14 DAY TRIAL // The mass surveillance reports published up until recently generally featured the United States or the United Kingdom and their programs, while other nations were also mentioned as being closely tied to the NSA, namely the members of the “Five eyes.”
Canada, for its part, has been largely left aside in reports, although it was mentioned they had knowledge of this or projects run by the NSA or the GCHQ. Now, following the most recent reports published in Globo by Glenn Greenwald, Canada gets a turn in the center of attention, RT reports.
And the reports revealing Canada was directly spying on the Brazilian Ministry of Energy are only the tip of the iceberg, Greenwald indicates.
“There is a huge amount of stuff about Canada in these archives because Canada works so closely with the NSA,” Greenwald said.
While he did not provide any particular details about the documents that will soon lose their top-secret hat, it seems Canada’s spying activities include economic and industrial espionage.
“There’s a lot of other documents about Canadians spying on ordinary citizens, on allied government, on the world, and their co-operation with the United States government, and the nature of that co-operation that I think most Canadian citizens will find quite surprising, if not shocking, because it’s all done in secret and Canadians are not aware of it,” Greenwald told CBC radio.
The recent reports indicated the country used a piece of software called Olympia to data mine information from phone calls, Internet traffic and emails going through the Brazilian ministry.
Following the reports, Dilma Rousseff, the country’s president, called for the US and its allies to stop these spying practices, refusing to engage into a cyberwar.
Many have pointed the finger at Greenwald as they did not consider the latest reports to be something people actually needed to know. But the journalist shrugs off critics and points out that the information is newsworthy because the US and its allies keep saying that they’re only engaging in mass surveillance to stop terrorism and to protect their nations, while they’re really engaging in industrial and economic espionage.