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Paul Merrell

Neil Macdonald: Ottawa weighing plans for bank failures - Politics - CBC News - 0 views

www.cbc.ca/...onald-canada-cyprus-banks.html

financial-collapse Canada

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Buried deep in last month's federal budget is an ambiguously worded section that has roiled parts of the financial world but has so far been largely ignored by the mainstream media. It boils down to this: Ottawa is contemplating the possibility of a Canadian bank failure — and the same sort of pitiless prescription that was just imposed in Cyprus. Meaning no bailout by taxpayers, but rather a "bail-in" that would force the bank's creditors to absorb the staggering losses that such an event would inevitably entail.
Paul Merrell

80 percent of Canadians back Israel boycott -- poll | The Electronic Intifada - 0 views

electronicintifada.net/...ans-back-israel-boycott-poll-0

polls BDS Israel Palestine Canada

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Four in five Canadians believe the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) on Israel is reasonable, a national survey released Wednesday suggests. More than half of Canadians polled also oppose their parliament’s condemnation of the BDS campaign, which aims to pressure Israel to respect Palestinian rights and international law, and two-thirds would support government sanctions on Israel. These results are remarkable evidence that efforts by the Canadian government, backed by Israel and its surrogates, to demonize the Palestine solidarity movement are failing.
  • Partial results released last month found that large numbers of Canadians see Israel’s government negatively, and Canadians almost unanimously reject the view that criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic.
  • According to the newly released findings, 78 percent of respondents say BDS is reasonable, but that shoots up to 88 percent among those who identify with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party. Favorable views of BDS surge even higher among supporters of Canada’s other left of center parties – the New Democratic Party, Greens and Bloc Québécois. Even supporters of the staunchly pro-Israel Conservative Party are evenly split: 49 percent say the BDS call is reasonable, while 51 percent say it is not – a difference that is within the poll’s margin of error.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • These findings provide another stark indication of how out of step Canada’s political elites are with public views on Palestine. In February 2016, Canada’s parliament overwhelmingly passed a motion condemning BDS. But Canadians feel very differently from their representatives. More than half of those surveyed say they oppose the parliamentary motion, while just a quarter support it. Opposition to the condemnation of BDS was strong among backers of all the left of center parties – ranging from 55 percent among Liberals to 78 percent among Greens. Only among Conservatives did more people support the motion (46 percent) than oppose it (33 percent). Consistent with generational trends seen in the United States, younger Canadians appear more sympathetic to Palestinian rights. Two-thirds of respondents aged 18-34 opposed the parliamentary condemnation of BDS, a number that drops to 46 percent among those aged over 65. Similarly, 84 percent of the 18-34 age group said the BDS call is reasonable, a number that fell to a still impressive 72 percent for those aged over 65.
  • Overall, 91 percent of respondents agreed that in general sanctions are a reasonable way for Canada to censure countries for violations of international law or human rights. Two-thirds of respondents agreed that sanctions specifically targeting Israel over its construction of settlements on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law would be reasonable, with one-third indicating opposition. Three-quarters of respondents who identify with Trudeau’s Liberals support sanctions. That support rises as high as 94 percent among backers of Canada’s other left of center parties. Among Conservatives support for sanctions plummets to 30 percent – highlighting a sharp partisan divide over Israel also seen in the United States.
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Mar 17
     
    The times they are a changin'.
Paul Merrell

New Snowden docs show U.S. spied during G20 in Toronto - Politics - CBC News - 0 views

www.cbc.ca/...uring-g20-in-toronto-1.2442448

surveillance state NSA Canada CSEC G8 G20

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Top secret documents retrieved by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden show that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government allowed the largest American spy agency to conduct widespread surveillance in Canada during the 2010 G8 and G20 summits.
  • The briefing notes, stamped "Top Secret," show the U.S. turned its Ottawa embassy into a security command post during a six-day spying operation by the National Security Agency while U.S. President Barack Obama and 25 other foreign heads of government were on Canadian soil in June of 2010. The covert U.S. operation was no secret to Canadian authorities.
  • Notably, the secret NSA briefing document describes part of the U.S. eavesdropping agency's mandate at the Toronto summit as "providing support to policymakers." Documents previously released by Snowden, a former NSA contractor who has sought and received asylum in Russia, suggested that support at other international gatherings included spying on the foreign delegations to get an unfair advantage in any negotiations or policy debates at the summit. It was those documents that first exposed the spying on world leaders at the London summit. More recently, Snowden's trove of classified information revealed Canada's eavesdropping agency had hacked into phones and computers in the Brazilian government's department of mines, a story that touched off a political firestorm both in that country and in Ottawa.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The secret documents do not reveal the precise targets of so much espionage by the NSA — and possibly its Canadian partner — during the Toronto summit. But both the U.S. and Canadian intelligence agencies have been implicated with their British counterpart in hacking the phone calls and emails of foreign politicians and diplomats attending the G20 summit in London in 2009 — a scant few months before the Toronto gathering of the same world leaders.
  • The spying at the Toronto summit in 2010 fits a pattern of economic and political espionage by the powerful U.S. intelligence agency and its partners such as Canada. That espionage was conducted to secure meeting sites and protect leaders against terrorist threats posed by al-Qaeda but also to forward the policy goals of the United States and Canada. The G20 summit in Toronto had a lot on its agenda that would have been of acute interest to the NSA and Canada.
  • The world was still struggling to climb out of the great recession of 2008. Leaders were debating a wide array of possible measures including a global tax on banks, an idea strongly opposed by both the U.S. and Canadian governments. That notion was eventually scotched. The secret NSA documents list all the main agenda items for the G20 in Toronto — international development, banking reform, countering trade protectionism, and so on — with the U.S. snooping agency promising to support "U.S. policy goals." Whatever the intelligence goals of the NSA during the Toronto summit, international security experts question whether the NSA spying operation at the G20 in Toronto was even legal.
  • "If CSEC tasked NSA to conduct spying activities on Canadians within Canada that CSEC itself was not authorized to take, then I am comfortable saying that would be an unlawful undertaking by CSEC," says Craig Forcese, an expert in national security at University of Ottawa's faculty of law. By law, CSEC cannot target anyone in Canada without a warrant, including world leaders and foreign diplomats at a G20 summit. But, the Canadian eavesdropping agency is also prohibited by international agreement from getting the NSA to do the spying or anything that would be illegal for CSEC.
  • The NSA warns the more likely security threat would come from "issue-based extremists" conducting acts of vandalism. They got that right. Protest marches by about 10,000 turned the Toronto G20 into an historic melee of arrests by more than 20,000 police in what would become one of the largest and most expensive security operations in Canadian history. By the time the tear gas had cleared and the investigations were complete, law enforcement agencies stood accused of mass-violations of civil rights. Add to that dubious legacy illegal spying by an American intelligence agency with the blessing of the Canadian government.
Paul Merrell

Snowden document shows Canada set up spy posts for NSA - Politics - CBC News - 0 views

www.cbc.ca/...up-spy-posts-for-nsa-1.2456886

surveillance state Canada CSEC NSA Privacy-Act

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • A top secret document retrieved by American whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals Canada has set up covert spying posts around the world and conducted espionage against trading partners at the request of the U.S. National Security Agency. The leaked NSA document being reported exclusively by CBC News reveals Canada is involved with the huge American intelligence agency in clandestine surveillance activities in “approximately 20 high-priority countries."
  • Sections of the document with the highest classification make it clear in some instances why American spymasters are particularly keen about enlisting their Canadian counterparts, the Communications Security Establishment Canada. "CSEC shares with the NSA their unique geographic access to areas unavailable to the U.S," the document says. The briefing paper describes a "close co-operative relationship" between the NSA and its Canadian counterpart, the Communications Security Establishment Canada, or CSEC — a relationship "both sides would like to see expanded and strengthened. "The intelligence exchange with CSEC covers worldwide national and transnational targets."
  • The briefing notes make it clear that Canada plays a very robust role in intelligence-gathering around the world in a way that has won respect from its American equivalents.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The intimate Canada-U.S. electronic intelligence relationship dates back more than 60 years. Most recently, another Snowden document reported by CBC News showed the two agencies co-operated to allow the NSA to spy on the G20 summit of international leaders in Toronto in 2010. But what the latest secret document reveals for the first time is just how expansive Canada's international espionage activities have become.
  • The NSA document depicts CSEC as a sophisticated, capable and highly respected intelligence partner involved in all manner of joint spying missions, including setting up listening posts at the request of the Americans. "CSEC offers resources for advanced collection, processing and analysis, and has opened covert sites at the request of NSA," the document states.
  • Aside from compromising the actual intelligence operation, Wark says, an exposed spy mission can imperil Canada's other diplomatic operations — "the political contacts, the trade contacts, the generation of goodwill between the countries and any sense of co-operation." Wark says if a country feels targeted by a Canadian embassy, it can put everyone working there under a cloud of suspicion: “Are they really diplomats or are they spies?” As a result of those risks, Wark says, approval for CSEC to establish a covert spying post at the request of the NSA would have to come from the ministerial level of the Canadian government — or even from the prime minister himself.
  • Canada and the U.S. have long shared security intelligence with sister agencies in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand – the so-called "Five Eyes" partnership. But the latest secret Snowden missive shows CSEC and the NSA becoming physically intertwined. "Co-operative efforts include the exchange of liaison officers and integrees," the document reveals, a reference to CSEC operatives working inside the NSA, and vice-versa. It notes the NSA also supplies much of the computer hardware and software CSEC uses for encryption, decoding and other state-of-the-art essentials of electronic spying needed for "collection, processing and analytic efforts."
  • CSEC employs about 2,000 people, has an annual budget of roughly $450 million and will soon move into an architecturally spectacular new Ottawa headquarters costing Canadian taxpayers almost $1.2 billion. By comparison, the NSA employs an estimated 40,000 people plus thousands of private contractors, and spends over $40 billion a year NSA whistleblower Drake says the problem is that both CSEC and the NSA lack proper oversight, and without it, they have morphed into runaway surveillance. "There is a clear and compelling danger to democracy in Canada by virtue of how far these secret surveillance operations have gone."
  • Paul Merrell on 11 Dec 13
     
    "'Co-operative efforts include the exchange of liaison officers and integrees,'the document reveals, a reference to CSEC operatives working inside the NSA, and vice-versa." And that fact raises potential U.S. Privacy Act issues. Under the Privacy Act, all U.S. agencies are prohibited from sharing information containing personal identifiers of U.S. citizens with any foreign government and requires that agencies make full disclosure to all persons  whose rights are thus violated. The Act also creates a cause of action for redress by the federal courts, with a minimum $1,500 damages plus attorney's fees and litigation expenses. Note that the other NSA documents show that NSA is sharing U.S. citizens' information that includes personal identifiers with Israeli intelligence. The NSA has been by another statute excused from compliance with some portions of the Privacy Act but not those discussed above.
Paul Merrell

Defence department discussed possible military intervention in Syria - 0 views

www.ottawacitizen.com/...story.html

war & peace Canada Syria military-intervention

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Canadian defence and diplomatic officials have been quietly working on plans for possible Canadian military missions — as well as shoring up non-religious groups on the ground — in Syria as its three-year civil war continues.The federal government has so far said it has no plans for Canada to be dragged into the conflict, which has killed an estimated 150,000 and driven hundreds of thousands more from their homes and their country.But internal documents obtained by the Citizen show National Defence has drawn up at least five scenarios in which it could become involved in Syria’s ongoing civil war, as well as potential Canadian Forces missions for each situation.The documents have been censored to remove specifics, but allude to “the rapidly deteriorating conditions in Syria, its impact on neighbouring countries and … the importance of Middle East stability.”
  • the fact such plans have been drawn up indicates the degree of seriousness to which defence officials and the government are taking the fighting in Syria, which brings with it the risk of escalation and broader regional impacts.Any military action would require the government’s approval.Meanwhile, separate documents show Canada has been helping train anti-sectarian activists, journalists and others so they can provide a political alternative to Islamic extremist groups if the fighting stops.
Paul Merrell

Canadians have united to reject fear and stop Bill C-51. Will the government listen? | ... - 0 views

rabble.ca/...ll-c-51-will-government-listen

surveillance state Canada CSIS legislation tyranny

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 May 15 - No Cached
  • It's rare in Canadian politics to see intense public interest in government legislative proposals -- let alone to see Canadians take to the streets in the tens of thousands to protest a piece of legislation by name. Yet that's exactly what has happened in the case of Bill C-51, which critics, including The Globe and Mail's editorial team, say will undermine basic democratic values and lead to the creation of a "secret police force" in Canada. In the space of a few short months since Bill C-51 was announced, hundreds of thousands of people have taken action to stop it: signing petitions, writing letters to local newspapers, phoning and writing to their member of Parliament, and hitting the streets in nationwide demonstrations in over 70 communities across Canada. It's not hard to see why so many people are concerned. Canada's top privacy and security experts warn that this legislation will undermine democratic rights Canadians have enjoyed for generations. For example, according to professors Craig Forcese and Kent Roach, who have conducted a detailed legal analysis of the legislation, Bill C-51 will:
  • Undermine Canadians' privacy by allowing widespread information disclosures among government agencies, and by giving the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) access to personal information held by up to 17 government departments. Even Stephen Harper has admitted that these kinds of dragnet surveillance measures are ineffective. Chill free speech online by criminalizing what is loosely defined as the promotion of "terrorism offences in general" and even showing "reckless disregard" for whether a particular post may encourage a violent act. As Forcese and Roach point out in their testimony to the Senate Standing Committee on National Security and Defence, "The new speech crime in our view violates freedom of expression because it reaches well beyond the sort of speech that threatens actual violence." Dramatically expand the powers of CSIS, without any commensurate increase in oversight or review measures. The legislation even allows CSIS to obtain a warrant permitting them to break the law and contravene the Charter rights of Canadians. Under C-51, such warrants would be granted in a secret hearing, with no representation from the target of such measures, and with no right of appeal.
  • So it's no surprise that Canadians are worried. What is unprecedented however, is the sheer number of Canadians taking part in the campaign to stop the bill. My organization, OpenMedia, has been campaigning on privacy issues for years -- but in all our time, we've never seen a public outpouring quite like this. Our joint efforts are clearly having an impact: public opinion has swung dramatically against Bill C-51 since it was announced. Support has plummeted, with a recent Forum Research poll finding that 56 per cent of Canadians now oppose Bill C-51, with just 33 per cent in favour. The business community, civic society groups, and principled conservatives have all spoken out. Sadly, there's no sign that the government is listening. At the time of writing, the government seems determined to use its majority to ram the legislation through the Commons in the coming weeks. What's even more worrying is that this reckless, dangerous, and ineffective legislation will further undermine Canadians' privacy rights -- rights that have already been seriously damaged by the government's Bill C-13, passed late last year, and by the government's failure to address the mass surveillance activities of its Canadian Security Establishment (CSE) intelligence agency.
Gary Edwards

America under tyrannical rule: what we must now do - 0 views

canadafreepress.com/...56517

Canada-Free-Press Douglas-Hagmann US-Constitution RiCO-Act

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Oct 13
     
    Interesting idea to restore the Constitutional Republic:  File a RiCO action against the US Government for criminal conduct, and try the case in a civil court, in front of a jury of 12 citizens.
Paul Merrell

CSIS asked foreign agencies to spy on Canadians, kept court in dark, judge says - 0 views

www.ottawacitizen.com/...story.html

surveillance state Canada CSIS courts blowback

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • OTTAWA — Canada’s foremost jurist on national security law has slammed CSIS for deliberately keeping the Federal Court of Canada “in the dark” about outsourcing its spying on Canadians abroad to foreign agencies, according to a redacted version of a classified court decision made public Friday.In a thundering rebuke, Federal Court Judge Richard Mosley said the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) purposely misled him when he granted it numerous warrants beginning in 2009 to intercept the electronic communications of unidentified Canadians abroad suspected as domestic security threats.“This was a breach of the duty of candour owed by the service and their legal advisers to the court,” Mosley said in his Further Reasons for Order.CSIS also mistakenly assigned powers to the warrants that the court never authorized and which do not exist in law, he said.“It is clear that the exercise of the court’s warrant issuing authority has been used as protective cover for activities that it has not authorized,” Mosley wrote.Furthermore, tasking foreign security intelligence services to spy on Canadians overseas “carries the risk of the detention of or other harm to a Canadian person based on that information.“Given the unfortunate history of information sharing with foreign agencies over the past decade and the reviews conducted by several royal commissions, there can be no question that the Canadian agencies are aware of those hazards. It appears to me that they are using the warrants as authorization to assume those risks.”
  • Legal observers say this case and Mosley’s scolding will harm CSIS’s credibility and raise questions about whether the service has broken Criminal Code provisions dealing with the invasion of privacy.“When a judge says the government breached its duty of candour that is a very big ‘ouch’ moment,” Craig Forcese, a national security law scholar at the University of Ottawa, wrote in a recent blog posting.At the time the first warrants were issued, CSIS told the court “on clearly stated grounds” that the electronic intercepts would be carried out from within Canada by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), the country’s foreign signals intelligence spy service.CSIS is largely restricted to domestic spying operations. If an investigation involves the use of intrusive techniques, such as electronic intercepts, Section 21 of the CSIS Act requires it to obtain a warrant approved by a Federal Court judge to guard the Charter right to a reasonable expectation of privacy.CSEC, meanwhile, is not allowed to spy on Canadians anywhere unless it is to provide technical and operational assistance to federal law enforcement and security agencies such as CSIS.And the federal court only has jurisdiction to authorize warrants under the CSIS Act as long as the communications in question are intercepted within Canada.
  • Yet once the so-called 30-08 warrants were approved by the court, CSEC, on behalf of CSIS, turned around and handed the jobs to one or more of its partners in the “Five Eyes” intelligence-gathering alliance between Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand.Mosley found out about the situation late this summer and summoned CSIS, CSEC and government officials and lawyers to court to explain themselves. The public version of his reasons for order was released Friday.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Some excerpts:• “I am satisfied that a decision was made by CSIS officials in consultation with their legal advisers to strategically omit information in applications for 30-08 warrants about their intention to seek the assistance of the foreign partners. As a result, the court was led to believe that all of the interception activity would take place in or under the control of Canada.”• “The principle of comity between nations that implies the acceptance of foreign laws and procedures when Canadian officials are operating abroad ends where clear violations of international law and human rights begin. In tasking the other members of the Five Eyes to intercept the communications of the Canadian targets, CSIS and CSEC officials knew ... this would involve the breach of international law by the requested second parties.”• “There is nothing in any of the material that I have read ... that persuades me that it was the intent of Parliament to give the service authority to engage the collection resources of the second party allies to intercept the private communications of Canadians.”• “It must be made clear, in any grant of a 30-08 warrant, that the warrant does not authorize the interception of the communications of a Canadian person by any foreign service on behalf of the service either directly or through the assistance of CSEC.”• “There must be no further suggestion in any reference to the use of second party assets by CSIS and CSEC, or their legal advisers, that it is being done under the authority of a (section) 21 warrant issued by this court.”
  • Forcese, meanwhile, raises some intriguing questions:• If Five Eyes assistance was not authorized, and CSEC and CSIS nevertheless sought it, are they still protected from Criminal Code, Part VI (invasion of privacy) culpability? Culpability, he writes, is only avoided where the intercept is lawfully authorized. If the parameters of the warrant were disregarded, does that vitiate the lawful access?• If CSEC and CSIS called on Five Eyes agencies to intercept communications, was the intercept still territorial, thus satisfying the international law concerns raised in the two warrant applications?“Outsourcing an international violation does not diminish state responsibility for that international violation. In a different context, that would be like asking bounty hunters to do your kidnapping of fugitives on the territory of a foreign state. Still a violation of international law.”CSIS has a choice, Forcese concludes: “Conduct extraterritorial spying without recourse to the courts, at risk of ultimately being called to account under domestic law, or honour the federal court’s construal of international law — and CSIS’s jurisdiction — and pull in its truly international surveillance operations, potentially blinding the country’s chief security intelligence agency.
  • Paul Merrell on 27 Dec 13
     
    Canadian Security Intelligence Service is in politically explosive deep doo-doo. 
Paul Merrell

Canada: The Ottawa Shootings and the Derogation of Constitutional Rights. Did Zebaf-Bib... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5410986

surveillance state Canada terrorists™ false-flag

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The tragic shooting of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo on October 22, 2014 at the War Memorial in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada followed by a shoot-out at the House of Commons, and the death of the shooter, Michael Zebaf-Bibeau, serves as a catalyst to advance several hidden government agendas. The Canadian government wants to spread unreasonable fear of radical, violent Muslim terrorists so that it can better control all Canadians, especially those who choose to exercise their constitutionally enshrined rights. The government is also advancing a social control mechanism so that it can deny and negate domestic constitutional rights, in particular Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 which recognizes and affirms aboriginal and treaty rights
  • It is very unlikely that Michael Zebaf-Bibeau acted alone. Prof. John McMurtry, author of The Cancer Stage of Capitalism From Crisis to Cure explains in “Canada: Decoding Harper’s Terror Game. Beneath the Masks and Diversions” describes Zebaf-Bibeau as a “ clinically insane, drug-addicted petty criminal living in a homeless shelter in Ottawa who had warned a judge in front of the police back in 2011:”‘If you can’t keep me in, I’m going to do something”. Furthermore, McMurtry wonders, “Who could have been a better tool for the events to come?” The notion that Zebaf-Bibeau was being exploited or set up by a handler/manager/police-informer is further reinforced by observations of investigative reporter Amy MacPherson who credibly claims in “Government Envisages Anti-Constitutional Surveillance Law During Ottawa Shooting” that U.S authorities had advance information. She wonders “… how American intelligence knew the name of a ‘possible terrorist’ as the mayhem was still unfolding. How did Americans know when Canadians didn’t, and how was this information so widespread that American media and Google had access to distribute, but domestic reporters on the scene did not?”
  • The theory that U.S agencies were somehow implicated in the tragedy is further reinforced by the fact that Operation Determined Dragon, a joint Canada/U.S counter-terrorism drill, was executed from 20 to 29 October 2014, so the murder of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo coincided with the time that Determined Dragon was being executed. Yet the Canadian government frames this tragedy as rooted in Islamic terrorism rather than the more credible alternative: that a homeless drug addict could have been used as a tool to further an already finalized agenda to participate in an illegal war in Iraq, and to restrict the rights and freedoms of all Canadians. Not surprisingly, the passing of the anti-constitutional surveillance law – Bill C-13, had also been expedited.
Paul Merrell

Canada bars visas from Ebola-hit countries - Americas - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...ntries-201411162157248321.html

ebola quarantine Canada Australia

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Canada has suspended visa applications for residents and nationals of countries with "widespread transmission" of the Ebola virus, becoming the second nation after Australia to introduce such a measure.  The countries most severely hit by the worst Ebola outbreak ever are Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Canada has not yet had a case of the disease. 
Paul Merrell

Canadian Spies Collect Domestic Emails in Secret Security Sweep - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...ony-express-email-surveillance

surveillance state Canada CSE bulk-collection email

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Canada’s electronic surveillance agency is covertly monitoring vast amounts of Canadians’ emails as part of a sweeping domestic cybersecurity operation, according to top-secret documents. The surveillance initiative, revealed Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, is sifting through millions of emails sent to Canadian government agencies and departments, archiving details about them on a database for months or even years. The data mining operation is carried out by the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, Canada’s equivalent of the National Security Agency. Its existence is disclosed in documents obtained by The Intercept from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The emails are vacuumed up by the Canadian agency as part of its mandate to defend against hacking attacks and malware targeting government computers. It relies on a system codenamed PONY EXPRESS to analyze the messages in a bid to detect potential cyber threats.
  • Last year, CSE acknowledged it collected some private communications as part of cybersecurity efforts. But it refused to divulge the number of communications being stored or to explain for how long any intercepted messages would be retained. Now, the Snowden documents shine a light for the first time on the huge scope of the operation — exposing the controversial details the government withheld from the public. Under Canada’s criminal code, CSE is not allowed to eavesdrop on Canadians’ communications. But the agency can be granted special ministerial exemptions if its efforts are linked to protecting government infrastructure — a loophole that the Snowden documents show is being used to monitor the emails. The latest revelations will trigger concerns about how Canadians’ private correspondence with government employees are being archived by the spy agency and potentially shared with police or allied surveillance agencies overseas, such as the NSA. Members of the public routinely communicate with government employees when, for instance, filing tax returns, writing a letter to a member of parliament, applying for employment insurance benefits or submitting a passport application.
  • Chris Parsons, an internet security expert with the Toronto-based internet think tank Citizen Lab, told CBC News that “you should be able to communicate with your government without the fear that what you say … could come back to haunt you in unexpected ways.” Parsons said that there are legitimate cybersecurity purposes for the agency to keep tabs on communications with the government, but he added: “When we collect huge volumes, it’s not just used to track bad guys. It goes into data stores for years or months at a time and then it can be used at any point in the future.” In a top-secret CSE document on the security operation, dated from 2010, the agency says it “processes 400,000 emails per day” and admits that it is suffering from “information overload” because it is scooping up “too much data.” The document outlines how CSE built a system to handle a massive 400 terabytes of data from Internet networks each month — including Canadians’ emails — as part of the cyber operation. (A single terabyte of data can hold about a billion pages of text, or about 250,000 average-sized mp3 files.)
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The agency notes in the document that it is storing large amounts of “passively tapped network traffic” for “days to months,” encompassing the contents of emails, attachments and other online activity. It adds that it stores some kinds of metadata — data showing who has contacted whom and when, but not the content of the message — for “months to years.” The document says that CSE has “excellent access to full take data” as part of its cyber operations and is receiving policy support on “use of intercepted private communications.” The term “full take” is surveillance-agency jargon that refers to the bulk collection of both content and metadata from Internet traffic. Another top-secret document on the surveillance dated from 2010 suggests the agency may be obtaining at least some of the data by covertly mining it directly from Canadian Internet cables. CSE notes in the document that it is “processing emails off the wire.”
  • Paul Merrell on 27 Feb 15
     
    " CANADIAN SPIES COLLECT DOMESTIC EMAILS IN SECRET SECURITY SWEEP BY RYAN GALLAGHER AND GLENN GREENWALD @rj_gallagher@ggreenwald YESTERDAY AT 2:02 AM SHARE TWITTER FACEBOOK GOOGLE EMAIL PRINT POPULAR EXCLUSIVE: TSA ISSUES SECRET WARNING ON 'CATASTROPHIC' THREAT TO AVIATION CHICAGO'S "BLACK SITE" DETAINEES SPEAK OUT WHY DOES THE FBI HAVE TO MANUFACTURE ITS OWN PLOTS IF TERRORISM AND ISIS ARE SUCH GRAVE THREATS? NET NEUTRALITY IS HERE - THANKS TO AN UNPRECEDENTED GUERRILLA ACTIVISM CAMPAIGN HOW SPIES STOLE THE KEYS TO THE ENCRYPTION CASTLE Canada's electronic surveillance agency is covertly monitoring vast amounts of Canadians' emails as part of a sweeping domestic cybersecurity operation, according to top-secret documents. The surveillance initiative, revealed Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, is sifting through millions of emails sent to Canadian government agencies and departments, archiving details about them on a database for months or even years. The data mining operation is carried out by the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, Canada's equivalent of the National Security Agency. Its existence is disclosed in documents obtained by The Intercept from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The emails are vacuumed up by the Canadian agency as part of its mandate to defend against hacking attacks and malware targeting government computers. It relies on a system codenamed PONY EXPRESS to analyze the messages in a bid to detect potential cyber threats. Last year, CSE acknowledged it collected some private communications as part of cybersecurity efforts. But it refused to divulge the number of communications being stored or to explain for how long any intercepted messages would be retained. Now, the Snowden documents shine a light for the first time on the huge scope of the operation - exposing the controversial details the government withheld from the public. Under Canada's criminal code, CSE is no
Paul Merrell

Canadian risks prison for not giving up phone's passcode - Yahoo News - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/phones-passcode-235154518.html

surveillance state Canada cellphone border-search-&-seizure password

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Montreal (AFP) - A Canadian charged for refusing to give border agents his smartphone passcode was expected Thursday to become the first to test whether border inspections can include information stored on devices.Alain Philippon, 38, risks up to a year in prison and a fine of up to Can$25,000 (US$20,000) if convicted of obstruction.He told local media that he refused to provide the passcode because he considered information on his smartphone to be "personal."Philippon was transiting through the port city of Halifax on his way home from a Caribbean vacation on Monday when he was selected for an in-depth exam.
  • "Philippon refused to divulge the passcode for his cell phone, preventing border services officers from their duties," Canada Border Services Agency said in an email.The agency insists that the Customs Act authorizes its officers to examine "all goods and conveyances including electronic devices, such as cell phones and laptops."But, according to legal experts, the issue of whether a traveler must reveal the password for an electronic device at a border crossing has not been tested in court. "(It's) one thing for them to inspect it, another thing for them to compel you to help them," Rob Currie, director of the Law and Technology Institute at Dalhousie University, told public broadcaster CBC.Philippon is scheduled to appear in court on May 12.
Paul Merrell

Impending Threat to Canadian Democracy: Harper Government's "Anti-Terrorism Act" isn't ... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5435766

torture Canada legislation liberties tyranny

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The Harper government’s Bill C-51, or Anti-Terrorism Act, has been in the public domain for over a month. Long enough for us to know that it subverts basic principles of constitutional law, assaults rights of free speech and free assembly, and is viciously anti-democratic. An unprecedented torrent of criticism has been directed against this bill as the government rushes it through Parliament. This has included stern or at least sceptical editorials in all the major newspapers; an open letter, signed by four former Prime Ministers and five former Supreme Court judges, denouncing the bill for exposing Canadians to major violations of their rights; and another letter, signed by a hundred Canadian law professors, explaining the dangers it poses to justice and legality. As its critics have shown, the bill isn’t really about terrorism: it’s about smearing other activities by association—and then suppressing them in ways that would formerly have been flagrantly illegal. The bill targets, among others, people who defend the treaty rights of First Nations, people who oppose tar sands, fracking, and bitumen-carrying pipelines as threats to health and the environment, and people who urge that international law be peacefully applied to ending Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories. (Members of this latter group include significant numbers of Canadian Jews.)
  • But the Anti-Terrorism Act is more mortally dangerous to Canadian democracy than even these indications would suggest. A central section of the act empowers CSIS agents to obtain judicial warrants—on mere suspicion, with no requirement for supporting evidence—that will allow them to supplement other disruptive actions against purported enemies of Harperland with acts that directly violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and other Canadian laws. The only constraints placed on this legalized law-breaking are that CSIS agents shall not “(a) cause, intentionally or by criminal negligence, death or bodily harm to an individual; (b) wilfully attempt in any manner to obstruct, pervert or defeat the course of justice; or (c) violate the sexual integrity of an individual.”
  • The second of these prohibitions—occurring in the midst of a bill that seeks systematically to obstruct citizens in the exercise of their rights, pervert justice, and defeat democracy—might tempt one to believe that there is a satirist at work within the Department of Justice. (Note, however, that CSIS agents can obstruct, pervert and defeat to their hearts’ content, so long as they do so haphazardly, rather than “wilfully.”) But the first and third clauses amount to an authorization of torture.
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Mar 15
     
    U.S. government's excesses metastasize to Canada.
Paul Merrell

Canada Casts Global Surveillance Dragnet Over File Downloads - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...e-levitation-mass-surveillance

surveillance state Canada CSE NSA-targets downloads

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • In a top-secret PowerPoint presentation, dated from mid-2012, an analyst from the agency jokes about how, while hunting for extremists, the LEVITATION system gets clogged with information on innocuous downloads of the musical TV series Glee. CSE finds some 350 “interesting” downloads each month, the presentation notes, a number that amounts to less than 0.0001 per cent of the total collected data. The agency stores details about downloads and uploads to and from 102 different popular file-sharing websites, according to the 2012 document, which describes the collected records as “free file upload,” or FFU, “events.” Only three of the websites are named: RapidShare, SendSpace, and the now defunct MegaUpload.
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  • “The specific uses that they talk about in this [counter-terrorism] context may not be the problem, but it’s what else they can do,” said Tamir Israel, a lawyer with the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic. Picking which downloads to monitor is essentially “completely at the discretion of CSE,” Israel added. The file-sharing surveillance also raises questions about the number of Canadians whose downloading habits could have been swept up as part of LEVITATION’s dragnet. By law, CSE isn’t allowed to target Canadians. In the LEVITATION presentation, however, two Canadian IP addresses that trace back to a web server in Montreal appear on a list of suspicious downloads found across the world. The same list includes downloads that CSE monitored in closely allied countries, including the United Kingdom, United States, Spain, Brazil, Germany and Portugal. It is unclear from the document whether LEVITATION has ever prevented any terrorist attacks. The agency cites only two successes of the program in the 2012 presentation: the discovery of a hostage video through a previously unknown target, and an uploaded document that contained the hostage strategy of a terrorist organization. The hostage in the discovered video was ultimately killed, according to public reports.
  • LEVITATION does not rely on cooperation from any of the file-sharing companies. A separate secret CSE operation codenamed ATOMIC BANJO obtains the data directly from internet cables that it has tapped into, and the agency then sifts out the unique IP address of each computer that downloaded files from the targeted websites. The IP addresses are valuable pieces of information to CSE’s analysts, helping to identify people whose downloads have been flagged as suspicious. The analysts use the IP addresses as a kind of search term, entering them into other surveillance databases that they have access to, such as the vast repositories of intercepted Internet data shared with the Canadian agency by the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters. If successful, the searches will return a list of results showing other websites visited by the people downloading the files – in some cases revealing associations with Facebook or Google accounts. In turn, these accounts may reveal the names and the locations of individual downloaders, opening the door for further surveillance of their activities.
  • 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.)
Paul Merrell

Amid International Outcry, Venezuelan Officials Allege Blackwater, U.S. and Canadian Li... - 0 views

venezuelanalysis.com/11212

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Venezuela coup-attempts Blackwater UK Canada

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • New revelations  in Venezuela have linked U.S. private security firm Blackwater, now known as Academi, to the aircraft that was to be used as part of Thursday's thwarted "Blue Coup" attempt. The four-stage plan included economic war, an international media offensive against the Venezuelan government, political destabilization fomenting ungovernability, and finally the use of a Super Tucano aircraft to strike "tactical targets" in the capital, such as the Presidential Palace, teleSur, and military intelligence The coup was planned for the one-year anniversary of violent opposition protests known as the Guarimba and was to come one day after a public statement by leading opposition leaders calling for a "transition". 
  • According to U.S. aviation records, the EMB-314B1 or "Super Tucano" aircraft in question was acquired  from Brazilian manufacturer Embraer by the firm Blackwater Worldwide in 2008 allegedly for the purpose of pilot training. Registered under the serial number N314TG, the aircraft is, moreover, the only one of its kind sold by the Brazilian firm to a private company.  The Super Tucano is a light, highly agile Brazilian aircraft designed principally for pilot training and counterinsurgency operations. The aircraft has an operational range that extends from the U.S. to any point in Colombia, and has been widely used in Colombian counterinsurgency operations, including in the 2008 assassination of FARC second-in-command Raul Reyes in violation of Ecuadorian sovereignty.  While Venezuela does have its own fleet of 12 Super Tucanos, all aircraft are currently grounded and undergoing major repairs, stated President Nicolas Maduro, whilst offering further evidence regarding the foreign origin of the aircraft. 
  • Blackwater has a checkered human rights record. Several of its contractors have been indicted in U.S. courts for their role in the 2007 massacre of Iraqi civilians, and Jeremy Scahill, national security correspondent for the Nation, has documented the firm's role in the CIA's global assassination program.
  • Paul Merrell on 18 Feb 15
     
    Blackwater, Canada, and the UK too. Oh me, oh my ... 
Paul Merrell

Canada reveals it's actively considering joining China-led Asian bank AIIB, despite U.S... - 0 views

business.financialpost.com/...ning-china-led-asian-bank-aiib

China AIIB Canada U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Canada broke its silence on Tuesday over whether it would take part in the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, signalling it was actively considering joining the institution despite U.S. and Japanese reservations.
Paul Merrell

Gulf States Slip Out of War on ISIS | Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...states-slip-out-of-war-on-isis

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy ISIL Saudis UAE Canada

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states went through the motions of joining the U.S.-led fight against the Islamic State and other Sunni terrorists, who received substantial help from the same Gulf states, but those U.S. “allies” have now slipped out of the conflict almost entirely, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Nov 15
     
    With Canada about to withdraw as well and Turkish participation turning out to be mere cover for its war against Kurds, the Coalition of the Willing in Syria is on the verge of the U.S. fighting a lonely battle against ISIL, except for that waged by U.S. "enemies," Russia, Iran, and Syria. 
Paul Merrell

Canada Cuts Off Some Intelligence Sharing With U.S. Out of Fear for Canadians' Privacy - 1 views

theintercept.com/...-of-fear-for-canadians-privacy

surveillance state Canada NSA intelligence-sharing

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Canada’s CBC network reported Thursday that the country is slamming on the brakes when it comes to sharing some communications intelligence with key allies — including the U.S. — out of fear that Canadian personal information is not properly protected. “Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan says the sharing won’t resume until he is satisfied that the proper protections are in place,” CBC reported. Earlier on Thursday, the watchdog tasked with keeping tabs on the Ottawa-based Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Jean-Pierre Plouffe, called out the electronic spying agency for risking Canadian privacy in his annual report. Plouffe wrote that the surveillance agency broke privacy laws when it shared Canadian data with its allies without properly protecting it first. Consequently, he concluded, it should precisely explain how Canadian citizens’ metadata — information about who a communication is to and from, the subject line of an email, and so on — can and can’t be used.
  • Canada’s decision to temporarily stop sharing information comes at a time when the U.S. is scrambling to come up with a new data-sharing arrangement with the European Union before a January 31 deadline. Europe’s top court decided in October that European privacy isn’t sufficiently respected by the American government or its spying agencies.
Paul Merrell

Canada withdrawing fighter jets from Iraq, Syria, Trudeau tells Obama - 0 views

www.msn.com/...ar-BBmgrZg

war & peace ISIL Canada Iraq Syria air-force-withdrawal

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Canada's prime minister-elect Justin Trudeau said Tuesday he told US President Barack Obama that Canadian fighter jets would withdraw from fighting the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.But he gave no timeline."About an hour ago I spoke with President Obama," Trudeau told a press conference.
  • While Canada remains "a strong member of the coalition against ISIL," Trudeau said he made clear to the US leader "the commitments I have made around ending the combat mission."Canada last year deployed CF-18 fighter jets to the region until March 2016, as well as about 70 special forces troops to train Kurds in northern Iraq.During the campaign, Trudeau pledged to bring home the fighter jets and end its combat mission. But he vowed to keep military trainers in place.His new Liberal government will be "moving forward with our campaign commitments in a responsible fashion," Trudeau said. "We want to ensure that the transition is done in an orderly fashion."
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Oct 15
     
    Canada's new prime minister is wasting no time in winding down Canadian involvement in the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq and Syria. 
Paul Merrell

Netanyahu Loses an Important Canadian Ally « LobeLog - 0 views

lobelog.com/ses-an-important-canadian-ally

Canada Trudeau election Israel Netanyahu Likud

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Coming up soon in LobeLog, an actual Canadian will analyze the implications for Canada’s Middle East policy of Monday’s victory of the Liberal Party’s Justin Trudeau over Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the parliamentary elections. For now, however, it’s worth noting that Bibi Netanyahu cannot be happy with the results. Without predicting what Trudeau will do, it’s clear that Bibi has just lost a very important international ally in Ottawa and within the Group of Seven (G-7). 
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