‘Aggressive and insidious’: More details of Canada spying techniques to follow, Greenwald promises

Canada is in the spotlight of an ongoing spying scandal as Glenn Greenwald has promised to disclose more details of the espionage of the Five Eyes global intelligence alliance that has already sparked unprecedented fury in Brazil.

American journalist Glenn Greenwald has promised to leak more secret cables he obtained from Edward Snowden in a series of interviews conducted on Monday.

“There is a huge amount of stuff about Canada in these archives because Canada works so closely with the NSA,” Greenwald, who lives in Brazil told the Globe and Mail.

Without providing details into the soon to be revealed secret documents, Greenwald suggested that the new material will shed more light into Canada’s global spying activities, including economic and industrial espionage against Brazil, which has been at the center of the recent scandal.

“There's a lot of other documents about Canadians spying on ordinary citizens, on allied governments, on the world, and their co-operation with the United States government, and the nature of that co-operation that I think most Canadian citizens will find quite surprising, if not shocking, because it's all done in secret and Canadians are not aware of it,” Greenwald told CBC radio.

“It’s not like Brazil is the only target for Canada,” the journalist assured the press.

Greenwald’s interviews follow the latest revelations Canadian and US intelligence agencies targeting Brazil’s mining industry.

On Sunday, Brazilian TV Globo released the latest leaks showcasing how the US National Security Agency (NSA) along with Communication Security Establishment (CSE) of Canada used software called Olympia to data mine information from phone calls, internet traffic and emails flowing out of the Brazilian ministry.

It also claimed the method of cracking the Ministry’s cyber defenses were discussed and shared among the ‘Five Eyes’ spy network, which includes the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

Following the leak, President Dilma Rousseff condemned the “cyberwar” launched by the US and its allies against Brazil and demanded they stop the espionage.

Commenting on the scandal, Greenwald told the Globe and Mail that the US and its allies are more interested in industrial espionage than preventing the global terrorist threat.

“The reason this is so newsworthy is that the US and its allies love to say the only reason they are doing this kind of mass surveillance is they want to stop terrorism and protect national security – but these documents make clear it is industrial and economic competition, it’s about mining resources and minerals,” Greenwald said. 

 

Furthermore, the US journalist accused the US intelligence machine of being hypocritical when it comes to spying activities in the world.

“The US is running around publicly accusing China of using hacking for industrial advantage – well, this is a really clear cut example of this – of how Canada and the rest of the Five Eyes are doing it,” the Globe and Mail quotes.

One of the leaked slides on Sunday has suggested that Canada’s CSEC shares their intelligence with NSA’s “Tailored Access Operations” unit.

“TAO is one of the most aggressive and insidious parts of the NSA – they’re hackers – they hack other people’s computers exactly the way hackers that the US puts in prison do,” Greenwald said. “Canada is working with the NSA on some of the most aggressive techniques that the NSA did.”

On Tuesday Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper expressed concern about the allegations that Canada’s intelligence agency has spied on the Brazilian Mines and Energy Ministry.

"Canadian officials are reaching out very proactively to their counterparts ... I'm obviously very concerned about this story and some of the reports around it, very concerned," Harper told reporters in Indonesia on the sidelines of an Asian summit. "That said, you know I cannot comment on national security operations."

Brazilian-US relations have also been ruined by the recent leak, with Rousseff postponing a state visit to Washington in response to the US spying on her communications with top aides. Rousseff has demanded a full public apology from President Obama. However, no such apology has been made.