Image for The Mega-spies on Megaupload

The Mega-spies on Megaupload

Have you ever used Megaupload or Rapidshare to store or share files online? Because if you have used those services, or any of over 100 other popular file hosting services, there’s a very good chance that agents at Canada’s spy agency CSEC have been rifling through your private, personal uploads. A report from The Intercept today revealed that CSEC agents been conducting surveillance on files that people upload using services like Rapidshare and Megaupload on a massive scale. Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher report that CSEC analyzed between 10 and 15 million downloads per day from the popular file-sharing services. Despite the huge volume of data vacuumed up in the effort, CSEC only deemed 350 download events “interesting”. That’s only 0.00001% of the total files swept up for examination.  

 

Even more disturbing, it seems that Canadian IP addresses were deliberately targeted by CSEC in violation of the law and contrary to repeated government assurances. They then cross-referenced the IP addresses of file-hosting users with other databases to learn the identity of these users. So basically, ending up as a target for in-depth surveillance could be as easy as clicking on a link.

And, thanks to international agreements with the Five Eyes surveillance partners, much of this information has been shared with other spy agencies, their huge databases and who knows where else. Because of course.

We’re pretty sure that using the enormous resources of CSEC to go after file storage users is a huge waste of time and money. It’s also a massive violation of Canadians’ right to privacy.

As our Josh Tabish put it on our facebook:

The spy agency should start offering free online backup services. They seem to be collecting everything anyways.

So who’s responsible for this misguided effort? The same guy who is bringing in new anti-privacy legislation on Friday - Peter MacKay and his boss Stephen Harper. Mind you, this is the same guy that once spent $47,000 on a news conference, lied to Canadians about CSEC spying on Canadians, and brought in legislation that the Supreme Court basically already ruled null and void owing to privacy violations, so we probably shouldn’t be that surprised.

What can you do? You can speak out here, and stay tuned at OpenMedia.ca for more on this story.



Take action now! Sign up to be in the loop Donate to support our work