Canadian Spy Program “LEVITATION” Illustrates “Giant X-Ray Machine Over All Our Digital Lives”
By John Queally
Global Research
January 29, 2015
Newly released documents contained in the archive of materials leaked to journalists by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals that Canada’s spy agency, the Communications Security Establishment, has been operating a covert, mass surveillance program designed to monitor the downloads of millions of Internet users around the world.
Reported jointly by The Intercept and the CBC on Wednesday, the revelations center on a slide presentation detailing a CSE program called LEVITATION which secretly “taps into Internet cables and analyzes records of up to 15 million downloads daily from popular websites commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files.”
According to the CBC:
The presentation provides a rare glimpse into Canada’s cyber-sleuthing capabilities and its use of its spy partners’ immense databases to track the online traffic of millions of people around the world, including Canadians.
That glimpse may be of even greater interest now that the Harper government plans to introduce new legislation increasing the powers of Canada’s security agencies.
Though Canada’s always been described as a junior partner in the Five Eyes spying partnership, which includes the U.S., Britain, New Zealand and Australia, this document shows it led the way in developing this new extremist-tracking tool.
Asked for his assessment of the surveillance program by The Intercept’s Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald, Ron Deibert, director of University of Toronto-based Internet security think tank Citizen Lab, said LEVITATION illustrates just how powerful the world’s intelligence agencies have become and described their myriad spy tools as a “giant X-ray machine over all our digital lives.”
After reviewing the details of the program, Deibert said, “Every single thing that you do – in this case uploading/downloading files to these sites – that act is being archived, collected and analyzed.”
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