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Surveillance files: Now Canada exposed as global snooper

by Josef Kafka

Amid a seemingly unstoppable wave of revelations of government spying on ordinary people and what they get up to online, Canada is the latest country accused of such clandestine operations. 

Its Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Canada's intelligence agency, has been engaged in a worldwide surveillance programme in which its staff have been downloading as many as 15 million files from the internet every day and analysing them, according to a new batch of secret documents obtained by the former US intelligence contractor and fugitive Edward Snowden. 

In one of the largest global surveillance operations yet revealed – certainly equal if not surpassing Snowden's initial exposes of mass spying by the US National Security Agency – the CSE has been able to tap into the internet's infrastructure, essentially massive fibre-optic cables wrapped around the world that transmit data, and take its pick of files, according to the documents. 

Those files include all kinds of material uploaded to the internet, from videos to music and a lot more, and especially those on file-sharing sites, in an operation codenamed Levitation and designed to ferret out communications between would-be terrorists as part of efforts to thwart any planned attacks in Canada. The countries targeted reportedly included the United States and Britain as well as several other European countries, notably Spain and Portugal, and Brazil.  

The secret documents, which are available to view at https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1510163-cse-presentation-on-the-levitation-project.html, provide further proof that whatever people are doing online, but especially using file-sharing websites, there's a good chance that someone is watching and analysing what they're doing, and not just in their own countries but right around the world. It comes at a time when Canada itself has recently been subjected to terror attacks, however minor in scale, and subsequent political moves to give intelligence bodies more power to root out extremist activities.

The CSE targeted a total of 102 file-sharing sites as part of its operations, according to the documents, only three of which are disclosed: SendSpace, RapidShare and MegaUpload, which has since been closed down. SendSpace said it was appalled at the breach of users' privacy and that no agency should be permitted to spy on its operations.

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