OLYMPIA: How Canada's CSEC maps phone and internet connections
On October 6, 2013, the Brazilian television program Fantástico revealed the existance of a software program called OLYMPIA. In this case, the program was used by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) to map the telephone and computer connections of the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME). OLYMPIA is a sophisticated software framework that combines access to a range of databases and analytic tools. It's used to discover and identify the telephone and computer infrastructure used by potential targets. This information can then be used for setting up tapping, bugging and/or hacking operations. OLYMPIA itself does not collect any actual content of communications. In this article we take a close look at the OLYMPIA tool, based on the powerpoint presentation that was first shown on Brazilian television on October 6, 2013. On November 30, the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail published most of the slides on its website. Here, all available slides are pul...