Peggy Curran reports that Canada’s monitoring of Internet traffic deterred a terrorist plot:
The alleged plot behind this week’s arrest of four suspected terrorists was to attack Montreal’s métro and Parliament Hill with bombs, says a former counter-terrorism officer with the RCMP and CSIS.
Michel Juneau-Katsuya told the Ottawa Citizen that at least one of the suspects, alleged ringleader Hiva Alizadeh, used Ottawa Public Library computers to communicate with other members of the Ottawa-based cell.
Internet messages among the men triggered computer “sniffers” monitoring electronic signals at Ottawa’s Communication’s Security Establishment, the national cryptologic agency, which alerted the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
[…]
“One of the (CSE) filters picked up their chat. The way the system is established, we’ve got red flags everywhere and you can trip one of those flags anytime.
“If you’re travelling to Pakistan, that’s a red flag. If you’re going on certain web sites, that’s another red flag, and if you use in e-mail certain key words. When you’ve got enough red flags, then you become a person of interest. My understanding is they were caught from the Internet.”
Read more in the Montreal Gazette.
Thanks to the reader who sent in this link.