Canadian Gov't Responds To Spying Revelations By Saying It's All A Lie And Calling Glenn Greenwald A

[unhappycamper]

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140131/12542726062/canadian-govt-responds-to-spying-revelations-its-all-lie-calling-glenn-greenwald-porn-spy.shtml

Canadian Gov't Responds To Spying Revelations By Saying It's All A Lie And Calling Glenn Greenwald A 'Porn Spy'
from the wtf? dept
by Mike Masnick
Fri, Jan 31st 2014 1:57pm

We've seen various government officials act in all sorts of bizarre ways after revelations of illegal spying on their own people (and foreigners), but none may be quite as bizarre as the response from the Canadian government, following the release late last night from the CBC (with help from Glenn Greenwald) that they're spying on public WiFi connections. That report had plenty of detail, including an internal presentation from the Canadian electronic spying agency, CSEC. In the Canadian Parliament today, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's parliamentary secretary, Paul Calandra, decided to respond to all of this by by insisting it's all a lie and then flat out insulting both the CBC and Glenn Greenwald.

~snip~

Okay. Where to start? First off, the whole idea that Greenwald "sold" the documents to the CBC is just ridiculous. Every so often we've seen others raise this kind if idiotic argument and it's just silly. Greenwald -- like any other freelance journalist -- gets paid to do journalism. No one is paying him for the documents. They're paying him to work as a journalist, which, you know, is what he does. The attempt to portray it as selling the documents is just a completely bogus smear.

Second, for all the CSEC's denials, note that Calandra makes no effort whatsoever to explain what's in the actual (fairly damning) document that the CBC published. Instead, he's playing games with words -- games that you should be quite used to if you've followed the infamous NSA dictionary. Note that he says that none of Canadians' "communications were targeted, collected, or used." There are a few problems with that. No one's talking about their communications here, but rather details of their locations and the kinds of devices they were using, which is exactly what's shown in the powerpoint presentation.

Next, the fact that the CSEC's activities are regularly reviewed is somewhat meaningless. Was this program reviewed? By whom? What did they find? As we've seen in the US, the claims of independent oversight of the NSA turned out to not mean very much once people looked at the details.

[bemildred]

1. When the law is on your side, argue the law.

When the facts are on your side, argue the facts.
When neither the facts nor the law are on your side, attack the credibility of your accusers.