CSE

Relaunch of the SIGINT Summaries

/ Christopher Parsons
Photo by Brett Sayles on Pexels.com

In 2013, journalists began revealing secrets associated with members of the Five Eyes (FVEY) intelligence alliance. These secrets were disclosed by Edward Snowden, a US intelligence contractor. The journalists who published about the documents did so after carefully assessing their content and removing information that was identified as unduly injurious to national security interests or that threatened to reveal individuals’ identities.

During my tenure at the Citizen Lab I provided expert advice to journalists about the newsworthiness of different documents and, also, when content should be redacted as its release was not in the public interest. In some cases documents that were incredibly interesting were never published on the basis that doing so would be injurious to national security, notwithstanding the potential newsworthiness of the documents in question. As an element of my work, I identified and summarized published documents and covernames which were associated with Canada’s signals intelligence agency, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE).

I am happy to announce a re-launching of the SIGINT summaries but with far more content. Content, today, includes:

In all cases the materials which are summarised on my website have been published, in open-source, by professional news organizations or other publishers. None of the material that I summarise or host is new and none of it has been leaked or provided to me by government or non-government bodies. No current or former intelligence officer has provided me with details about any of the covernames or underlying documents. This said, researchers associated with the Citizen Lab and other academic institutions have, in the past, contributed to some of the materials published on this website.

As a caveat, all descriptions of what the covernames mean or refer to, and what are contained in individual documents leaked by Edward Snowden, are provided on a best-effort basis. Entries will be updated periodically as time is available to analyse further documents or materials.

How Were Documents Summarized?

In assessing any document I have undertaken the following steps:

  1. Re-created my template for all Snowden documents, which includes information about the title, metadata associated with the document (e.g., when it was made public and in what news story, when it was created, which agency created it), and a listing of the covernames listed in the document.
  2. When searching documents for covernames, I moved slowly through the document and, often, zoomed into charts, figures, or other materials in order to decipher both covernames which are prominent in the given document as well as covernames in much smaller fonts. The result of this is that in some cases my analyses of documents have indicated more covernames being present than in other public repositories which have relied on OCR-based methods to extract covernames from texts.
  3. I read carefully through the text of the document, sometimes several times, to try and provide a summary of the highlights in a given document. Note that this is based on my own background and, as such, it is possible that the summaries which are generated may miss items that other readers find notable or interesting. These summaries try and avoid editorialising to the best of my ability.
  4. In a separate file, I have a listing of the given agency’s covernames. Using the listed covernames in the summary, I worked through the document in question to assess what, if anything, was said about a covername and whether what was said is new or expanded my understanding of a covername. Where it did, I added additional sentences to the covername in the listing of the relevant agency’s covernames along with a page reference to source the new information. The intent, here, was to both develop a kind of partial covername decoder and, also, to enable other experts to assess how I have reached conclusions about what covernames mean. This enables them to more easily assess the covername descriptions I have provided.
  5. There is sometimes an editorial process which involved rough third-party copyediting and expert peer review. Both of these, however, have been reliant on external parties having the time and expertise to provide these services. While many of the summaries and covername listings have been copyedited or reviewed, this is not the case for all of them.
  6. Finally, the new entries have been published on this website.

Also, as part of my assessment process I have normalized the names of documents. This has meant I’ve often re-named original documents and, in some cases, split conjoined documents which were published by news organizations into individual documents (e.g., a news organization may have published a series of documents linked to AURORAGOLD as a single .pdf instead of publishing each document or slide deck as its own .pdf). The result is that some of the materials which are published on this website may appear new—it may seem as though there are no other sources on the Internet that appear to host a given document—but, in fact, these are just smaller parts of larger conjoined .pdfs.

Commonly Asked Questions

Why isn’t XXX document included in your list of summarised documents? It’s one of the important ones!

There are a lot of documents to work through and, to some extent, my review of them has been motivated either by specific projects or based on a listing of documents that I have time to assess over the past many years. Documents have not been processed based on when they were published. It can take anywhere from 10 minutes to 5 hours or more to process a given document, and at times I have chosen to focus on documents based on the time available to me or by research projects I have undertaken.

Why haven’t you talked about the legal or ethical dimensions of these documents?

There are any number of venues where I have professionally discussed the activities which have been carried out by, and continue to be carried out by, Western signals intelligence agencies. The purpose of these summaries is to provide a maximally unbiased explanation of what is actually in the documents, instead of injecting my own views of what they describe.

A core problem in discussing the Snowden documents is a blurring of what the documents actually say versus what people think they say, and the appropriateness or legality of what is described in them. This project is an effort to provide a more robust foundation to understand the documents, themselves, and then from there other scholars and experts may have more robust assessments of their content.

Aren’t you endangering national security by publishing this material?

No, I don’t believe that I am. Documents which I summarise and the covernames which I summarise have been public for many, many years. These are, functionally, now historical texts.

Any professional intelligence service worth its salt will have already mined all of these documents and performed an equivalent level of analysis some time ago. Scholars, the public, and other experts however have not had the same resources to similarly analyse and derive value from the documents. In the spirit of open scholarship I am sharing these summaries. I also hope that it is helpful for policymakers so that they can better assess and understand the historical capabilities of some of the most influential and powerful signals intelligence agencies in the world.

Finally, all of the documents, and covernames, which are summarised have been public for a considerable period of time. Programs will have since been further developed or been terminated, and covernames rotated.

What is the narrative across the documents and covernames?

I regard the content published here as a kind of repository that can help the public and researchers undertake their own processes of discovery, based on their own interests. Are you interested in how the FVEY agencies have assessed VPNs, encryption, smartphones, or other topics? Then you could do a search on agencies’ summary lists or covernames to find content of interest. More broadly, however, I think that there is a substantial amount of material which has been synthesised by journalists or academics; these summaries can be helpful to assess their accuracy in discussing the underlying material and, in most cases, the summaries of particular documents link to journalistic reporting that tries to provide a broader narrative to sets of documents.

Why haven’t you made this easier to understand?

I am aware that some of the material is still challenging to read. This was the case for me when I started reading the Snowden documents, and actually led to several revisions of reading/revising summaries as I and colleagues developed a deeper understanding for what the documents were trying to communicate.

To some extent, reading the Snowden documents parallels learning a novel language. As such, it is frustrating to engage with at first but, over time, you can develop an understanding of the structure and grammar of the language. The same is true as you read more of the summaries, underlying documents, and covername descriptions. My intent is that with the material assembled on this website the time to become fluent will be massively reduced.

Future Plans

Over time I hope to continue to add to the summaries, though this will continue as a personal historical project. As such, updates will be made only as I have time available to commit to the work.

  1. As of writing, no reviewed Snowden document explicitly discloses an ASD covername. ↩︎

Unpacking the CSE’s 2021-2022 Annual Report

/ Christopher Parsons
black binocular on round device
Photo by Skitterphoto on Pexels.com

The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) released its 2021-2022 Annual report on June 28, 2022.1 The CSE is Canada’s leading foreign signals intelligence and cryptologic agency. It is specifically tasked with collecting foreign intelligence, defending government of Canada networks as well as private networks and systems deemed of importance by the government, providing assistance to federal partners, and conducting active and defensive cyber operations.2 The CSE operates as a Canadian equivalent to the United Kingdom’s GCHQ.

Five things stood out to me in the annual report:

  1. It provides more details about the kinds of active and defensive cyber operations that the CSE has undertaken while also clarifying when such operations might take place. This information is important given the potentially deleterious or unintended impacts of the CSE exercising these capabilities. It is, however, worth recognizing that the CSE is casting these activities as preventative in nature and does not include a legal discussion about these kinds of operations.
  2. The report extensively discusses threats to critical infrastructure and the activities that the CSE is undertaking to defend against, mitigate, or remediate such threats. Many of the currently voluntary engagements between the CSE and industry partners could become compulsory (or, at a minimum, less voluntary), in the future, should Canada’s recently tabled infrastructure security legislation be passed into law.
  3. We generally see a significant focus on the defensive side of the CSE’s activities, vis-a-vis the Cyber Centre. This obscures the fact that the majority of the agency’s budget is allocated towards supporting the CSE’s foreign intelligence and active/defensive cyber operations teams. The report, thus, is selectively revelatory.
  4. No real discussion takes place to make clear to readers how aspects of the CSE’s foreign intelligence, cybersecurity/information assurance, assistance, or active or defensive cyber operations authorities may interoperate with one another. The result is that readers are left uncertain about how combinations of authorities might enable broader operations than are otherwise self-apparent.
  5. As I raise at several points when analyzing the annual report there are a number of situations where information in the annual report risks concealing the broader range(s) of actions that the CSE may undertake. Readers of the annual report are thus advised to critically assess the annual report and read what it specifically says instead of what it may imply.

In this post, I proceed in the order of the report and adopt the headlines it used to structure content. After summarizing some of the highlight elements in a given section I proceed with a short discussion of the relevant section. The post concludes with a broader assessment of the annual report, what was learned, and where more information is desirable in the future.

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Unpacking NSICOP’s Special Report on the Government of Canada’s Framework and Activities to Defend its Systems and Networks from Cyber Attack

/ Christopher Parsons
grayscale photo of man and woman hacking a computer system
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.com

On February 14, 2022, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) released a report that explored how the Government of Canada sought to defend its systems and networks from cyber attack from 2001 onwards.1 The report provides a comprehensive account of how elements of the Government of Canada–namely the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS), Shared Services Canada (SSC) and Communications Security Establishment (CSE)–have developed policies, procedures, and techniques to protect government systems, as well as the iterative learning processes that have occurred over the past two decades or so pertaining to governmental cyber defence activities.

I want to highlight four core things that emerge from my reading of the report:

  1. From an empirical point of view, it’s useful to know that the Government of Canada is preparing both a policy on paying ransomware operators as well as developing a Vulnerabilities Disclosure Policy (VDP) though the report does not indicate when either will be open to public comment or transformed into formal government policy;
  2. A high-level discussion of senior coordination committees is provided, though without an accompanying analysis of how effective these committees are in practice. In particular, the report does not discuss how, as an example, cross-departmental committees are working to overcome problems that are raised in the sections of the report focused on TBS, SSC, or the CSE;
  3. NSICOP maintains that all parties associated with the government–from Crown corporations, to government agencies, to other independent branches of government–should operate under the government’s security umbrella. NSICOP does not, however, make a constitutional argument for why this should be done nor assess the operational reasons for why agencies may not currently operate under this umbrella. Instead, the report narrowly argues there are minimal privacy impacts associated with enjoying the government’s cyber security protections. In doing so, the committee presumes that privacy concerns have driven separate branches of governments to operate outside policies set by TBS, and services offered by SSC and the CSE. At no point did the Committee engage with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) to assess potential privacy issues associated with the government’s cyber security policies and practices; and
  4. NSICOP did not canvas a wide set of government agencies in their interviews and included no external-to-government parties. The consequence is that the report does not provide needed context for why some government agencies refuse to adopt TBS policy guidance or regulations, decline services operated by SSC, or have limited uptake or adoption of advice or technical systems offered by the CSE. The consequence is that this report does nothing to substantively assess challenges in how TBS, SSC, or the CSE themselves are deploying their defensive capacities across government based on the experiences of those on the receiving end of the proffered cyber security and defence offerings.

In this post, I conduct a deep dive into NSICOP’s report, entitled “National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians Special Report on the Government of Canada’s Framework and Activities to Defend its Systems and Networks from Cyber Attack.” Throughout, I summarize a given section of the report before offering some analysis of it. In the conclusion of this post I summarize some of the broader concerns associated with the report, itself, as well as the broader implications these concerns may have for NSICOP’s long-term viability as an independent reviewer of the national security community.

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Unpacking NSIRA’s 2020 Annual Report

/ Christopher Parsons
black and white typewriter on table
Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com

On December 13, 2021, the National Security Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA) released its 2020 Annual Report. NSIRA is responsible for conducting national security reviews of Canadian federal agencies, and their annual report summarizes activities that have been undertaken in 2020 and also indicates NSIRA’s plans for future work.

I want to highlight three points that emerge from my reading of report:

  1. NSIRA has generally been able to obtain the information it required to carry out its reviews. The exception to this, however, is that NSIRA has experienced challenges obtaining information from the Communications Security Establishment (CSE). It is not entirely clear why this has been the case.
  2. While most of NSIRA’s reviews have been completed in spite of the pandemic, this is not the case with CSE reviews where several remain outstanding.
  3. NSIRA has spent time in the annual report laying out tripwires that, if activated, will alert Canadians and their elected officials to problems that the review agency may be experiencing in fulfilling its mandate. It is imperative that observers pay close attention to these tripwires in future reviews. However, while these tripwires are likely meant to demonstrate the robustness of NSIRA reviews they run the risk of undermining review conclusions if not carefully managed.

In this post, I proceed in the order of the annual review and highlight key items that stood out. The headings used in this post, save for analysis headings, are correlated with the headings of the same name in the annual report itself.

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NSIRA Calls CSE’s Lawfulness Into Question

/ Christopher Parsons
photo of cryptic character codes and magnifying glass on table top
Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

On June 18, 2021, the National Security Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA) released a review of how the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) disclosed Canadian Identifying Information (CII) to domestic Canadian agencies. I draw three central conclusions to the review.

  1. CSE potentially violated the Privacy Act, which governs how federal government institutions handle personal information.
  2. The CSE’s assistance to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) was concealed from the Federal Court. The Court was responsible for authorizing warrants for CSIS operations that the CSE was assisting with.
  3. CSE officials may have misled Parliament in explaining how the assistance element of its mandate was operationalized in the course of debates meant to extend CSE’s capabilities and mandate.

In this post I describe the elements of the review, a few key parts of CSE’s response it, and conclude with a series of issues that the review and response raise.

Background

Under the National Defence Act, CSE would incidentally collect CII in the course of conducting foreign signals intelligence, cybersecurity and information assurance, and assistance operations. From all of those operations, it would produce reports that were sent to clients within the Government of Canada. By default, Canadians’ information is expected to be suppressed but agencies can subsequently request CSE to re-identify suppressed information.

NSIRA examined disclosures of CII which took place between July 1, 2015 – July 31, 2019 from CSE to all recipient government departments; this meant that all the disclosures took place when the CSE was guided by the National Defense Act and the Privacy Act.1 In conducting their review NSIRA looked at, “electronic records, correspondence, intelligence reports, legal opinions, policies, procedures, documents pertaining to judicial proceedings, Ministerial Authorizations, and Ministerial Directives of relevance to CSE’s CII disclosure regime” (p. 2). Over the course of its review, NSIRA engaged a range of government agencies that requested disclosures of CII, such as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and Innovation Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED). NSIRA also assessed the disclosures of CII to CSIS and relevant CSIS’ affidavits to the Federal Court.

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SIGINT Summaries Update: Covernames for CSE, GCHQ, and GCSB

/ Christopher Parsons

Today I have published a series of pages that contain covernames associated with the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), and Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). Each of the pages lists covernames which are publicly available as well as explanations for what the given covernames refers to, when such information is available. The majority of the covernames listed are from documents which were provided to journalists by Edward Snowden, and which have been published in the public domain. A similar listing concerning the NSA’s covernames is forthcoming.

You may also want to visit Electrospaces.net, which has also developed lists of covernames for some of the above mentioned agencies, as well as the National Security Agency (NSA).

All of the descriptions of what covernames mean or refer to are done on a best-effort basis; if you believe there is additional publicly referenced material derived from CSE, GCHQ, or GCSB documents which could supplement descriptions please let me know. Entries will be updated periodically as additional materials come available.