Afghanistan SIGINT 2

More follow up to that National Post story (see Afghanistan SIGINT below).

The CSE Chief's 30 April 2007 speaking notes state that "a large majority of [CSE's] foreign intelligence reporting" is on security-related topics and that in the last year "over a quarter of our security reporting was related to Afghanistan".

This is quite a bit less than the National Post said ("more than a quarter of the intelligence reports produced by the agency in the past year were related to the mission."), but it still makes for a lot of reporting.

Let's try some back-of-the-envelope calculations. If we assume that Adams's statement that "a large majority" of reporting is dedicated to security-related topics means that something like 60-70% of reporting is on security topics and that 25-30% ("more than a quarter") of security reporting relates to Afghanistan, then something like 15-20% of CSE's SIGINT reports have apparently been dedicated to Afghanistan over the past year.

On to the next envelope: CSE probably has roughly 1000 people on the SIGINT side of the house, broadly defined (there being about 400 in INFOSEC and maybe 200 or so in administrative positions). But a large number of those function in support capacities (e.g., watch officers, cryptanalysts, transcriber/reporters, IT types, customer liaison officers). If we go way out on a limb and guess that one-third to one-half of the SIGINT side are actual analysts, then maybe 50 to 100 analysts are working full-time on Afghanistan. That's a whole lot of analysts (and remember that figure doesn't include either the transcribers, translators, and other support resources or the personnel who collect the SIGINT, who, notwithstanding the deployment of "several" CSE staff members to Afghanistan, are presumably mostly CFIOG personnel). Enough to have their own dedicated group in the CSE organization chart.

[Update 3 June 2007:
Adams's testimony is now online. In his oral remarks he specified that "about 80 per cent of the CSE's activities is focussed on security and support to military operations". That means about 20-25% of CSE's recent reporting has been on Afghanistan and, to go once more out on that limb, perhaps 70 to 150 dedicated analysts. There are also many other items of interest in the testimony, by the way.]

That's enough people to do a lot of monitoring and analysis. A lot of that presumably relates to direct tactical support to military operations, and a lot also would relate to broader strategic/operational intelligence about the Taliban. (See the National Post article for further speculation along these lines.)

However, Chief Adams's recent speech at Laval University (6 February 2007) suggests that a much broader range of targets is being covered:

Another way in which CSE is helping to combat terrorism and contribute to international peace, security and prosperity is by providing intelligence for Canada’s mission in Afghanistan. It is important to emphasize that Canada’s mission in Afghanistan goes beyond military operations. This is because we know that success in Afghanistan cannot be assured by military means alone. That is why Canada has also deployed diplomats, development workers, civilian police, as well as experts in human rights, good governance and democracy-building. By providing intelligence in response to the government’s priorities, it is possible to analyse social networks so that the government can better reach its objectives of diplomacy and development.

Social networks? Okeydoak...

And how are we collecting all this material? Local radio monitoring, undoubtedly. Plus somebody (NSA?) is presumably monitoring satellite up- and downlinks to Afghanistan and remoting it back over here for a good close look. I also suspect we may be involved in processing the take from US SIGINT satellites, especially the TRUMPET satellites, or whatever they're called now, operated out of Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado. But that's just a guess.

You may be wondering, given the fact we're at war with the Taliban right now, why CSE would reveal the information that forms the basis of the above speculations. I don't think the agency is trying to get our soldiers killed, and neither am I in speculating about the information (for the record, I used to be in the infantry reserves, but I am not a supporter of this war). The answer, I think, is that the government has concluded the Taliban is already well aware that it is under intense SIGINT surveillance. The details of particular sources and methods used against the Taliban might matter a great deal, but very general information (and uninformed speculation like mine) does not.

In the news: Afghanistan SIGINT

CSE has revealed that it collects Aghanistan-related SIGINT, according to National Post reporter Stewart Bell ("Canada listening in on Taliban exchanges," National Post, 1 May 2007): "Canada's ultra-secret electronic spy agency revealed yesterday it has been heavily involved in Afghanistan and has deployed a team to the country."

Unfortunately, the story breaks down a bit after that promising-sounding lede. The second sentence tells us that "The Communications Security Establishment acknowledged its role in Afghanistan for the first time in testimony to the Standing Committee on National Security and Defence." Huh? Previous Chief Keith Coulter described CSE's collection of Afghanistan SIGINT over two years ago, in his 11 April 2005 testimony to the Special Senate Committee on the Anti-terrorism Act. Current Chief Adams has also publicly discussed the subject in the past, although this may be his first mention of it in testimony. Stewart Bell has even reported CSE's role in Afghanistan before.

What is newly acknowledged is the information that CSE "has deployed a team to the country." But then the third sentence of the article throws that information into doubt, telling us that "the agency is believed to have sent officers to Afghanistan to eavesdrop on the Taliban and other militant groups." Is believed to have sent!? Did he mention a deployed CSE team or not?

You have to go dig up Adams' own speaking notes (PDF file) to find the answer to that. According to his text, "CSE is working with the Canadian Forces Information Operations Group to provide foreign intelligence to Canadian troops in Afghanistan. As part of this effort, CSE has deployed several employees to that country."

So they have sent them. Now, whether they're engaged in the actual eavesdropping or providing some sort of support to CFIOG efforts is still an open question. But that's just hair-splitting anyway. I guess we'll have to wait for the transcript of his testimony to see if he modified or elaborated on those comments in any way when he was speaking.

An interesting tidbit from the notes: Chief Adams reports that CSE "currently employs 1700 individuals." I wonder if he was rounding things off quite a lot (1646 is the number most recently reported by the PSHRMA) or if the discrepancy represents the difference between actual individuals and "full-time equivalents" or some similar bit of human-resources arcana.

Adams speaks

The latest issue of Canadian Government Executive carries an interview with CSE Chief John Adams (Paul Crookall, "Gathering Intelligence: The challenges of the Communications Security Establishment," Canadian Government Executive, December 2006). In fact, Adams is the cover story (no pun intended).

The interview covers the challenges facing the CSE in an interesting but necessarily generic way.

Some comments on CSE support to military operations that I found intriguing:

We work more intensively with the uniforms; we provide direct support to Canadian Forces deployed abroad, particularly in Afghanistan. We work much more closely with the tactical side now.... We provide intelligence in real time to operations in Afghanistan. The information we gather, if accurate, can provide the tipping point for the success of an operation – or if inaccurate could have serious consequences.

SMO is not news, but the point about real time is interesting. Presumably, Mr. Adams is not referring to the local interception/analysis that may be done by the CFIOG "291ers" who deploy to Afghanistan. So where is CSE getting the raw material to analyse for Afghanistan operations? Local collection that is remoted back to Ottawa for analysis? There could be some of that I suppose. But I have long suspected that CSE helps to analyse some of the material collected by the so-called TRUMPET satellites operated by the Aerospace Data Facility at Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado – maybe that's where the Afghanistan material is coming from.

The Taliban, like Al Qaeda, are of course aware of the existence of SIGINT satellites and the fact that people are listening to their communications. But don't expect Mr. Adams (or anyone else from CSE) to comment yea or nay on the question of the specific collection systems CSE may be using.

I wonder if 771 Communications Research Squadron is missed now that SMO has taken on such importance?

The hunt for GHOSTHUNTER

In September 2016, The Intercept published this image taken by a U.S. photoreconnaissance satellite of an unidentified city. An ellipse overlaid on the image showed the estimated location of a target Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) satellite dish as determined by the GHOSTHUNTER program. (You can read more about GHOSTHUNTER in The Intercept's article: Ryan Gallagher, "Inside Menwith Hill: The NSA’s British Base at the Heart of U.S. Targeted Killing," The Intercept, 6 September 2016).

A couple of days ago I decided it might be interesting to determine exactly where that city is. Knowing its location might enable us to discover which satellite — probably one of the massive ORION satellites in geosynchronous orbit — had produced the VSAT location estimate, and it would also enable us to make an accurate measurement of the ellipse. The location might also provide some insight into the kinds of targets these capabilities were being used against.

But how to identify the city? My first thought was to use the shadows in the image. The exact date and time the image was taken (28 January 2009 at 05:16Z, with Z meaning Greenwich Mean Time) is shown on the image, and so is a north arrow. I figured measuring the direction of the shadows should enable me to determine a more or less north-south line on the globe along which the city ought to be located. The tricky part is that the satellite photo was taken from an angle (which means, for example, that the streets don't intersect at right angles in the image, even though it seems likely that they do in real life), making it difficult to measure the angle of the shadows accurately.



Skewing the image to make the street layout rectangular produced the image shown above, from which I determined the direction of the sun to be around 126.5 degrees, probably plus or minus at least a couple of degrees because of the imprecision of the whole process.

That measurement in turn produced an estimated line of location that extended along the western shores of the Caspian Sea down through Azerbaijan and western Iran and across the eastern part of the Arabian peninsula, curving a bit to the east as it proceeded southwards.

That seemed like a pretty good place to start, so I fired up Google Earth and had a look.

Sadly, nothing I could find looked like the city in the photo. In fact, none of the cities near my search line featured architecture remotely resembling that in the image, with its numerous open courtyards and long sections of roof constructed of multiple vaults in series. Clearly something was off.

So on to Plan B: Widen the search area and find the cities with that kind of architecture.

I did find similar-looking vaulted roofs in parts of eastern Iran. But there was still no city that really resembled the target.

Herat, in Afghanistan, however, was another matter. Although still not the right city, it was much, much closer to the right style. So it was time to take a closer look at Afghanistan.


Home, home in Zaranj

A point-by-point search of small cities in western Afghanistan led eventually to Zaranj, in the southwestern part of the country just a couple of kilometres from the border with Iran.



Here you can see the spy satellite image overlaid on the Google Earth image. It's a match!

...about 1000 km to the east of my initial line of search. So, what went wrong with the shadow method? It turns out the spy satellite image was not only skewed, it was also stretched along the east-west axis. As can be seen in the formerly circular logos in this version, the image had to be compressed to match the underlying Google Earth photo. That changes the angle of the shadows, which now indicate the direction of the sun to be about 135 degrees, not 126.5. A search along the line determined by that information, through western Afghanistan and Pakistan's Balochistan province, would have sped things up considerably. But I don't see any way to have determined the necessary correction ahead of time.

Anyway, we now have a spy satellite photo newly identified to be of Zaranj.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Zaranj turns out to be the kind of burg where a lot of activity that might be of interest to intelligence agencies takes place. This 2012 article, titled "The Scariest Little Corner of the World" (Luke Mogelson, New York Times Magazine, 18 October 2012), takes a fascinating look at the city and the region around it. Between the Hazaras, Tajiks, Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Afghan Baluchis, other Afghans, Pakistani Baluchis, other Pakistanis, Iranian Baluchis, other Iranians, Indians, Americans, other NATO forces, and, going back a ways, the Soviets, a lot has been going on. I won't even try to summarize it all here.


Analysis of the ellipse

As noted above, the ellipse on the photo shows the estimated location of a VSAT satellite dish that the NSA or other SIGINT agencies were monitoring and wanted to geolocate. Several candidate dishes that were found within the ellipse are highlighted, but it is not clear whether any of these dishes were singled out as probably being the target dish.

The long axis of the ellipse is oriented towards the southeast at an angle of about 134 degrees, which is quite close to the direction of the sun at the time the photo was taken, but that's just a coincidence. What is probably not a coincidence is that it also points pretty much exactly in the direction of the U.S. ORION 2 geosynchronous SIGINT satellite.

[Update 11 April 2018: Actually, it probably is a coincidence. As Marco Langbroek helpfully pointed out, the ellipse probably represents the location estimated by monitoring the VSAT dish from two SIGINT satellites at the same time, which means it very likely doesn't point in the direction of either one of them. As he noted, this document confirms that two satellites are used when making such estimates. So, sadly, it may not be possible to determine precisely which of the geosynchronous SIGINT satellites were involved in this case.

But Marco was able to identify the photoreconnaissance satellite involved: "I could positively identify the optical reconnaissance satellite that made the photographic image as USA 129 (1996-072A), a classified KH-11 "Keyhole" electro-optical reconnaissance satellite that made a pass over Zaranj at the given date and time based on amateur tracking data." Thanks, Marco!]

The size of the resulting ellipse will vary in each particular case according to the geometry of the intercepts and other factors, but this example gives an indication of how precisely SIGINT satellites can geolocate a transmitting VSAT dish. As measured in Google Earth, the ellipse is around 207 metres wide by 465 metres long, and thus covers an area of about 75,600 square metres, roughly seven and a half hectares. The data box attached to the ellipse originally provided a figure, redacted by The Intercept, for CEP, which is an abbreviation for circular error probable. This probably means that the ellipse depicts the area within which the dish was estimated to have a 50% chance of being located.


That's pretty impressive precision when you consider that these satellites orbit at an altitude of nearly 36,000 km and the slant range to their targets is even greater.


There may be other details that can be learned from a close examination of this image, but those are the obvious ones that come to my mind. Suggestions for other points [and other corrections] would be welcomed.

Nearly half a century after the first geosynchronous SIGINT satellite was launched (CANYON 1 on 6 August 1968), it's nice to learn a little bit more about how they operate.

Rolling in the dough

The 2008-2009 Report on Plans and Priorities documents were released on 1 April, and they show that CSE is awash in money.

According to DND's RPP, CSE's fiscal year 2008-09 budget is $242.8 million. That's down from the $267.6 million spent in fiscal year 2007-08, but it's more than $28 million higher than the amount originally budgeted for that year. (The reason it looks like a drop is that CSE got to spend almost $53 million more than originally budgeted last year.) This higher level of spending is projected to continue over at least the next two years as well.

Part of the reason for the big spending is that the Mid-Term Accommodations Project (MTAP) is much bigger than I had thought. According to this table, Phase 1 of the project—there's more than one phase?—is expected to cost just over $70 million. The Mid-Term Accommodations Project page in the Canadian Environmental Assessment Registry describes the project as a four-storey 6000-square-metre building, but I find it hard to believe that it's going to take all that money to build 6000 square metres of office space, even allowing for it being high-security office space.

The six-storey annex to the Sir Leonard Tilley building built in the 1989–1992 period—a pretty secure office space itself, I'm guessing—cost about $35 million, or about $50 million in today's dollars, and it has just over twice as much floorspace. Construction costs may have risen faster than inflation in the interim, but if the new national archives building soon to be built is any guide $70 million should still be good for 13–14,000 square metres of building. It looks to me like more construction is on the way, with the total probably sufficient to accommodate something like 500–600 personnel. And that's just phase 1.

[Then again, maybe not. See More on CSE's new building.]

And, as they say in the game shows, that's not all! Last year's extra spending included $14.5 million in salary and personnel costs, primarily related to retention pay, "salary pressures", and the Support to Deployed Operations Account (which presumably refers to CSE employees in Afghanistan); $10.7 million in extra operating and maintenance spending; and $27.7 million for capital spending, of which the MTAP accounted for only $841,000. Large amounts of extra spending also appear in the projections for this fiscal year and the two following years, roughly $22 million in extra O&M spending and over $70 million in capital spending. (Interestingly, however, projected salary and personnel spending is shown falling back almost to previous years' levels, raising the question of how Afghanistan, "salary pressures", etc. will be dealt with in coming years. I'm guessing those numbers will also rise.)

Roughly $60 million of the added capital spending and an unknown portion of the added O&M spending is accounted for by the MTAP spending scheduled to take place during those years, but we're still left with at least $10 million in newly added capital spending plus an unknown amount of additional O&M spending.

All told, thus, we're looking at new spending since the FY 2007-08 budget of $14.5 million in salary and personnel costs, with more probably coming; roughly $33 million in O&M, some of which is for MTAP Phase 1; $70 million in capital spending for MTAP Phase 1; and an additional $37 million in unidentified capital spending in excess of the previously projected spending. Grand total: more than $150 million in extra money for CSE.

Where does the extra $43 million promised to CSE in the February budget (blogged here) fit in? Presumably that money falls somewhere into the sums mentioned above. The budget documents provided the fairly unhelpful explanation that the $43 million would be provided over the next two years in order for CSE to make "necessary investments to keep pace with rapid technological advancements in information and communication technologies." It's hard to know what that means, but it doesn't sound much like a building project, especially one with a $70 million plus budget spread over at least 5 years. Since governments tend not to be fussy about the ethics of announcing previous expenditures as new spending, I'm guessing the budget's $43 million included the $27 million in capital spending just disbursed, plus something like $7 million in additional capital spending over this year and next and another $9 million or so in O&M spending over the same period. That total could and quite possibly does involve quite a few separate technology purchases. I wouldn't be at all surprised, however, if one of those projects turned out to be a nice, tasty latest-generation Cray supercomputer.

Charter Statement mischaracterizes CSE incidental collection

I'm working on a blog post about the oversight and review provisions proposed in Bill C-59, but I just want to make a quick point about this sentence in the Department of Justice's Charter Statement concerning the bill:

Although CSE is prohibited by subsection 23(1) from directing its activities at Canadians or persons in Canada, the practical realities of acquiring information from the [Global Information Infrastructure] means that despite best efforts to avoid it, CSE may incidentally obtain private communications and other private information of Canadians and persons in Canada.

The clear implication of this statement is that CSE uses its "best efforts" to avoid the incidental collection of private communications (i.e., communications that either begin or end in Canada).

This is simply untrue.

CSE is not permitted to target Canadians or persons in Canada*, but it is permitted when operating under its normal foreign intelligence authorizations to collect the communications of such persons incidentally (i.e., when they communicate with a CSE foreign target that is itself located outside of Canada). It collects such communications with deliberate intent, and the measures proposed in Bill C-59 would not change that fact.

(*For the purposes of this discussion, I'm ignoring those cases where CSE collects private communications on behalf of some other federal agency that has already obtained a judicial warrant for that purpose.)

This shouldn't be terribly surprising. If a foreign terrorist located in Afghanistan telephones someone in Canada and CSE happens to be monitoring that terrorist, the Canadian government—and the Canadian public—is going to want the agency to find out which person in Canada took the call and what it was they talked about.

There are differing views as to whether a judge ought to be involved somewhere in that process (the current proposal would introduce a quasi-judicial process), but that's a separate issue.

Prior to the passage of the Anti-Terrorism Act (Bill C-36) in 2001, it wasn't legal for CSE to collect private communications, incidentally or otherwise. Back then the agency really did have to make its best efforts to avoid incidental collection.

In some cases that was very difficult. But in other cases it was more straightforward. CSE could set its collection systems to ignore calls to or from a phone number in Canada, for example, regardless of who the call might connect to outside of Canada.

After 9/11, the prohibition on incidental collection by CSE was no longer considered acceptable. As Defence Minister Art Eggleton testified,

Under the Criminal Code CSE cannot collect communications that include any communications that originate in or terminate in Canada. This seriously limits CSE's ability to provide intelligence on issues that are critical to Canada's national security.

Let me illustrate what I mean. CSE focuses its collection only on foreign entities located outside Canada. This is about the third time I've said that, but I want to emphasize it. If such a target communicates with someone who is located in Canada, CSE cannot intercept the communication, as things presently stand, which means CSE stands to lose the communications of its targets at exactly the moment when they might have the most direct impact on Canada's interests, when they are communicating with someone in Canada. This constraint creates a serious gap in Canada's intelligence capabilities, which in turn affects our ability to collaborate effectively with our allies on intelligence issues. ...

What will the impact of the proposed amendments be on the National Defence Act? Under CSE's present legal framework, if a terrorist in Afghanistan is communicating with an individual in Toronto, CSE is not allowed to acquire that communication. With this amendment, important information that is now lost will become available to Canada and available to our allies in the fight against terrorism. When CSE has identified the communications of a foreign target abroad, it'll be able to follow those communications wherever they go.

And that's just what the agency now does. The "defeats" that sought to prevent the incidental collection of communications with one end in Canada are no longer in place.

There are undoubtedly efforts to avoid the inadvertent collection of private communications that are unrelated to CSE's foreign targets. And there are probably also efforts to minimize the collection of traffic that may be related to legitimate foreign targets but is considered for one reason or another to be unlikely to produce anything of foreign intelligence value, especially if that traffic might also involve Canadians or other persons in Canada at the other end.

But there are no "best efforts"—there is no effort at all—to avoid all incidental collection.

The Department of Justice is either mistaken or dishonest to suggest that "best efforts" are being used to avoid incidental collection.

I'm not sure which is worse.

Décary speaks

CSE's oversight commissioner, Robert Décary, has issued a highly unusual (possibly unprecedented) public statement that seeks to assuage some of the concerns swirling around CSE and the privacy of Canadians:

The Honourable Robert Décary, Q.C., Communications Security Establishment Commissioner, believes that public discussion would benefit from additional information about how he verifies whether CSEC complies with the law and protects the privacy of Canadians in the conduct of its activities.

As Communications Security Establishment Commissioner, a position established under the National Defence Act, I strive to strike a balance between — on the one hand — the government's need for foreign signals intelligence and IT security services, and — on the other hand — the need to ensure compliance with the law and the protection of the privacy of Canadians. Through the public annual reports, I also strive to provide assurance to Canadians with respect to their privacy.

Since my appointment, I have sought to clarify and explain more fully what my office and I do and how we do it, to help ensure that public discussion is based on fact. While it is not for me to disclose operational information of the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), I do encourage the government to be as transparent as possible. Every reasonable person recognizes, however, there are very real constraints imposed by national security and the Security of Information Act.

I am completely independent and operate at arms-length from the government. I have all the powers of a Commissioner under Part II of the Inquiries Act, including the power of subpoena, to access and review any information held by CSEC. We have secure offices on-site at CSEC. My employees have unobstructed access to CSEC systems, observe CSEC analysts first hand to verify how they conduct their work, interview them, and test information obtained against the contents of CSEC's databases.

Under the National Defence Act, CSEC is specifically required to protect the privacy of Canadians in the execution of its duties. Similarly, it is required to protect the privacy of Canadians in accordance with other laws, including the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Privacy Act, and the Criminal Code. The Minister of National Defence has provided further specific direction to the Chief of CSEC, regarding how he expects the agency will protect the privacy of Canadians in fulfilling its duties. The Chief has further elaborated and provided guidance to staff, through various internal policies, regarding the procedures and practices that must be followed.

When reviewing CSEC's activities — including any CSEC use or retention of metadata — for compliance, I assess them against all three factors: legal requirements; ministerial expectations; and internal policy controls. If I believe a law, ministerial direction or policy is not adequate, I make a recommendation to the Minister to address the deficiency.

I verify that CSEC does not direct its foreign signals intelligence collection and IT security activities at Canadians — wherever they might be in the world — or at any person in Canada. CSEC is prohibited from requesting an international partner to undertake activities that CSEC itself is legally prohibited from conducting.

It is well understood that Canadian federal law enforcement and security agencies may lawfully investigate Canadians. When these organizations request the assistance of CSEC, I verify that CSEC complies with any limitations imposed by law on the agency to which CSEC is providing assistance, for example, any conditions imposed by a judge in a warrant.

Given the structure of the international telecommunications environment, it is possible that CSEC may, while targeting a foreign entity located outside Canada, with a ministerial authorization, unintentionally intercept a communication that originates or terminates in Canada, which is a "private communication" as defined by the Criminal Code. I monitor and examine the small number of private communications unintentionally intercepted by CSEC and verify how CSEC treats these communications.

In the case of metadata, I verify that it is collected and used by CSEC only for purposes of providing intelligence on foreign entities located outside Canada and to protect information infrastructures of importance to the government. I have reviewed CSEC metadata activities and have found them to be in compliance with the law and to be subject to comprehensive and satisfactory measures to protect the privacy of Canadians. However, given that these activities may impact the privacy of Canadians, I had already approved, prior to recent events, the start of a specific review relating to these activities.

Additionally, in its reports, and in other information CSEC shares with its domestic and international partners, CSEC must render impossible the identification of Canadians, and I verify that this is done. As noted in my report last year, I have found that CSEC does take measures to protect the privacy of Canadians in what it shares with its domestic and international partners. For example, CSEC suppresses Canadian identity information in what is shared with its international partners. CSEC applies the same privacy rules to information acquired from domestic and international partners, and I verify that these rules are followed. In addition, open and ongoing discussion between the partners helps to limit the potential to affect the privacy of Canadians.

Furthermore, I examine any operational incidents that did or could have an impact on the privacy of Canadians to ensure that CSEC has addressed them and to identify any systemic issues about compliance with the law or the protection of the privacy of Canadians that should be the subject of follow-up review.

I provide the results of my reviews, in classified reports, to the Minister of National Defence, who is accountable to Parliament for CSEC. I am also required to submit an unclassified report to the Minister on my activities each year, which the Minister must then table in Parliament. My latest report is completed and I submitted it to the Minister.

A necessary element of my mandate also includes informing the Minister of any activities that I believe might present, or have the potential to present, a risk of non-compliance. If I find that CSEC did not comply with the law, I have the authority and the duty to report it to the Minister and to the Attorney General of Canada.

A number of my reports have included recommendations aimed at strengthening CSEC practices that contribute to compliance and incorporate measures that protect the privacy of Canadians. Some Commissioners' recommendations have resulted in CSEC suspending certain activities to re-examine how the activities are conducted. I closely monitor CSEC's implementation of my recommendations.

CSEC has accepted and implemented or is working to address the vast majority of recommendations made by my predecessors and me. Recommendations are made to proactively prevent possible privacy risks. In the context of ongoing and future reviews, my office will continue to seek ways in which CSEC compliance, and the privacy protections afforded to Canadians, can be further strengthened.

I think this is a helpful contribution.

The Commissioner's statement is much more detailed and comprehensible than the contents of his annual reports (and those of his predecessors), which are normally the only information the Commissioner provides to Canadians.

Those reports contain only one explicit mention of metadata, for example, and that instance, dating from 2007, only mentions that the Commissioner intended to review CSE's use of it. Today's statement is by far the most informative comment that we have ever had from a Commissioner on that topic.

Can we look forward to this greater degree of detail and clarity in future reports? It would certainly be a significant improvement.

Still, even this statement remains maddeningly vague and obtuse.

We are told, to return to the metadata question, that CSE collects and uses metadata "only for purposes of providing intelligence on foreign entities located outside Canada and to protect information infrastructures of importance to the government". But this second element -- which no one has mentioned until now, and which it would seem must certainly involve domestic communications within Canada -- is introduced and then dropped with no explanation whatsoever. Has he just told us that domestic metadata is indeed being collected and used? If so, he might have been a little clearer about it.

And even with respect to the first element, we are left to wonder why neither the Defence Minister nor the Commissioner is willing to clarify whether metadata concerning communications that cross the border (i.e. that have one end in Canada) fall within the category of data that might be collected "for purposes of providing intelligence on foreign entities located outside Canada". Why not just give us straight answers on the metadata question?

The Commissioner's statement also leaves the impression that the only time the actual content of such cross-border communications is intercepted is when such interceptions occur "unintentionally". Are we supposed therefore to understand that CSE never intentionally intercepts the phone calls that a known foreign intelligence target in Kandahar makes to persons unknown in Toronto?

That's certainly not how then-CSE Chief Keith Coulter described the new rules in 2001:

Under the current legal framework [prior to the passage of Bill C-36], if a terrorist in Afghanistan is communicating with someone in Pakistan, CSE could intercept that communication. If, however, the same terrorists are communicating with someone in Toronto, CSE is prohibited under the current regime from intercepting that communication. Let me be clear. Under the new regime CSE would still not target the individual in Canada. CSE cannot do that now, and it would not be authorized to do that under the new legislation. However, if this terrorist located in Afghanistan communicated with somebody in Canada, this legislation would give CSE the authority to follow that communication into Canada.

At the time the new legislation was passed, CSE told us all in no uncertain terms that the ability to follow a foreign-intelligence-related communication into Canada was vital to the agency's ability to function effectively in the modern world. For some reason the Commissioner seems to want to leave the impression that this only happens "unintentionally".

Similarly, the Commissioner's statement affirms that "CSEC is prohibited from requesting an international partner to undertake activities that CSEC itself is legally prohibited from conducting", but it skips past the vital question of how often those partners may nonetheless supply information that CSE would not itself be permitted to collect.

This is one of the key questions in this whole business. The former %^&*ing Solicitor General has just told us that the practice was common only a few years ago, and yet this statement pretends that the issue doesn't even exist.

Despite all of the disconcerting news of the past week or so, I still hold the view that CSE really is pretty careful when it comes to the privacy of Canadians.

And I'm glad that we have the CSE Commissioner to help hold the agency's feet to the fire in that regard.

But this statement is not good enough. You don't reassure people very much when you leave the distinct impression that your words have been carefully chosen to avoid giving straight answers.

Economic intelligence gathering IV

Does CSEC do economic intelligence gathering? (Previous comments on this question here, here, here, and here.)

This statement found in Section IV of the Department of National Defence's 2011-2012 Report on Plans and Priorities pretty much spells it out in black and white:

In line with the priorities approved annually by the Cabinet’s Ad Hoc Committee on Security and Intelligence, CSEC will continue to provide intelligence to hundreds of clients across the federal government to help them better understand global issues and inform their decisions. These priorities include:

• terrorism and extremism;
  
• mission in Afghanistan;
  
• proliferation of weapons of mass destruction;
  
• cyber security;
  
• foreign espionage and interference;
  
• Canada’s Northern Strategy; and
  
• international security and prosperity interests.

Prosperity interests.

As I noted earlier, economic intelligence gathering does not necessarily mean stealing foreign companies' secrets for the benefit of Canadian companies: such intelligence could also include data on future global energy supplies and the functioning of the global economic system, inside information on the negotiating positions of other countries participating in trade negotiations, and the detection of bribery and bid-rigging in international competitions for multi-billion-dollar contracts. It could mean listening in on the internal deliberations of foreign (non-Five Eyes) delegations participating in G8 and G20 summits.

But it might also -- on some occasions -- mean helping Canadian companies by supplying inside information on competitors' plans, operations, technologies, or bids.

The latter role might explain the fact that CSEC had a "Business Support Unit" within its SIGINT branch during the mid-2000s.

Does this unit or something equivalent still exist? It seems likely.

"Prosperity" may be the last item on the 2011-12 list of priorities quoted above, but it is near the top of the Harper government's foreign policy priorities. In November, International Trade Minister Ed Fast announced that the government would increase the support it provides to Canadian companies seeking export contracts: "We must be more aggressive and effective than the intense competition we face as we advance Canada’s commercial interests in key global markets. This new plan represents a sea change in the way Canada’s diplomatic assets are deployed around the world, and in so doing, we are ensuring that the commercial success of Canadian firms and investors is entrenched as one of our core foreign policy objectives.”

Want to see the CSEC priorities list for yourself? Sadly, you're out of luck. The "Section IV" material in DND's Reports on Plans and Priorities (RPPs) is not contained within the actual RPP documents. Instead, the documents contain a link to the DND website, where the material is posted separately. The RPPs from earlier years remain available on the web, but the Section IV material is scrubbed from the DND website after a year or two. The 2011-12 discussion of CSEC, its funding levels, and its priorities has thus evaporated.

And there will be no more such discussions. When CSEC became a stand-alone agency in November 2011, it stopped appearing in the National Defence RPPs.

It doesn't publish its own Report on Plans and Priorities. (Or Departmental Performance Report. Or Annual Report.)

CSEC's description in the Main Estimates document is the only remaining place where annual reporting of the agency's plans and priorities might be published. But in fact the description in the Main Estimates is nothing more than a couple of sentences of boilerplate that provide no new information.

What changed between June 2011, when the detailed description quoted above was published, and November 2011 that would justify that precipitous drop in public accountability? Neither CSEC nor its minister have even pretended to provide an answer. Nor, as far as I can tell, has a single member of parliament even raised the issue.

Recent items of interest

Recent news and commentary related to CSE or signals intelligence in general:

- Alec Wilson, "'Trust no one': The Citizen Lab’s Ronald Deibert and the biggest machine ever built," The Varsity, 7 December 2015.

- Dave Seglins, "New RCMP cyber unit to target global hackers, online scammers," CBC News, 2 December 2015. See also Justin Ling, "Canadian Cops Have a New Plan of Attack Against ‘Political’ Cybercrime and Anonymous," Vice News, 2 December 2015, and Marie-Danielle Smith, "New RCMP strategy emphasizes international intelligence-sharing," Embassy, 2 December 2015. Document: Royal Canadian Mounted Police Cybercrime Strategy, December 2015.

- Andrew Mitrovica, "Can we please stop blaming terrorism on civil libertarians?" iPolitics, 30 November 2015.

- Jim Bronskill, "RCMP need warrantless access to online subscriber info: Paulson," Canadian Press, 25 November 2015.

- "'Special Pages' from CSE's Wiki (April 2015)" (ATIP release), FVEYdocs.org, 25 November 2015. My contribution.

- Dave Seglins & Lynn Burgess, "Canada 'failing' in fight against cybercrime, hacking," CBC News, 24 November 2015.

- Michael Geist, "Post Paris, Are Canada's Internet Privacy Laws at Risk?" The Tyee, 24 November 2015.

- Dave Seglins & Lynn Burgess, "Cyberattacks on infrastructure a 'major threat,' says CSIS chief," CBC News, 19 November 2015.

- Claire Wählen, "Trudeau government putting new emphasis on cybersecurity," iPolitics, 17 November 2015.

- Dean Beeby, "Internet plays role in terrorism, but is rarely the single cause, study says," CBC News, 15 November 2015.

- Ministerial mandate letters (13 November 2015): Minister of National Defence, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness.

- Daniel Therrien, "National Security and Privacy in 2015: Remarks at the Privacy and Access 20/20 Conference," Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, 12 November 2015.

- Jim Bronskill, "Federal security officials eye ‘big data analytics’ in a bid to pinpoint threats," Canadian Press, 12 November 2015.

- Tonda MacCharles, "Trudeau’s decision on national security file promising and risky, experts say," Toronto Star, 11 November 2015.

- Murray Brewster, "New Defence Minister Harjit Singh Sajjan proved mettle in Afghanistan," Canadian Press, 5 November 2015. See also Sandy Garossino, "You have no idea how badass Trudeau's Defence Minister really is," National Observer, 4 November 2015, Tamara Baluja, "Harjit Sajjan: Meet Canada's new 'badass' defence minister," CBC News, 4 November 2015, and Matthew Fisher, "As ‘go-to guy’ in Kandahar, new defence minister won respect of senior officers," National Post, 5 November 2015. Should be interesting having a defence minister who has actually experienced SIGINT from the operational end and knows something about the topic.

- Jim Bronskill, "Trudeau faces demands to reverse an array of Harper-era security policies," Canadian Press, 2 November 2015.

- Ben Makuch, "These Emails Show Canada Was Super Stoked About Saudi Arms Deal," Vice News, 2 November 2015. Possibly relevant to this.

- Ian MacLeod, "Liberals mull keeping some new powers for spy service," Ottawa Citizen, 30 October 2015. As MacLeod reports, Joyce Murray's private member's bill in the last parliament (C-622), which formed the basis of the intelligence reform promises made by the Liberals during the election, "proposed amending the National Defence Act to take away the minister’s power to secretly authorize the interception of Canadians’ 'protected information,' including metadata, and putting it in the hands of Federal Court judges." If adopted, such a provision would probably result in the issuance of a single annual warrant authorizing the bulk collection of metadata, but at least it would put the agency's current metadata collection on a firmer legal footing, and such warrants might also include limitations on which data could be collected, what the data could be used for, whether and with whom it could be shared, and how long it could be retained.

- Patrick McGuire, "VICE News Battles Canadian Police Over Right to Protect Journalist's Material," Vice News, 30 October 2015. See also Alex Boutilier, "VICE Canada to fight RCMP’s demand for notes on suspected ISIS fighter," Toronto Star, 30 October 2015. "Parallel construction" at work?

- Michael Nesbitt, "Who watches the spies?" National Post, 29 October 2015.

- Jim Bronskill, "CSIS Capacity Under C-51 To Work With Foreign Partners Raises Accountability Concerns," Canadian Press, 25 October 2015.

- Jim Bronskill, "Ten things to expect from the Liberal rewrite of C-51," Canadian Press, 22 October 2015.

- Colin Freeze, "Canadian software tied to Yemen civil war, report alleges," Globe and Mail, 21 October 2015. See also Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, "Researchers Accuse Canadian Internet Company of Helping Yemen Censor the Web, Motherboard, 21 October 2015. The Citizen Lab report: Information Controls during Military Operations: The case of Yemen during the 2015 political and armed conflict. Personally, I'd like to know whether CSE's CNE operators are able to take advantage of Netsweeper deployments in Yemen and other countries.

- Christopher Parsons, "Stuck on the Agenda: Drawing Lessons from the Stagnation of “Lawful Access” Legislation in Canada, Technology, Thoughts & Trinkets blog, 21 October 2015.

- Christopher Parsons, "Beyond Privacy: Articulating the Broader Harms of Pervasive Mass Surveillance, Technology, Thoughts & Trinkets blog, 20 October 2015.

- David Pugliese, "Chinese spies and hackers, U.S. security and the Canadian Space Agency," Ottawa Citizen, 30 September 2015.

- Justin Ling, "Canada’s Defense Minister Talks Fighting the Islamic State, Arming the Kurds, and Cyber Warfare," Vice News, 28 September 2015. Now an opposition MP rather than Defence Minister, but Kenney's comments on the Canadian Forces' computer network attack capabilities are still worthy of notice: "I think you can reasonably assume that when the military develops a command, it has to have the capability to be both offensive and defensive. Potentially hostile countries need to know that, if they are going to launch cyber attacks against our critical systems, Canada and its allies have the capacity to retaliate."

SIGINT history

- Corporal Michael Thomas, "Remembering the crash of Boxtop Flight 22," RCAF, 30 October 2015.

- Maria Robson, "Trading Secrets: Canada’s Comparative Advantage in Signals Intelligence Sharing, 1947 to Present," M.A. thesis, University of Calgary, April 2015.

- William F. Friedman Collection of Official Papers, declassified documents available on the National Security Agency website. Lots of interesting documents here, including quite a few pertaining to Canadian SIGINT, such as this, this, and this.


Update 10 December 2015:

Some additional items I meant to include:

- Janet Davison, "Russian spies in Canada: new lessons from the Gouzenko defection," CBC News, 18 October 2015. Comments by historian Jonathan Haslam. Book: Jonathan Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2015.

- Craig Forcese, "Capstone comments on security for 2015 election," National Security Law blog, 17 October 2015.

- Michael Geist, " How the TPP Puts Canadian Privacy at Risk," michaelgeist.ca, 14 October 2015.

- Colin Freeze, "Former CSIS analyst on homegrown terrorism and Islamic doctrine," Globe and Mail, 13 October 2015. Book: Phil Gurski, The Threat From Within, Rowman & Littlefield, October 2015.

- Matthew Braga, "Where Canada's Three Political Parties Stand on Cybersecurity and Surveillance," Motherboard, 9 October 2015. See also OpenMedia's Report Card on the party platforms.

- Aaron Gluck Thaler, "New student coalition demands repeal of Harper’s surveillance Bill C-51, Ricochet, 9 October 2015.

- Jordan Pearson, "The Canadian Military Wants to Learn How to Hack Cars," Motherboard, 6 October 2015.

- Ian MacLeod, "Q&A: David Lyon talks about surveillance after Snowden," Ottawa Citizen, 5 October 2015. Book: David Lyon, Surveillance After Snowden, John Wiley & Sons, October 2015.

- David Pugliese, "Personnel levels drop at Communications Security Establishment, Ottawa Citizen, 19 September 2015. The numbers were back up to 2140 two months later.

-Stewart Bell, "Asking why people become terrorists is natural, but it’s better to recognize the signs and act, new book says," National Post, 11 September 2015. Interesting background info here: "[Phil Gurski] started work at the Communications Security Establishment in [July] 1983, two months before the Soviet Union’s nuclear early-warning alarm triggered, having falsely identified the launch of Minuteman intercontinental missiles from U.S. bases. The mistake almost started a nuclear war. Back then, the Cold War was the overwhelming focus of the CSE, which hired him at age 22, partly because he was adept at six languages. But Gurski was one of a dozen analysts given the job of keeping track of everything else going on in the world. Like terrorism. After picking up Arabic and Farsi, he became a Middle East expert, but he said there was no real sense of urgency around terrorism, even after the name Osama bin Laden began to surface. 'Terrorism was around back then but we didn’t pay a lot of attention,' he said."

Also of interest:

- The Globe and Mail has added a directory of the PGP keys of a number of its editors and reporters. They also have a SecureDrop site for more secure communications.

Capabilities inadequate? Enlarge your staff!

I have been wondering for quite a while whether CSE's staffing target of 1650 employees, first reported in 2005, was increased at some point. The fact that CSE's staff has been consistently larger than 1650 since the summer (it reached 1686 as of November) certainly gives reason for suspicion. Chief Adams's April comment that the agency employs "1700 individuals" might also be considered a tipoff, although you can't always count on the reliability of TESTAMINT.

Looks like it's about time to revisit the documentary record and see what conclusions are waiting to be drawn. No staffing projections at all in DND's 2007-2008 Report on Plans and Priorities. "Salary and personnel" cost figures are provided out to fiscal year 2009-2010, but since those don't change by a single buck they look to me like placeholder numbers. If they were accurate we would have to expect reductions in the number of full-time equivalents (FTEs) at CSE over the next few years. I'm not buying it.

Going back a year, we come to... what's this in the 2006-2007 Report on Plans and Priorities? A table of DND's projected civilian requirements. No specific figures for CSE, but a footnote to the table states that totals include "interim Communications Security Establishment (CSE) FTE's pending review by CSE. Interim CSE FTE's are based on RPP 2005-2006 planned FTE for fiscal year 2005-2006, and increased by 5% for every subsequent year" [emphasis added].

We don't know whether these "interim" projections still hold. (Institutions being what they are, it is hard to imagine that CSE's "review", whatever exactly that was, ended with a call for fewer resources. Given the amount of effort now apparently dedicated to Afghanistan, if given the option to do so it very likely called for more.) But at least this information gives us some numbers to work with.

The 2005-2006 RPP planned FTE number for CSE was 1546. Increasing that number by 5% in each of the three fiscal years projected in the 2006-2007 RPP gives us the following figures:

• 2005-2006: 1546
• 2006-2007: 1623
• 2007-2008: 1704
• 2008-2009: 1789

Is CSE headed for a total of nearly 1800? Or more? It would be stretching a bit too far to draw that conclusion on the basis of "interim" figures in a out-of-date budget document. But the 1704 projected for the current fiscal year looks just about dead on at the moment, so it certainly seems plausible.

Another CSE slide deck published

Der Spiegel published a new CSE slide deck on Sunday (part of a large dump of Snowden documents) in conjunction with a story discussing Five Eyes efforts to defeat common encryption methods used on the Internet (Jacob Appelbaum, Aaron Gibson, Christian Grothoff, Andy Müller-Maguhn, Laura Poitras, Michael Sontheimer & Christian Stöcker, "Prying Eyes: Inside the NSA's War on Internet Security," Der Spiegel, 28 December 2014).

The CSE deck, undated but probably from 2012, is titled "TLS Trends: A roundtable discussion on current usage and future directions".

The TLS in question is Transport Layer Security, the latest version of the Secure Sockets Layer protocol that provides encryption for many "secure" web transactions.

Der Spiegel (and other commentators) drew special attention to page 13 of the slides, which purports to list target activity at hockeytalk.com:

Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSEC) even monitors sites devoted to the country's national pastime: "We have noticed a large increase in chat activity on the hockeytalk sites. This is likely due to the beginning of playoff season," it says in one presentation.

If on-line game chat rooms are sometimes monitored, then I suppose it's not impossible that Hockeytalk is also considered a possible location for communications that may have nothing to do with hockey.

But, really, this sounds more like a made-up example to me, along the lines of Pte. Bloggs and the Fantasians, than a real case.

Of greater interest to me is the frequent use of the word "warranted" in the presentation. As CSE does not obtain warrants for its foreign intelligence and cyber defence operations, this sounds like a reference to "Mandate C" operations, which CSE conducts in support of CSIS and the RCMP (and a few other agencies) and which entail the deliberate (but targeted) surveillance of Canadians or other persons in Canada.

[Update 7 January 2015: An additional possibility is that some of this material is foreign intelligence collected in Canada under warrants that CSIS obtains through section 16 of the CSIS Act.]

[Update 29 December 2014, 7:30 pm: A report in VICE (Patrick McGuire, "We Learned Very Little about Canada’s Cybersurveillance Agency, CSEC, in 2014," VICE, 29 December 2014) also concludes that the Hockeytalk reference was intended to be humourous. An update to the article reports that CSE spokesperson Ryan Foreman assured VICE that the Hockeytalk slide was "obviously fictitious content", adding that "CSE is prohibited by law from directing its foreign intelligence or cyber defence activities at Canadians anywhere in the world or at anyone in Canada."

If there's one thing that we didn't need to learn about CSE in 2014, because we already ought to have known it, it's that they always neglect to mention Mandate C.]

Canada also comes in for a mention in another document released by Der Spiegel, this one describing a German operation against a Taliban commander/narcotics trafficker in Afghanistan that was supported by SIGINT analysts at NSA Georgia (NSAG):

Near-real-time locational data on [redacted] was passed from NSAG to the Germans via the Coalition’s CENTER ICE system.... The use of CENTER ICE was critical to the success of this operation. At NSAG CENTER ICE was manned by a Canadian integree within the Coalition Support Cell. Of note, this was the first time that CENTER ICE has been used at NSAG to support a live operation, in addition to the first time the Germans have used CENTER ICE for coordination such as this.

"CENTER ICE was manned by a Canadian integree..."

There's that hockey thing again!

The Canadian Forces Information Operations Group, the military arm of the Canadian SIGINT community, has a detachment of around 10 personnel working at NSA Georgia.

Can you hear me now?

The Intercept had a story last week on the state of speech processing capabilities within the SIGINT community (Dan Froomkin, "The Computers are Listening: How the NSA Converts Spoken Words Into Searchable Text," Intercept, 5 May 2015):

Top-secret documents from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show the National Security Agency can now automatically recognize the content within phone calls by creating rough transcripts and phonetic representations that can be easily searched and stored.

The documents show NSA analysts celebrating the development of what they called “Google for Voice” nearly a decade ago.

Though perfect transcription of natural conversation apparently remains the Intelligence Community’s “holy grail,” the Snowden documents describe extensive use of keyword searching as well as computer programs designed to analyze and “extract” the content of voice conversations, and even use sophisticated algorithms to flag conversations of interest.

The documents include vivid examples of the use of speech recognition in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in Latin America. But they leave unclear exactly how widely the spy agency uses this ability, particularly in programs that pick up considerable amounts of conversations that include people who live in or are citizens of the United States.

Spying on international telephone calls has always been a staple of NSA surveillance, but the requirement that an actual person do the listening meant it was effectively limited to a tiny percentage of the total traffic. By leveraging advances in automated speech recognition, the NSA has entered the era of bulk listening.

It does not appear to be practical yet for NSA and its partners to capture and process into searchable (and permanently storable) text all the speech that passes through the SIGINT system.

Still, it is clear that the intelligence community's ability to process speech is rapidly growing.

None of this should come as a surprise if you've been paying attention, of course.

CSE and its Five Eyes partners have been working on computer speech recognition, and related technologies such as speaker identification, for a long, long time.

And some of us on the outside have been worrying—the less charitable might say panicking—about the potential privacy implications of such technologies for nearly as long:

“CSE's interest in high-tech devices that help locate specific conversations and documents is a clear indication the five-member alliance collects and sifts large volumes of civilian traffic, said Bill Robinson, a researcher in Waterloo, Ont., who has long studied the spy agencies. "This technology is needed to process vast communications streams when you're hunting for nuggets within it." Mr. Robinson said the devices have legitimate uses, but hold "potentially frightening" implications for people's privacy as the technology advances. "They'll be able to do things they never could've done in the past.”” (Jim Bronskill, "High-tech snooping tools developed for spy agency," Vancouver Sun, 24 May 1999)

“Mr. Robinson says that while the federal government last year appointed a commissioner to oversee the CSE, he remains concerned that the SIGINT system as it sweeps through global, civilian communications could pose a threat, perhaps inadvertently, to the privacy of Canadians. "Not that the government is systematically monitoring citizens, but it's risky when the capabilities are developing to do that," he says.” (Peter Hum, "I spy," Ottawa Citizen, 10 May 1997)

“Since 1989, the CSE has awarded three contracts worth $1.1 million to a Montreal firm to make machines that can quickly isolate key words and phrases from millions of signals CSE monitors each day, CTV reported Sunday [based on Access to Information requests made by me]. “It’s frightening,” says Bill Robinson…. “It has Orwellian potential to sweep through everybody’s conversations. As computers get faster and faster, theoretically one would be able to keep records of all conversations.”” (“Spy agency works on eavesdropping device for phones, fax,” Ottawa Citizen, 31 January 1994)

Those capabilities don't appear to be here quite yet.

But they're a whole lot closer than they were 20 years ago.


Update 11 May 2015:

Follow-on story from The Intercept (Dan Froomkin, "The Computers are Listening: Speech Recognition is NSA’s Best-Kept Open Secret," Intercept, 11 May 2015):

It’s not surprising that the NSA isn’t talking about [speech recognition]. But oddly enough, neither is anyone else: Over the years, there’s been almost no public discussion of the NSA’s use of automated speech recognition.

One minor exception was in 1999, when a young Australian cryptographer named Julian Assange stumbled across an NSA patent that mentioned “machine transcribed speech.”

Assange, who went on to found WikiLeaks, said at the time: “This patent should worry people. Everyone’s overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency.”

Update 12 May 2015:

See also Allan Lawrence's 1984 speech to the House of Commons.

Update 8 June 2015:

More from The Intercept (Dan Froomkin, "The Computers Are Listening: NSA Won’t Say If It Automatically Transcribes American Phone Calls in Bulk," Intercept, 8 June 2015).

CSE to leave DND?

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.

Bossenmaier appointed Chief of CSE

Greta Bossenmaier has been appointed Chief of CSE effective 9 February 2015.

Bossenmaier is currently Senior Associate Deputy Minister of International Development at the Department of Foreign Affairs, Development and Trade. She was Deputy Minister of the Privy Council Office's Afghanistan Task Force from June 2009 to January 2012, and she began her career as a defence scientist in DND's Operational Research and Analysis Establishment. (More bio information here.)

Bossenmaier replaces the current Chief, John Forster, who is to become the Deputy Minister of National Defence effective 2 February 2015.

Forster spent only three years in the job at CSE (he became Chief on 30 January 2012), but his transfer to National Defence is a significant promotion and therefore presumably not an indication of any dissatisfaction with his performance at CSE.

Bossenmaier will be the 9th Chief CSE/Director CBNRC—and the first woman in the role—in the agency's 68-year history:

• 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 - 2015)
  
• Greta Bossenmaier (2015 - )

Does CSE do economic intelligence?

Some of the recent coverage of CSE has expressed a certain amount of skepticism about the idea that CSE might do economic intelligence-gathering.

For example, Wesley Wark, one of the leading experts on intelligence issues in Canada, expressed considerable doubt about the possibility in this article (Mark Gollom, "Brazil-Canada espionage: Which countries are we spying on?" CBC News, 8 October 2013), suggesting instead that Canada may have pursued its Brazilian targets at the behest of one of its UKUSA partners:

Security and intelligence expert Wesley Wark expressed doubts that any effort to collect information on Brazil was purely a Canadian intelligence operation with Canadian objectives.

Wark also questioned how Canada would be able to get access to those kinds of communications and why CSEC would devote its limited resources against a target not considered a top-tier threat.

"If this was a made in Canada intelligence operation, It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me," said Wark, who is also a professor at the graduate school of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa.

Instead, Wark said he believed this task was handed down to Canada by one of its so-called "Five Eyes" partners — the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand — who all share intelligence. Most likely, Wark said, it came from America's National Security Agency, which, according to previous revelations by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, had been targeting Brazil in the past.

"It would fit in with the modus operandi of the Five Eyes partnership that an intelligence task like this, which would include intelligence collected by one partner, might actually be handed over to another partner for processing and work," he said.

"Very often the intelligence that's gathered is distributed among partners to be worked up and I suspect that's what's happening in this case."

CSEC's legislative mandate when it comes to collecting foreign intelligence is very broadly defined in the National Defence Act, he said.

The secretive organization has played roles in Afghanistan, he said, by supporting military operations there, and also assisted in the hunt for the kidnappers of Canadians Robert Fowler and Louis Guay in Niger.

"We don’t really have any general sense of its strategic effort to collect intelligence," said Wark.

And there's nothing in the act that prevents it from gathering economic intelligence or explicitly states that it would be a natural part of what CSEC does, Wark said.

But he was skeptical about the amount of economic espionage CSEC has conducted in the past.

The agency's primary targets include global terrorist organizations, conflict zones where Canadian interests or Canadian troops are involved and weapons of mass destruction. Economic intelligence has not been a priority, he said.

"I don’t think it does much of it, if any at all."

And if economic intelligence has become a new priority, he said, then the public needs to be aware of it.

While it's indisputable that Counter-Terrorism and Support to Military Operations have been at the top of CSE's priorities list in recent years, I'm not so sure that Economic Intelligence is that low on the list.

Part of the problem here may lie in varying definitions of economic intelligence, which can range from data on future global energy supplies and the functioning of the global economic system to the inside scoop on the negotiating positions of other countries participating in trade negotiations to detection of bribery and bid-rigging in international competitions for multi-billion-dollar contracts to the theft of competitors' trade secrets and provision of that information to companies in one's own country.

There is absolutely no doubt that CSE, working alone and through its allies, collects some of these types of information. The contentious question, to which the public has no solid answer, is how far it goes toward the right-hand end of this spectrum.

But there have certainly been suggestions from time to time that Canadian activities have extended pretty far towards the right-hand side.

In the early 1980s, the use of Canadian SIGINT on global wheat production and pricing to maximize the price at which Canadian wheat could be sold was widely cited in news reporting about CSE (Neil Macdonald, "Security bill: `It leaves few places to hide'," Ottawa Citizen, 10 September 1983):

Of far more importance and value [than security related traffic]... is the commercial and diplomatic traffic intercepted by the CSE. Other government departments, notably External Affairs, "just hunger for it," said one source. The classic example given by security experts is information on the wheat market, Canada's most important area of trade with the Soviet Union. "A Soviet delegation might be over here pretending they don't really need all that much this year, and that they aren't willing to pay as much for it," said one government expert. "In the meantime, CSE has Sigint ...indicating there's been a crop failure in the Ukraine and they're desperate for our wheat. We can save Canadian farmers and grain dealers a fortune, so why not? Everybody does it."

Allies were also reportedly the target of such collection:

[Former Solicitor General Allan] Lawrence noted that the U.S. is one of Canada's major trading rivals: "They (the CSE) gave me the wheat scenario, too. Sure, we should know what effects the crop failure in Russia will have. But we should also know what the Argentines or what the U.S. are going to do about it."

Mike Frost's book Spyworld describes a specific instance of CSE collecting intelligence on U.S. plans for wheat sales to China, although the intercept in that case was said to have been inadvertent (pp. 224-7).

Spyworld also reported that CSE was directed to collect intelligence on an upcoming pipeline contract in India:

In 1985, the "Pilgrim" team got another "special" request from External Affairs for the New Delhi team. At one of their meetings an External representative told Frost: "The Minister would like you to look into some economic intelligence.... We have a Canadian company bidding on a pipeline to be built in India for $2.5 billion, and we'd like to get as much information on what's going on as possible." (p. 193)

Around the same time, in 1984, CSE began embedding Client Relations Officers in customer departments. The first four departments to host CROs were the Privy Council Office, External Affairs, Finance, and Industry, Trade and Commerce. (See more here.) This development was probably related to CSE's decision to begin operating embassy intercept sites and satellite monitoring facilities a few years earlier.

The 1990s brought a much increased emphasis on economic intelligence, if the whistleblowers of the period -- Mike Frost, Jane Shorten, and Fred Stock -- can be believed. All claimed that economic spying was stepped up significantly following the end of the Cold War, as CSE sought to justify its existence in an "end of history" world that was supposed to be characterized from then on by peaceful economic competition.

Wark himself had some interesting comments on the Shorten allegations at the time ("Canada to review agency accused of spying on allies," Associated Press, 14 November 1995):

Wesley Wark, a University of Toronto history professor, said spy agencies around the world, including those of the United States, France and Japan, increasingly gather economic information.

Wark said Canada would be foolish not to join in.

"I don't know what a friendly power in the economic sphere is, exactly, these days," he said. "That seems to be a very ambiguous term."

The government seemed to agree.

How far to the right of the spectrum economic intelligence-gathering routinely went we do not know, but by the 1990s its place in the pantheon of CSE priorities was freely acknowledged by the Canadian government.

Consider this April 1990 statement by Ward Elcock, then Deputy Clerk (Security and Intelligence, and Counsel) in the Privy Council Office, to the Special Committee on the Review of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act and the Security Offences Act:

The Communications Security Establishment... has in essence two roles. One of those is sometimes known as the ComSec role, which deals with the security of the communications of the Government of Canada. The second responsibility is the collection of signals intelligence, which is intended to provide the government with foreign intelligence on the diplomatic, military, economic, security and commercial activities, intentions, and capabilities of foreign governments, individuals, and corporations. [Emphasis added]

And the organization of the agency reflected those priorities: the largest of the two analysis groups within CSE's SIGINT Production Directorate was the International Political and Economic Production Group. The Soviet Production Group, previously the largest, had shrunk dramatically with the end of the Cold War, re-emerging as the combined, but still smaller, Military Production and Transcription Group.

Job ads in the late 1990s sought candidates with "a keen interest in global economic and political affairs" and "either a) proficiency in at least one Asian, Middle-Eastern or European language, or b) an academic background or experience in international economics, international business or international finance."

There is no doubt that CSE's intelligence priorities changed once again following 9/11. But the current CSE is more than twice as large as the CSE of the 1990s, and there is no reason to believe that economic intelligence ever disappeared entirely from the organization's remit.

So...

Does CSE collect economic intelligence?

Yes.

Is it stealing trade secrets or subverting bidding processes for the benefit of Canadian companies or industries?

There is some reason to believe such activities have been conducted at least occasionally in the past, but how often they are currently conducted, if at all, remains to be seen.

Let us now all turn, expectantly, in the direction of Glenn Greenwald.

[Update 11 October 2013: Journalist Andrew Mitrovica comments on Jane Shorten:

I have to take issue... with your reference to Jane Shorten. As you may know, I have written about my 1995 reporting about Shorten while I was at CTV earlier this week for the Star and in today's Citizen.

You write that "if the whistleblowers of the period like Mike Frost, Jane Shorten and Fred Stock -- can be believed."

I can't speak for Frost or Stock because I haven't tested the veracity of their statements to other journalists. I did, however, spend some considerable time with Shorten before, during, and after her extensive interviews with me and a former CTV colleague.

Shorten told the truth, no if, cans or buts. You do her a disservice by implying that there remains doubt about what she so courageously shared with Canadians about what she was no longer prepared to tolerate doing on CSEC's behalf in the name of "national security."

She went public with her grave concerns at great personal risk. She did not make a cent or profit in any other way by stepping forward to tell Canadians the truth. All she wanted was a mechanism to be established to rein in what she believed to be CSEC's unchecked powers.

And to her credit, that is precisely what happened. The Liberal government of the day created the office of the CSEC commissioner - limp as it is - in direct response to Shorten's iron-clad revelations. She did it. Not journalists, academics or bloggers.

So I think you need to correct the record and recognize the invaluable and indisputable role Shorten played in raising the alarm and forcing the government's historically reluctant hand in creating the one and only oversight body over CSEC.

(Reproduced with permission. Thanks, Andrew!)]

[Update 13 October 2013: I personally have no doubt that Jane Shorten was telling the truth. And I would agree that her revelations probably did a lot to ensure the creation of the Office of the CSE Commissioner.

But the Chretien government had already agreed in principle to establish such a mechanism by the time Shorten spoke up. On March 21st, 1995, the House of Commons passed a motion introduced by Liberal MP Derek Lee calling on the government to "establish an independent external mechanism to review the operations of the Communications Security Establishment, CSE, similar to the role played by the Security Intelligence Review Committee for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and table a report annually in the House." The Liberals had a comfortable majority in the Commons at the time, and this motion could only have passed with the de facto support of the Chretien government. The day after the motion, Defence Minister David Collenette announced that "in principle, the government supports an oversight mechanism for the CSE".

Derek Lee's motion was the result of a lot of prior work of many MPs, academics, and others, and it was passed in the context of extensive recent CSE-related reporting, most notably of Mike Frost's revelations in Spyworld, which was published in October 1994.

Did Shorten's revelations in November 1995 help ensure that the government's stated support for an oversight mechanism was followed up by the actual creation of the Office of the CSE Commissioner in June 1996?

I think that's quite likely.

We can certainly dismiss any role of bloggers in the events of 1995 and 1996.

But let's not ignore the contributions of the many other concerned Canadians whose efforts helped create the CSE oversight office.]