Information Security News: Nothing is secret

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.edmontonsun.com/News/Canada/2006/10/29/2165335-sun.html

By JEREMY LOOME
EDMONTON SUN    
October 29, 2006

On a typical evening, a man in Edmonton gets a phone call from a man in 
Karachi, Pakistan.

The call is relayed through a series of stations via fibre optic cable 
before bouncing off a satellite and back to the phone carrier's 
ground-based network. Near the man's home in Pakistan - or perhaps near 
the phone company relay station - a small but powerful antenna array 
picks up the call. It streams the content to a second array, which then 
bounces it back to another satellite, this time operated not by the 
company, but by a branch of the Australian government.

They'll probably never know it, but the two have just been caught in the 
web of information gathering known as Signals Intelligence. Since 1947, 
a year before George Orwell penned his cautionary novel 1984 and warned 
that Big Brother Is Watching, that's what has happened across the globe, 
to calls and messages of all sorts. If you've communicated over distance 
with anyone, ever, there's a chance someone listened in.

It's frequently complicated by increasing security around communications
- particularly fibre optic lines - as well as laws governing privacy. 
But if it's transmitted through the air or electromagnetically, 
someone can intercept it.

Canada has played a key role in that initial network, governed by a 
top-secret agreement drafted in 1948 called UKUSA. Its contents have 
never been revealed. In the years since the Cold War with the Soviet 
Union prompted its creation, the original five nations operating Signals 
Intelligence - which essentially amounts to the intrusion on private 
communication from any nation but their own - have been joined by dozens 
of others, each intent on both bolstering national security and 
protecting national interests. It's technically against international 
conventions but nobody protests too loudly, because just about everyone 
does it.

Along with surreptitious listening technology placed in other nations 
and along the lines of communication that run between them, each nation 
operates its own stations, chock full of an array of cutting edge 
eavesdropping equipment.

In Canada, the most important sits in Leitrim, a sleepy community of 
Ottawa that was just countryside when the station, codenamed CAF97, was 
first constructed in 1941. Now, it sits a scant distance from the end of 
Bank Street, where the city's longest street turns into Highway 31, 
taking busy urbanites past the capital's airport and subdivisions. 
Although the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) never talks 
about its operations publicly, Leitrim - a Canadian Forces base - is 
long believed to have monitored Russian submarine and shipping 
activities in the Arctic.

It's been a decade since the network was revealed in Nicky Hager's book 
Secret Power: New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network and it 
wasn't until 1999, and the publication of a privacy report for the 
European Union, that Signals Intelligence agencies admitted they 
existed. By then, the end of the Cold War had left Signals Intelligence 
-SigInt to those involved - adrift; they were relegated in importance to 
the back of the bus, with efforts aimed at preventing corporate and 
industrial espionage.

But Sept. 11, 2001, changed that. Now, Signals Intelligence is at the 
forefront of the spy game, and Canada is up to its neck in it. Once our 
neighbours came under direct attack, the needs of signals intelligence 
came under scrutiny, with its budget rising from $140 million in 2000 to 
more than $220 million in same-year dollars by 2007.

- - -

That doesn't, however, suggest that we now live in a world akin to the 
film Enemy of the State, where rogue NSA agents chase down Will Smith 
with technology that would make Bill Gates cry mercy. Legislation 
prohibits our version of the NSA - the Communications Security 
Establishment - from eavesdropping on our citizens, or even those with 
dual nationality.

Of all the nations to employ SigInt, we have some of the most 
stringently applied rules to protect our rights, says Bill Robinson. The 
London, Ont., man runs an intelligence blog, Lux Ex Umbra, and has 
become an expert on SigInts.

"The privacy concerns are legitimate and have to be balanced against the 
requirements of intelligence gathering," says Robinson. "Certainly we 
have been leaning heavily the other way, towards privacy protection. 
We're not being listened to all of the time, if only because the SigInts 
community does not have the people or technology to waste listening in 
on everyone, everywhere.

"We get the odd whistleblower from Canada with concerns but we tend to 
have fairly marginal complaints levelled.''


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