Six thousand construction workers, tradespeople and suppliers are erecting a futuristic $1.1-billion home for Canada’s premier intelligence agency, the Communications Security Establishment.
Everyone and everything on the site requires a security clearance. Even the wet cement was sifted for electronic bugs, according to a source.
The project CEO is Bud Mercer, the former RCMP assistant commissioner who led the gargantuan security effort for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service is a next-door neighbour. The whole area feels hermetically sealed.
Which leads to another paradox: This ultrasecret government installation is being built by private enterprise with private money raised on the open market.
When the keys to 1929 Ogilvie Rd. are handed to the Crown next August, the 775,000-square-foot spy palace will have been designed and built by a consortium of companies that is to manage the site and its advanced IT gear until 2044. Most of the financing comes from private equity and bond sales to CSE-approved institutional investors.
The job ranks as the biggest federal accommodation project ever attempted under a public-private-partnership or P3. The government says the arrangement eliminates risks and liabilities associated with construction and financing while retaining ownership. It says up to $176 million will be saved compared to a traditional procurement process.
But critics say P3s represent the privatization of public assets. They not only funnel public resources into generating private profits, but allow governments to hide debt within multi-decade contracts.
One thing that can’t be kept under wraps is the structure’s conspicuous architecture. It is sure to expose the secretive CSE to the public eye like never before. How the defence department agency responds could help determine how much legitimacy Canadians are willing to extend to its increasingly contentious electronic spying.
Matters may soon degenerate further. Journalist Glenn Greenwald, with his whistleblower source Edward Snowden, a former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, has upended the intelligence world over the past year with remarkable exposés and document leaks about massive government spying on citizens in the U.S., Britain, France, Brazil, Spain and other nations.
Information released in October to Brazilian media revealed the CSE has intercepted telecommunications traffic from Brazil’s Ministry of Mines and Energy.
Greenwald says he is now preparing to release more classified documents from Snowden outlining government spying here and Canada’s intimate relationship with the NSA.
“The documents are quite complex,” Greenwald told CBC last week. “There are a lot of them. There is enormous amounts of reporting to do in Canada, one of the most active surveillance agencies in the world, because of how closely they work with the NSA.
“There are many, many, many more significant documents about Canadian surveillance and partnership with the NSA that will be reported and, I think, will be quite enlightening for the people of Canada.”
In the Internet age, the CSE’s cutting edge is honed with supercomputers, algorithmic encryption keys and cryptanalysis. Its targets are the phone calls, faxes, emails, tweets, satellite and other electronic signals emanating from adversarial foreign nations and overseas threat actors.
The purloined information is turned into intelligence and shared with federal departments and ECHELON, the signals intelligence network connecting Canada, the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, the so-called Five Eyes alliance.
As a longtime net importer of foreign intelligence, it is crucial for Canada to maintain goodwill with those allies, especially since former navy sub-lieutenant Jeffrey Delisle was caught in 2012 selling allied military secrets to the Russians.
The shimmering new CSE showcase and the contemporary CSIS headquarters next door symbolize Canada’s commitment to holding up its end of the intelligence-sharing pact, says Wesley Wark, a leading expert on security and intelligence. It’s also a measure of how times have changed for government secret service.
The CSE’s job inside its current heap of cramped, old and under-powered buildings spread around Heron Road and Riverside Drive (including the former CBC headquarters building) has been so clandestine it operated under a secret order-in-council for 55 years.
That Cold War mentality and almost singular focus on the former USSR and its Eastern Bloc allies finally died on Sept. 11, 2001. The 9/11 attacks prompted government to bring in the CSE from the cold and task it with countering terrorism and guarding federal computer networks against cyber threats. Its signals intelligence expertise became indispensable to the military in Afghanistan. Its workforce has since doubled to about 2,000 civilian employees and federal budgetary estimates for this year put projected spending at about $460 million.
The Anti-terrorism Act of 2001 not only officially recognized the CSE’s existence but amended the National Defence Act to give it authority to intercept private communications between Canadians and foreigners, something it had never been allowed to do.
Though the National Defence Act prohibits the CSE from “directing” its activities at Canadians or people in Canada, the minister of defence can “for the sole purpose of obtaining foreign intelligence” authorize it to intercept private, domestic communications provided, “the interception is directed at foreign entities located outside of Canada.”
That means if a suspected or known terrorist operating abroad contacts someone in Canada, the CSE can legally eavesdrop on the domestic end of the communications. It can also claim it does not “target” Canadians.
When the law was changed in December 2001 most Canadians didn’t notice. Those who did tended to yawn. But a dozen years later, individuals are inextricably tethered to a wireless, digital existence. Messing with their electronic privacy is a touchy thing to do.
Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s vast hoovering of the electronic conversations of U.S. citizens and foreigners, possibly Canadians, have provoked indignation and scrutiny.
The headlines and backlash have rippled north across the border. In addition to the Brazilian caper, the CSE has been hit with accusations it monitored Canadians’ global telephone and Internet use. In a separate action, the B.C. Civil Liberties Association filed a lawsuit in October charging that the CSE’s activities are unlawful and in breach of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Government oversight of the CSE now falls to the strangely-named Office of the Communications Security Establishment Commissioner, headed by Jean-Pierre Plouffe, a former military and superior court judge. The watchdog office, however, has been criticized for its own secrecy. Many observers believe it also lacks meaningful authority.
Liberal Public Safety critic and MP Wayne Easter, once the minister responsible for CSIS, introduced a private member’s bill in the Commons last week to establish a national security committee of parliamentarians to oversee the federal spy apparatus. The idea has been around for almost a decade but never enacted.
In January 2011, Prime Minister Stephen Harper mused about the idea of creating a committee on national security, but said there was no agreement on a particular model. The government has since been largely silent on the issue.
The CSE may not have the same option. As it faces new, complex and fast-moving operational challenges and tries to find needles of significance in vast haystacks of speeding electrons, it is probably going to have to explain itself to Canadians in a way it is not used to, says Wark, a visiting research professor at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
“There’s a privacy dimension increasingly to what CSE does, which wasn’t really there in the days when it was purely engaged in the business of interception of overseas communications from state organizations.
“How does it distinguish between illegal intrusions and (citizens’) legitimate communications with government websites and electronic flows and so on?” How will it unearth the intelligence treasures presumed hidden within social media sites without stepping on privacy landmines?
The pending move across town seems to be bringing the CSE to a crossroad.
Will it reveal more of itself to Canadians, as the RCMP’s national security arm and CSIS have learned to do? Or will it hold on to a culture of deep secrecy and risk heightening public suspicion and distrust?
“Social licence is a very important concept for intelligence agencies in a democracy, the notion that they have to have a degree of public legitimacy and they have to work to earn that and continue to work at it,” says Wark.
“To a certain extent the new palace on Ogilvie Road is going to be one of the symbols that’s going to keep this whole question of legitimacy or social licence in the public mind. People now have at a visual point of reference.
“The question is whether this futurist building housing this futurist intelligence ability is really very forward-thinking, thinking about the future and thinking about the problems of living in a democratic society.”
A CSE official recently gave the Citizen an external tour of the site. The person insisted on not being named, quoted or photographed. Two accompanying security officers vetted every photograph taken. Answers to many questions — the Citizen submitted an extensive list to the CSE last March — were withheld “for operational security reasons.”
Even from a distance, the unfinished structure is impressive. It is larger than Bayshore, Ottawa’s second-largest shopping centre. There is zero resemblance to a typical government building.
The “wow!” factor is intentional. The CSE needs to recruit — and retain — top Canadian minds in mathematics, linguistics, computer science, cryptology, electrical engineering and other disciplines. Google Inc. and other avant-garde outfits are chasing the best and brightest university grads, too.
Intelligence agencies by nature are closed organizations. People working near each other might not know what their neighbour is up to. But the CSE has decided that workplace collaboration, rather than compartmentalization, is a better way to get results.
So bureaucratic conformity is out, or at least minimized. The CSE is going ultra-modern, sophisticated, stylish, relaxed and green.
Seven “pods” or small office buildings plus a data centre encircle and connect to a five-storey, elongated central “hub.”
The hub’s concave exterior walls are fashioned from the same type of triangular pieces of glass used to build the convex exterior of the Ottawa Convention Centre. The hub is capped with a curving and stylized triangular roof, like a giant, gently arched wing.
The interior features an atrium designed to let natural light flood deep inside, giving people on each of the five floors views of the expansive grounds and the people moving about. There is a spacious cafeteria and individual work and relaxation areas. Private offices are out and shared spaces are in.
The intent is for the highly-specialized spies to get away from their private workstations in the pods and serendipitously collide, connect and intellectually cross-pollinate with fellow spies from different disciplines. The hope is that they will want to live there.
The residential real estate market in the area is already feeling the love. CSE employees are approaching homeowners around Carson Grove, Cardinal Heights and Rothwell Heights and offering $50,000 to $100,000 over market value for some properties that aren’t even for sale, says Tim Tierney, city councillor for Beacon Hill-Cyrville. Knock-downs and redevelopments are happening, too.
“It’s pretty intense right now,” he says.
The downside is shrinking residential street parking along Bathgate Drive and Blair Road, already under pressure from hundreds of CSIS employees. Tierney and his constituents are not happy the CSE is providing 800 parking spaces for at least 2,000 employees. The squeeze is a CSE attempt to get workers to ride public transit and bikes, he says.
“On the positive side, they could have put up a grey box, that’s their right, but they decided to make it fancy.”
And very green.
Camelot, as the project has been dubbed within the defence department, is designed to meet LEED Canada gold certification standards. An array of photovalic cells on the roof of the two-storey employee parking garage will send solar-generated electricity to a shipping and receiving area and a visitors’ centre at the main entrance off Ogilvie Road.
The hub’s glass walls have low-e coating to help regulate seasonal heating and cooling. Its roof is reflective to reduce the “heat island” effect. Even the water supply is filtered to discourage use of disposable plastic water bottles.
Underground at points along the property’s security perimeter, workers have buried the pulverized concrete remains of the old Cyrville Road-Highway 417 overpass that was removed and replaced in 2011. The intent is to thwart ambitious intruders from burrowing into the site.
Up above, the 36-hectare property is surrounded by trees, ponds and a tall, imposing black steel fence and countless unblinking security cameras. A new, paved public pedestrian path runs just outside the property’s security perimeter. A publicly-accessible bank branch and child daycare are to front the site along Ogilvie Road.
So, the most secretive organization in the country is now highly visible. There seems to be a growing recognition within the CSE that it needs to be more obliging, more “out there” with Canadians.
How far remains to be seen.
Original Article
Source: ottawacitizen.com
Author: Ian MacLeod
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