Canada’s electronic spy agency sifts through millions of files and videos downloaded online by men and women as element of an extensive play to locate defendants and extremist schemes, CBC News has learned.

Aspects of the Communications Security Establishment job dubbed “Levitation” are shown in a record obtained by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden and lately released to CBC News.

“Every single thing that you just do — in this situation uploading/downloading files to these websites — that act is being archived, gathered and assessed,” says Ron Deibert, manager of the University of Toronto-based internet security think tank Citizen Lab, who reviewed the file.

In the file, a PowerPoint presentation composed in 2012, the CSE analyzer who wrote about being overloaded with innocuous files including episodes of the musical TV series Glee within their hunt for terrorists, it jokes.

CBC examined the record in collaboration with the U.S. news website The Intercept, which got it from Snowden.

The demo gives a rare glimpse into Canada’s cyber-sleuthing abilities and its own use of its own secret agent associates’ enormous databases to monitor the internet traffic of huge numbers of individuals all over the world, including Canadians.

That glance might be of interest that is greater that the Harper government intends to introduce new legislation raising the powers of the security agencies in Canada.

The electronic surveillance service in Canada said it cannot remark on the particular plan, but included that a number of its own metadata evaluation is intended to recognize foreign terrorists using the web for actions endangering the security of Canadians and Canada.