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Report: Canada agency monitors file-sharing

 
Published Jan. 29, 2015

OTTAWA, Ontario — Every day, Canada's electronic spy agency examines tens of millions of electronic documents and videos — and some of the people who downloaded them — as part of an antiterrorism effort involving the United States and other allies, a document leaked by Edward Snowden indicates.

The project, to detect possible extremists by monitoring visits to sites commonly used to download music, film and television series — often illegally — was outlined in a top secret PowerPoint presentation document made by the surveillance agency, the Communications Security Establishment Canada, in 2012.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corp., in collaboration with the Intercept news website, first reported on the project, known as Levitation, on Wednesday.

The presentation to the Communications Security Establishment Canada indicated that the agency looks at 10 million to 15 million uploads a day from 102 file-sharing sites and finds about 350 a month that might point to extremists. Those include bomb-making instructions and "lots of pictures of cars on fire." Yet the system also captures a great deal of unrelated material. One slide was titled "Filtering out 'Glee' Episodes."

A software analysis produces a list of suspects. Systems operated by U.S. and British electronic surveillance agencies are then used to link those suspects to Internet addresses, email and Facebook accounts.

The document listed only two "successes" up to 2012. It said the system had produced "a German hostage video from a previously unknown target" and the "hostage strategy" of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, a terrorist organization that operates in North Africa.

Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency, was granted temporary asylum by Russia in August 2013.

In a statement, the Communications Security Establishment Canada would not confirm or deny that the project exists. The statement said that the agency's "foreign signals intelligence has played a vital role in uncovering foreign-based extremists' efforts to attract, radicalize, and train individuals to carry out attacks in Canada and abroad."

Some Internet privacy experts said they were concerned that the program captures and examines a vast amount of online activity that had no connection to terrorism or extremists.

"It means that these agencies have an immense amount of information," said Christopher Parsons, an electronic surveillance researcher at Citizen Lab, part of the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs. "That raises the prospect that at some point laws could be changed to make it available to other branches of the government."

The program also suggests that Canada plays a larger role in electronic surveillance than previously thought, he added.

Wesley Wark, an intelligence specialist at the University of Ottawa, said that a lack of information about the program made it impossible to judge whether it is an acceptable invasion of privacy, although he noted that the Canadian agency was prohibited by law from using any data it collects on Canadian citizens.

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"How effective it is, we have no idea," Wark said. "Somebody has to be able to step forward and say, 'This is justifiable; we are getting good value.' They just can't sit in the shadows."