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:
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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