Canada Spies on Internet Downloads
Another story from the Snowden documents:
According to the documents, the LEVITATION program can monitor downloads in several countries across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and North America. It is led by the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, Canada’s equivalent of the NSA. (The Canadian agency was formerly known as “CSEC” until a recent name change.)
[…]
CSE finds some 350 “interesting” downloads each month, the presentation notes, a number that amounts to less than 0.0001 per cent of the total collected data.
The agency stores details about downloads and uploads to and from 102 different popular file-sharing websites, according to the 2012 document, which describes the collected records as “free file upload,” or FFU, “events.”
EDITED TO ADD (1/30): News article.
Nicholas Weaver • January 29, 2015 7:23 AM
This is more an analytics pass over data thats already collected: The taps really do record every URL, so what to do with it? Well, you troll the locker sites for interesting (in this case, Jihadi) files, and if anyone downloads an interesting file, you find out who they are from other information. They would get ~300 hits/month.
And if you are going to build an invasive global surveillance system, this is the kind of things you should do with it.
In the west, Jihadis start out as Jihobbiests. So it really is important to discover the Jihobbiests before they develop good OPSEC skills, learn to shoot and shut up and wait. And this looks to be a good way to find some Jihobbiests.
Its also why I hate the “Needle and the haystack” analogy. Its really about pulling threads: the data collected is useless if you don’t know where to start. But if you do (in this case, having developed a process to identify files of interest on locker sites), it really does work.