News today that Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE) used its Internet cable-tap program Atomic Banjo through its CSE Web Operations Centre (CWOC) to track 10 to 15 million user uploads and downloads daily and analyze the records in its needle-in-a-haystack effort to stumble upon extremist plots and suspects, and has been monitoring and collecting HTTP metadata for 102 known “Free File Upload” (FFU) file-sharing sites, commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files, is well … not so surprising. Canada is a partner in the so-called “Five Eyes” electronics communications intelligence partnership, which also includes the United States, Britain, New Zealand and Australia.
The three FFU file-sharing sites specifically named are RapidShare, SendSpace, and the defunct MegaUpload – based on a 21-slide CSE Microsoft PowerPoint tradecraft presentation in 2012 compiled by a three-member Canadian team and shared with its Five Eyes partners titled, “LEVITATION and the FFU Hypothesis.” CSE said in the presentation three years ago they “only care about the 2,200 URLs [Uniform Resource Locators] that point to documents of interest,” citing the example of a SendSpace file titled, “How to make a gas bomb.” CSE said they were “finding about 350 interesting download events per month” back then. Levitation is the codename also for the larger Communications Security Establishment covert behaviour-based target discovery project, as well as the presentation.
The “LEVITATION and the FFU Hypothesis” CSE presentation comes from the cache of Edward Snowden. The 31-year-old American computer specialist, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee and former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, who had lived in Kunia, Hawaii, went AWOL almost three years ago, eventually landing in Moscow, and since June 2013 has disclosed more than 200,000 classified documents to the press, a fraction of the cache of about 1.7 million NSA intelligence files he downloaded, and the biggest theft of U.S. secrets in history, the Pentagon said in January 2014.
Branded as either a patriot or traitor, largely depending on the politics of whoever is doing the branding, Snowden faces criminal prosecution in the United States and was granted temporary asylum in August 2013 in Russia.
The “LEVITATION and the FFU Hypothesis” story was reported collaboratively today by reporter Ryan Gallagher and co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald of First Look Media’s The Intercept, an online publication created and funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar last February, and Amber Hildebrandt, Michael Pereira and Dave Seglins of CBC News. The Intercept lists its short-term mission as providing “a platform to report on the documents previously provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.”
A series of exposés, based on Snowden’s leaks, began being published in June 2013, revealing Internet surveillance programs such as PRISM, XKeyscore and Tempora, as well as the interception of telephone metadata from U.S. allies, including Canada, around the world. The Canadian government was alleged to have engaged in economic espionage involving Brazil’s Ministério de Minas e Energia.
Snowden’s release of National Security Agency (NSA) material was called in 2013 the most significant leak in U.S. history by American defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who knows the territory well enough, one supposes, having himself leaked the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, which were published by the paper beginning in June 1971.
Only a small percentage of the documents purloined by Snowden have been published to date. Since 2013, Snowden has been what Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks were to 2010. As is the case now with Snowden, at the same time stolen classified material was published by WikiLeaks, it was also being published collaboratively across various portals and platforms in three of the world’s most prestigious daily newspapers – the New York Times in the United States, the Guardian in Britain and Der Spiegel in Germany.
On July 25, 2010, Assange’s WikiLeaks, a non-profit Swedish website started in December 2006, posted an unprecedented 91,731 mostly classified documents, the so-called “War Logs,” and most with a middling “secret” clearance level – from United States military databanks relating to the war in Afghanistan – on the Internet.
The documents made it possible to compare the mainly dismal frontline reality on the battlefield with the political propaganda coming from the higher-ups.
While some – including Assange – compared the War Logs to the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, the War Logs and Pentagon Papers were different in kind, as Ellsberg noted himself in interviews in July 2010.
“There is a very real drama because of the size of the release and it’s an important step, but these are low-level field reports while the Pentagon Papers were a high-level analysis about the origins of the war,” Ellsberg said. “Still, it’s a very important moment because this is a war that is taking place right now and what WikiLeaks has done could change how people think about it.”
The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) is Canada’s national cryptologic agency with a National Defence Act mandate that includes foreign signals intelligence (SIGINT) interception and analysis, including cryptanalysis or codebreaking, of communications and other electronic signals. CSE is prohibited by law from targeting Canadians or anyone in Canada under the signals intelligence part of their mandate, but can, if requested, with proper warrants or other lawful authority held by the requesting agency, provide technical and operational assistance to federal law enforcement and security agencies in the performance of their lawful duties under what is known as CSE’s “assistance mandate.”
Its new $1.2 billion dollar headquarters at 1929 Ogilvie Rd., completed last July, was dubbed “Camelot” in official Department of National Defence documents and is the most expensive federal building ever constructed in Canada, located next door to the only slightly better known Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which also has its headquarters in Gloucester in east-end Ottawa.
The centrepiece of the new CSE complex on Ogilvie Road is equivalent to a 90-storey skyscraper turned on its side.
The old CSE headquarters was the five-storey Sir Leonard Tilley Building at 719 Heron Rd., near Carleton University, well known to the intelligence community as “The Farm,” and located at the corner of Riverside Drive and Heron Road, within the boundaries of the federal government’s Confederation Heights campus, in Ottawa. The Sir Leonard Tilley Building was built in 1961 and custom designed for use by intelligence services. The building’s exterior elevations conceal specialized features linked to intelligence gathering such as the design of “slippers” beneath the floor plates and the electrical and mechanical systems.
The Communications Security Establishment’s predecessor was the Communications Branch of the National Research Council of Canada (CBNRC), which began work in September 1946. The CBNRC was formed at the end of the Second World War by combining the two wartime cryptologic offices; the civilian Examination Unit (XU) and the military Joint Discrimination Unit (JDU), made up by 1945 of what had been the disparate SIGINT collection units of the Navy, Army and Air Force. The Examination Unit was Canada’s first civilian office that was solely dedicated to the encryption and decryption of communications signals traffic content. Until then, signals intelligence (SIGINT) was entirely within the purview of the military.
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