Year in Review

Well, 2014 turned out to be quite a year. For me, it was a really productive one, and I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to work on some great projects. Below are a few personal highlights that I've put together as a sort of 'year in review', along with a list of notable stories and developments in the realm of surveillance and national security, some 'ones to watch' for 2015, and a few awards that I've decided to hand out for dishonourable government conduct, just because there was so much of it over the last twelve months, and the worst offenders deserve some recognition...

(I meant to post this last week, but I've been on a remote Spanish island on holiday with no internet connection... so here it is, better late than never...)
 
January to March

In January I worked with Canadian broadcaster CBC to reveal details about domestic surveillance in the Canada. In February, The Intercept launched, and I contributed to a story that revealed some new details about US and UK government efforts to target WikiLeaks. In March, I had a report out shining a light on how the US National Security Agency has worked alongside its UK partner Government Communication Headquarters to infect large numbers of computers across the world with malware. I also worked on a story exposing the NSA's targeting of innocent system administrators as part of its covert attempts to hack into communication networks.

April to June

In March, I worked with German news magazine Der Spiegel on a story revealing new details about the NSA's surveillance of world leaders. In April, I reported on British spies' attempts to get broad unsupervised access into NSA troves of surveillance data. And in June, I worked with some great reporters at Danish newspaper Dagbladet Information to reveal new information showing how the NSA forms secret partnerships with countries across the world in order to help significantly expand its surveillance reach.

July to September

In August, the US military banned its personnel from reading The Intercept, and a few days later we published one of the most important stories I've worked on to date, exposing a vast US surveillance search system used to share huge troves of private data among dozens of US government agencies, including domestic law enforcement. The story revealed the decades-long history of US agencies' use of masses of metadata to monitor people's behaviour, and exposed how the CIA was using metadata to aid its efforts to secretly kidnap terror suspects (a practice that often resulted in the suspects — some of whom were totally innocent — being brutally tortured).

In September, we began reporting details at The Intercept about the scope of surveillance in New Zealand, and shined a light on deceptive statements made by the government there about its spying efforts; meanwhile, police raided and ransacked the home of the excellent investigative reporter that we were (and are) working with on Snowden revelations related to New Zealand.

October to December

In November, I worked on a story revealing how one of the most sophisticated pieces of malware ever discovered — dubbed "Regin" by security experts — was linked to cyberattacks perpetrated by British spies against Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom and European Union offices. This piece was an interesting one to work on in that it combined both news reportage with malware analysis — something that's never been done before in journalism, I think — and was published alongside downloadable samples of the Regin malware.

In December, I had a new report out revealing a secret NSA program that involves spying on emails sent among hundreds of mobile phone companies around the world, a practice that helps the agency hack into phone networks. The story exposed how the NSA targeted a London-headquartered trade group that represents tech giants like Microsoft and Facebook, and provided evidence that NSA had been working to insert security vulnerabilities into global telecommunications infrastructure so that they can be exploited for surveillance.

Also in December, I reported new details about the GCHQ hack of Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom as part of a reporting collaboration with newspapers in Belgium and the Netherlands. This particular story is one that I am especially proud of; it was the culmination of about six months of work, and took a huge amount of cooperation with different teams operating out of four separate countries simultaneously. We were able to tell the full story of the British hack on Belgacom, a hugely significant incident representing an unprecedented cyberattack by one EU member state on another. The story included new 'smoking gun' evidence showing that the Regin malware samples contained code-names that also appeared in secret GCHQ documents obtained from whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Vital stories

Here a list of some reports and developments that stood out to me in 2014:

NSA collects millions of text messages daily in 'untargeted' global sweep, The Guardian, 16 January.

Snowden docs show UK spies attacked Anonymous, hackers, NBC News, 4 February.

The NSA’s secret role in the US assassination program, The Intercept, 10 February.

Optic Nerve: millions of Yahoo webcam images intercepted by GCHQ, The Guardian, 27 February.

NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls, Washington Post, 18 March.

Top EU court rejects EU-wide data retention law, BBC News, 8 April.

Death from above: how American drone strikes are devastating Yemen, Rolling Stone, 14 April.

Turkish president approves law widening secret service's powers, Reuters, 24 April.

The NSA is recording every cell phone call in the Bahamas, The Intercept, 19 May.

Germany arrests man suspected of spying for US, BBC News, 4 June.

NSA: Inside the five-eyed vampire squid of the Internet, The Register, 5 June.

Vodafone reveals existence of secret wires that allow state surveillance, The Guardian, 6 June.

US officials scrambled to nab Snowden, hoping he would take a wrong step. He didn’t, Washington Post, 14 June.

GCHQ sanctions spying on every Facebook, Google and Twitter user, The Telegraph, 17 June.

In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are, Washington Post, 5 July.

Germany to spy on US for first time since 1945 after ‘double agent’ scandal, The Independent, 7 July.

Meet the Muslim-American leaders the FBI and NSA have been spying on, The Intercept, 9 July.

Hacking online polls and other ways British spies seek to control the Internet, The Intercept, 14 July.

The secret government rulebook for labeling you a terrorist, The Intercept, 23 July.

CIA Admits improperly hacked into Senate computers, Washington Times, 31 July.

Barack Obama’s secret terrorist-tracking system, by the numbers, The Intercept, 5 August.

The Islamic State (documentary), Vice, 7 August.

German spy company helped Bahrain hack Arab Spring protesters, The Intercept, 8 August.

Photos of alleged 9/11 '20th hijacker' can stay classified: court, Reuters, 2 September.

MRAPs and bayonets: what we know about the Pentagon's 1033 program, NPR, 2 September.

The NSA and GCHQ campaign against German satellite companies, The Intercept, 14 September.

Israel's NSA scandal, New York Times, 16 September.

Wikileaks releases FinFisher files to highlight government malware abuse, The Guardian, 16 September.

The NSA and me, The Intercept, 2 October.

Citizen Four (documentary), 10 October.

Why was the NSA chief playing the market? Foreign Policy, 22 October.

MI5 spied on leading British historians for decades, secret files reveal, The Guardian, 24 October.

In Cold War, US spy agencies used 1,000 Nazis, New York Times, 26 October.

Secret manuals show the spyware sold to despots and cops worldwide, The Intercept, 30 October.

Brazil is keeping its promise to avoid the US Internet, Gizmodo, 30 October.

Disguised as climate negotiators, Dagbladet Information, 1 November.

UK intelligence agencies spying on lawyers in sensitive security cases, The Guardian, 7 November.

FBI says it impersonated AP reporter in 2007 case, AP, 7 November.

Americans’ cellphones targeted in secret US spy program, Wall Street Journal, 14 November.

WhatsApp now provides end-to-end encryption for your messages, Gizmodo, 18 November.

Before Snowden, a debate inside NSA, AP, 19 November.

US firms accused of enabling surveillance in despotic Central Asian regimes, The Intercept, 20 November.

How Vodafone-subsidiary Cable & Wireless aided GCHQ’s spying efforts, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 25 November.

CIA torture report, 9 December.

WikiLeaks CIA leaks, 18 & 21 December.

Inside the NSA's war on internet security, Der Spiegel, 27 December.

The Sabu Files, Vice/Daily Dot.

Save our sources campaign, The Press Gazette.

Ones to watch in 2015

Some things worth keeping an eye on...

A new US cybersecurity unit that will advise agencies on surveillance operations.

Details about a secret database being used by federal agents in the US, the existence of which has become the subject of dispute in an ongoing court case.

Information about documents being shredded en masse in a UK police anti-corruption investigation.

Developments in the US government's ongoing criminal investigation into WikiLeaks, which may have involved the use of a prominent informant.

The long-overdue publication of a government-commissioned post-Snowden review of UK surveillance operations.

The US government using state secrecy powers to block the release of files from anti-Iran group.

Renewed 'crypto wars' as law enforcement agencies in the US push for more powers to combat privacy-protecting encryption technologies.

More details about the CIA's hacking of Senate computers.

A continuing government effort to introduce new laws bolstering surveillance powers in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

Many more stories from the Snowden documents related to secret spying conducted by the US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and other countries.

Now for a few awards...

Because I feel like handing out some dubious accolades:

Bullshit statement of the year

Winner: Recently retired GCHQ spy chief Sir Iain Lobban for his claim in October that the agency doesn't engage in "anything remotely resembling mass surveillance." A completely false statement that could not be further from the truth.

Runner-up: UK home secretary Theresa May for "collection of bulk data is not mass surveillance."

3rd prize: former US vice-president Dick Cheney for "we were very careful to stop short of torture."

Dishonourable mentions: former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden for "I didn’t do anything wrong"; New GCHQ spy chief Robert Hannigan for "GCHQ is happy to be part of a mature debate on privacy in the digital age."

Orwellian euphemism of the year

New Zealand's prime minister John Key tries and fails to make mass surveillance palatable to the public in September by re-branding it "mass protection."

Outrageous admission of the year

Former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden tells an audience at Johns Hopkins University in April: "We kill people based on metadata."

Understatement of the year

President Barack Obama, in August, on the CIA's brutal human rights abuses post 9/11: "We tortured some folks."

Gaffe of the year

UK foreign secretary Philip Hammond, who is responsible for signing off on GCHQ surveillance operations, illustrates that he doesn't have a clue what he's been approving during a parliamentary hearing in October.

Hypocrite of the year

Michael Hayden, the CIA chief who overseen the agency's secret extrajudicial kidnapping operations that involved imprisoning and torturing terrorism suspects, some of whom were entirely innocent,  complains in December that a Senate report criticising CIA torture methods was like being "tried and convicted in absentia. We were not given an opportunity to mount a defense."

Most bizarre mass surveillance justification of the year

UK prime minister David Cameron explains to British lawmakers in January that fictional TV crime dramas demonstrate the need for new dragnet spying powers.

Most absurd response to surveillance revelations of the year

A special joint award that goes to the Canadian prime minister's parliamentary secretary, Paul Calandra, and John Key, New Zealand's prime minister. Instead of addressing the substance of revelations about secret government spying in 2014 (that I was involved in reporting), Calandra and Key both resorted to weird and childish petty insults, calling my colleague Glenn Greenwald a "porn spy" (Calandra) and a "loser" (Key).

Villain of the year

UK police and security agencies for establishing a precedent that means journalism — the mere publication of facts and opinions — can now be considered terrorism; for working to secretly identify journalists' confidential sources; and for eavesdropping on lawyers' privileged communications.

Canada's WiFi Surveillance and CSEC's Non-Denial Denials

On Thursday, a report I worked on with Glenn Greenwald and Greg Weston was published in Canada, revealing how the country's spy agency CSEC secretly developed a program to monitor WiFi users in a major Canadian airport.

The piece, based on documents leaked by the former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, has led to CSEC being accused of acting unlawfully and has triggered calls for better oversight of the agency.

But one of the most intriguing aspects of the fallout from the story has been the Canadian government's response — which merits some scrutiny and analysis.

First, some context.

Back in November, Greenwald, Weston and I reported separate revelations about Canada's role in an NSA operation to spy at the G8 and G20 summits in Canada in 2010. In response, CSEC's chief John Forster claimed in response to reporters' questions:

What I can tell you is that CSEC, under its legislation, cannot target Canadians anywhere in the world or anyone in Canada, including visitors to Canada.

During a speech in October, Forster had made a similar statement:

I can tell you that we do not target Canadians at home or abroad in our foreign intelligence activities, nor do we target anyone in Canada. In fact, it's prohibited by law. Protecting the privacy of Canadians is our most important principle.

And again, in January, he repeated this assertion in a letter to a Canadian newspaper:

Under the law, CSE’s foreign intelligence mandate specifically dictates that our activities be directed only at foreign entities, and not at Canadians or anyone in Canada. That is the law and we fully respect that.

Having analysed Canadian documents in the Snowden material, these statements struck me as quite astonishing.

Why? Because one of the top-secret Snowden documents revealed that, in 2012, CSEC had set up a program that involved monitoring WiFi usage at a large Canadian airport. The secret files showed how CSEC was able to use a huge amount of data about the WiFi connections to follow users "backward and forward in recent time" — identifying visits to hotels, other airports, Internet cafes, coffee shops, and a library.

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The tactic is described by CSEC in the files as "IP profiling" — a surveillance method that can be used to track users' movements over time. In one case, as we reported at CBC on Thursday, the spy agency says that it performed a sweep of an entire "modest-sized" city and identified 300,000 user IDs:

​ The "mission impact" of the tactic, according to the document, is that it can alert spies to "target country location changes" and "webmail logins with time-limited cookies":

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The full document [pdf] speaks for itself. It illustrates a secret surveillance operation was conducted on Canadian soil — sweeping up metadata on the WiFi usage of thousands of people not suspected of any crime. Equally significant, the revelation contradicts CSEC chief Forster's repeated assertion that "we do not target Canadians at home or abroad in our foreign intelligence activities, nor do we target anyone in Canada."

After we reported the airports story, it got more interesting.

CSEC issued a statement that was notable for three reasons. First, the agency did not repeat its previous mantra claiming not to "target anyone in Canada." Second, it appeared to make an admission that it is sweeping up metadata within Canada, saying that it was "legally authorized" to "collect and analyze" this information. And third, it issued a fresh denial, saying that "no Canadian or foreign travellers were tracked. No Canadian communications were, or are, targeted, collected or used."

Shortly afterwards, on Friday, a similar denial was made by the Canadian prime minister's parliamentary secretary, who launched a bizarre personal attack on Greenwald while claiming that the "facts" were that "nothing in the stolen documents showed that Canadians' communications were targeted, collected, or used, nor that travellers' movements were tracked."

But these denials are hollow.

It's a straw man to claim that the revelations were about communications being "targeted, collected, or used." That is not what our story was about. The issue at hand is how CSEC initiated a program to sweep up information showing when people are connecting to WiFi networks and using this information to build "profiles" of their movements back and forward in time.

And that brings us to the more important point. CSEC and the prime minister's secretary claimed that "no Canadian or foreign travellers were tracked." However, what they did not say was how they were defining the word "tracked."

The documents quite clearly show how the agency used user "IP profiles" to monitor WiFi users' movements over time, with this capability enabling it to generate "alerts" when a person relocates to another country.

The dictionary definition of "tracking" says that it means "the act or process of following something or someone." CSEC's IP profiling is exactly that — monitoring users' location and keeping tabs on where they are. Indeed, the document says as much, outlining how CSEC uses this tactic to "follow IDs backward and forward in recent time." The documents also mention how CSEC used tools called "Quova" and "Atlas database" — which are technologies used to pinpoint the geolocation of an IP address.

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CSEC's denial that it "tracked" Canadians or foreign travellers, I think, hinges upon a narrowly defined interpretation of the word. The US Department of Defence, for instance, uses "tracking" as a specific technical term meaning the "precise and continuous position-finding of targets by radar, optical, or other means." CSEC's IP profiling definitely fits the dictionary definition of "tracking" as it is understood by most people — but does it fit the narrower military definition? Perhaps CSEC believes that IP profiling does not constitute "precise and continuous" tracking. But if so, it should be explaining this — as otherwise its denial is highly misleading.

Spy agencies are professionals in the art of deception, and sometimes that seems to be reflected in their public relations strategy. Afterall, we have seen misleading denials issued repeatedly by the National Security Agency and its Five Eyes counterparts about various surveillance revelations in recent months. Again and again, officials have used narrowly defined words or jargon terms in a carefully crafted way in order to issue non-denial denials in which they appear to refute an allegation but on closer reading do not really refute it at all.

The ultimate point here is that the tactics being used by CSEC and the Canadian government to deflect criticism of their secret surveillance programs merit as much attention as the revelations themselves. That is especially clear when, in response to disclosures about their secret programs, senior government officials launch childish character assassination attempts against the journalists who reported the information. In a democratic society, surely a higher standard is required. It is not enough for governments and spy agencies to spit out a few indignant statements and denials with the expectation that people should just blindly trust that they are telling the truth.

Also, no matter how "tracking" is being defined, what is clear is that CSEC was (and our sources say still is) running a large-scale surveillance operation on domestic soil, seriously calling into question spy chief Forster's previous statements that "our activities" are not directed "at Canadians or anyone in Canada." The CSEC boss is due to appear before a Senate committee hearing on Monday. Hopefully Canada's lawmakers will take the opportunity to ask some probing questions.

UPDATE, 7 February 2014: Since the story was published last week, there have been several developments. There have been more calls for an independent review of CSEC's activities, while spy chief Forster was forced to publicly defend the surveillance in Monday's Senate hearing.

There have also been some interesting analyses of the leaked documents worth responding to.

First, the surveillance blog Electrospaces claimed that the secret documents seemed to have been "incorrectly interpreted" in our CBC report. The blog published an anonymous analysis from someone who says that CSEC's surveillance project was "was not surveillance of Canadian citizens per se but just a small research project." The second analysis came from Bruce Schneier, who claimed that it was "not really true" that CSEC used "airport Wi-Fi information to track travellers."

First of all, it is a mischaracterization to claim that the CSEC project was just a small research project that didn't implicate Canadians "per se." It was part of a pilot initiative that involved sweeping up data on hundreds of thousands of people — many of whom would have been Canadian citizens. Our sources for the story told us that the pliot had since gone live — i.e. that it had gone from being a "proof-of-concept" to an operationally active domestic program. This is about much more than a "small research project."

Second, it is absolutely the case that CSEC tracked travellers' movements based on the Internet activity by using IP and ID data and honing in on a major Canadian airport's WiFi system.

It may be about more than that — and I agree with Schneier when he says that it is "actually far more interesting than simply eavesdropping on airport Wi-Fi sessions" because of the wider ramifications of this kind of 'big data' analysis.

But this particular initiative was focused on pulling out a huge trove of user ID and IP data and following users "backward and forward in recent time" to and from a Canadian airport to see if it would be possible to keep tabs movements and trigger alerts based on those movements.

What we reported was accurate and remains so: "Canada's electronic spy agency used information from the free internet service at a major Canadian airport to track the wireless devices of thousands of ordinary airline passengers for days after they left the terminal."

Even CSEC chief Forster has since come out and admitted that a kind of tracking was going on (though he says it didn't occur in "real time," which is not something we actually claimed):

Forster said the agency used metadata to develop a model that showed they could track an internet user's network activity "around a public access mode," and that the tracking didn't happen in real time.

Some of the more insightful analysis on the CSEC affair has come from Bill Robinson, a Canadian surveillance expert described by the Toronto Star as "Canada's authority on CSEC."

Robinson makes some interesting points on the meaning of "tracking" in this context and CSEC's initial denial that it had tracked people — and I think he could be hitting the nail on the head here:

While normal human beings might conclude that both Canadian and foreign travellers were indeed tracked, CSEC's claim may be that only devices were tracked in the specific tests reported in the document. Since no device was tracked specifically on account of the fact that it belongs to a particular person, and the analysis itself (as far as I know) did not seek to associate particular individuals with particular devices (although it may well have utilized information associated or associatable with specific individuals), CSEC may feel it is justified in stating that no individuals were tracked. The same or similar logic seems to underlie the agency's claim that it can collect metadata related to thousands or even millions of Canadians and persons in Canada for foreign intelligence purposes while at the same time stating that its foreign intelligence operations do not "target" any Canadians or persons in Canada.

In a separate blog post after spy chief Forster's testimony before the Canadian Senate committee on Monday, Robinson wrote:

In essence, the government's position is that the metadata project reported by the CBC did take place, that its purpose was to develop targeting and analysis techniques that are in fact now being used operationally by CSEC, and that the collection, analysis, use, and retention of Canadian metadata is a normal part of CSEC's operations, necessary to those operations, and entirely legal. Officials also insist, however, that CSEC does not use the data to target Canadians for foreign intelligence purposes.

To have CSEC now appearing to admit (under pressure) that it is using metadata to conduct domestic monitoring on a mass scale is revelatory — and that is where the focus should be. As I wrote here previously, how "tracking" is being defined as a word should not be the most central point in the debate. The attention should be on CSEC conducting a large-scale surveillance operation on Canadian soil and misleading Canadian citizens about it in a series of public statements. Robinson asks the right questions in his earlier blog post:

If real-world operations are now being conducted using the techniques described in the document, or similar kinds of techniques, those operations will indeed involve the tracking of specific individuals who are either known before the tracking began or identified subsequent to their being singled out by analysis of the data.

Will the government state that no Canadian or foreign travellers have ever been tracked (or, if it prefers, detected in a number of different locations over time) in Canada, either by CSEC or by any other Canadian or allied agency, under any mandate, using these or similar metadata-based techniques?