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Documents Reveal Canada’€™s Secret Hacking Tactics – The Intercept:

Canada’s electronic surveillance agency has secretly developed an arsenal of cyberweapons capable of stealing data and destroying adversaries’ infrastructure, according to newly revealed classified documents.

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Christopher Parsons, a surveillance expert at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, told CBC News that the new revelations showed that Canada’s computer networks had already been “turned into a battlefield without any Canadian being asked: Should it be done? How should it be done?”

Communication Security Establishment’s cyberwarfare toolbox revealed :

Top-secret documents obtained by the CBC show Canada’s electronic spy agency has developed a vast arsenal of cyberwarfare tools alongside its U.S. and British counterparts to hack into computers and phones in many parts of the world, including in friendly trade countries like Mexico and hotspots like the Middle East.

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Some of the capabilities mirror what CSE’s U.S. counterpart, the NSA, can do under a powerful hacking program called QUANTUM, which was created by the NSA’s elite cyberwarfare unit, Tailored Access Operations, says Christopher Parsons, a post-doctoral fellow at the Citizen Lab, one of the groups CBC News asked to help decipher the CSE documents. QUANTUM is mentioned in the list of CSE cyber capabilities.

Publicizing details of QUANTUM’s attack techniques fuelled debate south of the border about the project’s constitutionality, says Parsons, who feels a debate is needed here in Canada as well.

“Our network has been turned into a battlefield without any Canadian being asked: Should it be done? How should it be done?” says Parsons.

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“With Bill C-51, we’re seeing increased powers being provided to CSIS, and that could mean that they would be able to more readily use or exploit the latent domestic capabilities that CSE has built up,” says Parsons.

Leaked documents reveal Canada’s cyber warfare tools :

Implanting malware on computer networks, disabling enemy computer systems, disrupting and grabbing control of an adversary’s infrastructure.

It all sounds so un-Canadian, but these are among the cyber warfare tools developed by the country’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE), according to documents obtained by the Canadian Broadcasting Communications. The CSE is Canada’s electronic spy agency.

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The documents indicate that Canada’s computer networks have “been turned into a battlefield without any Canadian being asked: Should it be done? How should it be done?” said Christopher Parsons, surveillance expert with Citizen Lab, an international research group at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.