Lux Ex Umbra

Forster takes the conn

2012-01-30T14:39:00.004-05:00

John Forster is the new Chief of CSE effective today.

His official bio is live at the CSE website.

According to that document, Forster is both "Deputy Head and Chief" of CSE.

Deputy Head? What the heck is that supposed to mean? I am not versed in the ways of these bureaucratic folk and their customs are strange to me. However, I do note that John Adams was never described as Deputy Head. He was an Associate Deputy Minister of National Defence. Is Deputy Head supposed to be the equivalent of that position -- or maybe even the equivalent of Deputy Minister -- now that CSE is a stand-alone agency?

And if Forster is Deputy Head, who, as Patrick McGoohan would say, is Number One?

Who is The Head?

The Minister? Is Peter MacKay now the Head of CSE?

I keep asking questions and no one ever answers them for me. It may have something to do with the fact that I chose to write a blog about people who are sworn to secrecy. Yes, that could be it.

But CSE does have a lone, overworked Media Relations Officer. I will ask him about this Deputy Head business and report back.

Bad Canada! No treat!

2012-01-29T22:50:00.002-05:00

Former Defence Minister Bill Graham repeats the story that Canada suffered a loss of U.S.-supplied intelligence following our failure to join the U.S. in its own great failure of intelligence (both institutional and presidential) in Iraq (Steven Chase, Colin Freeze & Oliver Moore,"Inside Trinity, the secretive Halifax facility where an alleged spy last worked," Globe and Mail, 27 January 2012):

Mr. Graham, who served in the role [of defence minister] from 2004 to 2006, explained that the time-honoured intelligence-sharing relationship among [the Five Eyes] was jeopardized once before – when Canada refused to join last decade’s U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

“We definitely paid a price. We definitely were shut out for about a year,” he said.

If the various extant accounts are accurate, the Iraq War was not the only time punishments have been meted out to Canada for insufficient ready-aye-readiness. In 2010, British intelligence historian Richard Aldrich revealed two previous incidents involving Canada. And UNDE... Well, we're not really sure what UNDE was on about, but it may have been referring to another two cut-offs.

But, really, this is all getting rather tiresome. Sure, Canada probably lost some access to Iraq-related intelligence as a result of not having any forces operating there. But – and I'm sure Bill Graham must have been well aware of this since he was the defence minister – we didn't have any forces operating there. So big deal.

The U.S. and the other members of the UKUSA community share intelligence because it is in their interests to do so. Canada benefits from that sharing, but so do the U.S. and the other members. That's why they do it.

Policy disputes arise among the members from time to time. The U.S. was extremely annoyed with the U.K. in 1956 (as was the U.K. with the U.S.). But the intelligence relationship went on, because both countries believed that it was in their interest to continue it.

The U.S. was highly incensed with New Zealand in the 1980s. But, as Nicky Hager has documented, even in the case of that very unequal intelligence-sharing relationship, only very minor cuts were made to the intelligence supply: the fundamental SIGINT relationship went on.

The U.S. from time to time threatens (and evidently to some limited extent occasionally engages in) intelligence cut-offs not because it has decided that its overall intelligence-sharing relationships no longer serve its interests but because it understands that credulous political leaders may fall for such threats and thus modify their policies to make them more to the U.S.'s liking.

We owe it to ourselves not to be too credulous in this respect.

And we also need to remember that, in the final analysis, we seek intelligence in order to advance our foreign, defence, and domestic security policies; our foreign, defence, and domestic security policies do not exist to advance our intelligence-sharing arrangements. If the cost of maintaining access to certain Iraq-related intelligence was sending Canadian troops to Iraq, then the government made the right decision when it chose not to pay that cost.

The ironic thing in this particular example, of course, is that the Chretien government was quite willing to go to Iraq. It had provided contingency funds in the Estimates to pay for the operation. The "compromise" it promoted at the UN Security Council amounted to nothing more than a slight delay in the timeline of the war – giving Saddam more time to prove a negative was never going to make the impossible possible. In the end, the government's insistence on a second UN resolution saved it from going to war in Iraq, but it might just as easily have trapped it into taking that foolish step.

And – another irony of intelligence-sharing among countries that occasionally differ on matters of policy – at the same time as Canada was promoting its "compromise" at the Security Council, the NSA was mounting a surge in UN coverage aimed ultimately at influencing the Security Council to vote in favour of the U.S. position. The UKUSA allies had been asked to help the NSA effort, and it's hard to imagine that they didn't. Was CSE involved? If so, exactly which country's policies was it advancing?

This is the kind of conundrum that is going to keep on coming up. If you're going to participate in intelligence-sharing, you're going to end up sometimes advancing policies you don't agree with. The standard calculation that Ottawa makes is that despite such disagreements, on the whole the intelligence-sharing serves Canada's interests.

Which is the same calculation that Washington makes with respect to U.S. interests.

Which is why even though we sometimes differ on policy, and although symbolic cut-offs may occur from time to time, the broad intelligence-sharing relationship continues.

If either government ever decided that the two countries' interests and policies had diverged so greatly as to call into question their status as allies and partners, then we could expect intelligence-sharing to end. But that possibility remains inconceivable in either capital.

Until then, apocalyptic claims of imminent intelligence cut-offs resulting from the spy scandal or policy disagreement du jour should be met with a collective roll of all five eyes.

OSINT and CBNRC

2012-01-27T22:48:00.006-05:00

As the Gouzenko revelations, the allegations in the headlines of today, and innumerable incidents in between demonstrate, the Russians love to spy. But does that love of the excitement, intrigue, and duplicity of traditional spycraft blind them to the value of open source intelligence? And did it blind them in the past?

Few Canadians had heard of the Communications Branch of the National Research Council in the late 1940s and 1950s, and even fewer knew anything about it. But the Soviet intelligence services knew of it, maybe through Canadian sources and certainly through their agents in the U.S. and the U.K.

And with nothing more than knowledge of its name, the Soviets could have learned a great deal about CBNRC through open sources – assuming they were smart enough to check them out.

Let’s see what we (and they) could have learned using just the information available to someone in the public library in 1955.

NRC Review

The first place we’ll check is the NRC’s annual public report, the 1955 edition of the National Research Council Review. Ah, this is promising: there’s a list (pp. 247-267) of the top 550 or so NRC employees by name, NRC division or section, and job class.

Sadly, however, the Communications Branch doesn’t appear anywhere in the annual report. It’s treated as if it doesn’t exist at all.

So we move on.

Public Accounts of Canada

Next we check the 1954-55 Public Accounts of Canada, the annual official record of federal government spending.

Now, this is interesting: there’s a list (pp. P-10 to P-13) of the 380 or so NRC employees who earn $5000 or more a year.

Maybe the NRC Review will come in handy after all. Let’s compare the lists.

It takes quite a while to cross all of the names in the NRC Review off the list in the Public Accounts (believe me, I’ve done it), but, hmmm, the results are quite interesting: roughly 35 of NRC’s top-earning employees don’t appear anywhere in the NRC annual report.

Some of this discrepancy can be put down to new arrivals who don’t make it onto the annual report list, some to departures during the year, and some perhaps to clerical errors. But a check of earlier reports shows that most of the names, some 25 of them, never appear in the annual reports.

So who are these people? Let’s have a look at their names:

Browness G A
Carson W S
Chramtchenko M
Colls T G S
Denning C E
Diditch S J
Dornan J E
Drake E M
Ensell G
Featonby J
Handforth R E
Hellyer C N
Hepburn S K
Johnston P A E
Jury J M H
MacAskill R
MacKiddie C G
Maillet R J
McLaren R S
Odin J P
Oliver M S R
O'Neill N K
Thomson G S
Trowbridge W J
Wilkins T J

The Public Accounts list provides the annual salaries of these people. Salary is normally a pretty good indication of rank, so let’s sort the names by income:

Drake E M [$10.5 k]
O'Neill N K [$8.2 k]
MacAskill R [$7 k]
Diditch S J [$6.56 k]
Colls T G S [$6.4 k]
Hellyer C N [$6.36 k]
Trowbridge W J [$6.32 k]
Denning C E [$6.08 k]
Dornan J E [$6.08 k]
McLaren R S [$5.97 k]
Oliver M S R [$5.97 k]
Ensell G [$5.75 k]
Browness G A [$5.72 k]
Featonby J [$5.55 k]
MacKiddie C G [$5.55 k]
Maillet R J [$5.35 k]
Thomson G S [$5.35 k]
Wilkins T J [$5.35 k]
Hepburn S K [$5.33 k]
Chramtchenko M [$5.23 k]
Odin J P [$5.23 k]
Carson W S [$5.15 k]
Handforth R E [$5.15 k]
Johnston P A E [$5.15 k]
Jury J M H [$5.11 k]

By this point my more loyal readers (assuming I have any) will probably have recognized some of these names. There may be one or two mistaken identifications, but aside from those few cases they are all CBNRC employees. Here is the first part of the second list again, with a few annotations added:

Drake E M [$10.5 k] = Ed Drake, CBNRC Director
O'Neill N K [$8.2 k] = Kevin O’Neill, Co-ordinator Production
MacAskill R [$7 k] = Rod MacAskill, Co-ordinator Administration
Diditch S J [$6.56 k] = Steve Diditch, Head Reporting
Colls T G S [$6.4 k] = Tom Colls, Head O Group
Hellyer C N [$6.36 k] = Chuck Hellyer, Head IBM Group
Trowbridge W J [$6.32 k] = Bill Trowbridge, Head T&D Group
Denning C E [$6.08 k] = Cecil Ernest Denning, Head R&D Group
Dornan J E [$6.08 k] = Jack Dornan, Head P Group
McLaren R S [$5.97 k] = Robert McLaren, Head ? Group, former liaison officer to AFSA/NSA
Oliver M S R [$5.97 k] = Mary Oliver, Head Administrative Services

By subtracting one list from the other we have managed to recover the entire top echelon of the CBNRC! (The additional information about their specific jobs, of course, is not revealed.)

We have also identified roughly 6% of CBNRC’s entire staff at that time (albeit with a few possible mistakes), and by examining the distribution of salaries we can even develop a crude sense of the agency’s upper rank structure. Repeating the process using earlier editions of the NRC Review and the Public Accounts going back as far as 1946, we can increase the list of known staff members to more than 50, accounting for more than half of the agency’s staff during its earliest years (and, of course, all of its more senior staff).

Peter Dwyer

One of the names appearing on the earlier lists is P. Dwyer. Although unknown to the average Canadian at the time, this is a name very well known to Moscow: Peter Dwyer was the MI6 liaison officer in Washington prior to Kim Philby’s appointment to the job in late 1949. Philby knew Dwyer well, and he knew that when Dwyer left Washington it was to take a job with the Canadian government in Ottawa. He may even have known that Dwyer’s new job was to be Head of Reporting at CBNRC. Dwyer stayed at CBNRC for only two years, moving from there to the Privy Council Office and eventually to the Canada Council. But for those two years his name appears on our OSINT lists.

Thus, if the Soviets are doing OSINT at this time, Dwyer's name (and possibly others they might recognize through intelligence sources) confirms for them that they are indeed looking at a list of considerable interest.

The Estimates

A look at the government's spending estimates also reveals some interesting information. The 1955-56 Estimates show that NRC had 2198 "Full Time Positions" as of 31 March 1955, whereas the 1954-55 Estimates had shown 2618 "Full Time Positions" as of the same date. What happened to 420 NRC employees? Comparison of the numbers shows that the missing employees have been retroactively transferred (for accounting purposes) to a catch-all category called “Casuals and Others”.

The figures provided in the Estimates enable us to further break down the 420 positions by job category:

Scientific & Executive
1 Director
2 Senior Research Officers
6 Associate Research Officers
80 Assistant Research Officers
38 Junior Research Officers
[Sub-total: 127]

Service Staff
2 Principal Clerks
3 Clerks, Grade 4
26 Clerks, Grade 3
51 Clerks, Grade 2B
40 Clerks, Grade 2A
[Sub-total: 122]

Technical Staff
1 Technical Officer, Grade 3
9 Technical Officers, Grade 2
43 Technical Officers, Grade 1
82 Senior Laboratory Assistants
36 Laboratory Assistants
[Sub-total: 171]

TOTAL: 420

It is immediately obvious that this is no random group of summer interns or other casual employees; it is clearly a coherent organization with its own internal structure. It is CBNRC. The entire organization.

We can speculate as to why the accounting change was made. CBNRC was undergoing substantial growth during the 1950s, and this had the effect of making NRC’s overall staff numbers grow in a way that almost certainly became increasingly difficult for NRC officials to explain and justify to members of parliament and the public. The change was probably intended to obscure the extent of this growth and thus deflect embarrassing questions.

That it also reveals a detailed snapshot of the CBNRC’s staffing and organization as of 31 March 1955 is presumably an unintended side effect.

Liaison officers

That's not all we can find. The same documents that record employee salaries also record the amounts of travel and representation allowances paid to employees. By comparing this data to the public lists of Canadian diplomats posted abroad, it is possible to determine that CBNRC began sending representatives to London and Washington earlier in the 1950s. In the mid-1950s, CBNRC’s representative at GCHQ is J.A. [Joe] Gibson and its representative at NSA is H.M. [Howie] Harris.

Department of Public Works annual report

There is also some information available about the location of the CBNRC’s offices. In an extremely rare public mention of the agency’s name, the 1950 annual report of the Department of Public Works reports that "extensive alterations and improvements" have been done to the Rideau Military Hospital "to provide accommodation for the Communications Branch and Radio-Electrical Engineering Division" of NRC. A quick check with the Radio Electrical Engineering Division, which makes no secret about its location, confirms that it remains at the NRC’s Montreal Road campus, but CBNRC is another matter. No one is willing to comment on that. However, a simple drive past the compound would confirm that the former military hospital (and former convent before that) is now a high-security site, with a guardhouse to control entry at the gate and a fence topped with barbed wire surrounding the grounds. Our OSINT analyst would also be able to see that the size of the building is about right for an organization of some 400-500 people.

OSINT overview

To sum up, during the 1950s, an OSINT analyst starting with nothing more than the name of the CBNRC and a general sense of what to look for could have determined the size of CBNRC’s staff in 1955, the location of its office building, and the names and salaries of more than 50 of its employees, including its entire top echelon. The analyst could also have developed a crude picture of the organization’s structure and determined both the fact that CBNRC had liaison officers in the U.S. and the U.K. and the names of those liaison officers.

In addition, by watching the progression of individual salaries over time it would have been possible to identify whose careers were on the fast track, whose careers were stagnating, and who had just left the agency for some reason.

Such information would have been of tremendous use to the Soviets at the time, both in assessing CBNRC’s capabilities and in identifying CBNRC employees to target for surveillance or potential recruitment. Occasional surveillance of the building would have enabled them to keep track of the size of CBNRC’s staff and also to identify many of its lower-paid employees, who would not have appeared in the Public Accounts lists.

OSINT concerns

The Canadian government was concerned about the dangers of open-source information during the 1950s.

According to Mark Kristmanson,

In October 1952, the Globe and Mail disclosed that for five dollars any foreign intelligence agency could obtain the Canada Air Pilot and discover the location of every Canadian airfield, including the secret ones in the North.... [Peter] Dwyer [who was by then with the Privy Council] soon received a report from the Department of Mines and Technical Surveys that a suspicious-looking man with a Russian accent had attempted to purchase the said publication. The man was Mr. Ogorodnikov, the Ottawa representative of Tass, the official Soviet news agency. Half a century later the incident seems comical, but it prompted serious discussions about restricting public access to open-source information. Air Intelligence Chief Edwards thought it ‘one of those problems peculiar to our democratic way of life’. George Glazebrook advocated a principle of step-to-step reciprocation with the Soviets. RCMP counter-intelligence officer Terry Guernsey allowed that other Russian attempts to purchase the Air Pilot had been monitored and he suggested the whole question of open sources be put up to the Security Panel. Reading these responses, Dwyer... recommended better measures to enhance feedback when Soviet agents attempted to acquire public documents. (Mark Kristmanson, Plateaus of Freedom: Nationality, Culture and State Security in Canada, 1940-1960, University of Toronto Press, 2003, p. 119)

Public documents such as the Public Accounts, the Estimates, and departmental annual reports could not be withheld from the public, however. They could be found in any major public library. The only protection against the loss of information through documents such as those would have been to prevent it from appearing in them in the first place.

It is not clear whether the government ever realized the extent of the information that it was leaking about CBNRC. Some of the information provided was deliberately obscure. Some information, such as most budget data, was successfully hidden. But there is no sign that the government ever made a serious attempt to prevent the kind of information described in this post from appearing. The Public Accounts continued to list public servant salaries until 1964, when, ironically, privacy concerns rather than security concerns finally brought an end to the practice. (It is perhaps worth remembering that lower privacy doesn't always mean greater security.)

Another question remains: Did the Soviets ever conduct OSINT collection on CBNRC? Did they ever take advantage of this excellent source of information? Perhaps they had such good clandestine sources of information about the organization that they had no need to waste time compiling open-source information. There is no public information that suggests they ever had a spy within CBNRC, however. Perhaps they were so in thrall to the supposed romance of espionage that they never bothered to pursue the open sources available.

Or maybe they collected it all, and more. We just don't know.

Unfortunately, this question is one that open sources can't answer.

CSE, UKUSA, and TRINITY

2012-01-26T14:55:00.006-05:00

Murray Brewster reports that the UKUSA community is concerned about the alleged Russian spy who worked in the TRINITY Joint Ocean Surveillance and Intelligence Centre ("Expert: Spy case worries military," Canadian Press, 26 January 2012):

...a defence source said "consternation and choice words" have been directed at Russia through the back channels of nations involved in signals intelligence co-operation under the United Kingdom — United States of America Agreement, a 65-year-old pact that counts Britain, the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand among its members.

I picture the dialogue going something like this:

"We're shocked -- shocked! -- to find spying going on in this relationship!"

"Your intercepts, sir."

"Thank you."

Some might argue that those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw fake rocks. But that would be churlish.

For the reoord, I do not approve in any way of Canadians, in uniform or otherwise, who provide our secrets to foreign powers.

Brewster goes on to say the following about CSE:

The focus on computers raises the spectre that the highly secret Canadian [sic] Security Establishment could be at risk. That agency, which operates at arms-length from the military and the country’s spy service, provides electronic eavesdropping and communications intercepts to the federal government and allies under the UKUSA agreement.

It's not clear to me what Brewster means when he writes that CSE "could be at risk". SIGINT product may have been provided to the Russians? Sources and methods may have been put at risk? The effort to rebrand the Communications Security Establishment as the Communications Security Establishment Canada has been an epic fail?

As usual, we await answers.

Williams is DG Military SIGINT

2012-01-20T21:02:00.003-05:00

Old news, but for the sake of keeping the record straight: Brigadier-General (AWSE) Robert S. Williams replaced Brigadier-General (AWSE) John L. Turnbull as Director General Military SIGINT last July. Williams was previously Director of Geospatial Intelligence (DGEOINT) and Intelligence Branch Advisor. His full bio can be found here.

BGen Turnbull and his predecessors were described as DG Military SIGINT at CSE, implying a formal position in the agency's hierarchy; Williams is described as DG Military SIGINT at NDHQ. Does this mean a change in the nature of the position? I don't know.

John Forster to be next Chief

2012-01-12T20:41:00.006-05:00

Prime Minister Harper announced today that the next Chief of CSE will be John Forster, currently the Associate Deputy Minister of Infrastructure. (Official bio here.)

Forster will become Chief on January 30th, replacing John L. Adams, who has held the job for six and a half years. Adams, who is 70 this year, "becomes Senior Advisor to the Privy Council Office and is named as Skelton-Clark Fellow to the Queen’s University School of Policy Studies, effective January 30, 2012."

Forster will be the 8th Chief of CSE/Director of CBNRC, and the 4th in the still relatively new tradition of appointing Chiefs from outside the agency:

Edward M. Drake (1946 - 1971)
N. Kevin O'Neill (1971 - 1980)
Peter R. Hunt (1980 - 1989)
A. Stewart Woolner (1989 - 1999)
D. Ian Glen (1999 - 2001)
Keith Coulter (2001 - 2005)
John L. Adams (2005 - 2012)
John Forster (2012 - )

[Update 13 January 2012:

Media coverage of the appointment:

Robert Sibley, "Longtime bureaucrat takes helm of top-secret intelligence unit," Ottawa Citizen, 13 January 2012

I don't know where Sibley got the idea that CSE has only 500 employees. The number hasn't been that low for over half a century, since ca. 1959 to be precise. Also, as noted above, bringing in a Chief from outside the agency is hardly a brand new idea. I'm sure it has its pros and its cons, but on the whole I suspect it's a good approach.]

December 2012 CSE staff size

2012-01-12T11:10:00.000-05:00

1903.

(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.)

Gouzenko and the Soviet target

2012-01-07T22:05:00.009-05:00

The defection of Igor Gouzenko on September 5th, 1945 was one of the key events in the outbreak of the Cold War. Gouzenko, who was a GRU (Soviet military intelligence) cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, brought with him evidence of massive Soviet spying in Canada, including penetration into the Manhattan Project, the U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb. (More on Gouzenko here.)

Gouzenko’s revelations, which were quickly shared with the U.S. and British governments, sent shock waves through all three capitals.

But not because any of these governments found the idea of allies spying on allies inconceivable. The U.S. had been intercepting Soviet communications traffic and attempting to break into Soviet diplomatic codes since 1943. And the United States and Britain had agreed on August 15th, 1945, three weeks before Gouzenko’s defection, to extend their highly successful wartime SIGINT partnership into the post-war era, with the target of their cooperation being Soviet communications.

Thus, when Gouzenko defected, his knowledge of Soviet cryptographic procedures and techniques was also of great interest to the Western allies.

The extent to which that knowledge was of assistance to Western SIGINT efforts, including the now-famous VENONA code break into KGB, GRU, and Soviet diplomatic communications, remains largely hidden, but there has been some discussion of Gouzenko’s contribution in declassified documents.

The VENONA effort began in the U.S. in 1943, but it took a number of years before texts could be even partially read, and even in 1980, when the project was closed down, many gaps still remained.

An unclassified official history of the VENONA project (Robert L. Benson, The VENONA Story, National Security Agency: Center for Cryptologic History, 2001) reports that Gouzenko made no direct contribution to the project:

While the 1945 defection in Ottawa of GRU code clerk Igor Gouzenko provided message texts that revealed a great deal of espionage, Gouzenko did not produce any cryptographic materials of direct use to Arlington Hall’s cryptanalytic effort. In the long run, success against GRU messages came from the accumulated knowledge and experience gained exploiting the Soviet trade, true diplomatic, and KGB systems and the application of early computers. (p. 44.)

However, NSA’s top-secret history of Cold War cryptology, released to the public in redacted form, is a little less unequivocal (Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989: Book I: The Struggle for Centralization, 1945-1960, National Security Agency: Center for Cryptologic History, 1995, Top Secret Umbra, released in redacted form):

...after World War II several outside factors speeded the tortuously slow process of additive key diagnosis and recovery and bookbreaking. The first was the defection of a Soviet GRU cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, in September 1945.... Because Gouzenko worked with communications, Frank Rowlett of ASA was invited to interrogate him. During his sessions Rowlett learned much about the way the KGB codebooks were put together and how the additives were used. This information cut time off ASA’s cryptanalysis effort. (p. 161)

Robert Louis Benson and Cecil J. Phillips’ History of Venona (National Security Agency: Center for Cryptologic History, 1995, Top Secret Umbra, released in redacted form) seems to have been Johnson’s primary source on Gouzenko. The History of Venona provides considerable detail about the information provided by Gouzenko and is worth citing at length:

Lieutenant Colonel Frank B. Rowlett departed Washington, in civilian clothes, on 25 September 1945, to question Lt. Igor Gouzenko, the GRU code clerk who had defected....

Frank Rowlett spent several days questioning Gouzenko, codenamed “Corby”, and the following paragraphs are based on his “Special Report on Bourbon Cryptography: Report on Interrogation of Corby”, dated 15 October 1945. [Bourbon was the codeword for the U.S.-British effort against Soviet communications at that time.]

...

Rowlett drove to an isolated, lakeside summer cabin some 90 miles from Ottawa where Gouzenko was under guard. The Rowlett party included Professor Gilbert Robinson, a wartime Canadian Sigint officer, Inspector Leopold of the RCMP and a driver. (Robinson had conducted the preliminary questioning of Gouzenko on cryptologic matters – Gouzenko had given names of spies and supporting papers to the Secret Service [sic; U.K. Security Service?], RCMP and FBI.)

Rowlett learned that Russian cryptography, in the external affairs area, could be divided into two types:
Systems used by Russian establishments abroad in communication with Moscow. These systems were entirely by encipherment of a code by a one-time additive.

Emergency or illicit systems which used a substitution alphabet based on one and two-digit equivalents for the Cyrillic alphabet, which would then be enciphered by one-time key generated from a book or other publication readily accessible to both Moscow and the communicant in the field, i.e., both Moscow and the field had to have the same book, same edition.
Gouzenko explained Russian crypto-security doctrine and procedures, and the day to day work of a GRU code clerk. All code clerks were approved and trained by the KGB. Every Russian official authorized to sign messages—the GRU Resident/Military or Naval Attache, the Trade Representative, the Ambassador or Consul—had a code clerk assigned to him who would prepare the messages. These clerks were responsible to the KGB for security and procedures—the officials who drafted the messages could not keep file copies of the original texts of the messages they were releasing. In the case of the GRU Resident in Ottawa, he would bring his notes into the office of the code clerk, and in the presence of the code clerk write out a message. The code clerk, after the drafter had left the office, would encode the message and then take it to the mission’s communications officer who would give it an external serial number and take it to the commercial cable company for transmission to Moscow (the Russian establishment in Ottawa did not at that time have its own communications facilities).

The Russian text of a GRU message would be encoded by a four-digit, one-part code, that is, the codebook was arranged in strict alphabetic order. When an item had to be put in the message for which no equivalent appeared in the code book, it was spelled out by means of a Cyrillic or Roman substitution alphabet which was issued as a supplementary chart to the code. When this chart was to be used the four-digit group 7810 would be entered, meaning “begin spell” and the end of the spelling would use a special two-digit group, 91, to mean end of the spelling.

The GRU code text would then be enciphered by a one-time pad. All pads, for every agency of the Soviet government, were manufactured by the KGB. The pads had either 35 or 50 pages each and each page would contain ten lines of five 5-digit groups, for a total of 50 groups or 250 digits per page of pad. Each page or sheet of the pad had a two digit number in the upper left hand corner ranging from 01 to 35 or 50 depending on the number of pages in the pad. These pads were carefully packaged and controlled. When the message reached Moscow, a senior officer would determine the addressee and pass it to the appropriate code clerk. Gouzenko reported, curiously, that copies of these GRU messages would go directly to the KGB for analysis (perhaps he meant, also to the KGB). Gouzenko described for Rowlett, at some length, the emergency or illicit systems.

Gouzenko believed that the KGB, in producing all one time pads for the government, mechanically generated them using an apparatus, “which selects numbers purportedly at random by a device using small balls in some fashion. This apparatus was credited to the British originally, but certain improvements were made by the (KGB) cryptographers when it was adopted by them. No further information regarding pad generation is available.”

...

A small team in Bill Smith’s Russian unit consisting of Mrs. Genevieve Feinstein, Miss Mary Jo Dunning and Mr. Burton Phillips immediately began a study of the Rowlett report in context of the traffic on hand. It is maddening for the non-cryptanalyst to try to understand, but then to realize, that even with such a source as Gouzenko, who brought out plaintext of some of the GRU encrypted messages and explained the system in great and accurate detail, the traffic remained unbreakable. Gouzenko’s background information on the Russian systems was certainly very important and helpful—but with it Arlington Hall could not read any traffic and could at best only add some words to book breaking vocabulary of the GRU code book. But the code book would not do anything unless the cipher additive, from the one time pads, could be identified and stripped off to reveal the underlying code groups. Gouzenko had no pads, and if he had it would only have given an opening into the message(s) enciphered by that particular pad. Gouzenko’s most enduring contribution to Venona was to put the cryptanalyst into the office of a Russian code clerk, giving us an understanding of how he worked, and what his systems looked like and how they were used. (pp. 61-64)

It is likely that Gouzenko’s information on Soviet cryptologic techniques and doctrine was useful to more than just the VENONA effort. His information on emergency/illicit communications procedures, for example, was probably of great use in counter-intelligence investigations and may have contributed to the decipherment of some messages.

Based on these reports, it does not appear that his information made much direct contribution to the VENONA project. His contribution to the book-breaking element of the project was, as noted in the official histories, probably of some value, however. Gouzenko did not bring a GRU code book with him when he defected, but he would certainly have known the code groups for many of the most commonly used words in the book. This information, and the information that the GRU book was a one-part (alphabetical) code, would probably have been of considerable help to the book-breakers when they began the job of recovering the meanings of the code groups in the GRU code book.

It seems possible (at least to me) that Gouzenko’s information on the Soviet spell/endspell procedure was also helpful. Meredith Gardner’s exploitation of spell/endspell sequences led in December 1946 to one of the key early breaks in the VENONA project when he uncovered the names of Manhattan Project scientists in a KGB message. Presumably most, if not all, such codes have some sort of spell/endspell capability, so Gardner would almost certainly have made the break regardless. But it may be that Gouzenko’s information eased the process somewhat.

Data storage, surveillance, and privacy

2011-12-27T16:33:00.004-05:00

University of Ottawa professor Roland Paris writes on the approach of the total surveillance society (Roland Paris, "The total surveillance society approaches," Ottawa Citizen, 22 December 2011):

We will soon reach the point where governments will have the capacity, should they wish it, to monitor, record, and permanently archive the communications and activities of their citizens from birth to death. That’s the sobering message of a new Brookings Institution report by John Villasenor, an engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Within the next few years,” he writes, “it will be technically possible and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders — every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner.”

The machinery for such monitoring — from intercepting electronic communications to recording images of faces and licence plates in public spaces — already exists and is rapidly improving. Yet, it is the plummeting cost of data storage that makes total surveillance a real possibility.

Consider this: The audio for all the telephone calls made by a single person over the course of one year could be recorded using roughly 3.3 gigabytes of storage space. [...]

Some might dismiss this vision as a dystopian fantasy. But why wouldn’t countries with records of using every tool at their disposal to monitor their citizens also take advantage of these new surveillance and data storage capacities as they become available? And isn’t it true that even in liberal democracies with strong privacy laws, including Canada, we have also seen a gradual shrinking of private space and pressures for more ubiquitous surveillance?

The main benefit of Villasenor’s report — like that of other stylized visions of the future, including George Orwell’s — may not be its specific predictions, but rather, its ability to shock us into seeing real-time trends that might otherwise go unnoticed, including in our own society. Indeed, it speaks to the importance of a different kind of heightened vigilance: not of our fellow citizens, but of our right to remain largely hidden from the constant gaze of the state.

The data storage capabilities are certainly on the way.

CSE is currently building the "largest repository of Top Secret information in Canada", including a data centre that, if its apparent size is any indication, could contain as much as one third of the storage capacity of the massive NSA data centre currently under construction at Camp Williams, Utah (which probably will store exabytes or even yottabytes of data).

There is no reason to think that Canadians will be the primary subjects of the data that CSE will be storing (although if the adjacent CSIS will also be a major user of the facility, and that's not necessarily unlikely, data on Canadians could comprise a major part of its contents).

Fortunately, we have the Office of the CSE Commissioner to assure Canadians that CSE does not violate Canadian law, including such privacy protections as exist in Canadian law. For the most part the Commissioner's annual reports have provided important reassurance in this respect.

These reports would be a heck of a lot more reassuring, however, if the government would finally get off its ass and act to resolve the dispute that has been going on between successive CSE Commissioners and the Minister of National Defence for at least SEVEN YEARS over the legality of some of CSE's surveillance activities.

The Commissioner's 2009-2010 annual report provided the welcome news that a resolution to the dispute was finally in sight: the Minister of National Defence had promised the Commissioner that "clarification of ambiguities and other amendments to the [National Defence Act] are a legislative priority."

Unfortunately, the Harper government has a lot of priorities. The MND's promise was made sometime in the year that ended in March 2010. Since that time, the government has introduced at least 90 bills in parliament.

Let's just say it's a good thing that these guys don't consider the privacy of Canadians a NON-priority.

CSE leaves DND

2011-12-15T19:58:00.002-05:00

As this blog speculated earlier, CSE has left DND to become a stand-alone agency of the government of Canada!

The change was very quietly made early on the morning of November 16th. The "Place in Government" section of the CSE webpage has the details:

The Government of Canada has taken the decision to establish CSEC as a stand-alone agency. This is an administrative change that established the Chief, CSEC as a deputy head and accounting officer, who reports directly to the Minister of National Defence as of 16 November 2011.

Questions and Answers

What has changed?

The Chief, CSEC, now reports directly to the Minister of National Defence.

What was the reporting structure before the change?

Before the change, CSEC was reporting through two deputy ministers: the National Security Advisor (NSA) on policy and operational issues and the Deputy Minister (DM) of National Defence on administrative and financial matters.

Will the change affect CSEC’s current mandate?

No, this is principally an administrative change that will not affect CSEC’s mission, mandate and operations.

What will be the status of CSEC after the change?

CSEC will be established as a stand-alone agency within the Minister of National Defence portfolio. For the purposes of the Financial Administration Act (FAA), CSEC will be designated as a department by being added to column 1 of Schedule 1.1, as a branch of the federal public administration, through an Order-in-Council. This will also establish the Chief, CSEC as deputy head and accounting officer reporting directly to the Minister of National Defence.

As I understand it, this means that the agency will remain within the Minister of National Defence's portfolio, but it will no longer be a part of the Department of National Defence.

Aficionados of bureaucratic procedure will appreciate the fact that in order to make the transfer the government felt it had to make subsection 132(1) of the Public Service Employment Act apply to the CSE for exactly two seconds, during which time Order in Council P.C. 2011-1305 transferred control and supervision of the Communications Security Establishment and the Communications Security Establishment Internal Services Unit (whatever the heck that is) from DND to CSE itself.

Morse: No longer just for dinosaurs...

2011-12-12T12:52:00.010-05:00

Morse code has long been written off as part of radio - and radio intelligence - history. But now we learn from the Communications and Electronics Newsletter (Vol. 55) that the MOS Formerly Known As 291 has resumed teaching morse to some of its members. That's right, the dits is back:

...the role of Morse code as an emerging player in the communications world is again capturing the imagination of the Comm Rsch trade. Once considered moribund in the communication world, Morse code appears to be staging its comeback. An example of this lies in Toshiba's 2008 development of a handheld, thumb-operated communications device named "Clique", which uses only three keys to produce Morse code for sending text messages - a method rapidly increasing in popularity in Asia.

With evidence of such devices, it is not a surprise that the age-old technology has found its way back onto the Comm Rsch radar. Trade advisors and senior personnel have recognized Morse Code's re-emergence and quickly approved the re-establishment and maintenance of its training. The result is an updated Morse Code training program that is now available to Comm Rsch personnel awaiting Phase II training. As with the new ASA course, the initial iteration of this full-time five and a half month Morse Course (Serial 0001) commenced in January of this year.

Forget about the Toshiba "Clique" thing. That was some kind of hoax or April Fool's joke. But the Morse training course is, as far as I can tell, serious.

November 2011 CSE staff size

2011-12-09T20:19:00.000-05:00

1902.

(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.)

Tutte tut

2011-12-06T21:04:00.008-05:00

The Paroxysms blog has posted some interesting documents on the naming of the Tutte Institute obtained under the Access to Information Act.

The Tutte Institute is CSE's classified cryptologic and data-mining research institute (previous post here), which is named after Bletchley Park veteran William Tutte. The institute was established in 2009 but officially opened and formally named the Tutte Institute for Mathematics and Computing in September 2011.

Among the most interesting bits in the released documents is a list of the individuals who were considered for the name of the institute and the criteria used for judging among them.

Eight individuals were considered, including four who are still alive. The latter four presumably received only cursory consideration as one rather crucial criterion was that the individual must no longer be living, and there is no indication in the documents that consideration was ever given to rendering non-deceased candidates compliant in this respect.

But here's what I find really interesting: Gilbert de B. Robinson was not one of the candidates considered!

Robinson -- no relation incidentally -- was a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto. He was president of the Canadian Mathematical Society from 1953 to 1957 and served as managing editor of the Canadian Journal of Mathematics for 30 years.

He might also be called the father of Canadian cryptanalysis. He and colleague H.S.M. Coxeter were the Canadian mathematicians asked in 1941 to investigate how a Canadian cryptanalytic agency might be established. It was they who recommended that Herbert Yardley, the Examination Unit's first director, be recruited by Ottawa. Coxeter remained at the U. of T. during the war, but Robinson went on to become one of the Examination Unit's original employees, and he also served as its first (and only) Canadian director, albeit in an acting capacity. (More on the Examination Unit here.) He was awarded an M.B.E. for his wartime services, and returned to Toronto after the war, retiring in 1971. He died in 1992.

I want to be clear here. William Tutte was a distinguished mathematician and cryptanalyst, and the judges who chose to name CSE's institute in his honour may well have made the best decision. It certainly can't be characterized as a unjustifiable decision.

What astounds me is not that Robinson wasn't chosen, although if it had been my decision he would have been. What astounds me is that he wasn't even considered.

What the heck was that about?

[Update 8 January 2012:
Robinson was also the Canadian cryptanalyst who questioned Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko following his defection in September 1945.]

La Salle Academy update

2011-12-03T01:23:00.003-05:00

I've made a few changes to the post on CSE's first headquarters building, the La Salle Academy.

My thanks to Mark Weiler for information about the La Salle Academy's buildings during the 1940s.

October 2011 CSE staff size

2011-11-15T22:27:00.000-05:00

1898.

(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.)

September 2011 CSE staff size

2011-10-25T23:29:00.000-04:00

1879.

(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.)

Adams to retire in 2012

2011-10-21T13:37:00.002-04:00

CSE Chief John Adams will retire in early 2012 (Colin Freeze, "Canada’s other spy agency seeks new chief," Globe and Mail, 20 October 2011). He will be 70 in May 2012.

No word yet on who will be the 8th Chief of CSE/Director CBNRC.

New HQ update

2011-10-07T12:40:00.003-04:00

CSE has posted an update on the status of construction of its new headquarters complex.

Pictured above, the nearly completed Mid-Term Accommodation Project building. The MTAP building -- when are they going to come up with better names for these facilities? -- is described as a data centre, which I take to mean that it will host CSE's supercomputer(s). Note the grey, windowless portion of the structure on the left-hand side.

In the past, I've suggested that this facility (and the data storage complex that will be associated with it, which I'm assuming is the big windowless building going up at the north end of the LTAP) should be called the Charles N. Hellyer Computer Centre.

August 2011 CSE staff size

2011-09-27T15:33:00.000-04:00

1795.

(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.)

Tutte Institute revealed

2011-09-06T22:57:00.002-04:00

CSE has established a "classified research institute", the Tutte Institute for Mathematics and Computing, to assist it in its cryptologic and data mining efforts (Colin Freeze, "Top secret institute comes out of the shadows to recruit top talent," Globe and Mail, 5 September 2011):

The federal government has actually employed a small stable of arms-length academic cryptographers for several years now, but this summer it opted to redouble and rebrand the effort. In doing so, Ottawa has stepped up its quiet drive to lure some of the smartest PhD-calibre mathematicians away from ivory towers and into applied government work. ...

Previously known to select few mathematicians as the Cryptologic Research Institute, the think tank is the creation of an ultra-secretive federal agency, the Communications Security Establishment Canada. The CSEC has two main jobs: first, to spy on foreign communications for information about threats, and second, to shield government data from prying eyes.

While this “signals-intelligence” agency has its own stable of hundreds of code makers and code crackers, it often finds itself needing periodic infusions of cutting-edge academic work to stay current. So, two years ago, the CSEC hired Hugh Williams, who some describe as a “rock star” mathematician at the University of Calgary, to lead the effort to put together the Tutte Institute. Last year, the spy agency built a home for the institute on its sprawling Ottawa campus.

Now comes a public profile – something it never had before – as the Tutte Institute seeks to bolsters its ranks beyond its roughly 20 top-calibre researchers and 15 full-time staff. It wants to lure “the best minds in mathematical and computational research,” according to an announcement posted on the CSEC website.

Here is a presentation on the institute by Williams.

The Globe and Mail article and CSE's website are both coy about the exact location of the institute on the agency's "sprawling" campus. However, my awesome investigative powers (AKA Google) tell me it is in the Insurance Building. Presumably it will be housed in the MTAP once that building opens.

William Tutte (1917-2002), after whom the institute is named, was a British mathematician who worked at Bletchley Park during the war and later emigrated to Canada, where he had a distinguished academic career. A short biography of Tutte is on the CSE website.

As the bio puts it, while working at Bletchley, Tutte "uncovered the structure of the encryption machines which generated a code known as 'Fish', solely by observing the machine generated obscuring string and encrypted messages that were intercepted. His work enabled Britain to break these codes regularly throughout the remainder of the War."

Tutte's own account, FISH and I, is considerably more enlightening.

July 2011 CSE staff size

2011-09-05T12:34:00.000-04:00

1816.

(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.)

June 2011 CSE staff size

2011-07-21T14:57:00.000-04:00

1881.

(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 facilities: Rideau Annex

2011-06-26T00:51:00.014-04:00

Part two of my “brief” tour of CSE’s facilities, past and present.

Rideau Annex (1950-1961)

CBNRC’s (CSE’s) second headquarters was in a former convent that had been used as a military hospital during the Second World War.

The building was built by the Sisters of Charity of Ottawa (the Grey Nuns) in 1915 and served as their novitiate until 1941, when it was converted for use as the Rideau Military Hospital. As the photograph shows, the building had four storeys plus a basement. (Kudos to author Mark Kristmanson for finding this photo.) Judging from the photo, and assuming the rear of the structure was similar to its front, the gross size of the building may have been about 6000-7000 square metres. (More precise information would be welcome.)

After the war the building was no longer needed as a hospital, and in October 1948 the Grey Nuns rented it to the NRC, which was looking for a new home for CBNRC.

In August 1949 the Department of Public Works let a contract to renovate the building to serve as the home of both the CBNRC and the NRC’s Division of Radio and Electrical Engineering (REED). At the time, REED had about 250 employees and CBNRC was growing towards its approved establishment of 227. The two organizations were thus expected to have a total of about 475 employees, which is about the number of people a building of that size would have been expected to accommodate at that time.

Among other modifications made to the building in preparation for CBNRC's arrival was the installation of an incinerator for the destruction of classified waste, eliminating the need to truck waste to the NRC’s Montreal Road site for secure destruction.

CBNRC’s Comcentre was moved to the new site, now called the Rideau Annex, in December 1949. The rest of CBNRC moved to the site in January 1950.

The Cold War intervenes

It is not clear whether REED ever took up residence in the building. If it did, however, it was quickly pushed out.

By 1950 the Cold War was rapidly heating up. The Soviets had tested their first atomic weapon, based on a stolen U.S. design, in August 1949, and in June 1950 the communist regime of North Korea invaded South Korea, starting the Korean War. The post-war demobilization of Canada's armed forces was rapidly reversed and military spending skyrocketed.

Intelligence-gathering was also stepped up dramatically. In November 1950, CBNRC’s establishment was increased to 393. Four months later, in March 1951, it was increased to 449, twice the size it was when CBNRC moved into the Rideau Annex and enough to require the entire building.

At the time CBNRC moved to the site, the Rideau Annex was surrounded mainly by farmland. Located east of the Rideau River near Hurdman Bridge on Alta Vista Drive (which was then Churchill Drive in Gloucester), it was nicknamed “the Farm” by those in the know.

According to Mark Kristmanson, "the building's location in a sequestered field overlooking the embassy district of Sandy Hill made it an ideal site for Colonel Drake's Communications Branch." Despite its rural setting, "the Farm" was not far from downtown Ottawa: "The spire of Parliament was clearly visible, rising above the embassy district across the river." (Kristmanson also reported that "The Branch's administrative sections occupied the Nunnery's lower levels, preparing briefs to be transported twice daily by armed courier across the bridge and downtown to the Privy Council Office in the East Block of the Parliament.") (Mark Kristmanson, Plateaus of Freedom: Nationality, Culture and State Security in Canada, 1940-1960, University of Toronto Press, 2003, pp. 108-109.)

The building was vacated by CBNRC in 1961 and demolished sometime during the 1960s, making it difficult to establish its precise location. However, this 1953 air photo shows a Rideau Annex-sized building on a spot now occupied by the Alta Vista Towers apartment buildings, and this website reports that the Alta Vista Towers were built on land formerly owned by the Grey Nuns, so it was almost certainly located where the apartment buildings now stand.

No Room for Canadians

CBNRC’s years in the Rideau Annex were a time of rapid growth and transition for the agency. CBNRC Director Ed Drake was a Canadian, but much of the upper echelon of the organization had been and was still being recruited from Britain at that time, and by early 1950 resentment began to boil over within CBNRC over the lack of opportunities for Canadian staff. As the History of CBNRC tells it, "The word went round among the CB staff that NRC had come to mean ‘No Room for Canadians’" (Chapter 27, pp. 28-29).

The appointment of former MI6 officer Peter Dwyer as Head of Reporting, replacing Steve Diditch, the Canadian who had been serving as acting head, was one of the catalysts of the controversy. Dwyer moved to the Privy Council Office two years later, and eventually became Director of the Canada Council. Diditch was formally confirmed as Head of Reporting in 1953.

Recruits from Britain continued to play leading roles in the agency for several decades to come—Kevin O’Neill, recruited from Bletchley Park in 1946, served as Drake’s second-in-command from the departure of GCHQ official Geoffrey Evans in 1949 until Drake’s retirement in 1971; he then served as Director CBNRC (and first Chief of CSE) until his own retirement in 1980. By the mid- to late 1950s, however, the dominance of British recruiting was over and the controversy had died down.

The Rideau Annex was an improvement over the facilities CBNRC had occupied in the La Salle Academy. But it was far from ideal by today’s standards, with no air conditioning, primitive electrical infrastructure, and only one cantankerous freight elevator.

Writing many years later in CSE's in-house newsletter, Harold Stewart called the building “drafty and cold in the winter, hot and humid in the summer," and "ramshackle", with a cafeteria that "consisted of two rooms adjacent to each other in the basement" that had formerly been used as the hospital morgue (Tillian, May 1979, p. 31). The lack of air conditioning led to work cancellations on the hottest days:

A hundred people, more or less, worked in one big room on the second floor. I say ‘worked’ because that’s what most of them claimed they were there for. In the summer when it was very hot one of the girls would fake a faint (so the story goes) and ‘due to the threat of heat prostration’ everyone would get the rest of the day off...

We used to play horseshoes at the rear of the building. It became quite a pastime at break and at noon hours. Even in the extreme heat we would play. But, I can recall some people becoming quite incensed on occasion and vocally took us to task for jeopardizing their chances of getting off due to the heat. If management saw a few of us enjoying ourselves in recreation with no apparent ill effects they would surely see no reason for sending employees home. (p. 32)

Stewart also contributed a story about the building elevator:

The old freight elevator, the only elevator in the building, was a rather hazardous vehicle and quite tempermental [sic]. We were not supposed to operate it without the assistance of "Marty", the official operator. One day I did. I made the mistake of overloading. "Never overload the elevator" I was told. Anyway, I did and just before closing the elevator door along comes Mr. Drake, the Director, and hops on with me....and the several too many boxes....minus "Marty", of course. Never get on the elevator "minus Marty!!" After a cheerful "good morning" the vehicle moved...one floor and a half...and STOPPED! Well, that left us, of course, between floors, immobile! Mr. Drake looked at me - I looked at him - and one of us said "I guess we're stuck!" I don't recall how long we were there, and I don't receall the conversation. But, for some reason Mr. Drake never forgot my name after that. Two days after this little incident a memo was circulated throughout the building advising one and all, once again, "not to overload the lift"...or words to that effect....reminding us, too, that "Marty so-and-so" still had a worthwhile contribution to make, running the elevator! (p. 32)

Others had equally amusing memories of life at the Farm:

Some of the entertainment was unscheduled, like the evacuation demonstration of the building on behalf of the Emergency Measures Organization (EMO), when the demonstration smoke bombs were found to be toxic and inextinguishable too late, as the entire building was filled with smoke that would not go away and the entire staff choked and gasped their way outside. Fortunately, there were no real casualties except for a few inhalers who felt they needed oxygen at a local hospital, and the hapless and luckless demonstration casualty who had been strapped to a stretcher preparatory to being lowered from the fifth floor by ropes, and couldn’t escape the toxic smoke. Next day it was business as usual, even if your clothes smelled funny for the next few days and fellow passengers in buses eyed you oddly. Then there was the day a sudden gust of wind hit the big room on the second floor and everybody’s work sheets and papers were blown about the room, with those tables beside the windows (the DPW still considering our request for window screens) scattering across the adjoining fields “fluttering and dancing in the breeze”. The mad dashes about the fields that day must have looked to onlookers like something out of “The Rites of Spring”. (Tom Chadsey, Tillian, Spring 1980, p. 24.)

Other aspects of security, beyond the lack of window screens, were also rudimentary by today’s standards.

An RCMP guard was stationed at a desk in the main entrance to Rideau Annex, and checked the passes of entering staff members. There was also a chain-link fence surrounding the property, with a guard house intended to control entry to the premises. The gate and guardhouse were, however, not put into full operation until May 1952, at which time a Commissionaire was stationed at the gate and checked the passes of all who entered. There was only one gate in the ten-foot fence, which was topped with barbed-wire. (Curiously, the barbed-wire was slanted inwards, giving rise to comments that the fence was intended to keep the staff in, rather than to keep out intruders.) (History of CBNRC, Chapter 26, pp. 6-7.)

More importantly, the building lacked any kind of modern emission security features to prevent eavesdropping on inadvertent emissions from its cryptographic and other electronic equipment. The Western intelligence community had become acutely aware during the 1950s of how top-secret information could leak through cables, power lines, and even through the air, and it was busy both exploiting and attempting to defend itself against the phenomenon. The History of CBNRC records that “GCHQ showed great concern” about some redacted element of the Rideau Annex’s security (Chapter 26, p. 21). Almost certainly, its concern related to emission security.

Size also eventually became a problem. By 1957, CBNRC had grown to about 470-490 staff, a total equal to or greater than the combined CB and REED establishments (about 475) at the time the Rideau Annex was first occupied, suggesting that the building was probably close to full. And it was still growing. One or more additional increases to its establishment had been approved in the mid- to late 1950s, such that CBNRC was by that time expanding towards a target of close to 600 employees (587?), a total that could not all be accommodated at the Rideau Annex.

When it was first occupied in 1950 there had been plenty of space in the building, but by the late 1950s that was no longer the case:

I remember when we moved in that we had to spread out our desks to make our large room on the third floor look occupied. In the 11 years that we spent at Rideau Annex (as that building became known), how much CB grew. The empty fourth floor, where we used to have pingpong tables was taken over, the back room on the first floor was put into use and the cafeteria in the basement expanded across the hall. Finally, some of the sections had to head for the Montreal Rd. Complex of NRC because the building became too small to hold us all. (Frank Cumming, Tillian, Spring 1980, p. 38.)

M36 (1957?-1961)

To ease the crowding, T&D Section, later known as T Group, was moved to temporary accommodations in NRC’s M36 building at its Montreal Road campus. The move probably took place in 1957, the year the building opened. The building is currently the home of NRC’s “Design and Fabrication Services”, and it is quite possible that it housed the same kind of activities when it opened. T&D Section’s work, which may have involved the production of COMSEC equipment and/or materiel, may have been considered broadly similar to the other activities going on in the building, and perhaps in need of less rigorous secrecy than SIGINT work.

Moving again

By the late 1950s, it had become clear that the Rideau Annex was no longer a suitable location for CBNRC. Its age, its lack of emission security features, and, ultimately, its size led eventually to a decision to build a new headquarters specifically for CBNRC.

The contract for construction of the Sir Leonard Tilley building was let in February 1959, and in June 1961, fifty years ago this month, CBNRC moved out of the Rideau Annex and into its new home.

CSE facilities: La Salle Academy

2011-06-23T11:44:00.029-04:00

In honour of CSE's fifty years (this month) in the Sir Leonard Tilley building, here is part one of a brief (well, it was supposed to be brief) tour of CSE’s facilities, past and present.

La Salle Academy (1946-1950)

The first headquarters of the Communications Security Establishment, or Communications Branch of the National Research Council (CBNRC) as it was then called, was in the La Salle Academy on Guigues Street (now Avenue) at Sussex Drive.

The site was first used for signals intelligence purposes in August 1943, when one or more of the upper floors were occupied by the Army, Air Force, and Navy Discrimination Units. The building also soon hosted a Joint Machine Unit, which operated Canada’s first code-breaking machines, the forerunners of CSE’s massive computer arrays of today. On August 1st, 1945, the Army and RCAF Discrimination Units, the Joint Machine Unit, the Japanese processing elements of the Examination Unit, and a communications and cipher office were amalgamated as the Joint Discrimination Unit (JDU).

The JDU was renamed the Communications Research Centre in July 1946. Still housed in the La Salle Academy, the CRC formed the core of the CBNRC on the latter’s creation in September 1946. At its moment of birth, CBNRC had a staff of 62, most of whom had simply transferred from the CRC, many becoming civilians in the process. CBNRC had an approved establishment of 179, probably slightly higher than the peak number of personnel at the site during the war, but post-war recruitment was slow, and staff numbers reached that level only around the time the agency moved to its next location, in January 1950.

The present-day building consists of multiple, joined structures. The structure on Sussex Avenue (on the left in the photo above) was built in 1852 as the College of Bytown, which eventually became the University of Ottawa. This building subsequently went through several uses before becoming, in 1899, the La Salle Academy, a Roman Catholic school for boys. The long wing along Guigues Street (on the right in the photo; see also below) was built in 1934 as classroom space for the Academy. Later additions were made in the 1960s and afterwards, and the entire building is now heritage designated. Since the 1970s it has hosted a variety of government offices.

As far as I can tell, CBNRC, and the Discrimination Units before it, occupied only the upper floors (3rd floor and rooftop structure) of the 1934 structure during most of their tenure in the building (image from Google Street View). The 1934 structure is now connected on several floors to the original 1852 building, but at the time it was a free-standing building, and I am not aware of any evidence that CBNRC ever occupied any space in the 1852 structure. By 1949 or earlier, the agency expanded to occupy two classrooms on the 2nd floor of the 1934 building. However, it was forced to relinquish that space in September 1949, a few months before it left the La Salle Academy entirely.

Depending on the internal structure of the building (how many floors did the school auditorium occupy?), it appears that CBNRC had about 1190-1700 square metres of space to house its staff, or 1370-1880 after the expansion to the second floor. By today's standards, even the higher end of those ranges would be ridiculously cramped, and it seems clear that even at the time the agency was facing considerable crowding by the time it moved out of the Academy.

In addition to space issues, CBNRC also had a problem with disposing of classified waste at the site.

After a short period during which the waste was burned in the East Block of the Parliament Buildings [which housed the Department of External Affairs at the time], and later in the E.B. Eddy Paper Mill in Hull, secure arrangements were made to use a large incinerator (the "Boiler Room") at NRC's Montreal Road Laboratories. (Kevin O'Neill (ed.), History of CBNRC, 1987, Chapter 26, p. 5.)

It is likely that the government never intended the La Salle Academy to be the CBNRC’s permanent post-war home. Incredible though it may seem given today’s approach to security, Canada’s then ultra-secret signals intelligence agency was not alone in the La Salle Academy. As the History of CBNRC attests (Chapter 26, p. 6), the Catholic boys’ school continued to operate in the building during the time CBNRC was there (and presumably also during the war). Indeed, the reason CBNRC had to withdraw from the 2nd floor was that the school needed its classrooms back.

Weird or what?

Even more incredibly, from 1948 on, the building also hosted professional theatre productions, first by the Ottawa Stage Society and later by the Canadian Repertory Theatre:

The only theatre the society had been able to find was the auditorium of the La Salle Academy, a Roman Catholic boys’ school. At that time the space was not in use, and when the Stage Society rented it, it consisted of a bare stage, space in the basement, and none of the backstage facilities that most theatres of even modest size provide. (Diane Mew, Life Before Stratford: The Memoirs of Amelia Hall, Dundurn Press, 1989, p. 93.)

The first production staged at the La Salle Academy was While the Sun Shines, by Terrence Ratigan, which opened on May 10th, 1948:

Seats in the orchestra were a dollar and those in the balcony were fifty cents. Twenty-nine people turned up on opening night. Among those who had been invited but who did not attend was Viscount Alexander of Tunis, the governor general. Nine weeks and nine productions later, when the same play was repeated, the governor general and his wife were in the audience, along with two hundred members of the diplomatic corps. (p. 91.)

It seems unlikely that the Soviet embassy turned down a chance to attend.

CBNRC employees also took advantage of the theatre’s presence. Writing many years later in CSE’s in-house newsletter, Gwen Flahven, one of the employees from that time, recalled “watching rehearsals in the theatre below and meeting Christopher Plummer, William Hutt, Betty Leighton, William Shatner, and other actors and actresses” (Tillian, Spring 1980, p. 11).

The number of people on CBNRC's staff continued to grow throughout its time at the La Salle Academy. Late in 1947, the agency's establishment was increased from 179 to 227. CBNRC had not yet reached that number by the time it left the Academy in January 1950, however, and it is unlikely that it would have been able to accommodate them all if it had. As early as August 1948, CBNRC Director Ed Drake had called the President of the NRC, C.J. Mackenzie, to complain "about his cramped office space" (Mark Kristmanson, Plateaus of Freedom: Nationality, Culture and State Security in Canada, 1940-1960, University of Toronto Press, 2003, p. 108).

For space, security, and perhaps other reasons (the school may have wanted its top floors back), it was clear that CBNRC could not remain permanently at La Salle Academy. In August 1949, the Department of Public Works let a contract for "extensive alterations and improvements" to the Rideau Military Hospital to accommodate both the Communications Branch and the Division of Radio and Electrical Engineering of the NRC, and by the beginning of the next year CBNRC had moved to its second headquarters site.

[This post was updated on 3 December 2011 to incorporate what I hope is a better estimate of the space occupied by CBNRC within the La Salle Academy. My thanks to Mark Weiler for information about the La Salle Academy's buildings during the 1940s.]

May 2011 CSE staff size

2011-06-20T23:14:00.001-04:00

1906, a new record!

(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 budget growth

2011-06-15T22:49:00.005-04:00

Here's a chart of CSE's budget since 1995-96 (also shown is CSE's Personnel budget, which is of course included in the Total Budget line). All figures have been converted to 2011 dollars to account for the effects of inflation.

As the chart shows, CSE's budget was stagnant or even declining in the late 1990s. But then came The Day That Changed Everything: September 11th, 2001.

Since that day CSE's budget has skyrocketed.

CSE's 2011-12 budget is almost three times as large--in constant dollars--as it was in 2000-01. Its personnel budget is roughly two and a half times as large as it was then. Its actual number of staff has more than doubled, and is still growing.

The GWOT has truly been good to CSE. Other factors, notably the growth of the Internet and electronic communications in general, have also been in play. But there can be little doubt that it was Osama Bin Laden who turned on the money taps.

70 years of cryptanalysis

2011-06-09T08:48:00.002-04:00

Today, June 9th, 2011, is the 70th anniversary of cryptanalysis in Canada.

Canada's first cryptanalytic agency, the Examination Unit, began operations on 9 June 1941. Shown above, the XU staff in mid-1942. Oliver Strachey, a British cryptanalyst seconded from GC&CS to replace Herbert Yardley as head of the XU, is seated in the third row from the front, second from left.

More information about the XU here:

This date in history: XU began operations

XU approved

Herbert O. Yardley

And a bit on the more recent (although now out of date) history of cryptanalysis in this country:

The fall and rise of cryptanalysis at CSE

CSE to leave DND?

2011-06-08T16:55:00.007-04:00

Is CSE planning to leave the Department of National Defence?

That seems to be the subtext of this job posting for a "special advisor" to provide strategic advice to CSE's Chief Financial Officer AKA Director General Finance:

[CSE] has experienced a rapid infusion of funds and growth since 2001.Further changes might become necessary in order to support [the agency's] enhanced mandate, including possible changes to CSE's organizational status and/or reporting relationship within Government. The CFO for CSE has been mandated to consider and assess the implications on the financial management function, infrastructure and capacity of possible changes to CSE's organizational status, including the impact of CSE becoming a separate agency under the [Financial Administration Act].

REQUIREMENTS

The CFO of CSE requires a Special Advisor to:

A) Coordinate the development and implementation of plans for selected scenarios, including the identification of internal and external expert resources and/or partnerships with other departments required to support the project.

B) Provide strategic advice to the CFO (and to CSE's senior management, on an as and when required basis): the complex financial issues arising in the event of a change in CSE's organization status, the associated resource implications, resourcing options and implementation timelines; and options for partnering or interface arrangements with other federal government organizations to achieve a required state of readiness with due consideration to cost and affordability issues.

C) Lead a comprehensive gap analysis between the current financial responsibilities, accountabilities, capacity and infrastructure of CSE, and future requirements for the full range of governance models options available for CSE.

D) Act as an independent advisor to the CFO when advising Senior Management on the implications of the various options.

E) Advise the CFO on the development and implementation of strong financial management governance, policy, program, performance, and reporting and accountability frameworks to support implementation of a new status for CSE.

F) Conduct representational, advocacy and negotiation initiatives with senior officials of Central Agencies, DND, other federal departments, consultants and other external stakeholders and partners, on an as and when required basis.

In providing this advice, the consultant will take into account the current needs and requirements of CSE for robust and modern financial management governance and service delivery model, the ranges of options for possible changes to CSE status and/or reporting relationship within Government, resulting changes anticipated in financial responsibilities and infrastructure, costs and affordability, as well as the long term direction for CFO organizations within the federal government.

See also this ad.

Sounds like CSE is looking at becoming a free-standing agency like CSIS.

That would presumably simplify CSE's currently somewhat convoluted reporting relationships, but who would be the responsible minister? The Defence Minister, as it is now? DND has traditionally been CSE's main customer, but that may become less true as the Afghanistan mission winds down. Foreign Affairs? CSE is a foreign intelligence agency after all, and Foreign Affairs is both a major customer and the department that traditionally led the SIGINT policy-making process. Public Safety? The PS minister already handles both CSIS and the RCMP, among other agencies, but that ministry is probably too domestic-focused, despite CSE's increasing role in security intelligence.

And what is DND's view? Would this be an amicable separation?

Perhaps DND would be happy to see CSE go if it means they don't have to pay for CSE's new billion-dollar headquarters complex, which CSE somewhat bizarrely is now boasting will be "the largest repository of Top Secret information in Canada."

Trust bureaucrats to emphasize how many files they have.

Update 12 June 2011

From the Department of Barn Doors

Boy howdy, it only took about one day for all three of the job postings I linked to above to get pulled. This is the Internet, people. Once it's out there, it's out there. You think you're the only guys with data repositories?

The interesting bits from the first link are already posted above. For the record, here are the interesting bits of the other two posts:

Our government client Canadian [sic] Security Establishment is currently seeking a temporary Special Financial Advisor

Requirements
• Bilingual
• Secret Security Clearance

Duties
• Coordinate the development and implementation of plans for selected scenarios, including the identification of internal and external expert resources and/or partnerships with other departments required to support the project.
• Provide strategic advice to the CFO (and to CSE's senior management, on an as and when required basis): to the complex financial issues arising in the event of a change in CSE's organization status to the associated resource implications, resourcing options and implementation timelines; and to options for partnering or interface arrangements with other federal government organizations to achieve a required state of readiness with due consideration to cost and affordability issues.
• Lead a comprehensive gap analysis between the current financial responsibilities, accountabilities, capacity and infrastructure of CSE, and future requirements for the full range of governance models options available for CSE.
• Act as an independent advisor to the CFO when advising Senior Management on the implications of the various options.
• Advise the CFO on the development and implementation of strong financial management governance, policy, program, performance, and reporting and accountability frameworks to support implementation of a new status for CSE.
• Conduct representational, advocacy and negotiation initiatives with senior officials of Central Agencies, DND, other federal departments, consultants and other external stakeholders and partners, on an as and when required basis.
• In providing this advice, the consultant will take into account the current needs and requirements of CSE for robust and modern financial management governance and service delivery model, the ranges of options for possible changes to CSE status and/or reporting relationship within Government, resulting changes anticipated in financial responsibilities and infrastructure, costs and affordability, as well as the long term direction for CFO organizations within the federal government.
• Develop and present an implementation plan to the Technical Authority (T A) -a draft version of the implementation plan must be presented first.- upon receipt, CSE may supply comments for incorporation into a final version
• Analyze and document necessary actions required to implement the CFO model based on the gap analysis review. Develop position papers which will include arguments justifying proposed functions to be implemented.
• Monthly electronic progress reports to the Technical Authority (T A) outlining progress against the schedule and implementation plan. Problems or potential problems shall be highlighted.
• Presentations of the results to the T A and various CSE Committees such as Steering Committee (SC), ExCom, People Planning Resource Committee (PPRC), etc.
• An overall final report of all deliverables in Microsoft Power Point presentation and/or Word
document format in English only.
Have a current and valid professional accounting designation from a recognized association (CA, CMA or CGA).
• Be fluently bilingual at the Public Service (at minimum CCC Level), to be able to conduct interviews and make presentations in both official languages.
• Have held for a minimum of two years, in the last five years, a Chief Financial Officer/Senior Financial Officer position in the Government of Canada (GoC) at the EX-04level or above.
• Significant experience of ten (10) years (minimum) within the last fifteen (15) years, at the senior level in GoC (DG level or above) in the management of the finance function as defined by the Comptroller General of Canada in the CFO Model and the application of best practices in the areas of finance and contract management.
• At least one (1) year of senior level experience with the management of independent agencies, as well as with various governance and funding models in use in Canadian government agencies.
• At least one (1) year of experience in the Treasury Board Secretariat in the areas of Program Analysis and/or development, and in the areas of governance, common service policies and shared services.
• At least one (1) year of experience in structuring/modernizing financial management practices in federal government organizations.

and number two...

Current Opportunities - Career Description
Other - General Application - Ottawa, Ontario
...

If you are interested in employment with the CSEC but didn't see a position that fit your skill set, we encourage you submit your application into our general inventory for future consideration.

About CSEC

The Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) relies on the expertise and knowledge of approximately 2000 employees to help the Government protect information of national interest through leading-edge information technology and to provide cyber security advice and services. CSEC is also mandated to collect foreign signals intelligence as per the Government of Canada's intelligence priorities. Federal security and law enforcement agencies, in the performance of their own lawful duties, also benefit form CSEC's capabilities.

CSEC is located in the Confederation Heights area of Ottawa, close to the Rideau Canal and Carleton University, and easily accessible by public transport (OC Transpo bus or O-train). In 2014, CSEC will be moving to a new, state-of-the-art, high security facility, in the Gloucester area of Ottawa. It will be the largest repository of Top Secret information in Canada.

Update 17 June 2011

The "largest repository" line is also used here.

April 2011 CSE staff size

2011-05-30T23:38:00.001-04:00

1856.

(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.)

CANUSA confirmation

2011-05-13T13:44:00.006-04:00

Intelligence historian Matthew Aid has already confirmed that the CANUSA agreement was concluded in 1949 and that (as I had speculated earlier) this letter marked the formal conclusion of the agreement. (See also this post.)

But now we can see it in black and white in an official, declassified document. Pages 32 and 33 of A Reference Guide to Selected Historical Documents Relating to the National Security Agency/Central Security Service 1931-1985, originally classified Top Secret Umbra but declassified in slightly redacted form in 2010, reports the following about the agreement:

a. Letter: "The CANUSA Agreement"
b. 27 May 1949
c. From the Chairman, Communications Research Committee (Gordon G. Crean) to the Chairman, United States Communications Intelligence Board (USCIB) (Major General Charles P. Cabell)
d. NSA Historical Collection: Series V, A.22 (Tab E), Series V.J.3.3, and Series VII, 19, Box 4, 3k.
e. This unlikely format for an agreement was in actuality a letter from the chairman of the Communication Research Committee to the chairman of USCIB in which he proposed to clarify the existing Comint relations by offering a new set of proposals which, if the U.S. agreed, could serve as the basis for a new agreement. The proposals included provisions for the exchange of [one half line redacted] data, and a variety of other information. The agreement would apply to all Canadian and U.S. Comint authorities which existed at that time or in the future. This was not the first exchange between the U.S. and Canada. Collaboration with Canada on Comint matters dated to before the U.S. entry into World War II.
f. (TSC) [Top Secret Codeword]

So there we have it. The Guide confirms the name "CANUSA Agreement" and confirms that Crean's letter of 27 May 1949 (referenced in the 29 June 1949 reply) contained the proposed terms of the agreement.

This NSA document also provides official confirmation of the signing of the CANUSA Agreement in 1949.

I would quibble a bit with the Guide on a couple of points. First, an exchange of letters is not that unlikely a format for an intergovernmental agreement (there must be hundreds of Canada-U.S. agreements in place as a result of such exchanges). Second, in keeping with the protocol of such exchanges, it is the reply accepting the proposed terms of the agreement that actually seals the agreement, so unless the 27 May 1949 letter specified a different date for entry into force it seems more appropriate to me to date the CANUSA Agreement to 29 June 1949 rather than 27 May 1949.

That said, apparently there was also (as Matthew Aid reported) a formal signing of the agreement in November 1949. (Kurt Jensen similarly reported in his book Cautious Beginnings: Canadian Foreign Intelligence, 1939-51 that a November-December 1949 conference "ended with the signing" of the agreement.) It is possible that the agreement didn't enter into force until that signing.

The CANUSA Agreement was based more or less closely on the text of the BRUSA (later renamed UKUSA) Agreement of 1946. Now that the text of the UKUSA Agreement has been released, is there any reason why the CANUSA text should remain under wraps?

Anyone? Anyone?

Bueller?

March 2011 CSE staff size

2011-04-17T16:54:00.001-04:00

1871.

(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.)

February 2011 CSE staff size

2011-03-16T23:57:00.001-04:00

1842.

(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.)

Legislative priority watch

2011-02-26T17:00:00.005-05:00

The 2009-2010 annual report of the CSE Commissioner offered some hope that the never-ending dispute between the government and the commissioner over the legality of CSE's ministerial authorizations would finally be resolved.

According to the report, "[former] Commissioner Gonthier was informed by the Minister of National Defence that clarification of ambiguities and other amendments to the [National Defence Act] are a legislative priority."

The commissioner's report was released just over six months ago. In September, when I last wrote about this issue, I noted that "'legislative priority' though the issue may be, none of the 46 bills introduced by the government so far in this session addresses the Commissioners' concerns."

Make that 60 bills and counting.

The office of CSE Commissioner was created to provide a means of assuring Canadians that CSE's potentially highly intrusive powers are under effective legal constraints. This dispute, which cuts to the core of that mandate, has now remained unresolved for at least six years (and possibly as much as nine years).

That is 40% (or more) of the entire existence of the office of CSE Commissioner.

January 2011 CSE staff size

2011-02-18T20:54:00.001-05:00

1814.

(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.)

UNDE goes UNDEcover

2011-01-14T13:00:00.004-05:00

The Union of National Defence Employees is continuing its campaign against the privatization of some 91 support jobs at CSE.

The union's latest move includes a website (Security for Sale) and a video commentary by an anonymous CSE employee denouncing the privatization move as a security threat:

UNDE has also prepared an "External Briefing Note" outlining its concerns about the project.

The briefing note makes the interesting claim that "at two previous points in history regular information transfers have been restricted from coming into Canadian possession, these restrictions were a result of perceived or real security breaches".

Is that a reference to these incidents? The examples that Aldrich refers to sound more like policy disputes -- particularly in the case of Operation FRICTION -- rather than security breaches, but maybe that's one way to perceive them. There was also the question of full Canadian access to Iraq War-related intelligence, but, again, that's not really characterizable as an issue about security breaches.

Is UNDE referring to something else entirely? The document states that all of the information in it is unclassified, but I certainly don't recall hearing anything about such breaches. Does anyone care to elaborate on this unclassified information?

Further information:
Colin Freeze, "Union accuses senior Tories of selling out national security," Globe and Mail, 14 January 2011

Carmen Chai, "National defence union fights government plan to outsource security jobs," Postmedia News, 14 January 2011

December 2010 CSE staff size

2011-01-13T23:06:00.001-05:00

1808.

(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 staff to decline -- upward

2011-01-11T23:18:00.003-05:00

A slightly misleading headline in today's Ottawa Citizen:

David Pugliese, "New spy HQ going up, but staff numbers going down," Ottawa Citizen, 11 January 2011.

The focus of the story is the 91 CSE jobs that the government plans to privatize under the public-private partnership deal to build CSE's new headquarters.

But the implication of the headline at least -- that the number of CSE employees is about to decline -- does not appear to be true.

As noted here, CSE appears to be headed for a "staff complement" of 2000 employees or more (possibly many more) by the time its new headquarters is completed four or five years from now. That's significantly up from its current complement, most recently reported to be 1817.

About that Phil Barnesosophy degree...

2010-12-24T00:15:00.005-05:00

When John Adams was first appointed Chief of CSE in 2005 there was a mildly amusing typo in his official bio reporting that the new Chief had received a Masters degree in "Phil Barnesosophy" from Oxford University. The typo was later corrected to read "Masters, Philosophy, University of Oxford".

So far, so good. But today I happened to check out the Chief's bio on the CSE website, and what do I read? This: "As a Rhodes Scholar, he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree at Oxford university in England in 1967." No mention of a Masters degree at all.

What's up with that? A Masters degree from Oxford isn't worth mentioning any more? Chinese cyberspies stole it?

I'm not alleging anything here. I don't know what the explanation is. I'm just curious about the discrepancy.

Update 18 January 2011:
Corrected to fix a typo about a typo -- ironically, in the original version of this post I misspelled Barnesosophy!

Adams on the new headquarters complex

2010-12-23T02:22:00.005-05:00

CSE Chief John Adams has given the Globe and Mail some more details on CSE's new headquarters complex (Colin Freeze, "Canada's little-known spy agency comes out into the open," Globe and Mail, 22 December 2010):

As envisioned, the seven-building CSEC complex will be the equivalent of a 90-storey skyscraper turned on its side – a highly secure compound outfitted with the latest high-tech gear. Two nearby electrical generating stations will power the agency’s computers, which suck in millions of conversations from around the world each day and scour them for intelligence information.

CSEC’s 1,700 staff and $300-million budget are double what they were a decade ago. Yet the agency’s bricks-and-mortar surroundings have been neglected. Some staff complain that a wall-sized mainframe computer has even fallen through an old floor. The current complex, a scattering of Cold War-era buildings near Carleton University, can no longer suck enough energy off the grid to sustain operations.

“We’ve run out of power,” said Mr. Adams, whose facilities use about as much energy as a small town. “We’ve got 700 people buried in a basement.”

Plenty more in the article, including a site plan for the new complex.

And this little tid-bit:

...Canadians need to understand how much raw data the spy agency handles – and how much more it’s going to have to handle in the future, Mr. Adams argues. He makes a case that the new complex in Ottawa’s East End is vital for national security.

Already, he said his staff process the informational equivalent of a WikiLeaks-sized data dump of State Department cables every day – or more transactions than all of Canada’s big banks combined. His staff burn through megawatts of brainpower and electrical energy as their computers crunch unfathomable amounts of information.

My wild estimates for the new complex are multi-exabytes of data storage and as much as 25 megawatts (of electrical power), respectively.

Graphic: Murat Yukselir/Globe and Mail

LTAP/MTAP "Taj Mahal"

2010-12-18T15:54:00.004-05:00

More details on CSE's planned new headquarters complex:

David Pugliese, "New DND facilities to have ice rink, hobby garden: Documents," Postmedia News, 17 December 2010

Update: 21 December 2010

CSE Chief Adams has responded to the "Taj Mahal" report.

A couple of interesting points:

- Adams states that the "new facility is required to house a staff complement of almost 2,000 employees". Assuming the Chief's number doesn't include contractors (at least 91, according to the Pugliese article), this suggests that there could be nearly 2,100 people working at the site -- plus some number of military personnel. It remains unclear whether that overall figure includes the 200-250 that will be accommodated in the MTAP building, but either way, it represents significantly more people than CSE's current 1817.

- Adams cites a "severe lack of power" at the current site as one of the reasons a new facility is required. See "More power!" in this post for one possible explanation of CSE's power needs.

November 2010 CSE staff size

2010-12-14T15:14:00.000-05:00

1817.

(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.)

It's against the law!

2010-11-30T16:31:00.005-05:00

It's not often those of us outside the SIGINT world get to engage in a venerable intelligence tradition like reading other people's secret diplomatic traffic.

And what fun it is too. You can see why government ministers get such a kick out of it.

But personally the biggest chuckle I've had out of the whole affair so far was in response to this comment:

The French Foreign Ministry called the WikiLeaks release "irresponsible" and said it violated international law concerning the secrecy of communications between embassies and their home bases (Edward Cody, "Leaks undercut relations with U.S., nations say," Washington Post, 30 November 2010).

I am shocked -- shocked! -- to find gambling going on in this establishment!

October 2010 CSE staff size

2010-11-05T18:39:00.001-04:00

1720.

(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.)

September 2010 CSE staff size

2010-10-14T15:54:00.001-04:00

1777.

(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.)

LTAP update

2010-10-06T01:38:00.003-04:00

The government has chosen the Plenary Properties consortium as the "preferred proponent" for the design, construction, and maintenance of CSE's Long-Term Accommodation Project:

The project, which has an estimated capital cost of $880 million, is expected to reach financial close by January 2011. This means that the project’s costs will have been finalized, a financing rate will have been set, expenditure authority will have been granted and the contract will have been awarded. Construction of the LTA project is planned to begin in spring 2011.

Government announcement here. My previous comments and speculations here.

MTAP artist's concept

2010-10-04T00:11:00.004-04:00

The picture above is an artist's concept of CSE's new Mid-Term Accommodation Project building, which is currently under construction and due for completion in 2011.

The MTAP facility will house 200-250 personnel.

A Long-Term Accommodation Project is also underway to construct new facilities for the rest of CSE's staff at the same site in Ottawa's east end. (My previous comments here.)

Radio gear at HMCS Churchill

2010-10-03T00:51:00.003-04:00

Jerry Proc, who created and maintains an excellent series of webpages on Radio Communications and Signals Intelligence in the Canadian Navy, has just added a great resource on the radio gear used at HMCS Churchill during its years of operation. Check it out. His main Churchill page is here.

The other Canadian sites his pages cover are listed in the sidebar on the right-hand side of this blog.

A tale of two frictions

2010-10-02T01:07:00.004-04:00

Here's a little bombshell that was dropped back in June to the apparent notice of nobody around these parts. According to Richard Aldrich, professor of international studies at the University of Warwick and author of the recent GCHQ: The uncensored story of Britain's most secret intelligence agency, the United States has cut off Canada's access to U.S. intelligence twice in recent decades as a result of policy disputes between the U.S. and Canadian governments (Richard Aldrich, "Allied code-breakers cooperate -- but not always," Guardian, 24 June 2010).

The first incident reportedly took place during the run up to the 1991 Gulf War:

After Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Washington asked Ottawa to assist by sending naval ships to the Gulf. The Canadian fleet was out-dated and equipped for anti-submarine warfare. Fearing the threat from aircraft and Exocet missiles, the Canadians protested that their ships would be too vulnerable.

Washington signalled its intense displeasure by cutting off the intelligence flow and so the "screens went blank". Ottawa had a change of heart and three days later communications were restored. In honour of this memorable episode in allied relations, Ottawa's defence chiefs christened their Gulf naval deployment "Operation Friction".

The second incident he reports was sparked by the Canadian government's decision to establish the Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Maher Arar:

In 2005, the Americans shut off the flow of intelligence once more because Canada had set up an inquiry into the case of Maher Arar, a citizen who had been the victim of rendition to Jordan and Syria. The inquiry team had been allowed to look at classified American material – against Washington's wishes.

Whether or not these accounts, based on confidential interviews, are correct (and I have no reason to think that they aren't), they highlight a real trade-off that comes with Canada's participation in the UKUSA intelligence community.

Our intelligence-sharing arrangements give Canada access to an enormous range of information that it would not otherwise get (albeit not always accurate: see Mass Destruction, Weapons of), but our contribution to that sharing also advances foreign, defence, and security policy priorities that are not always our own, and fear that our access may be lost may lead us sometimes to bow to those priorities in our own actions.

Nicky Hager addresses these issues forcefully in Secret Power, his book about New Zealand's role in the UKUSA community. And James Littleton raised the same sorts of issues for Canada in his 1986 book Target Nation.

In the specific incidents that Aldrich mentions, it is difficult to know what effect the intelligence cut-offs may have had. Would the Mulroney government not have sent Canadian forces to participate in the Gulf War in the absence of a threat to our intelligence access? That doesn't seem likely, although the choice of forces or the timing of their dispatch might have been different. And the Arar Inquiry did go ahead, although of course we don't know what information may have been withheld from it.

Still, it is clear from similar incidents in the history of the UKUSA community that the threat of cut-offs and the fear of cut-offs do at least sometimes play a role in the decision-making surrounding contentious policy issues.

Aldrich's GCHQ deals with that question as it pertains to the U.K. very well, and I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in the history of that agency and its role in British foreign and defence policy. (It might, however, be best to wait for an updated edition in paperback -- more about the book in a later post.)

CSE Commissioner's 2009-2010 report

2010-09-27T23:53:00.005-04:00

The CSE Commissioner's annual report was released during the summer.

Although submitted by the new Commissioner, Robert Décary, the report is based on the activities and findings of his two predecessors, Peter Cory and the late Charles Gonthier.

The big news, from my point of view, is that the report finally provides an explanation of the longstanding legality dispute (see also this) between CSE/Department of Justice and successive CSE Commissioners.

What's at stake are the "ministerial authorizations" signed by the Minister of National Defence that authorize CSE to intercept communications that may include "private communications" as defined by the Criminal Code. As noted by the Commissioner (and acknowledged by CSE Chief Adams and Associate Chief (Operations) Robert Gordon in 2007), these authorizations do not apply to the monitoring of particular individuals or groups but rather to methods of collecting foreign intelligence--presumably things like the collection of internet traffic or the monitoring of telephone traffic carried on telecommunications satellites.

It is not always clear, especially with internet traffic, whether one or even both ends of a particular communication may be in Canada, in which case it would be subject to the laws pertaining to private communications. The ministerial authorizations make it possible for CSE to intercept communications that may cross the border without breaking Canadian law in the process, but they do appear to be (at least potentially) extremely broad in scope, and they have obviously been of some concern to the CSE Commissioners:

CSEC’s foreign intelligence ministerial authorizations are broadly written and apply to methods of collecting foreign intelligence rather than to individuals. However, Commissioners have been of the view that it is not clear that the [National Defence Act] supports such an approach. Commissioners have stated that amendments to the NDA are necessary to clarify ambiguities relating to foreign intelligence ministerial authorizations. Former Commissioner Gonthier also emphasized last year that "the length of time that has passed without producing amended legislation puts at risk the integrity of the review process.”

The report goes on to say that

Commissioner Gonthier was informed by the Minister of National Defence that clarification of ambiguities and other amendments to the NDA are a legislative priority. Pending amendments, Commissioners have continued to use the interim solution of applying a qualified opinion, that is, reviewing CSEC foreign intelligence collection activities under ministerial authorization on the basis of the NDA as it is interpreted by Justice Canada. However, past Commissioners have noted they disagree in certain important respects with that interpretation, which highlights the need for amendments to the NDA.

What is not yet clear is whether the clarifications and other amendments now promised by the Defence Minister will limit those powers in any way or simply make the current broad approach more explicitly legal. It could make for an interesting debate when the proposed changes come before parliament--if they ever do. A quick check shows that "legislative priority" though the issue may be, none of the 46 bills introduced by the government so far in this session addresses the Commissioners' concerns.

Successive CSE Commissioners have been complaining about this question since at least 2005. How many more years will they have to do so?

August 2010 CSE staff size

2010-09-21T16:01:00.001-04:00

1720, same as last month.

(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.)

July 2010 CSE staff size

2010-09-05T15:52:00.001-04:00

1720.

(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.)

June 2010 CSE staff size

2010-07-15T21:37:00.001-04:00

1763.

(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.)

CFIOG detachment locations in U.S.

2010-06-26T22:12:00.005-04:00

A recent article in the Communications and Electronics Newsletter (Col G. D. Loos, "Update from CFIOG," C&E Newsletter, Vol. 52, 1 December 2009) provides some new and more up to date information on CFIOG detachment locations:

CFIOG Detachment. This group of some 50 personnel continues to strengthen our Canada/United States partnership as imbedded personnel in such locations as Anchorage, AK, San Antonio, TX, Denver, CO, Honolulu, HI, Norfolk, VA, and Fort Meade, MD.

The sites Loos lists are probably the FLR-9 circularly disposed antenna array operated by the 381st Intelligence Squadron at Elmendorf AFB, Alaska (air photo); the Medina Regional Security Operations Center at Lackland AFB, San Antonio, Texas (air photo); the Denver Security Operations Center at the Aerospace Data Facility-Colorado, Buckley AFB, Colorado (air photo); NSA Hawaii, formerly the Kunia Regional Security Operations Center (air photo), soon to be replaced by the Hawaii RSOC; Naval Information Operations Command Norfolk in Virginia (air photo); and NSA headquarters at Fort Meade (air photo).

This is the first time to my knowledge that the Elmendorf and Buckley locations have been acknowledged. A number of Canadian personnel used to be assigned to Naval Security Group FRD-10 locations; it is possible that these two predominantly Air Force locations were added to replace the FRD-10 slots (all the U.S. FRD-10 arrays have been shut down).

Buckley is an especially interesting site in that the Aerospace Data Facility-Colorado is one of the mission ground stations for U.S. high-altitude SIGINT satellites and is the sole operator of the TRUMPET and TRUMPET Follow-On satellites, which monitor the northern hemisphere from Molniya orbits.

The article does not specify whether other detachment locations acknowledged in the past, such as the Georgia RSOC, also remain active.

21 EW Regiment stands up

2010-06-26T17:13:00.004-04:00

A little catch-up on this one: 2 EW Squadron and its reserve counterpart, 772 EW Squadron, were merged in April to create the 21 EW Regiment, the first new regiment in the Canadian army since the Second World War:

21 EW Regiment: A weekend merger at CFB Kingston, CKWS Television, 19 April 2010

Soldiers attend parade to celebrate new regiment, DND, April 2010

zOMG! UKUSA agreement declassified

2010-06-25T14:05:00.006-04:00

NSA and GCHQ have released the texts of the UKUSA agreement and related appendices, memoranda, etc.! Somewhat redacted, yes, but an amazing amount of material intact.

UKUSA Agreement Release 1940-1956 (NSA website)

Newly released GCHQ files: UKUSA Agreement (UK National Archives site)

Bartleman vindicated by Air India Inquiry

2010-06-24T12:14:00.003-04:00

The Final Report of the Air India Inquiry, released on June 17th, has vindicated former Ontario Lieutenant Governor James Bartleman.

Bartleman, who was Director General of the Intelligence Analysis and Security Bureau at the Department of External Affairs at the time of the attack, told the Inquiry that he had seen a CSE communications intercept during the week before the Air India flight indicating that it was to be targeted that weekend. CSE and other government witnesses subsequently denied that such an intercept had ever existed, however, and the government sought to discredit Bartleman's testimony. (Background here.)

In his report (specific part here), Inquiry Commissioner Mr. Justice John Major stated that

On balance, the evidence cited by the Attorney General of Canada to discredit James Bartleman was not persuasive. Bartleman was a unique consumer of intelligence who had exceptional access to CSE materials. It was a well-accepted fact that there were many threats to Air India flights from Canada and these threats were generally discounted. In light of these surrounding circumstances, it is reasonable to conclude that James Bartleman saw a document with a direct threat to Air India Flight 182 on June 22, 1985 that other witnesses do not recollect seeing.

The Commission accepts the evidence of Bartleman, and finds that he delivered a message to the RCMP identifying a direct threat to Air India 182 the weekend of the June 22, 1985 flight. In accepting Bartleman’s testimony, it is significant to note that he had nothing to gain by coming forward with his testimony, and stood only to suffer a loss to his reputation in facing government-wide efforts to impugn his credibility.

Further coverage:

Bill Curry, "Inquiry vindicates former security minister [sic] whose Air India warnings went ignored," Globe and Mail, 17 June 2010

Richard J. Brennan, "Former Ontario lieutenant governor praised for recalling terror warning," Toronto Star, 18 June 2010

New CSE Commissioner appointed

2010-06-22T10:49:00.004-04:00

Former Justice of the Federal Court of Appeals Robert Décary was appointed Commissioner of the Communications Security Establishment on 21 June, bringing an end--at last!--to the Peter Cory interregnum.

Official announcement here.

Robert Décary's bio.

Previous comments here and here.

Recent commentary on the position of CSEC Commissioner by blogger Patrick Baud (Who Watches the Watchmen?).

May 2010 CSE staff size

2010-06-22T10:49:00.001-04:00

1789.

(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.)

April 2010 CSE staff size

2010-05-14T12:40:00.001-04:00

1734.

(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.)

CBNRC/CSE staff 1946-2013

2010-05-02T23:43:00.003-04:00

Here's a quick look at CBNRC/CSE's growth over its history.

CBNRC had 62 people on staff (authorized strength of 179) when it opened its doors in 1946. It grew rapidly throughout the late 1940s and 1950s and then levelled off at about 600 at the beginning of the 1960s.

It remained at about 600 until the early 1980s, when the agency, by then renamed CSE, began its second major period of growth. This period saw CSE take on a number of new roles, including satellite monitoring, SIGINT interception from embassy sites, and supercomputer-based cryptanalysis. The Soviet target remained the agency's predominant focus, however.

By the time CSE reached a new plateau at about 900 employees the Cold War had ended, wiping out in the process a large part of CSE's role. There then followed a period of retrenchment during which a large number of Cold War-era employees retired and the overall staffing level of the agency remained static or even shrank somewhat. Economic and diplomatic intelligence-gathering are thought to have taken on greater prominence within CSE's target priorities during this period.

CSE's third--and ongoing--period of growth began in the wake of the 9/11 attack on the United States. Security intelligence and support to military operations have become CSE's new priorities, and money and resources have been virtually thrown at the agency. With 1752 employees at present, CSE has roughly twice the peak number of employees it had during the Cold War, and almost three times the number it had for most of the Cold War.

And this third period of growth has not yet ended. The government projects a CSE staff of 1825 in FY 2012-13, and the agency's new headquarters, scheduled for completion in 2015, is being designed to hold as many as 2250 (although the latter number will include contractors, and possibly military personnel, as well as CSE staff).

Now if they could just find one CSE Commissioner...

Commissioner decommissioned?

2010-04-26T22:01:00.003-04:00

It has been more than a month and a half since the Globe and Mail reported that CSE Commissioner Peter Cory was resigning his position, just three months after having accepted the job (blog post here), and still there is no official word on his status. No confirmation, no denial, no appointment of a successor.

Ottawa, in its ongoing effort to be as inscrutable as Stalin's Politburo, has apparently decided to leave us all guessing.

Even the G&M's article has been pulled from free public access.

But now, perhaps, we have been favoured with a sign. It seems that Justice Cory has also largely disappeared from the Office of the Communications Security Establishment Commissioner website. Apart from his official bio, the only place he now appears on the site is on a list of Former Commissioners on the OCSEC History page.

Judging from that subtle indication, it would appear that he is indeed leaving the post. Presumably he has agreed to keep it quiet until Ottawa appoints his successor.

So... Can we get on with it? Hmm?

March 2010 CSE staff size

2010-04-15T16:13:00.003-04:00

1752.

(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.)

Related:

New figures are now available on CSE's personnel plans for the next few years (source: DND 2010-11 Report on Plans and Priorities):

Forecast for the fiscal year just ended: 1658 civilian full-time equivalents (FTEs).
Planned for 2010-11: 1762 FTEs
Planned for 2011-12: 1817 FTEs
Planned for 2012-13: 1825 FTEs

More growth to come?

CSE is anticipating that a staff of some 2250 will occupy its new headquarters upon its completion in 2015 (if I read the runes aright), but that figure includes both government employees, which could include some military personnel as well as CSE civilians, and an unspecified number of contractors, so the final target figure for CSE's civilian employees remains unclear.

There also could be some variation between the actual number of employees and FTEs. For example, the monthly figures I've been reporting on this site average out to 1699 over the last fiscal year, whereas the FTE forecast for the same period is only 1658.

February 2010 CSE staff size

2010-03-11T13:54:00.000-05:00

1745.

(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.)

Cory resigning as CSE Commissioner?

2010-03-10T13:56:00.002-05:00

The Globe and Mail reported on Saturday that retired Supreme Court Justice Peter Cory is resigning from his job as CSE Commissioner, just three months after he accepted the job (Colin Freeze, "Commissioner leaving cyber-spy agency," Globe and Mail, 6 March 2010).

According to the report, which has not yet been confirmed, Cory is resigning because he "believes his part-time job as commissioner of the Communications Security Establishment conflicts with his continuing role in advising the federal Justice Department on legal issues," and he has decided to remain in the latter role.

At first glance, this is certainly a plausible explanation: the Department of Justice supplies the Communications Security Establishment's legal advice, so any disputes between the CSE Commissioner and CSE over interpretation of CSE's mandate or the legality of its activities are in effect disputes between the Commissioner and the Department of Justice.

And it just so happens that there is already a longstanding (and as far as the public knows still unresolved) dispute between the CSE Commissioners and CSE/Department of Justice over the legality of some undisclosed aspect of CSE's activities. The first the public heard of it was in CSE Commissioner Antonio Lamer's 2005-06 Annual Report. Lamer's successor, Charles Gonthier, picked up the torch when he took office and continued to pursue the issue until his untimely death last year. The dispute was probably the biggest question hanging over the office of the Commissioner when Cory accepted the job in December.

But, that being the case, if conflict of interest is really the issue here, why didn't Cory and his government overlords think of it before he took the job? What the hell is going on here?

With Cory never really having had the time to settle into the job, we've now gone the better part of a year with effectively no CSE Commissioner in the midst of a legality dispute that has already dragged on for five years (or maybe more)--despite the blindingly obvious fact that the fundamental purpose of having a Commissioner is to provide assurance to Canadians that CSE obeys the law! And now this government, which never met a watchdog it didn't instinctively want to neuter, has to start from scratch looking for a new candidate for Commissioner?

January 2010 CSE staff size

2010-02-10T16:41:00.001-05:00

1738.

(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.)

December 2009 CSE staff size

2010-01-13T10:52:00.001-05:00

1728.

(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.)

November 2009 CSE staff size

2009-12-14T13:27:00.000-05:00

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

2009-12-03T21:37:00.004-05:00

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

2009-11-16T10:46:00.001-05:00

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

2009-11-01T15:07:00.003-05:00

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

2009-10-26T14:34:00.000-04:00

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

2009-10-18T01:49:00.007-04:00

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

2009-10-06T22:52:00.005-04:00

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.)

August CSE staff size

2009-09-14T16:13:00.000-04:00

1631.

(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.)

July CSE staff size

2009-08-17T16:04:00.001-04:00

1634.

(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.)

Alert to remain in operation

2009-07-27T17:54:00.004-04:00

The Canadian government announced its new "Northern Strategy" (Canada’s Northern Strategy: Our North, Our Heritage, Our Future) on 26 July. Among other elements, the strategy (CBC report here) commits the government to "maintain the signals intelligence receiving facility at CFS Alert".

That should put concerns about the possible demise of the station to rest at least until the next round of budget-cutting in Ottawa.

CSE Commissioner died 17 July

2009-07-27T17:22:00.006-04:00

CSE Commissioner Charles Gonthier died of cancer on July 17th. R.I.P. (Statement by Defence Minister Peter MacKay here.) No word yet on his replacement.

The Commissioner's annual report, completed in June, was tabled by MacKay five days later, on 22 July. Among other points, the report indicates that the dispute between the Commissioner and CSE/Justice Department over interpretation of the law pertaining to the legality of some of CSE's activities still hasn't been resolved. How many Commissioners will it take?

(HT to an anonymous reader for informing me of Gonthier's death.)

June CSE staff size

2009-07-15T15:46:00.000-04:00

1666.

(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.)

Soviet HF-DF

2009-06-22T22:47:00.007-04:00

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union built an extensive network of large circularly disposed antenna arrays (CDAAs) for high-frequency radio direction-finding and monitoring. The largest of these CDAAs were known in the West as the Krugs. These huge arrays were laid out on a circular pad 200-300 metres in diameter and consisted of a large vertical screen about 105 metres in diameter surrounded by 40 large monopoles distributed around a circle about 120 metres in diameter. A building at the centre of the array housed the monitoring equipment and intercept operators (see diagram).

The United States also built an extensive network of large Wullenweber arrays: 14 huge FRD-10 CDAAs for the U.S. Navy and eight even larger FLR-9 CDAAs for the Army and Air Force. Canada also built two FRD-10s, one at Masset and one at Gander. With the end of the Cold War, however, most of these arrays were dismantled. Only two FLR-9s remain in service, and the two Canadian FRD-10s are now the only ones left in the world. (More on the history of the FRD-10 here.) The U.S., Canada, and the other UKUSA allies also built a number of smaller CDAAs known as Pushers, many of which are still in service.

Like its FRD-10 and FLR-9 counterparts, the Soviet (now Russian) Krug network has been largely dismantled. Desmond Ball (Soviet Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), Australian National University, Canberra, 1989) reported in 1989 that some 30 Krug systems were then operational in the Soviet Union. Presumably even more were built over the history of the Cold War. But most are no longer in service. About 25 of the sites have been located using Google Earth to date, and all but a few are clearly no longer functional. The Soviets also built a network of smaller Fix-24 CDAAs similar to the Pusher arrays, most of which are also no longer in service.

Some sites, including the Gatchina Krug site near Saint Petersburg (see photo), are apparently still in use, however.

The Soviet Union used its Krug network to monitor and determine the location of Western HF radio transmissions, especially aircraft and ship transmissions. CDAAs are capable of determining the direction of arrival of a radio signal with a high degree of precision, and by triangulating the bearings taken on the same transmission by several different Krug stations the Soviets could plot the location of the transmitter fairly accurately.

Due to their remote locations, however, many of the Krug stations had to report the bearings they took by radio, and Western SIGINT stations were apparently able to monitor and exploit these transmissions in turn. (Western SIGINT stations also monitored the reports made by Soviet air surveillance radar stations and thus were able to track Soviet aircraft flying in Soviet airspace. This was one of the reasons NORAD was routinely able to intercept Soviet aircraft on training missions before they entered North American radar coverage. But that's a story for another day.)

Jerry Proc's CFS Masset page recounts an example of Western monitoring of the Krug network that reportedly made the rounds in the 1970s:

A Soviet Air Force bomber traveled to the Abbotsford BC International Air Show and sent position reports in CW back to their home base as they flew across Canada. During this flight, the Russian KRUG network was using the aircraft transmissions for check bearings and was reporting the bearings in tenths of a degree. Our backplotting of these bearings is said to have confirmed their accuracy.

I'm not sure I would trust the veracity of a bearing supposedly taken on an aircraft that was reporting its actual position, but the story does confirm Western monitoring of the Krug network.

May CSE staff size

2009-06-15T12:23:00.001-04:00

1672: The latest build-up has apparently begun.

(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.)

UNDE's in a twist

2009-06-10T13:12:00.009-04:00

The Union of National Defence Employees continues its heroic struggle to ~~save union jobs~~ preserve the security of the Dominion by stopping the public–private partnership plan (P3) for CSE's new headquarters: Who is putting security at risk at the Communications Security Establishment Canada? CSEC or PSAC?

Boy howdy, it's not often we get a demo in front of CSE headquarters! Down with the crypto-fascist surveillance complex! Smash the state! Stick it to The Man! What? It's not about that? Oh. Never mind...

I'm no fan of the recent fad for public–private partnerships (Let's bring a little of that good ol' market magic to government; it did such wonders for the economy!), and I consider myself a strong supporter of unions. But are we really supposed to believe that this is about national security? Granted, there may be some validity to UNDE's point about greater security risks in relying on lower-paid workers with high turnover rates. But we haven't heard any horror stories from GCHQ's experience with P3 workers... so far, anyway. And the case of Geoffrey Arthur Prime (or Ronald Pelton, William Weisband, William Martin and Bernon Mitchell...) demonstrates that the dedicated, long-serving public servant is no guarantee of security.

On the other hand, there has never been an espionage case involving a CSE employee (at least, as far as the public knows). That's a record that's hard to beat.

Anyway, UNDE has a model letter that you can send to our Political Masters if you want to join the Security Revolution.

I'm guessing that this and maybe some other issues are behind the hold up in CSE's latest (overdue) collective agreement. More industrial action mutterings on the way? Commentary on the previous agreement here.

Pics of the actual demo, as opposed to the image above, here.

CSE in the news

2009-06-07T14:44:00.002-04:00

Recent mentions in the news:

Stewart Bell, "Targeting Taliban bombs: Strategy Change; Military task force looks to stop leading killer of soldiers," National Post, 6 June 2009.

Michelle Shephard, Richard J. Brennan & Les Whittington, "The art of dealing with kidnappers: As more Canadians are abducted abroad, Ottawa forced to learn new skills at negotiating," Toronto Star, 25 April 2009.

CFS Leitrim to expand

2009-06-02T23:16:00.005-04:00

CFS Leitrim is going to be enlarged over coming years, according to this lede-burying story published two weeks ago (Patrick Dare, "City OK with rebuilding Leitrim Road for military, as long as government pays", Ottawa Citizen, 16 May 2009): "City officials were told at a recent meeting with DND that the station's expansion is planned over the next several years." The article reports that Leitrim "has been suggested as a site of a new operational command building, a project that has been estimated to cost more than $60 million." It is not clear whether this building represents the entire expansion project.

Why the headline about Leitrim Road? The project will apparently require rerouting of a 1.3-km stretch of Leitrim Road in a southward curve around the station "for security purposes", presumably an antiterrorism/force protection measure. The road work is expected to be done in 2010.

Other (or possibly related) work soon to be undertaken at Leitrim:
- Canadian Forces Station (CFS) Leitrim - Construction of West Entrance
- Canadian Forces Station Leitrim Electrical Distribution Upgrade

The Secret Sentry is out!

2009-05-29T14:13:00.007-04:00

The Secret Sentry, Matthew Aid's new history of the NSA, is in the stores! (At least, it is in Canada; it doesn't seem to be available in the U.S. until June 9th, strangely enough.) I've been waiting for this book for about 15 years, and yesterday I finally got my hands on it!

It's 432 pages long, so I haven't got it all read yet, but it definitely lives up to its billing. I haven't seen any jaw-dropping revelations at this point, but it provides systematic and comprehensive coverage and there is lots of new information. It will certainly become the go-to reference on NSA history.

On a parochial note: There is very, very little on the agency of primary interest to this blog—its post-1975 name doesn't even make it into the book. Of course, it's not a history of CSE; it's a history of CSE's much, much larger cousin. The book does confirm that the CANUSA agreement was signed in November 1949, however (page 13 and footnote 22 on page 318). Previous discussion of the CANUSA agreement here and here.

[Update 2 June 2009: Done! It's a good, satisfying read. Doesn't have the anecdotal flair of James Bamford's books, but it is well written and provides a more comprehensive, systematic picture. I would have liked to have seen more information on SIGINT technologies, intercept stations, and allied agencies. There is nothing at all on ECHELON and the controversy surrounding that system, for example. Given the amount of exaggeration and nonsense extant on that topic, a reasonable description of the actual workings of the system (along the lines of that in Secret Power) would have been welcome. An updated version of the kinds of information found in The Ties That Bind and The U.S. Intelligence Community would also have been a valuable addition from my point of view. Of course, including all of that stuff would have made for a much longer book, and one that probably would have been less interesting to most readers. It has 96 pages of endnotes as it is (Heaven!), and I'm sure the author was already testing his publisher's forbearance sorely in getting them to go along with that.

Bottom line: The book is essential reading for anyone interested in this topic.]

Full disclosure: I am one of the many people listed in the author's acknowledgements.

Secret Power available online

2009-05-25T17:32:00.004-04:00

Secret Power, investigative reporter Nicky Hager's 1996 book on New Zealand's SIGINT agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), has just become available online as a free download.

The GCSB is one of the five partner agencies in the UKUSA intelligence community. Secret Power was and is by far the most complete look inside the structure and workings of a UKUSA SIGINT agency, and it has also been the best single source of information on the infamous "ECHELON" system.

Matthew Aid's soon-to-be-released history of the NSA, The Secret Sentry, will provide a far more complete look at the history and workings of NSA and the UKUSA community as a whole, but I doubt that any agency will ever again go under the microscope quite the way that GCSB did in Secret Power.

(HT to Cryptome.)

Full disclosure: I am one of the many people listed in the author's acknowledgements.

Turnbull now DG Military SIGINT

2009-05-20T23:56:00.003-04:00

Brigadier-General (AWSE) John L. Turnbull replaced Commodore (AWSE) Andrea Siew as Director General Military SIGINT at CSE last year. Turnbull was Commander of the Canadian Forces Information Operations Group for three years prior to his appointment to the position of DG Military SIGINT. His full bio can be found here.

New HQ announced; massive expansion underway?

2009-05-15T13:41:00.008-04:00

Here is the official announcement of the project to build CSE's new headquarters. The announcement essentially confirms what we already knew, but it does add a few details, as well as raising a few questions.

The new building will be constructed, as expected, through a public-private partnership.
Construction is planned to begin early in 2011.
The Mid-Term Accommodation Project, a $70-million 6000-square-metre building announced last year and scheduled for completion in 2011, is now considered Phase I of the headquarters project, while the new project is considered Phase II.
The size of the Phase II building will be 72,000 square metres, for a total of 78,000 square metres at the new headquarters site. (Assuming the two buildings will be at the same site; the press release doesn't specify location aside from the National Capital Region. Maybe it's a s33kr1t.)

Now for some questions:

CSE has typically provided about 25 square metres of facility space per employee, and this figure appears to hold for the Phase I building, which is supposed to hold up to 250 employees. It also holds for GCHQ, which is said to house 4000-4500 employees in its new 102,000-square-metre building. If, however, the same figure holds for CSE's Phase II building, that building will be able to accommodate roughly 2900 employees, for a site total of about 3100. That's more than 1450 more than CSE currently has, and about 1300 more than it is currently expected to have! It would appear that either a massive and so far unannounced expansion of CSE is in the works or the happy few then on staff will be luxuriating in their palatial new digs come 2015.
According to Minister of Transport John Baird, who apparently has something to say on these matters because he is the MP of one of the National Capital Region ridings, the project "represents an estimated $800 million capital investment by the Government of Canada." The press release goes on to say that "Facilities management and life-cycle replacement costs, over a 30-year agreement, will be added to the project total." I had thought that the $880 million estimated in the 2009-10 Report on Plans and Priorities represented both the construction costs and the 30-year facility operations costs, but this would seem to suggest that the operations costs will come on top of the $800 million cited. That would make it an extremely expensive building, however. I'm more inclined to think that both the $70-million figure for the Phase I project and the $800- (or $880-) million figure for the Phase II project already include both construction and 30-year operating costs. I guess time (or maybe a future, more informative press release) will tell.

[Update 30 May 2009: Actually, the Report on Plans and Priorities shows that the entire $70 million for the Phase I building will be spent over the next couple of years, so no 30-year operating costs there. Since $70 million for a 6000-square-metre building works out to $11,667 per square metre, which applied to the 72,000 square metres of the Phase II building would be $840 million, it looks like no 30-year operating costs there either. Bottom line: it looks like what we have here are two extremely expensive buildings.]

[Update 5 November 2009: See the latest news and my wild speculations about this project here.]

CSE is growing -- again!

2009-05-13T22:55:00.003-04:00

DND's 2009-2010 Report on Plans and Priorities indicates that CSE is back in another growth period, the fourth major expansion in its 63-year history. The report projects that CSE will grow from an average size of 1635 full-time equivalents (FTEs) in 2008-09 to 1817 FTEs in 2011-12, an increase of 150-200 staff members. And since the projection doesn't go any further than 2011-12, it is not clear that the increase is going to stop at 1817. Next year's report may answer that question.

Interestingly, I speculated about a year and a half ago that CSE might be headed to a staff of 1800 or more based on information in earlier Reports on Plans and Priorities. That growth failed to materialize, but maybe it was only delayed for a couple of years and the plan is now back on track.

The record of previous expansions can be reviewed here.

A recent article by David Pugliese ("Privatization threatens jobs at spy agency: As many as 200 CSE positions at risk," Ottawa Citizen, 8 May 2009) reports that CSE plans to privatize as many as 200 positions at the agency (CSE says a maximum of 130) over the next several years. The privatized positions would include jobs such as facility maintenance and IT support. It is not clear what effect this plan would have on the overal FTE numbers mentioned above.

The Union of National Defence Employees, which represents CSE employees, is not happy about the plan.

New headquarters to be built

2009-05-13T21:13:00.004-04:00

David Pugliese reports ("East Ottawa slated to get new spy HQ: Ogilvie Road-area site tapped to house intercept agency," Ottawa Citizen, 12 May 2009) that the government will soon announce plans to construct a new headquarters complex for CSE. Known as the "Long-Term Accommodation Project" (LTAP), the plan will apparently provide new facilities for CSE's entire staff, leading to the eventual closing of CSE's current Heron Road campus.

The new building (or buildings), scheduled for completion in 2015-16, will be located at the same site as the "Mid-Term Accommodation Project" (MTAP) building announced last year (blogged here), on a plot of land adjacent to CSIS headquarters on Ogilvie Road.

All in all it's very big news for CSE.

And even more jaw-dropping is the building's projected cost! An estimate of the total cost of the LTAP can be found in DND's recently released 2009-2010 Report on Plans and Priorities. And that number is: $880 million!

Yolki palki, that's a lot of clams. I thought the MTAP was expensive at about $70 million to accommodate approximately 250 employees. If the LTAP houses 1600 or so, it will cost roughly twice the per employee amount of the MTAP.

Dollars to doughnuts

GCHQ's splashy high-tech headquarters building, the "Doughnut", cost only £337 million (about $600 million Canadian) when it was built five years ago, and it accommodates a staff of about 4000-4500, which would make the Canadian building about 3-4 times as expensive per person.

The explanation probably lies in the government's plan (revealed by UNDE) to have the private sector design, build, and operate the building over the course of a 30-year contract. GCHQ used the same approach with the Doughnut, with the total cost estimated to be £1.2 billion, or about $2.13 billion Canadian. That would put GCHQ's per person cost at about $500,000, which is virtually identical to the Canadian per person cost if the $880 million figure is taken to represent CSE's 30-year contract cost. It strikes me as strange that that entire sum would be listed as a "capital cost" in the Report on Plans and Priorities, but maybe that is the way such projects are listed, and the cost figures certainly seem to make more sense that way.

April CSE staff size

2009-05-13T10:53:00.000-04:00

1631.

(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.)

March CSE staff size

2009-04-30T12:36:00.001-04:00

1634.

(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.)

February CSE staff size

2009-03-13T16:09:00.000-04:00

1631.

(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.)

January CSE staff size

2009-02-16T13:27:00.001-05:00

1630.

(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.)

December CSE staff size

2009-01-14T15:17:00.000-05:00

1626.

(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 documents on UKUSA history

2008-12-23T21:56:00.006-05:00

The National Security Archive posted the officially released version of the history of NSA during the Cold War on its website last month. American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989 was written by NSA historian Thomas R. Johnson and was originally classified Top Secret Umbra.

The released section of the document covers only the period from 1945 to 1980, and even that section is heavily censored (or redacted as the cognoscenti like to say).

Nonetheless, it contains a lot of interesting material, such as this tidbit noted on the National Security Archive's intro page:

After the end of World War II, with Soviet codes still unbreakable, the U.S. Army and Navy SIGINT organizations had relatively little to listen to. Johnson’s history reveals that as of mid-1946, the most productive source available to the U.S. Army SIGINT organization was French communications, which accounted for half of the finished reporting going to intelligence consumers in Washington.

Interestingly, Kurt Jensen reports in his recent book Cautious Beginnings: Canadian Foreign Intelligence, 1939-51 (UBC Press, 2008) that French was also one of CBNRC's major targets in the early post-war period (a suggestion that was also made in John Bryden's Best-Kept Secret: Canadian Secret Intelligence in the Second World War, Lester, 1993).

The NSA document also contains what I believe to be the first officially released mention of the UKUSA Agreement[*] (Book I, p. 17-19). The document explains that "the British Dominions" were mentioned in the 1946 BRUSA Agreement, which laid out the basis of post-war SIGINT co-operation between the US and the UK, but the dominions "were not direct and immediate partners in 1946." "Thus," it notes, "the now famous UKUSA Agreement was not that at all; at least to begin with. How it became the UKUSA Agreement was a development that spanned another eight years." This development involved, among other things, the Melbourne Tripartite Conference of September 1953, which laid the foundations for full Australian participation in the SIGINT partnership. Page 19 of the history reports that "the name BRUSA was changed [to UKUSA] at British request a year later," i.e., in 1954.

[Update 30 May 2009: Matthew Aid's new history of NSA, Secret Sentry, confirms and adds to this picture. According to Aid, the post-war BRUSA agreement was signed by the United Kingdom and the United States on 5 March 1946; the agreement's name was changed to UKUSA in May 1954. This suggests (to me at least) that the agreement ought to be referred to as the UKUSA (originally BRUSA) agreement of 1946.]

The 1949 CANUSA Agreement also comes in for a mention in the document (p. 18), although almost all of the details, including the name itself, remain redacted. The following bit of information is provided, however:

[Redacted].But the United States was suspicious; Canada had just been through a major spy scandal, the Gouzenko affair (chapter 4), and USCIB wanted to go slow. Making matters worse was the head of the Canadian policy committee on COMINT, a rather prickly character [redacted] refused for several years to adopt some of the security procedures which the United States and Great Britain had agreed upon at the BRUSA Conference. Moreover, while the United States wanted a formal document on COMINT cooperation, [redacted] did not. After several years of very difficult negotiations, the two countries finally agreed to exchange letters between [redacted] and USCIB chairman Major General C.P. Cabell. Thus [redacted] won the battle of the legal documentation while the United States got its way on security procedures.

Mr. Redacted was, of course, Department of External Affairs officer G.G. ("Bill") Crean, who was chairman of the Communications Research Committee during that period. It looks like my earlier post on the CANUSA Agreement may have been correct in its suggestion that this letter was the actual document that sealed the agreement. Independent historian Matthew Aid, who wrote the introduction to the NSA history on the National Security Archive website, believes that this letter is indeed the document. But he also says that there was a formal signing of the agreement in the fall of 1949. [More info here.]

*The only previous official mention of UKUSA that I am aware of was DSD Director Martin Brady's 1999 letter to journalist Ross Coulthart, in which he acknowledged that DSD co-operates "with counterpart signals intelligence organisations overseas under the UKUSA relationship." See here and here for the actual letter.

November CSE staff size

2008-12-12T11:56:00.000-05:00

1639.

(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.)

Alert's 50th anniversary

2008-11-06T21:42:00.004-05:00

Jerry Proc has added a great overview of the Alert 50th anniversary celebrations that were held at Alert and Leitrim in September. Alert's role as an operational SIGINT site officially began on 1 September 1958, and the station remains an operational SIGINT site today.

SIGINT experimental operations were begun at the site in 1956 under the auspices of the Air Force, but Alert Wireless Station was an Army operation when it officially opened in 1958. The station transitioned to the CF Supplementary Radio System after its 1966 creation and subsequently to the CFIOG after the latter's 1998 creation. As of 1 April 2008, Alert has returned to being an Air Force responsibility.

October CSE staff size

2008-11-06T21:40:00.001-05:00

1637.

(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.)

September CSE staff size

2008-10-07T15:54:00.002-04:00

1627. Back to a more normal level...

(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 called upon to Establish Communications Security

2008-09-22T23:30:00.003-04:00

CSE has been called upon to rescue the Prime Minister's listserv from the nefarious clutches of persons unknown ("PMO calls in spooks after e-mails sent in Harper's name," Canadian Press, 21 September 2008).

After all, they can't spend all their time cracking secret codes or hunting terrorists and stuff like that.