Members of the hacker group Anonymous released a confidential cabinet document today revealing secrets about the overseas activities of Canada’s spy agencies. The breach revealed both the scope of Canada’s surveillance network and the volume of communications its old and outdated system manages.

The group also released a video claiming that the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) tried to spy on President Barack Obama on Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s orders — and that the espionage, when it was discovered, put the Keystone pipeline project in jeopardy.

Only three foreign stations of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) — based in Washington, London and Paris — have been publicly acknowledged but a document marked “Secret” and allegedly from the Treasury Board of Canada says that Canada has 25 foreign stations, “many of which are located in developing countries and/or unstable environments.”

The stations are staffed by about 70 CSIS personnel who handle approximately 22,500 messages annually — not including “the high volume of extremely sensitive traffic from the Washington station,” according to the document.

The document is dated February 6, 2014 and outlines a proposal to approve approximately $3 million in additional funds to “extend the Service’s (CSIS’s) secure corporate network environment to its foreign stations.”

It describes the systems CSIS uses now as “inefficient and labour intensive data-processing and analysis systems to process and report intelligence information obtained at it foreign stations … These outdated processes result in delays that impact the Service’s operational effectiveness and jeopardize the security of its personnel.”

The new system reportedly was tested at two of the foreign stations — the document doesn’t say which — and is expanding to the rest.

“We do not comment on leaked documents and we continue to monitor this situation closely,” said Jeremy Laurin, a spokesman for the Public Safety Minister Steve Blaney, Monday evening.

The revelations came after the RCMP failed to meet a deadline set by the group for police to arrest an RCMP officer who fatally shot one of its members last week in Dawson Creek, B.C. Today’s actions, they claim, are only the beginning.

“There is info in the PR that’s explosive, we think, but we are not providing source documentation on that now or ever. If we did, someone would be in a police party van within 15 minutes,” said a spokesman for the group.

“Canadian security forces and their Five Eyes partners in New Zealand, the U.K., Australia and the U.S. have been extremely proactive in developing and purchasing offensive hacking capabilities,” said a masked Anonymous spokesperson in the group’s most recent video.

“Fortunately for us, Canada has been far more lax in defending its own systems.”

The documents have some portions blacked out — a security measure taken by Anonymous because it said its hackers were worried authorities could use information in the blacked-out sections to identify the machine or machines which were compromised.

No additional documents were released to support the claims against the prime minister and CSE.

When asked when the next leak could happen, a spokesman for Anonymous replied: “We will basically take tomorrow off and evaluate what comes next. We have a tentative publication schedule for additional material. Could be as early as this week, could wait until after Labour Day.”

@Claire_Wahlen

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