faulker064

On October 6, 2013, the Brazilian television program Fantástico revealed the existance of a software program called OLYMPIA. In this case, the program was used by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) to map the telephone and computer connections of the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME). OLYMPIA is a sophisticated software framework that combines access to a range of databases and analytic tools. It's used to discover and identify the telephone and computer infrastructure used by potential targets. This information can then be used for setting up tapping, bugging and/or hacking operations. OLYMPIA itself does not collect any actual content of communications. In this article we take a close look at the OLYMPIA tool, based on the powerpoint presentation that was first shown on Brazilian television on October 6, 2013. On November 30, the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail published most of the slides on its website. Here, all available slides are pul...

(Updated: February 9, 2014) On January 30, the Canadian television channel CBC broke a story written by Greg Weston, Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher, saying that the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), which is Canada's equivalent of NSA, used airport WiFi to track Canadian travellers - something which was claimed to be almost certainly illegal. This story was apperently based upon an internal CSEC presentation (pdf) from May 2012 which is titled "IP Profiling Analytics & Mission Impacts": The CSEC presentation about "IP Profiling Analytics & Mission Impacts" (click for the full presentation in PDF) However, as is often the case with many of the stories based on the Snowden-documents, it seems that the original CSEC presentation was incorrectly interpreted and presented by Canadian television. The presentation was analysed by a reader of this weblog, who wants to stay anonymous, but kindly allowed me to publish his interpretation, ...