Category: Canada

The Surveillance Games

I’ll be off the next few days at ‘The Surveillance Games’ conference in Vancouver.

Coincidentally, the local police have recently announce that they will be buying the same kind of sonic weapons we saw being used against protestors at the Pittsburgh G8 meeting. Except they want us to call them ‘megaphones’ and claim they won’t use them aggressively*. I think we still need to call a weapon a weapon. Just think, with such rebranding the police could get over their recent little problem with tasers too: just call them ‘joy-buzzers’ (just with a whole lot more ‘joy’...). The urban arms race that such mega-events always spark off as manufacturers push their latest toys to anxious governments, of course just adds another layer of bitter irony to the fact that Canada also intends to ignore its own call for global truce during the Games… it seems that you don’t even need the actual gesture for gesture politics these days.

*Even if these devices were just megaphones, this purchase would in any case be rather ironic given that Vancouver city has banned protestors from using any amplification devices by amending their bylaws in July 2009.

Everyday prejudices mean Canadians end up on watchlists

Another great audit report from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner here in Canada, investigating the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (Fintrac) has just been released. Fintrac, created in 2001 in the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act and now with even more extended powers, operates a databases which is supposed to contain details of those suspected of supporting terrorism or money laundering (often on behalf of major criminal and terrorist groups).

However, there is a good story in The Globe and Mail today which leads on the most worrying aspect identified by the audit, which is that in many cases, the Fintrac database is massively overreliant on unsubstantiated suspicions from low-level functionaries in banks, insurance firms and credit agencies. Some of these ‘suspicions’ were clearly simple prejudice as they appeared to be based entirely on ethnicity. Part of the problem is that there are no clear guidelines as to what constitutes a reasonable suspicion in the legislation.

But being put on the database can have serious consequences, firstly because of the potential penalties involved (up to $2m CAN fines and 5-years imprisonment) and secondly, because the information in the Fintrac database can be accessed by Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police  (the RCMP – Canada’s FBI) or shared with overseas police and intelligence services. In the latter case, as we already know, mounting errors can result in innocent people being subject to ever more harsh treatment including being excluded from countries, placed on no-fly lists or even the UN1267 ‘known terrorists and affiliates’ list, as well as, in the worst cases, opening them up to extraordinary rendition, imprisonment and torture.

Jennifer Stoddart, the current Privacy Commissioner, has a well-deserved reputation getting positive changes made, so let’s hope she can persuade Fintrac to get this sorted out pretty soon.

Canadian Internet Snooping Law

I’ve noted before that there seems to be a concerted push around the world by governments to introduce comprehensive new telecoms surveillance laws that force telecommunications and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to record, store, and provide access to and/or share with state intelligence agencies, the traffic and/or communications data of their customers (in other words, users like us). What is noticeably here is that there is a particular logic that appears in the arguments of governments who are attempting to persuade their parliaments or people of the need for such laws. This logic that is firstly, circular and self-referential, in that it makes reference to the fact that other governments have passed such laws as if this in itself provides some compelling reason for the law to be passed in their own country. The second part of this is a king of competitive disadvantage arguments that flows from the first argument: if ‘we’ don’t have this law, then somehow we are falling behind in a never openly discussed intelligence-capability race that will hit national technological innovation too.

The media often seem oblivious to what seems obvious, and hence the story on the CTV news site today with reference to Canada’s currently proposed communications law that would allow the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) warrantless access to such the data from Internet and telecoms providers. They consider it to be ‘unexpected’ that the parliamentary Security Intelligence Review Committee has come out in support of the bill. Looking at the reasons why though, they are exactly what one would expect if one has been following the debates around the world and contain exactly the logics I have outlined. The story notes that the committee “points out that governments in the United States and Europe have already passed laws requiring co-operation between security agencies and online service providers” (without, incidentally, pointing out that these remain enormously controversial, or that other governments have abandoned some of their attempts) and later that “intelligence technology… requires continued access to new talent and innovative research.” However they won’t go into details as it is a “very sensitive matter.”

And absent from this debate as usual is the fact that this is not just a question of ‘national security’ if you set up these systems, you feed the US National Security Agency too. Canadian intelligence is still bound by agreements made after WW2, particularly the CANUSA agreement on Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), later incorporated into the UKUSA structure. And as we all know, right now, the USA does not always have the same strategic interests as Canada (the issue of arctic sovereignty is just one example). If this bill is passed, it’s a license for US spies, not just Canadian ones.

Would Canadians be “safer with a camera on every corner”?

I haven’t got very involved with Canadian debates on surveillance yet (but don’t worry, I will!). However a comment piece in Thursday’s Globe and Mail, which demanded that Canadian cities install ubiquitous video surveillance, prompted me to pen an immediate letter, which was signed by both Professor David Lyon and myself. It was published today, slightly edited – the full version is below. (They also decided to edit out our respective titles, which makes me look senior to Professor Lyon. Oops.)

“Marcus Gee writes that “We’d be safer with a camera on every corner” (Comment, May 22nd, p.15). If only this were true. However it simply is not the case.

Mr Gee quotes the UK as an example of where video surveillance is effective, but this is not supported by the crime figures in the UK or by academic research. The most comprehensive evaluation of all studies done of the effects of CCTV on crime (by the Campbell Collaboration, 2009) concluded that it had little or not effect on the occurrence of violent crimes like the disgraceful murder of Christopher Skinner, which prompted Mr Gee to write. Even the limited British police assessment of CCTV conducted by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in 2008, admitted this was the case.

It is easy to demand that ‘something must be done’ as a response to any particular incident of violent crime, and CCTV is the currently fashionable ‘something.’ But let us get beyond the superficial and look at the evidence. Then we could have a proper debate about CCTV.”

UN 1267 and kafkaesque justice

I have just come back from a talk by Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Canadian citizen of Sudanese origin who has just in June returned to Canada after six years in Sudan. He wasn’t there by choice but because he was arrested by the Sudanese intelligence services (NISS) – who have been frequently condemned by Amnesty International and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights – imprisoned and tortured and then prevented from returning by the Canadian government, until a Federal Court Judge, Russel Zinn, ruled in his favour.  He has never been charged with any offence let alone convicted, and it has been made clear on a number of occasions that there is no evidence against him. Furthermore he alleges (and Judge Zinn agreed) that the Canadian Secret Intelligence Service (CSIS) was involved almost every step of the way, including harassing him and his family, and participating in his interrogation in the Sudan – CSIS is, of course, as unacountable as most of the intelligence agencies of supposedly democratic western states.  You can read more about the case here.

Now he’s back, but he is effectively a persona non grata, as since 2006, at the request of the US government, he has been on The Consolidated List established and maintained by the 1267 Committee with respect to Al-Qaida, Usama bin Laden, and the Taliban and other individuals, groups, undertakings and entities associated with them (the ‘UN 1267 List’). This list, established by UN Resolution 1267, and administered by the permanent members of the Security Council (not the General Assembly or other more accountable UN organisations), goes much further than the US ‘No-Fly List’. It is supposedly a list of the most dangerous Al-Qaeda and Taliban members and affiliates and no signatory state is allowed to provide those listed with any financial or material assistance, including services, employment, healthcare and so on. You would think that this extraordinary (and so far as we know, indefinite) punishment would require equally extraordinary proof, but the situation is the opposite: there is no public evidence or accountability offered. It is theoretically possible to get off the list, but appeal is only to the UN 1267 List committee itself, seems to work on the principle of ‘prove that you are not a terrorist’ – an all but impossible task for anyone – and no reason for refusal is published or given to the appellant.

But the list itself is entirely public. On the website, you can find Abdelrazik, listed under ‘Individuals associated with Al-Qaeda’ – and let’s make it clear, no evidence has been offered to suggest that he is in any way associated with that terrorist organisation or its affiliates. The entries are telling in that they are basically a series of ‘known aliases’ of various degrees of apparent strength of evidence (which of course is not provided). Each group of aliases could really be anyone or any number of people for two main reasons. Firstly, there is the acknowledged lack of expertise of western intelligence agencies in Arabic and Muslim countries – just as a random example, see this article from earlier this year which makes clear that the CIA is still massively deficient in all foreign language skills. The second is the fact that any information they do have was in many cases either paid for or obtained by forced confessions through intimidation and torture, which as everyone knows, provides nothing of value and is counterproductive in a wider political sense (in addition to being wrong, of course). And to add another layer of bleak irony, some of this unreliable information is obtained from the very organisations (like NISS) condemned by the UN for their appalling human rights records! Yet a web of certainty and indefinite punitive restriction is being spun around these dubious data.

Judge Zinn in his judgement, compared the situation to that of The Trial by Franz Kafka, and it’s hard to imagine a more apt word for it than kafkaesque. He not only decried the Canadian government’s attitude to this individual case as flawed (as have been the actions of almost all the major western nations in this area), but he argued that the UN 1267 list as a whole was  “a denial of basic legal remedies and untenable under the principles of international human rights” and – I would add – morally indefensible.

Facebook forced to grow up by Canadians

Wel, Facebook has finally been forced to grow up  and develop a sensible approach to personal data. Previously, as I have documented elsewhere, the US-based social networking site had pretty much assumed ownership of all personal data in perpetuity. However it has now promised to develop new privacy and consent rules and ways of allowing site users to chose which data they will allow to be shared with third parties.

So why the sudden change of heart? Well, it’s all down to those pesky Canucks. Yes, where the USA couldn’t bothered and where the EU didn’t even try, the Canadian Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, had declared Facebook to be in violation of Canada’s privacy laws. And it turns out that in complying it was just easier for Facebook to make wholesale changes for all customers rather than trying to apply different rules to different jurisdictions.

This suggests an interesting new phenomenon. Instead of transnational corporations being able to always seek out a country with the lowest standards as a basis for compliance on issues like privacy and data protection, a nation with higher standards and an activist regulator has shown itself able to force such a company to adjust its global operations to its much higher standard. This is good news for net users worldwide.

However, we shouldn’t rejoice too much: as Google and Yahoo have shown in the case of China, in the absense of any meaningful internal ethical standards, a big enough market can still impose distinct and separate policies that are far more harmful to the interests of individual users in those nations.

Moon protest highlights wider border surveillance issues

The mass mooning of the US balloon camera owned by Sierra Nevada Corporation went ahead, but the irony was that the system had already been disabled by the weather. Apparently a large thunderstorm cause a gash in the fabric of the balloon last week which, if nothing else, should prove rather more effective than the protest in making sure that the US government does not invest in it.

However the wider issue of the US surveillance of the border with Canada remains (not mention that of the Mexican border, already a major concern) and whilst this particular technology and the appropriately ridiculous protest, has attracted most attention in the media, let’s not forget that camera towers have been erected and the USA is flying UAVs along the border. Surely President Obama should realise that the paranoid policies of his predecessor do nothing apart from damage relationships (and trade) with a close neighbour?

US cameras to see the whole of the moon…

There’s been a story developing for a while now on the US-Canadian border. This used to be one of the most casual and friendly of borders, indeed there are families stretched across both sides and in many places the border meant only slight differences in the price of some goods…

But no more. There might be a new president, but Obama seems to be allowing the Bush-era plans for strengthening the border with Canada to continue. There are now CCTV towers being erected, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) patrolling, and new much stricter passport regulations and customs and immigration checks. As usual this seems to be being done with a kind of macho indifference to the opinions of the Canadians that is making the US actions doubly unpopular.

If this seems like some kind of sci-fi nightmare then then most crazy, Philip K. Dick-style element is to be found on the Michigan-Ontario border at Port Huron, where the Sierra Nevada Corporation, a US military aerospace company, has launched a tethered balloon camera (the company calls it an MAA (medium altitude airship) pointed at the town of Sarnia across the border. This isn’t even an official scheme, it’s a private company trying to sell this insanity to the Department of Homeland Security, and naturally the Mayor and citizens of Sarnia are angry about this international violation of their privacy, and many of both sides of this border think that this intensified security as an attack on the trust that exists between Americans and Canadians.

So what are Sarnians doing? They are giving the cameras something to look at, that’s what. More specifically they are planning to drop their pants for a mass ‘moon the balloon’, which in these days of ever more insane surveillance schemes seems just about the only possible response.

Mega-events, Security and Surveillance

The connection between what are often called ‘mega-events’ (international summits, major sporting competitions etc.), securitization, and he intensification of surveillance is becoming a very interesting area and one which we wrote about in our recent book on urban resilience. I am writing some further stuff on this with Kiyoshi Abe on how mega-events have been managed in Japan.

It seems that in general, such events are either used as ‘test-beds’ for new technologies and procedures which are then either continued afterwards (as with The Olympic Games and CCTV in Greece in 2004 and The FIFA World Cup and video surveillance in Japan/Korea in 2002), or become ‘islands’ of temporary exemption where normal legal human rights protections are reduced or removed and whole areas of public space are often literally, fenced off (as in Rio de Janeiro for the Pan-American Games of 2007, whose model will apparently be extended to include walling off the poor favelas in time for the 2014 FIFA World Cup). There’s going to be a very interesting conference on The Surveillance Games later this year to tie in with the Vancouver Winter Olympics.

Now The Guardian newspaper is reporting that the London Olympics 2012 may make use of a proposal originally designed to stop the proliferation of unofficial commercial advertising near games venues in order to prevent protest. The legislation even allows police to enter private houses to seize material.

Of course the government say that they have no plans to use it in this way, but it’s interesting to see the way in which the ‘standards’ being imposed by such travelling cicuses of globalization tend to end up looking more like the authoritarian regime in Beijing (host of the highly securitized 2008 Olympics) than the supposedly liberal west, whilst at the same time promoting a very controlled but highly commercialized environment. Even the original purposes of the 2006 law (necessary for London to host the Games) are an interesting reflection of the massive corporate interests involved in the Olympics, for which they apparently need a captive and docile audience.

US borders with Canada strengthened

There has been a lot of interest in the US border with Mexico in recent years, and rightly so. However, what not so many people have noticed is that the closing of the closing of the USA is taking place along the world’s largest land border between two countries, the border between the USA and Canada.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) already patrol the airspace (and at a low enough level that private flights have had to be restricted, thereby doing two security jobs with one technology). However, the most recent announcement concerned the installation of video surveillance towers to monitor waterways. This is all on the basis of very little information about whether this is either cost-effective or necessary; according to the AP article, the Border Patrol themselves admit this: “What we don’t know is how often that vulnerability is exploited […] if, in fact, there’s a lot more going on than we thought, then this technology will help us identify it and it will help us respond and apprehend those people in ways that we haven’t before.” So essentially, this is surveillance to see whether surveillance is necessary – it seems we are now in a surveillance double-bind, so you no longer need a strong reason to install cameras; they are their own justification and may be justified in retrospect whatever does or does not happen. If nothing is seen, they will be said to be a deterrent, if something is detected then they will be proclaimed as showing the need for surveillance!

The technology employed against those tricky Canucks will be provided by the same supplier, Boeing, that has been so criticised for its failures on the Mexican border (and there have been plenty of failures down there). It seems that even when it comes to the trump card of security, which normally wins hands-down, the congressional pork-barrel remains the joker in the pack. Now, the Canadians and local firms along the US border have already been complaining about the post-9/11 restrictions that have begun to stifle cross-border trade on which many of those communities depend. In a recession, such considerations might be thought to count for something, but it seems that the mighty Boeing’s profits matter more…