The Narwhal | News on Climate Change, Environmental Issues in Canada

Canada’s Secret Spy Agency Sued for Spying on You

Stephen Leahy — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 17:30:45 +0000

WARNING: Military Spooks Probably Know You Are Reading This

You could be in Canada's secret surveillance database. All it takes is a phone call, text message or email to someone in another country. And every time you visit a website your location, your browsing history and other metadata can be collected by the little-known Communications Security Establishment Canada.

All of this is illegal according to BC Civil Liberties Association which filed a lawsuit in BC Supreme Court Tuesday.

“Unaccountable and unchecked government surveillance presents a grave threat to democratic freedoms,” says Joseph Arvay, Q.C., lawyer for the BC Civil Liberties Association.

"We are deeply concerned that CSEC (Communications Security Establishment Canada) is gaining secret, illegal access to the private communications of ordinary Canadians," said Arvay.

CSEC, which will soon be housed the most expensive government building ever constructed (almost $1.2 billion), is Canada's $350 million-a-year counterpart to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

In recent months the NSA has received much media attention after whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked secret NSA documents. Those documents revealed the extensive surveillance the NSA undertakes including tracking the calls of almost every American citizen and spying on a vast but unknown number of Americans’ international calls, text messages, and emails.

Turns out CSEC also spies on Canadian citizens but unlike the NSA no court or committee oversees its operations. Canada's other big spy agency, the $500-million-a-year Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has its activities monitored by an independent committee.

CSEC is a military spy agency and has no such overview. The Minister of National Defence calls all the shots and issues directives in secret.

However a Nov 21, 2011 directive that became public revealed that then Minister Peter Mackay approved the collection and analysis of metadata. This is information that is automatically produced each and every time a Canadian uses a mobile phone or accesses the internet. [See Guardian's Guide to Metadata]

"Metadata information can reveal the most intimate details of Canadians’ personal lives, including relationships, and political and personal beliefs," said David Martin, lawyer for the BCCLA.

Canadians should be able to use the internet "without the government snooping on our personal information and monitoring our behaviour online," Martin said in a Vancouver press conference Tuesday.

The spy agency is allowed to capture the communications of Canadians at home and abroad if the collection relates to obtaining “foreign intelligence.” CSEC shares this information with foreign intelligence entities in the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia.

Arvay says CSEC's domestic spying infringes on Canadians rights of freedom of expression.

"Canadians are going to censor themselves fearing their communications will be intercepted," he said.

It's "unbelievable there is no judicial oversight of CSEC" said Caily DiPuma, Counsel for the BCCLA.

"Canadians have a right to privacy. We have no idea what CSEC is doing with their information or how they are interpreting laws," DiPuma said.

No one knows have many Canadians are caught up in the CSEC net said OpenMedia.ca Executive Director Steve Anderson.

OpenMedia fought a successful battle against Bill C30 – the online spying bill. "I was shocked to learn that CSEC is monitoring Canadians online and we're picking up the tab," Anderson said.

"We can’t even tell when we’ve been victimized by it. We strongly support the BCCLA’s court challenge," he said.

OpenMedia has launched a new online sign-up pledge against "out-of-control spying on Canadians.”

Incredibly, CSEC is just the tip of the domestic spying spear for Canadians involved in labour and social justice, indigenous issues, environmental or other organizations the Harper government has labeled as a "threat" to Canada's business interests.

The RCMP, CSIS and others involved in "security intelligence" have been monitoring Canadians involved in various non-governmental organizations such as environmental groups said Jeffrey Monaghan of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

Protests and opposition to Canada's resource-based economy, especially oil and gas production, are now viewed as threats to national security, Monaghan said.

Based on security documents just released under freedom of information laws, CSIS has likely created a wide-ranging surveillance net in partnership with the private sector he said.

One Feb 2011 document reads: "…the private sector is ideally suited to provide the Service (CSIS) with unsolicited, but potentially valuable street-level information."

Later the document notes that the private sector can violate Canada's privacy laws "for reasons of law enforcement, national security, defense of Canada, conduct of international affairs…"

Part II will look at the role of the private sector, including energy companies, in working with law enforcement to spy on and punish individuals and organizations involved in legal, democratic activities.

Image Credit: CSEC Common Criteria icon

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Canada’s Surveillance State Equates Protest to Terrorism

Adam Kingsmith — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Last month’s PRISM revelations are a disconcerting reminder that even here in Canada, paranoid fantasies about mass government surveillance are more than a work of fiction.

Listening to our phone calls, monitoring our Internet searches, reading our emails, trawling our social media accounts. These things are not only possible, but thanks to government fear mongering feeding our increased tolerance for supervision in a post-9/11 world, they’re also entirely legal. In Canada, government data mining is administered by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC)—a top-secret federal agency that reports directly to the Minister of Defence, employs over 2,000 people, and operates with an annual taxpayer-funded budget of nearly half-a-billion dollars. Armed with enough raw computing power to process boundless amounts of information, this “NSA-North” is free to intercept and cultivate all metadata—essentially a record of who we know, and how well—coming through the country in order to map out our social networks, patterns of mobility, professional relationships, and even our personal interests.

In conjunction with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS)—Canada’s better-known intelligence agency responsible for disseminating and responding to perceived threats to national security—CSEC is able to employ this metadata in order to determine which groups and individuals may pose a threat to domestic security. Unfortunately, the disturbing lack of public oversight—all CSEC operations are monitored by a single retired judge whose findings are all confidential—gives the federal government license to deploy their extensive surveillance apparatuses against any and all domestic groups which dare to challenge the status-quo. As a new report on documents released under the Freedom of Information Act highlights, under the mandate of the Harper Administration, law enforcement and intelligence agencies are increasingly blurring the line between genuine fundamentalists and average citizens—people whose “terrorist activities” include organising petitions, attending protests, and generally expressing dissension. Moreover, the report emphasises the fact that agencies such as CSEC and CSIS now view activist activities such as blocking access to roads and buildings as “forms of assault,” while media stunts like the unfurling of banners, non-violent sit-ins, and peaceful marches are now deemed “threats” or “attacks.” Aboriginal rights advocates, unions, anti-capital factions, countercultural institutions, alternative media outlets, and with increasing fervour, environmental organisations—they all get lumped together under the category of “terrorists” in order justify the widespread monitoring, detaining, and at times imprisoning of Canadian citizens expressing dissent. The new face of "terrorism" according to the Harper Administration. Image Credit: hidden side/Flickr

“Security and police agencies have been increasingly conflating terrorism and extremism with peaceful citizens exercising their democratic rights to organise petitions, protest and question government policies,” said Dr. Jeffery Monaghan of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen's University. “Canada is at very low risk from foreign terrorists but like the U.S. it has built a large security apparatus following 9/11. The resources and costs are wildly out of proportion to the risk.”

Thus—as the University of Victoria’s Dr. Kevin Walby highlights in his 2012 journal article Making Up Terror Identities: Canada’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre and the Social Movement Suppression—in order to secure funding as threats from organisations like Al-Qaeda and the Black Bloc begin to fall off the radar, groups like Idle No More and anti-pipeline and anti-fracking protesters have been re-branded in order to fill the “terrorist vacuum.” Greenpeace International co-founder and BC Environmental Network chair Rod Marining—one of the thousands of Canadians considered to be a “national security risk”—believes this shift in focus from foreign to domestic threats is directly correlated to the federal government’s re-positioning of the exploration and exploitation of Canada's natural resources as in our national interest. Case in point, a recent statement by Canada’s Natural Resource Minister Joe Oliver frames protesters and environmentalists as “radical groups” trying to undermine the Canadian economy by hijacking “our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.” According to Will Potter—renowned journalist and the author of the award-winning book, Green is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege—environmentalists are being framed as “eco-terrorists” by Canadian intelligence agencies due to the fact that the Harper Administration has billions of dollars in oil revenues riding on the completion of both the Keystone XL and Enbridge Northern Gateway pipelines.

“[Domestic issue-based] extremism,” maintains Canada’s Counter-terrorism Strategy, “tends to be based on grievances—real or perceived—revolving around the promotion of various causes such as animal rights, white supremacy, environmentalism and anti-capitalism.”

In short, Canada’s official counter-terrorism strategy discusses environmentalists who peacefully protest pipeline projects alongside the 2011 Norway Massacre and the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing as comparable examples of “domestic issue-based extremism.” The Tories have also drastically ramped up the auditing of charitable environmental organisations that oppose fossil fuel-related projects, established a “counter-terrorism” unit in northeastern Alberta to protect the oil industry from alleged “attacks” by activists, and from 2005-2009, released a series of “counter-terror reports” haphazardly blurring the line between legal protest and illegal conduct from such “terror cells” as PETA, Greenpeace International, The Sierra Club, ForestEthics, and The Pembina Institute. What’s more, an alarming new report has discovered that secret-level briefings have been taking place between CSIS and various energy conglomerates since 2005—raising concerns that in some instances, federal agencies such as CSEC have been selling out Canadian citizens by secretly feeding the private information of environmentalist and First Nations protesters directly to the multinationals they’re protesting. Pervasive surveillance, unregulated data mining, sinister information sharing, and rhetorical terrorist branding—these have all become integral parts of a federal mechanism working to obfuscate the difference between legal protest and illicit terror in order to minimise dissent by re-framing fundamental freedoms such as speech and assembly as acts of domestic terror. In reality, the only threat citizen protest groups like environmentalists, anti-capitalists, and alternative media typically pose, is the threat to shift public opinion by changing people’s minds—apparently a criminal offence according to this administration. Which begs the disconcerting question, how can our government claim to protect us from terrorism if—in their eyes—we’re the ones who've become the terrorists? Image Credit: Clarissa Peterson/Flickr

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