Canadian Spy Agency Tracks Millions Of Downloads Daily

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Wait, Canada actually has a spy agency? :eek:

Canada's electronic spy agency sifts through millions of videos and documents downloaded online every day by people around the world, as part of a sweeping bid to find extremist plots and suspects, CBC News has learned.
 
Hate to be the guys looking through all that crap. There's a lot on the internet that don't need to be seen by any sane person.
 
Ehh, if Canada's spy agency gets singled out versus every other country's spy agencies it's not a good sign for them since they all so it anyways.
 
My favorite is the workflow slide titled "Filtering out Glee Episodes" :D

Nothing here seems all that unexpected to me, any country with even a moderately well funded intelligence community should have these capabilities. I'm not sure how they retrieve those user agent strings though, I'm not much of a web services guy. Seems to me that would require a man-in-the-middle, which might be legally grey part.

Does anybody think that the phrase at the top center of each page

TOP SECRET//$1//REL CAN, AUS, GBR, NZL, USA
does that not imply that agencies from these countries have one network share called TOP SECRET?

Nice that they also mention a success story.
 
what i find the most surprising about it is that Canada has a spy agency
 
Legal, illegal, right, wrong, whatever. At this point, everyone should consider everything they do on the internet as the equivalent of performing on a worldwide public stage for all to see. I think privacy has become something uncontrollable due the the technological advances of the last 20 years. And even if all the countries agreed to "do good" and the laws kept pace - you'd still be at risk due to hackers, incompetent security, etc.

Canada is just doing what everyone else is. It's the digital equivalent of sifting through people's trash cans for evidence... :(
 
what i find the most surprising about it is that Canada has a [homophobic] spy agency

I guarantee someone will be made pay for singling out 'glee' in that presentation long before they feel any repercussions for mass spying.
 
Its not like we have been trying to hide the fact that we have a cyber spy agency....

Take a look at the building being developed.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/inside-canada-s-top-secret-billion-dollar-spy-palace-1.1930322

That's not how you build a spy agency building! Too many windows and greenery. This is how you build a spy agency building:
201372421726917734_20.jpg


Featureless black monolith.
 
Legal, illegal, right, wrong, whatever. At this point, everyone should consider everything they do on the internet as the equivalent of performing on a worldwide public stage for all to see. I think privacy has become something uncontrollable due the the technological advances of the last 20 years. And even if all the countries agreed to "do good" and the laws kept pace - you'd still be at risk due to hackers, incompetent security, etc.

Exactly. Be it hackers, the gubbment, or your employer - people can see what you're doing online. That's why I think governments trying to limit encryption (or requiring keys for it) is a load of BS.

Canada is just doing what every other spy agency is doing. It's their job. I don't agree with it, but it's going to happen whether or not I agree or not. So, protect yourselves. Encrypt communications that you don't want read. Get a Faraday cage for other stuff. Depends on your level of wanting to hide things. Internet is still an open, public network.
 
CAN, AUS, GBR, NZL, USA

It's a group called "The Five Eyes", and they share a lot. I think it goes all the way back to the 50s.

I would love to be able to pick a random, work-a-day man or woman from each country and see just how much muck our fine agencies have stored on them.

Even if it might terrify me.
 
I guarantee someone will be made pay for singling out 'glee' in that presentation long before they feel any repercussions for mass spying.

they're filtering (not singling out) out glee episodes because everyone calls it 'the bomb' and don't want to accidentally swat someones house for watching Glee?.. instead they'll wait until its over so they don't bust their TV... I think some people would be thankful gosh ;)
 
It's a group called "The Five Eyes", and they share a lot. I think it goes all the way back to the 50s.

I would love to be able to pick a random, work-a-day man or woman from each country and see just how much muck our fine agencies have stored on them.

Even if it might terrify me.
Five Eyes goes back to WW2 and the development of nuclear weapons. Although we shared atomic secrets back then and not intelligence. Canada is a lot closer than most Americans think and although not large as a country, we are very good at what we do.
 
My favorite is the workflow slide titled "Filtering out Glee Episodes" :D

Nothing here seems all that unexpected to me, any country with even a moderately well funded intelligence community should have these capabilities. I'm not sure how they retrieve those user agent strings though, I'm not much of a web services guy. Seems to me that would require a man-in-the-middle, which might be legally grey part.

Does anybody think that the phrase at the top center of each page

TOP SECRET//$1//REL CAN, AUS, GBR, NZL, USA
does that not imply that agencies from these countries have one network share called TOP SECRET?

Nice that they also mention a success story.



There are a few five eyes networks at SECRET and TOP SECRET. Two I heard of are CFE (Secret?) and Stoneghost (Top Secret), the latter a RCN officer dumped info from and gave it to the Russians a couple years back and I suspect is the one holding most ELINT interceptions products from CSEC. NATO also has networks too.

Despite this -- I wonder where these agencies tap into the unclas internet and have the transits to their internal servers with sufficient bandwidth for the data capture, yet keep the infrastructure supporting this 'hidden' (okay, NSA is pretty obvious with their new building). It looks more like CSEC and NSA are resorting to brute force hacking into server farms or a form of social engineering. All this will do is make 'illegal' operations move onto Tor and I2P, although Tor has already been compromised. I find it humorous that uploaded 'junk' is slowing down their sifting, reminds me of the bad words for ECHELON days. Someone could get creative and create a bot network to generate a shit tone of junk metadata just out in the open (non disruptive to the Internet's operation) cause probably cause grief for the five eyes' comms interception points. Suffice to say, if you have the dire need to keep the gov't out and must conduct your 'business' on the Internet, this is a non stop full time job requiring dedicated personnel and R&D teams to keep up or even get ahead of the pack - encryption these days is too easily broken by a datacenter of two and might buy you a few minutes of reprieve.
 
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