NSA gave Canada at least $300,000 to develop spy program

Canada is among the top beneficiaries of a U.S. National Security Agency program meant to build intelligence relationships with Americas allies by paying for improvements to their electronic-eavesdropping capabilities.

A newly published leak about the NSAs funding shows that in 2012 at least $300,000 was sent to Canada fourth place after Pakistan, Jordan and Ethiopia among the 15 countries that benefited from this program. The chart appears in No Place to Hide, the new book based on leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and written by U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald.

The contribution is a pittance in the multibillion-dollar world of government surveillance. Over the past decade, the Canadian government has doubled the staff and budget of Communications Security Establishment Canada, the countrys counterpart organization to NSA.

But the disclosure is significant because CSEC does not acknowledge its partnerships with the NSA, including financial support.

The U.S. spy agency has fallen into global notoriety over the past year, after being caught covertly recording the communications of allied world leaders and amassing data about U.S. citizens.

In Ottawa on Tuesday, NDP defence critic Jack Harris questioned why U.S. money is heading north. This is one more piece of the puzzle that we dont understand, as to what exactly is the relationship between what Canada, the Americans and others are doing, he said.

For the past 70 years, the NSA and CSEC have been working together to spy on foreigners messages, while safeguarding their own governments messages from snooping adversaries.

For this, they use cryptology the art of code making and code breaking. To develop this capacity, CSEC has often relied on the much-larger NSA for know-how, technology and raw intelligence. But like many countries, Canada safeguards its NSA relationship by never speaking about it.

The Canadian blogger Bill Robinson, who tracks CSECs budget lines closely, has pointed out that Canada has been on the receiving end at least $11-million in research funding from unspecified foreign partners in just over a decade.

When The Globe inquired last fall about whether this money came from the NSA, the official reply was that it came from the Five Eyes partnership the wider alliance of U.S., British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand intelligence agencies. Canada works closely with its allied counterparts to pursue the latest cryptological research, a spokeswoman said.

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NSA gave Canada at least $300,000 to develop spy program