November 2009 CSE staff size

1739.

(If you click through on the link and get a different figure, it's probably because the Canada Public Service Agency has updated its website; they update the numbers once a month.)

New CSE Commissioner appointed

Former Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada Peter Cory has been appointed to the position of Communications Security Establishment Commissioner, effective 14 December 2009. (Official news release here.)

Cory will replace former judge Charles Gonthier, who died on 17 July while still serving as CSE Commissioner. The appointment will thus bring to a close a nearly five-month period during which there has been no CSE Commissioner.

Cory served in the RCAF during the Second World War. He is past chairman of the Ontario Civil Liberties Section of the Canadian Bar Association and past National Director of the Canadian Bar Association. He served on the Supreme Court from 1989 to 1999. Following his retirement, he served as head of an independent inquiry—the Cory Collusion Inquiry—into possible security force collusion in murders during the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland.

October 2009 CSE staff size

1733.

(If you click through on the link and get a different figure, it's probably because the Canada Public Service Agency has updated its website; they update the numbers once a month.)

CSE 2015

Thanks to information published by Peter Kovessy in the Ottawa Business Journal ("Feds begin P3 procurement to build massive east-end spy HQ," Ottawa Business Journal, 24 September 2009), we're starting to get a clearer picture of what CSE could look like once its new headquarters complex is finished in 2015.

Two construction projects are underway or soon to be underway at the new site. The Mid-Term Accommodation Project, announced in 2008, involves construction of a $70-million, 6000-square-metre building (see blog posts here and here). The second, the Long-Term Accommodation Project, announced earlier this year, will be a much larger, $880-million building that will host the remainder of CSE's Ottawa-based staff.

Staff build-up continues

According to Kovessy's report, recently released solicitation documents indicate that approximately 2000 employees and contractors will occupy the LTAP building. Together, the two buildings will hold a total CSE employee/contractor workforce of some 2250. That's more than 500 more than CSE's current 1717 FTEs and more than 400 more than the 1817 FTEs projected for fiscal year 2011-12 (the latest date for which public projections are available)!

A certain amount of uncertainty is introduced into these calculations by the fact that contractors are included in the 2000 figure. But I'm guessing that the contractors in question will consist mainly, if not entirely, of the 130-200 maintenance and support positions that CSE is planning to privatize as part of the public-private partnership arrangement that will build the building. If that's the case, then in functional terms the increase in CSE's workforce will indeed be more than 500.

This previously unacknowledged expansion will leave the agency two and a half times as large as it was at the end of the Cold War.

An enormous and expensive new HQ

The solicitation documents also show that the gross size of the LTAP building will be 82,700 square metres (890,000 square feet). Previous news releases had acknowledged only that the building would have 72,000 sm of "rentable space" (see my earlier blog posting here).

This is a huge amount of space by normal standards. As I noted in that earlier posting, CSE has typically allotted around 25 square metres gross space per employee. The MTAP building comes in at about 24 sm. GCHQ's relatively new headquarters also provides around 24 sm per employee. The LTAP building works out to 41 sm per person!

It's also an extraordinarily expensive building. The high-security annex to CSE's Sir Leonard Tilley building, constructed in the 1989-1992 period, was built for about $400 per square foot in today's dollars. The new addition to the CSIS building that's about to be built is also projected to cost about $400 per square foot. At a projected cost of $880 million, the LTAP will work out to nearly $1000 per square foot!

Thus, by "normal" standards we might expect the 2000 people in the LTAP to be accommodated in a building of about 48,000 sm (510,000 sf) costing a total of about $200 million.

What could possibly explain a nearly empty, $680-million, 35,000 sm (380,000 sf) addition to the LTAP?

The Charles N. Hellyer Computer Centre

The most plausible explanation, I think, is a gigantic computer centre. I will call this hypothetical facility the Charles N. Hellyer Computer Centre, not because I have any evidence that CSE is planning to call it that but because I think they should call it that. (Chuck Hellyer headed Canada's SIGINT computer operations from the founding of the Joint Machine Unit in 1943 until his retirement from CBNRC in December 1974.)

A 380,000-square-foot computer centre is one huge computer centre, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility. At one-million square feet, the data centre that NSA is planning to build at Camp Williams, Utah will be more than two and a half times as large. The Camp Williams facility is budgeted to cost US$1.6 billion, or about $1725 per square foot in Canadian dollars. My crude calculations put the cost of the Hellyer Computer Centre at an essentially identical $1790 per square foot, so this cost figure also appears to be plausible.

A whole lotta computers

There may be other explanations for some or all of the "excess" space in the new CSE headquarters. But if the Hellyer Computer Centre hypothesis is anywhere near correct, we're talking about a whole lotta computers. Presumably it would contain a mix of very high performance supercomputers, for such tasks as cryptanalysis and data mining, and vast data storage capabilities. (The Utah data center, by contrast, will be mainly data storage.)

By 2015, when the building is scheduled to open, we could looking at supercomputers capable of 100 to 250 petaflops (the fastest in the world is currently about 1.7 petaflops) and storage capabilities of 5 or more exabytes. These are outrageously large numbers, I know. But with internet traffic projected to hit 1 zettabyte (I swear I'm not making these terms up!) by 2015, they may be small compared to what the SIGINT agencies would like to have.

More power!

The other thing worth noting about the Hellyer Computer Centre hypothesis is that if it's anywhere near correct, they're going to need a whole lot of electrical power at the new CSE campus. Current petaflop computers use multi-megawatts of power. The NSA is projecting that the Utah Data Center will consume 65 megawatts. If the Hellyer Center used a proportionate amount of power, it would consume about 25 megawatts, or about 3.5% of Ottawa's entire electrical power consumption.


Big numbers all. But if your ambition is to "master the internet", as CSE Chief Adams put it a few years ago, you have to think big.

Image: Billion Dollar Brain, Keystone/Getty Images

September 2009 CSE staff size

1717!

(If you click through on the link and get a different figure, it's probably because the Canada Public Service Agency has updated its website; they update the numbers once a month.)

CSE joins the GWOR

CSE is joining the Global War On Recessions!

As part of the federal government's broader effort to be seen shovelling stimulus dollars out of the door as fast as possible, CSE has become a beneficiary of CANADA'S ECONOMIC ACTION PLAN:

Edward Drake Building - "The program of work includes repairing the pavement at this site."
Sir Leonard Tilley Building - "This project includes the replacement of the ceiling."
Insurance Building - "Program of work includes: repairing the pavers and insurance building." [sic]

Next month, I assume, they'll all be contributing to Canada's economic recovery by turning the furnace on when the weather gets cold.

Court confirms that CSE can collect for CSIS

In January, Federal Court of Canada judge Mr. Justice Richard Mosley cleared the way for CSE to support CSIS by collecting information on Canadians outside Canada. Judge Mosley's judgment was released today in redacted form by the Federal Court (CSIS-30-80).

As far as I can tell, the government has always intended that CSE be able to conduct collection activities in support of CSIS. The CSIS Act requires CSIS to obtain judicial warrants to conduct intrusive surveillance activities against Canadians. Then-Solicitor General Robert Kaplan, testifying in 1984 about the proposed act, stated that such surveillance might sometimes be conducted outside of Canada and that there was "no statutory requirement that the entire activities of the Security Intelligence Service be performed in Canada". Section 24 of the Act made it legal for other persons (e.g., other agencies such as CSE) to assist CSIS in executing surveillance warrants issued under s. 21 of the Act, and in 1991 CSE confirmed to the Globe and Mail that it does provide various forms of "technical assistance" to CSIS pursuant to warrants issued under s. 21, although collection was not specifically mentioned. That same year, the Security Intelligence Review Committee, the CSIS watchdog body, noted in its annual report that "current CSIS policies and procedures safeguard the interests of Canadians by limiting the information obtained from CSE to that which CSIS has the mandate and authority to collect." CSE's ability to co-operate with CSIS was explicitly written into Canadian law in 2001, when CSE was finally given its own statutory mandate, one element of which is to "provide technical and operational assistance to federal law enforcement and security agencies in the performance of their lawful duties".

So why was the legal decision necessary? In 2007 Mr. Justice Edmond Blanchard denied an application by CSIS for a warrant to conduct surveillance on ten individuals (nine Canadians and one foreign national) outside of Canada, arguing that without an explicit mandate in Canadian law he had no jurisdiction to authorize activities that would violate customary international law by impinging on the sovereignty of foreign countries (SCRS-10-07). CSIS had sought both to use the services of CSE in conducting the surveillance and to conduct surveillance activities of its own abroad (installing local wiretaps, etc.). Judge Blanchard stated that he found CSIS's arguments that CSE could assist in the execution of such a warrant "persuasive", but he did not rule on that issue as the jurisdiction issue made it moot.

Whether CSIS had never up to that time used CSE's collection abilities in support of s. 21 surveillance warrants, as some of the media coverage on that decision suggests (see, e.g., Colin Freeze, "Spying laws outdated, expert argues," Globe and Mail, 20 February 2008), or CSIS had been using CSE collection support but that support ended up as a collateral casualty in a jurisdictional decision sparked by CSIS's desire to send its own agents to conduct covert surveillance abroad, as seems more likely to me, the result of Blanchard's decision was that CSIS could not use CSE to conduct surveillance on Canadian targets abroad. (CSE surveillance of non-Canadian targets in support of CSIS presumably continued unhindered.)

The Mosley decision has now lifted that roadblock, not by finding a jurisdictional basis for CSIS surveillance conducted in other countries, but by deciding that CSIS can conduct surveillance abroad as long as it is done from "within Canada". Judge Mosley also confirmed that CSE does have the legal ability to assist in such surveillance when pursuant to a s. 21 warrant.

How can CSE conduct surveillance abroad from "within Canada"? Several possibilities come to mind, all of which are probably used from time to time. First, CSE can monitor HF radio and some satellite communications from the CFIOG intercept stations in Canada. Second, many communications between foreign points transit through Canadian territory, and it is likely that CSE has the ability to intercept selected communications from that traffic. Third, CSE can collect local cell phone and microwave traffic from the covert intercept stations it has in many Canadian diplomatic establishments, which technically are considered Canadian territory. Finally, and probably most importantly, CSE can task the collection resources of its UKUSA allies to conduct intercepts of Canadian targets. Those collection resources are located all around the world and even in outer space, but since the tasking can be done from workstations in Canada presumably that too is considered to be from within Canada.

The decision also opens the way for another form of CSE collection activity for CSIS. Discussion of this technique is quite heavily redacted in the decision, but it seems clear that the technique in question is remote computer intrusion, e.g., hacking into computers in other locations (in this case, abroad), examining their contents, capturing passwords, monitoring the activities of their users, and so on. Such activities don't fall into the traditional definition of signals intelligence, but CSE has been engaging in this form of intelligence collection for more than a decade, and when its statutory mandate was drafted in 2001 it was written to reflect this broader role ("to acquire and use information from the global information infrastructure").

I strongly suspect that the government intended all along that CSE be able to use its capabilities in support of CSIS in the execution of s. 21 warrants and that the Blanchard decision was an unexpected glitch. Whether it has never been done before or was simply on hold for a couple of years, however, CSE collection support to CSIS has clearly got the green light now. It looks like CSE will be an even busier place in the wake of this latest decision.

Links to some of the media coverage of the decision:

• Jim Bronskill, "CSIS enlists technical wizardry to eavesdrop abroad," Canadian Press, 6 October 2009.
• Colin Freeze, "Canada's foreign intelligence agency can now eavesdrop on citizens abroad," Globe and Mail, 6 October 2009.
• Joanna Smith, "Court gives CSIS expanded search powers," Toronto Star, 6 October 2009.

(HT to Jim Bronskill and an anonymous reader for alerting me to this story.)