The photo above shows the Cray X-MP/11 (later upgraded to X-MP/14) supercomputer that CSE operated from 1985 to 1995. The X-MP/11 was CSE's first supercomputer, purchased as part of a concert...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2024/04/photo-of-cses-cray-x-mp11.html
The Main Estimates for Fiscal Year 2024-25 , tabled in parliament on February 29th, reveal that CSE is on track to receive its first official billion-dollar budget: $1,041,683,002 to be precise (...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2024/03/billion-dollar-budget.html
On 5 December 2023, the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) of the U.K. Parliament published a report on the U.K.’s international intelligence partnerships . As the report states, th...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2024/03/uks-intelligence-partnership-with-canada.html
Anyone who uses Canada’s access to information process on a regular basis will likely come to suspect that information is occasionally withheld not for national security or other legitimate rea...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2024/02/redactile-dysfunction.html
U.S. journalist and author David Kahn died on January 24th. He was 93. Kahn's 1967 book The Codebreakers , which covered the history of code making and breaking from its ancient origins to the m...
...one giant leap for common sense? Possibly. SLINGSHOT is CSE's "SIGINT production and dissemination system. It is used for gathering client requirements; end-product report (EPR) authorin...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2024/01/one-small-step-for-transparency.html
Was Alberta once considered for the location of a satellite monitoring site for CSE? That’s my current working hypothesis. An access to information request I recently submitted t...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-satellite-monitoring-site-that.html
Planned additions to CSE's fiscal year 2023-24 budget authority that were announced in the Supplementary Estimates (B) , tabled in parliament on November 9th, will push the amount of money th...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2023/11/cse-budget-authority-tops-1-billion.html
In July 2023, I presented a paper titled "The Seven Ages of Canadian SIGINT" to the 2023 annual conference of the North American Society for Intelligence History . I've done some minor update...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-seven-ages-of-canadian-sigint.html
"Canadian Intelligence History at the Crossroads," a conference on the history of Canadian intelligence activities and organizations, will be held at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa on ...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2023/10/call-for-papers-canadian-intelligence.html
From Independent Special Rapporteur David Johnston's First Report : > We continued to receive documents, both as suggested by the Canadian > Security and Intelligence Service ...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2023/05/even-independent-special-rapporteurs-do.html
Yesterday, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) posted an important collection of 284 documents relating to the operations of the Communications Security Establishment. The do...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2023/03/bccla-posts-cse-documents.html
On November 4th, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) released the public version of its report on the security and intelligence activities of Global Affa...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2022/12/nsicop-report-on-global-affairs-canada.html
CSE's 2021-2022 Annual Report was released on June 28th. At roughly 15,000 words, the report is significantly longer and more informative than last year's, and about five times as long as CSE...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2022/08/notes-on-cses-2021-22-annual-report.html
Improving diversity within CSE and other parts of the intelligence community is an ongoing challenge, but with the appointment of the first non-white Canadian to the position of Chief of CSE (ef...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2022/07/diversity-in-top-ranks-of-cse.html
On 8 July 2022, Prime Minister Trudeau appointed Caroline Xavier to be the next Chief of CSE, effective 31 August 2022. Xavier will replace incumbent Shelly Bruce, who is retiring. Xavier is ...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2022/07/xavier-to-be-next-chief-of-cse.html
On May 19th, NSIRA released the declassified version of its Review of Departmental Frameworks for Avoiding Complicity in Mistreatment by Foreign Entities (NSIRA Review 2019-06). Ministerial dire...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2022/06/nsira-report-on-avoiding-complicity-in.html
The 2021 annual report of the Office of the Intelligence Commissioner (ICO) was tabled in Parliament on May 5th. From the perspective of this blog, the most interesting news in the report was th...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2022/05/intelligence-commissioner-2021-annual.html
Set up during the Second World War and housed in the National Research Council, the Examination Unit (XU) was Canada's first cryptanalytic agency. The XU was shut down in the closing days of th...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2022/05/history-of-examination-unit.html
2021 was the Communications Security Establishment's 75th anniversary year. Every day during that year, I posted a Tweet highlighting an item related to Canada's SIGINT activities that had taken ...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2022/01/a-year-of-canadian-sigint-history-posts.html
NSIRA's 2020 Annual Report was tabled on December 10th, 2021. I'll try to write a post on the CSE-related items in the report eventually, but in the meantime you can find the great bulk of w...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2021/12/nsira-2020-annual-report.html
CSE's 2020-2021 Annual Report was released on 28 June 2021, and although I discussed the document on Twitter then, it's about time I got around to commenting on it on this blog as well. I...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2021/12/cse-2020-2021-annual-report.html
In addition to Stress Tested , I have also contributed chapters to two other books published in the last year. I wrote the chapter on the Communications Security Establishment for Top Secret...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2021/12/recent-book-chapters.html
An open-access PDF version of the book Stress Tested: The COVID-19 Pandemic and Canadian National Security is now available at this link . Edited by Leah West, Thomas Juneau, and Amarnath...
On June 18th, the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA) released the public version of its report on a review the agency conducted in 2020 of CSE's disclosure of Canadian Iden...
https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2021/06/nsira-review-calls-into-question.html