Bcc: CSE

The CBC and The Intercept have published new reports on the collection by CSE's cyberdefence program of e-mail and website contacts between Canadians and the federal government (Amber Hildebrandt, Michael Pereira & Dave Seglins, "CSE monitors millions of Canadian emails to government," CBC News, 25 February 2015; Ryan Gallagher & Glenn Greenwald, "Canadian Spies Collect Domestic Emails in Secret Security Sweep," The Intercept, 25 February 2015).
As explained in the CBC report,
A top-secret document written by Communications Security Establishment (CSE) analysts sheds new light on the scope of the agency’s domestic email collection as part of its mandate to protect government computers. ...The number of e-mails said to be serious enough to take action on (~1460/year) corresponds well to the range for e-mails "used or retained" by the CSE cyberdefence program (1000-3996/year) that I reported here based on analysis of CSE documents released under the Access to Information Act.
The surveillance service vacuums in about 400,000 emails to and from the government every day and then scans them using a tool called PonyExpress to look for any suspicious links or attachments, according to the top-secret document.
That automated system sifts through them and detects about 400 potentially suspect emails each day — about 146,000 a year. That system sends alerts to CSE analysts, who then can take a closer look at the email to see if it poses any threat.
Only about four emails per day — about 1,460 a year — are serious enough to warrant CSE security analysts contacting the government departments potentially affected. ...
CSE holds on to emails for “days to months,” while metadata -- the details about who sent it, when and where -- is kept for “months to years,” according to the document. The agency also records metadata about visits to government websites.
As the CBC notes, the number of e-mails and other contacts monitored and the number ultimately flagged for action are likely to have increased since the 2010 document was written. In 2010 CSE routinely monitored only its own communications and those of the Department of National Defence and the Department of Foreign Affairs. It has since also become responsible for monitoring communications to the rest of the Government of Canada through the Shared Services Canada network. However, the Access documents suggest that, as of a year or two ago, the total number used or retained per year remained lower than 4000.
The CSE document that today's reports are based on, another one of the Five Eyes documents leaked by Edward Snowden, can be found here. (Be sure to check the second half of the file, where the speaker's notes accompanying the powerpoint slides were also reproduced.)
The CBC also published a very interesting set of CSE responses to questions that its reporters put to the agency. (But don't expect all the questions to be answered.)
The activities revealed in today's reports are the kinds of things we would expect a cyberdefence program to do, and the CBC was right, I think, to report the information without trying to make a scandal out of it. That said, there are legitimate questions about how much information concerning Canadians' interactions with their government is retained by CSE, how long that information can be held, and what purposes that information can be used for, and the CBC was also right to report those questions‐and CSE's partial responses.
Update 1 March 2015:
Further coverage/commentary:
- Nicole Bogart, "CSE monitors your emails to the government: What you need to know," Global News, 25 February 2015
- Adrian Lee, "So, when do we start caring about privacy?" Maclean's, 25 February 2015
- Craig Desson, "Leaked files show Canadian spy agency struggling with flood of data," Toronto Star, 26 February 2015
- Ken Hanly, "Op-Ed: Canadian spy agency collects Canadian emails to government sites," Digital Journal, 26 February 2015
1 Comments:
Michael And Ingrid Heroux said
http://michaelandingridheroux.wordpress.com
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My wife and I got a Blogger account to give it a try and see what it's like. Not sure what to expect.
5 Eyes monitoring communications between their citizens and their government, income tax and everything. No wonder our government never responds to our electronic comunications with them. It makes you wonder if they are using that for political gain. From the latest news it seems the governments are more worried about the political oponents than they are about terrorists.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/11430257/The-Spy-Cables-MI6-FBS-SSA-and-Mossad-documents-leak-by-Al-Jazeera-as-it-happened.html
Your friend Justin Ling is having trouble just like we are getting information from the government.
http://www.vice.com/read/csis-is-refusing-to-tell-us-how-much-it-spent-on-an-unconstitutional-snooping-campaign-897
We have been dealing with the access to information for the province of BC now and the Justice Department Of BC is now refusing to give us our information also just like the federal government is. I have dealt with the federal justice department since the age of 9 and we just got another letter from them 2 days ago telling us they have no information on me and they said they already told us last year that they are not going to answer anymore of our access to information requests. They told us to get The Privacy Commission Of Canada to investigate them again. We did that last year numerous times and they refuse to help us. The BC justice department just told us the same thing a few days ago, to get the BC privacy commissioner to investigate why they won't give us our information. I have a history with the BC justice department also.
The Law Society Of BC last month tried to get their personal injury lawyer to get my wife and I to sign a waiver waiving The Justice Department of any wrong doing or harm they might of caused our family over the abuse we have suffered for the last 5 years, the waiver also stated we would not of been able to summons them to court for any harm they might of caused to us. We refused to sign it and we walk out of the Court house where we had our meeting and they are trying to say that they have no information on us. Follow the money. Thanks
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