When Canada Learned It Had Spies: ““The government had constantly denied that Canada was involved in spying or espionage,” Macadam said in one of a series of phone interviews. “I thought it was important to find out if we were.” If only he had known...

When Canada Learned It Had Spies:

“The government had constantly denied that Canada was involved in spying or espionage,” Macadam said in one of a series of phone interviews. “I thought it was important to find out if we were.”

If only he had known the depths of the rabbit hole he was about to enter.

Source: Vice Magazine

The stash of secret documents provided to journalists by Edward Snowden has been a treasure trove of classified codenames from the spy agencies of the Five Eyes, the allied intelligence collective that includes the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

Some are simply bizarre, such as “Squeaky Dolphin,” “Dreamy Smurf” and “Egotistical Giraffe,” some are more disquieting, such as “Boundless Informant,” “Skynet,” or “Turmoil.”

But the most tasteless and creepiest of them all might be “Widowmaker,” the codename for a team of spies from the NSA, the British GCHQ, and the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), which was briefly mentioned in a Guardian article on Wednesday.

Although the story doesn’t delve too much into details, and the original Snowden documents referred to in the story were not released, what that means is that the “Widowmaker” team helped track and geo-locate alleged terrorists. The information provided by the “Widowmaker” team was then used to bomb and kill those targets—hence its disturbing and perhaps tasteless name.

Source: Vice Magazine

Map: The 193 foreign the NSA spies on and the 4 it doesn’t

Map: The 193 foreign the NSA spies on and the 4 it doesn’t