Canada spies for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and covers up its surveillance with widespread lies and obfuscation, according to a newly released book by American journalist Glenn Greenwald.

Greenwald received leaked highly classified NSA documents from Edward Snowden, a former NSA worker now in exile in Russia.

“Canada is also a very active partner with the NSA and an energetic surveillance force in its own right,” Greenwald writes in No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.

Greenwald, who has received thousands of leaked NSA documents from Snowden, writes that electronic surveillance began under the presidency of George W. Bush and has accelerated in the Obama regime.

Greenwald writes that Communications Security Establishment Canada boasted of targeting the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy, and accuses the NSA of massive surveillance of its own citizens.

“The hacking practice is quite widespread in its own right: one NSA document indicates that the agency had succeeded in infecting at least fifty thousand individual computers with a type of malware called Quantum insertion,” writes Greenwald, a member of the team from The Guardian which, along with The Washington Post, were awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in public service.

Quoting from a top secret April 2013 NSA information paper, Greenwald writes: “There is evidence of widespread CSEC/NSA co-operation, including Canada’s efforts to set up spying posts for communications surveillance around the world at the behest and for the benefit of the NSA, and spying on trading partners targeted by the U.S. agency.”

Drawing from his access to Snowden and his leaked documents, Greenwald describes Canada on the top tier of co-operation with the NSA, along with Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

He writes that “the NSA often maintains these partnerships by paying its partner to develop certain technologies and engage in surveillance, and can thus direct how the spying is carried out. The Fiscal Year 2012 ‘Foreign Partner Review’ reveals numerous countries that have received such payment, including Canada, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Pakistan, Taiwan and Thailand.”

In 2012, Canada took at least $325,000 in research money, placing it fourth among co-operating countries, behind Pakistan, Jordan and Ethiopia, Greenwald writes.

He quotes from an April 2010 message from Snowden to the journalists he sent documents: “The U.S. government, in conspiracy with client states, chiefest among them the (other members of the) Five Eyes — the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — have inflicted upon the world a system of secret, pervasive surveillance from which there is no refuge. They protect their domestic systems from the oversight of citizenry through classification and lies, and shield themselves from outrage in the event of leaks by overemphasizing limited protections they choose to grant the governed.”

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