Canada’s Domestic Spying Rivals NSA’s

The Canadian government carries out massive surveillance on the communications of innocent citizens. Don’t worry: It’s all in the name of “fighting terrorists.”

This has not gotten much attention in the mainstream media. Or the alternative media. That is because we have had no major whistleblower emerge and no secret documents leaked, as in the American case of Edward Snowden and the NSA.

What little we know paints a picture of a spying apparatus similar to that of the NSA in the US, the DGSE in France, the GCHQ in the UK, and the Stasi in East Germany.

Canada’s electronic eavesdropping agency, CSEC — part of the Department of National Defence — collects citizens’ telephone and internet data on a massive scale. Supposedly, the Liberal government first implemented this program in 2005, then ended it in 2008. The Conservative government sneakily reinstated the program in 2011.

Peter MacKay, a lawyer who is currently Canada’s Defence Minister, says we should not worry. CSEC is prohibited from looking directly at Canadians’ communications. “Trust us.”

Instead, only “meta-data” is collected into mammoth databases and analyzed. This includes phone numbers, IP addresses, and “routing” information. No big deal, right?

But Glenn Greenwald, who came out with the original NSA story in the US, says the collection of this metadata is even more intrusive than being able to listen to one’s phone calls and reading emails. That’s because the metadata alone creates a super-detailed picture of you — with whom you speak, for how long, from what location.

Should we even believe Mr MacKay when he says CSEC doesn’t listen to phone calls or read emails? Certainly not. Peter MacKay is a politician — therefore, he is first and foremost a professional deceiver and manipulator. Remember Rockwell’s Law: “Always believe the opposite of what state officials tell you.”

Sadly, the Canadians and their mainstream media are utterly obsessed over rather pedestrian scandals like Wright-Duffy affair, and the domestic spying story is failing to get traction.

It seems all “democratic” governments monitor the ostensibly “private” communications of their citizens. We all live in East Germany now.

— Read more and more at the Globe and Mail —