Thanks to Edward Snowden, it became known that Canadian government spied on millions of file-sharing downloads from the popular websites. It turned out that over a hundred of websites including MegaUpload were constantly monitored in a search for extremists. Actually, all file-sharers in the world should realize that they are being monitored. A lot of copyright owners, anti-piracy agencies and analytics companies constantly crawl BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks, spying on downloads and collecting data. In fact, the public nature of the abovementioned networks is very attractive for those who want to eavesdrop. However, for some reason people using file-hosting sites believe that their transfers cant be tracked because transactions take place privately from user to website via HTTP. Now it turned out that Canadas top electronic surveillance agency was spying on millions of downloads from over 100 of file-sharing services. Canadas surveillance agency led a project dubbed LEVITATION, which unveiled widespread online surveillance carried out by the local authorities. Snowdens revelations showed that the agency monitored about 15m downloads daily in an effort to track down extremists. It is known that the Canadian government monitored RapidShare, SendSpace and MegaUpload when the latter was still alive. In the meantime, none of the cyberlockers were required to cooperate with the authorities, since the local Communications Security Establishment had its own special capabilities. Another operation, dubbed ATOMIC BANJO, obtained information directly from broadband cables, and the agency could get the unique IP-address of each machine that downloaded files from those cyberlockers. Then the collected IP-addresses were cross-referenced with additional information provided by the American NSA or British GCHQ. As a result, they received a list of other sites visited by the downloaders. Finally, further associations with Facebook or Google accounts could link to names, addresses and other personal details. This system can track downloads in countries all over Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and North America. While the Canadian agency could not spy on its own citizens, a list of suspicious downloads contained IP-addresses from Montreal, along with addresses originated in the US, UK, Germany and Spain.
