Canada used an airport WiFi to spy on travelers

New documents leaked by Edward Snowden have discovered another participant of the spy process that had involved the NSA and GCHQ British. canadian intelligence agency, the CSEC (Communications Security Establishment Canada ), also set up spyware to monitor the activity of its citizens.

In particular it has been revealed that the agency used information from a provider of WiFi in a major Canadian airports to make a follow-up of thousands of devices belonging to passengers who were connected to it. That track days remained after those passengers had left the flight terminal. Such activity is illegal under the laws of the country, but the CSEC uses the usual pretext to shield. In a statement to the string CBC News, their leaders indicated that the agency ” is required to collect foreign signals intelligence to protect Canada and Canadians. And to fulfill that role, CSEC is legally authorized to collect and analyze the metadata . ”

The monitoring was part of a test of the NSA

In the metadata, they say, no communications are included, and “limited” to obtain the location and phone numbers to which a person calls or receiving the calls. According to these documents, monitoring of these devices was maintained for more than a week and for example detected as the same devices were connected to WiFi access points in all kinds of scenarios of Canada and even the United States.

In the document filtering by Edward Snowden is further revealed that the operation of tracking passengers was part of a test to evaluate the performance of a new program that the CSEC was developed in collaboration with the NSA .

The two major airports in Canada-Toronto and Vancouver- deny any partnership (and by extension, data transfer) with CSEC or any other Canadian intelligence, and operators like Boingo, which also has infrastructure its kind in the country-say not yield data to CSEC .

Source|CBC