the Conservatives as they attempt to cut off debate on Harper’s new terror bill.

“That’s not the way we do things” in this country.

(Press Progress)

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Jean Chrétien, Joe Clark, Paul Martin and John Turner
The Globe and Mail : February 19, 2015

The four of us most certainly know the enormity of the responsibility of keeping Canada safe, something always front of mind for a prime minister. We have come together with 18 other Canadians who have served as Supreme Court of Canada justices, ministers of justice and of public safety, solicitors-general, members of the Security and Intelligence Review Committee and commissioners responsible for overseeing the RCMP and upholding privacy laws.

Among us, we have served in our various public office roles from 1968 to 2014. Over that time we were faced with, and responded to, a range of pressing security concerns. We all agree that protecting public safety is one of government’s most important functions and that Canada’s national security agencies play a vital role in meeting that responsibility.

Yet we all also share the view that the lack of a robust and integrated accountability regime for Canada’s national security agencies makes it difficult to meaningfully assess the efficacy and legality of Canada’s national security activities. This poses serious problems for public safety and for human rights.

A detailed blueprint for the creation of an integrated review system was set out almost a decade ago by Justice Dennis O’Connor in his recommendations from the Maher Arar inquiry, which looked into the role that Canada’s national security agencies played in the rendition and torture of a Canadian citizen. Justice O’Connor’s recommendations, however, have not been implemented; nor have repeated calls from review bodies for expanded authority to conduct cross-agency reviews.

Meanwhile, efforts to enhance parliamentary oversight of national security agencies have also been unsuccessful. For example, in October 2004, a report calling for parliamentary oversight over national security activities was presented to the minister of public safety; this report contained an oversight structure that was agreed upon by representatives of all parties in both the House of Commons and the Senate. Legislation was introduced at the time, but not adopted before the next election.

Canada needs independent oversight and effective review mechanisms more than ever, as national security agencies continue to become increasingly integrated, international information sharing remains commonplace and as the powers of law enforcement and intelligence agencies continue to expand with new legislation.

Protecting human rights and protecting public safety are complementary objectives, but experience has shown that serious human rights abuses can occur in the name of maintaining national security. Given the secrecy around national security activities, abuses can go undetected and without remedy. This results not only in devastating personal consequences for the individuals, but a profoundly negative impact on Canada’s reputation as a rights-respecting nation. A strong and robust accountability regime mitigates the risk of abuse, stops abuse when it is detected, and provides a mechanism for remedying abuses that have taken place. In the years since the Arar inquiry, international human rights experts – including the UN Committee against Torture – have called on Canada to improve oversight of its national security agencies.

Canada’s national security policies and practices must be effective in order to protect public safety. Independent oversight and effective review mechanisms help ensure that resources devoted to national security activities are being utilized effectively and efficiently. The confidential nature of national security activities means that it is more difficult to rely on the usual public checks on government performance, such as scrutiny from Parliament, civil society, media and the general public. Security-cleared review bodies play crucial roles in catching and correcting operational and structural problems before they become full-blown national security failures, leading to better security for Canadians.

National security agencies, like all government institutions, must be accountable to the public. Accountability engenders public confidence and trust in activities undertaken by the government, particularly where those activities might be cloaked in secrecy. Independent checks and balances ensure that national security activities are protecting the public, and not just the government in power. Oversight and review mechanisms are necessary to make sure that powers are being exercised lawfully, and that government officials are not called upon to undertake activities that might expose them or Canada to legal liability either at home or abroad.

The Right Honourable Jean Chrétien, Prime Minister of Canada (1993-2003), Minister of Justice (1980-82);

The Right Honourable Joe Clark, Prime Minister of Canada (1979-80), Minister of Justice (1988-89);

The Right Honourable Paul Martin, Prime Minister of Canada (2003-06);

The Right Honourable John Turner, Prime Minister of Canada (1984), Minister of Justice (1968-72);

The Honourable Louise Arbour, Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada (1999-2004);

The Honourable Michel Bastarache, Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada (1997-2008);

The Honourable Ian Binnie, Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada (1998-2011);

The Honourable Claire L’Heureux Dubé, Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada (1987-2002);

The Honourable John Major, Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada (1992-2005);

The Honourable Irwin Cotler, Minister of Justice (2003-06);

The Honourable Marc Lalonde, Minister of Justice (1978-79);

The Honourable Anne McLellan, Minister of Justice (1997-2002), Minister of Public Safety (2003-06);

The Honourable Warren Allmand, Solicitor General of Canada (1972-76);

The Honourable Jean-Jacques Blais, Solicitor General of Canada (1978-79);

The Honourable Wayne Easter, Solicitor General of Canada (2002-03);

The Honourable Lawrence MacAulay, Solicitor General of Canada (1998-2002);

The Honourable Frances Lankin, Member, Security Intelligence Review Committee (2009-14);

The Honourable Bob Rae, Member, Security Intelligence Review Committee (1998-2003);

The Honourable Roy Romanow, Member, Security Intelligence Review Committee (2003-08);

Chantal Bernier, Acting Privacy Commissioner of Canada (2013-2014);

Shirley Heafey, Chairperson, Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP (1997-2005);

Jennifer Stoddart, Privacy Commissioner of Canada (2003-2013)

(originally posted at The Globe and Mail)

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Canada’s spy agency is running its own global Internet mass surveillance program – and Canadians are among the targets

Amber Hildebrandt, Michael Pereira and Dave Seglins
CBC: January 28, 2015

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.

CBC analyzed the document in collaboration with the U.S. news website The Intercept, which obtained it from Snowden.

(read the full article at CBC)

Canada Casts Global Surveillance Dragnet Over File Downloads

Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald
The Intercept: January 28, 2015

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.)

The latest disclosure sheds light on Canada’s broad existing surveillance capabilities at a time when the country’s government is pushing for a further expansion of security powers following attacks in Ottawa and Quebec last year.

Ron Deibert, director of University of Toronto-based Internet security think tank Citizen Lab, said LEVITATION illustrates the “giant X-ray machine over all our digital lives.”

“Every single thing that you do – in this case uploading/downloading files to these sites – that act is being archived, collected and analyzed,” Deibert said, after reviewing documents about the online spying operation for CBC News.

David Christopher, a spokesman for Vancouver-based open Internet advocacy group OpenMedia.ca, said the surveillance showed “robust action” was needed to rein in the Canadian agency’s operations.

“These revelations make clear that CSE engages in large-scale warrantless surveillance of our private online activities, despite repeated government assurances to the contrary,” Christopher told The Intercept.

(read the full article at The Intercept)

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