Brazil slams Canada over new metadata spying allegations

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Former spy dismisses allegations: "they actually mislead more than they inform." 
by Cyrus Farivar

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (left) met with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2011.

dilmarousseff

The Canadian government is refusing to comment on new allegations that its spy agency has been conducting economic surveillance on a Brazilian government ministry.

"[We do] comment on foreign intelligence gathering activities,” said Lauri Sullivan, a spokesperson for the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC, the equivalent of the National Security Agency in the United States) when speaking with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). “Under the law, this organization cannot target Canadians.”

On Sunday, a Brazilian television network, TV Globo, reported that the CSEC spied on e-mail and phone metadata collected from traffic to and from the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy. The network relied on documents shared by Glenn Greenwald, who received them as part of the massive trove of files leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

CSEC is also part of the "Five Eyes" intelligence sharing program between Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.

In light of the news, the Canadian ambassador to Brazil has been summoned (Google Translate) to the Foreign Ministry in Brasilia.

"This is unacceptable between countries that are supposed to be partners. We repudiate this cyber warfare," Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff wrote on Twitter on Monday.

However, the Globe and Mail, a major Canadian newspaper, spoke with a former high-ranking spy who dismissed the allegation, calling the documents a “wargame scenario.”

“There’s no smoking gun here,” said Ray Boisvert, a deputy director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service until last year. "It’s again more little snippets and snapshots from the Snowden revelations; they actually mislead more than they inform."

Still, the paper added that the impact for the Great White North could be “grave”:

They come at a time when Brazil has become a top destination for Canadian exports, when a stream of delegations from the oil and gas industries are making pilgrimages to Rio de Janeiro to try to get a piece of the booming offshore oil industry, and when the Canadian government is eager to burnish ties with Brasilia. Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird visited Brazil in August and spoke repeatedly about the country as a critical partner for Canadian business.

The CBC adds that:

The country is Canada's 11th largest trading partner with $2.6 billion in Canadian exports to Brazil, including fertilizers, mineral fuels and oils, machinery, and paper, according to the department. Brazil was also Canada's seventh highest source of foreign direct investment in 2012, with nearly $16 billion in stocks.

At a recent event at the United Nations General Assembly, Guilherme Patriota, the deputy permanent representative at the Permanent Mission of Brazil to the United Nations, told Ars how exasperated his government has become.

"We are [part of the group of] Western countries friendly with the US, and nevertheless the e-mails of our president are being read by the NSA," he said. "There's simply no end to it.”

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