Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who is in Moscow, is seen on a giant screen during a live video conference for an interview as part of Amnesty International's annual Write for Rights campaign at the Gaite Lyrique in Paris D
Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who is in Moscow, is seen on a giant screen during a live video conference for an interview as part of Amnesty International's annual Write for Rights campaign at the Gaite Lyrique in Paris December 10, 2014. REUTERS/Charles Platiau REUTERS/Charles Platiau

Documents obtained by former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden that were leaked in 2012 have shown Canada's electronic spy agency has been monitoring, intercepting and analysing millions of file downloads by Internet users in a bid to identify extremists and terrorists around the world.

The covert operation was dubbed Levitation, a report published by CBC News on Jan 28 said. It covered allied countries and trading partners including the United States, Britain, Brazil, Germany, Spain and Portugal. CBC released the report in collaboration with news website The Intercept, which includes journalist Glenn Greenwald, who obtained the documents from Snowden.

Greenwald wrote the Levitation program was led by the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, Canada’s equivalent of the NSA. Electronic spy agents, according to the Snowden documents, eavesdrop on about 10 to 15 million uploads and downloads of files daily from free websites.

Ron Deibert, director of the University of Toronto-based internet security think-tank Citizen Lab, who reviewed the document, told CBC every single thing and information is taken. "Every single thing that you do — in this case uploading/downloading files to these sites — that act is being archived, collected and analysed."

Even massive uploads/downloads related to the episodes of the musical TV series Glee were there. It only meant sharing of movies, photos, even music aren’t disregarded as potential conduits for mass anti-terror surveillance. According to the documents, at least 350 “interesting” downloads are seen monthly, representing to less than 0.0001 percent of the total collected data.

The document said the CSE took note of information downloaded and uploaded in about 102 different popular file-sharing websites. These included RapidShare, SendSpace, and the now defunct MegaUpload. "CSE is clearly mandated to collect foreign signals intelligence to protect Canada and Canadians from a variety of threats to our national security, including terrorism," Andrew McLaughlin, agency spokesman, told CBC.

Greenwald said the Levitation program had caught of two Canadian IP addresses “that trace back to a web server in Montreal appear on a list of suspicious downloads found across the world. He is not sure if the program had ever been used to prevent any terrorist attacks. But the covert operation, he said, already had two success stories, “the discovery of a hostage video through a previously unknown target, and an uploaded document that contained the hostage strategy of a terrorist organization.”

Canada had always been described as the junior among the Five Eyes spying partnership of the U.S., Britain, New Zealand and Australia. The revelation shocked Canadians and immediately called for actions to rein in CSE’s operations. “These revelations make clear that CSE engages in large-scale warrantless surveillance of our private online activities, despite repeated government assurances to the contrary,” David Christopher, a spokesman for Vancouver-based open Internet advocacy group OpenMedia.ca, told The Intercept.