CSEC Airport Wifi Story Link Roundup
Posted by Matt on February 03, 2014 Tagged with: csec, surveillance
There are a number of updates to the CSEC airport wifi story that I wrote about last week. I decided to just let them sit and stew for the weekend and collect them all into one post. So here's your reading list for the day:
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If you haven't already, start with the original CBC story.
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CSEC has released a statement on the original CBC story. They deny tracking Canadians, throw in the "it's just metadata" line for good measure and then repeat the lie that the Commissioner of CSEC, who reviews CSEC's surveillance activities, "has never found CSE to have acted unlawfully".
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The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association released a statement. Here's the summary: they are unhappy about the situation. The BCCLA recently brought a lawsuit against CSEC alleging that their surveillance activities are conducted in a manner which is inconsistent with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
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A number of MPs directed questions to Minister of Defense Rob Nicholson about the story and got no real answers. Here's Nathan Cullen and Françoise Boivin, then David Christopherson, then Charmaine Borg, then Emmanuel Dubourg, then Scott Brison, and finally David Christopherson tries again. (Hat tip to Kevin McArthur for collecting the video links on Twitter).
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MP Paul Calandra made a bizarre statement in which he defended CSEC and called journalist Glenn Greenwald a "porn spy". (Apparently Greenwald had some involvement with a porn company back in 2002.)
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MP Joyce Murray has taken things a step further and called for an independent review of CSEC's activities. I'm not sure if Nicholson has responded to this, but if he does, I imagine he'll state that CSEC undergoes an independent review every year and then he'll repeat once more the above lie.
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Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert wrote an article for the Globe & Mail in which he stated "[T]he potential for the abuse of unchecked power contained here is practically limitless".
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Over at Ars Technica, Cyrus Farivar has a good article about the whole thing, which focuses more on the technical aspects of how the tracking might have been done. It includes a brief analysis from another Citizen Lab... person (Labian? Labite?), Christopher Parsons.
Update Feb 4, 2014 - This really is the story that keeps on giving.
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CSEC chief John Forster appears before a Senate committee and continues to insist that everything is okay because it's just metadata and they're not "tracking" anyone. Ryan Gallagher points out that this seems to involve adopting a very specific and narrow definition of the term "tracking".
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Michael Geist feels that while better oversight is needed, it's not going to fix all the problems.
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CSEC has also claimed that all this snooping and tracking was done in the name of research. They were just testing the system. In a more technically focused post, Bruce Schneier points out that Microsoft has done some of the same research, and patented it.
Update February 20
This update comes a little late, but better late then never.
- The Office of the CSEC Commissioner released a statement. The bulk of it discusses the Commissioner's role in providing oversight of CSEC. Craig Forcese, who you should absolutely be reading if you're into this stuff, responded and makes the point that simply saying "No, it's cool guys, it's all totally legal, don't worry" is no longer sufficient. A brief excerpt from his post:
There is only so much one can say conclusively when confronted with the inequality of arms in this most secret of areas. But legal doubts need to be assuaged with real law. And so the government needs to show its legal cards. It is long past the time when a bare assertion of legality suffices, when that assertion is based on a legal theory that no one outside of government has seen.