A Tale of Eco-Surveillance

Ottawa Citizen June 4, 2014  Government orders federal departments to keep tabs on all demonstrations across country

"The federal government is expanding its surveillance of public activities to include all known demonstrations across the country, a move that collects information even on the most mundane of protests by Canadians.

The email requesting such information was sent out Tuesday by the Government Operations Centre in Ottawa to all federal departments.

“The Government Operations Centre is seeking your assistance in compiling a comprehensive listing of all known demonstrations which will occur either in your geographical area or that may touch on your mandate,” noted the email"

G&M Sept 14, 2014 Environmental extremism a rising threat to energy sector, RCMP warns

“Environmental ideologically motivated individuals including some who are aligned with a radical, criminal extremist ideology pose a clear and present criminal threat to Canada’s energy sector,” said the report, written in March 2011. Since then, the RCMP has held regular meetings with energy companies and federal officials to review potential threats to infrastructure

RCMP spokesman Greg Cox denied the force is targeting protesters or environmental groups in general

G&M Feb 17, 2015 : ‘Anti-petroleum’ movement a growing security threat to Canada, RCMP say :

"In highly charged language that reflects the government’s hostility toward environmental activists, an RCMP intelligence assessment warns that foreign-funded groups are bent on blocking oil sands expansion and pipeline construction, and that the extremists in the movement are willing to resort to violence.

RCMP spokesman Sergeant Greg Cox insisted the Mounties do not conduct surveillance unless there is suspicion of criminal conduct. 

“As part of its law enforcement mandate the RCMP does have the requirement to identify and investigate criminal threats, including those to critical infrastructure and at public events,” Sgt. Cox said in an e-mailed statement. “There is no focus on environmental groups, but rather on the broader criminal threats to Canada’s critical infrastructure. The RCMP does not monitor any environmental protest group. Its mandate is to investigate individuals involved in criminality.”

... the report which is stamped “protected/Canadian eyes only” and is dated Jan. 24, 2014."

Global, March 17, 2015 CSIS helped government deal with Northern Gateway protests

"Canada’s spy agency helped senior federal officials figure out how to deal with protests expected last summer in response to resource and energy development issues – including a pivotal decision on the Northern Gateway pipeline.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service prepared advice and briefing material for two June meetings of the deputy ministers’ committee on resources and energy"

CBC March 12, 2015 SFU Prof. Tim Takaro called by RCMP after taking photos near Kinder Morgan site

"A B.C. climate change scientist says he got an "intimidating" call from RCMP because he had taken pictures on Burnaby Mountain near the site of a proposed [Trans Mountain] Kinder Morgan pipeline.

Tim Takaro, a health sciences professor at SFU, says he was having lunch in Tofino with his family on Wednesday when his daughter's [unlisted] cellphone rang. When she answered it, she was told it was the Burnaby RCMP calling and they were looking for her father."

Prof. Takaro works at SFU on Burnaby Mountain. He was taking pictures in a public park.
You can listen to his account at the link.

Some good news ...
Forum Research and VICE have a poll out today on plummeting support for Bill C-51 from 1370 online Canadian voters surveyed March 13 and 14th :

"When asked their approval of a number of specific provisions of bill C51, the majority disapprove of the Bill allowing security services to infiltrate and track environmentalists, First Nations and pipeline protesters (61%)"  

Support for tracking and infiltrating environmentalists, FN, and pipeline protesters came from Alberta (32%) and federal conservatives (56%)

Support for the overall stiffer legislation of C-51 (just under half of respondents) :

"is common to the oldest (62%), the wealthy ($80K to $100K - 62%), in Quebec (72%), among Conservative voters (84%), Bloquistes (76%), the least educated (74%), mothers of children under 18 (65%), Catholics (72%) and Evangelicals (82%)."

Figures.
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From Ferguson and Gaza to the Toronto G-20

Combined Tactical Systems, Inc. (CSI), according to its website, manufactures and markets tactical munitions and crowd control devices to armed forces, law enforcement, corrections and homeland security agencies around the world.

This photo of its Jamestown, Pennsylvania headquarters raised a few eyebrows this week because :

1) as you can see in the photo, CSI was flying an Israeli flag alongside the US one up until January 2012 and, according to a former CSI plant employee in the first comment here, it is flown whenever the Israeli owner/founder is in town, and 

2) CTS tear gas shell cartridges manufactured there were found a week apart in Gaza and Ferguson, Missouri - where protests and excessive police reaction fuelled by the half a billion dollars in military weapons given to local police forces erupted in response to the August 9 shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by a local police officer. 

Comparisons of the highly militarized assault on their respective populations, supportive tweets from citizens in Gaza to citizens in Ferguson about dealing with the effects of teargas, and a look at the fact Ferguson and St. Louis County police forces were trained in Israel in recent years followed.

Along with 9,500 other law enforcement officials who have attended Israeli-led LEEP training sessions in the US and Israel. 

The Law Enforcement Exchange Program (LEEP) - created :

"in cooperation with the Israel National Police, the Israel Ministry of Internal Security, and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) to support and strengthen American law enforcement counter terrorism practices"

 - was the brainchild of former FBI Assistant Director and Chief of Counter-Terrorism Steve Pomerantz, in his capacity as Director for Counter-Terrorism Programs for The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). 

JINSA was founded to "advocate on behalf of a strong U.S. military, a robust national security policy, and a strong U.S. security relationship with Israel" to "provide leadership and affect policy on crucial issues of national security and foreign policy." 

Yeah, they pretty much have that part nailed down.

Former JINSA advisory board members include perennial neocon warmongers Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, James Woolsey, and Michael Ledeen.

Meanwhile, according to the U.S.-Israel Strategic Cooperation : Joint Police & Law Enforcement Training page at the Jewish Virtual Library detailing their joint history :

"In early September 2012, the New Police Department (NYPD) opened an Israeli branch at the Sharon District Police Headquarters" in Israel because "the Israeli police is one of the major police forces with which it must maintain close work relations and daily contact."

Really? The NYPD requires daily contact with Israeli police from a location inside Israel?

Naturally, there have also been Canadian security junkets to Israel. In 2005, on his first day as Ontario emergency management commissioner, Julian Fantino, Toronto Police Staff Supt. Bill Blair, and 30 more Ontario police officials left for Israel to "study security and anti-terrorism measures", courtesy of the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, airline El Al and the Israeli government.

But back to Combined Tactical Systems (CSI). In addition to making the teargas cannisters used against populations in Gaza, Ferguson, Tahrir Square in Egypt, Bahrain, Occupy Wall Street, and Toronto's G-20 in 2010, they also run their own training sessions "combining product tools with knowledge and techniques."

In February 2010 - four months before the Toronto G20 - this highly respected and decorated officer was a Training Sergeant with the Toronto Police Public Order Unit working on :

• Development & delivery of crowd management training to Toronto Police Service and police agencies across Canada.
• ORT (Obstacle Removal Team) trained - Responsible for training Toronto Police members in extrication and removal of protestors from fixed objectives using various tools and equipment.

when he took the four-day CSI course on chemical munitions (hand-held and fired), distraction devices (flash bangs), and fired munitions, bean bags, wood batons, rubber batons, sting calls :

CHEMICAL MUNITIONS/ LESS LETHAL WEAPONS - INSTRUCTOR  

Combined Tactical Systems, San Bernadino, CA / February 2010

Then read this account of Why there wasn't accountability for the police in Ferguson and see if it doesn't remind you of the same police set up used to defy accountability at G-20, involving the aforementioned Fantino and Blair.

Final note from Jewish Virtual Library :

In January 2011, Canada and Israel signed an umbrella pact for defense and military cooperation and bolstered that agreement in November 2011 amid the turmoil that had been set upon the Middle East and around the Arab World during the Arab Spring. Canadian Defense Minister Peter MacKay and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak settled a number of memoranda of understanding to facilitate information and intelligence sharing as well as cooperative arrangements for the development and sale of military technologies.

From Ferguson and the occupation of Gaza to the Toronto G-20, war is a racket that always comes home .

Edited for clarity and typos.
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Two tales of RCMP Excessive Response Teams

What was the point of this exactly? 

Sending in snipers in camo with dogs to crawl through the grass towards a group of unarmed people blockading a road because they fear the wholly-owned Canadian subsidiary of a Houston, Texas exploration company is setting up to frack their land. 

Oddly enough, Canadian law supports the rights of the foreign company to frack over those of the people attempting to protect their community from it. 

Hence the blockade protest, ongoing since Sept 30 when Elsipogtog First Nation Chief Aaron Sock issued the company an eviction notice not recognized by our courts and government. 

Yesterday, three days after the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples called conditions facing First Nations in Canada "a crisis" and the same day our PM also left the country, hundreds of RCMP moved in to enforce the rights of the fracking company.    40 people including the chief were arrested for refusing to abide by the court injunction to leave and the media was presumably pleased with their pictures of burning cop cars after the situation blew up.

In France, fracking has been banned since 2011 - despite legal challenges from corps - due to its potential for contamination of groundwater and causing earthquakes.
In BC, 85% of our 8,000 natural gas wells are fracked with another 40,000 on the way.

Elsipogtog Update : Eyewitness account at Halifax Media Co-op - excellent, important read.

Another Excessive Response Team story from rural BC.

Here's a guy from the RCMP Emergency Response Team with his M-16 exactly as he looked when he and three others set out to arrest war veteran and PTSD sufferer Greg Matters for assault in Sept 2012 after Matters and his brother got into a family fight the day before. 

Matters was unarmed and surrendering to them when he was spooked by the ERT helicopter sent in from Kamloops full of more officers circling closely overhead and tried to run away. When a faulty taser failed to work on him, he was shot twice in the back with an M-16 and died. 

The Independent Investigations Office which had cleared the officers of "having committed a criminal offence" in April stated Matters was shot "in the chest" but last week a forensic pathologist testified at the coroners inquest he was "shot twice in the back". He either was or was not wielding a hatchet at them according to officers' testimony.

The ECT also assaulted and arrested Matters' mother and had no warrant so the BC Civil Liberties Assoc. has lodged a complaint with the Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP.

Prince George Citizen : RCMP jumped the gun: lawyer

How did anyone with an ounce of sense think a stressed out guy the police knew had PTSD from having been physically attacked by superiors in Bosnia would react to four guys dressed like this showing up on his property accompanied by a helicopter?  

The Elsipogtog First Nation are in negotiations with the fracking company and local government officials; Greg Matters had a number of people he trusted to bring him in for questioning over what was a family dispute .
Yet somehow they both wound up dealing with RCMP escalating excessive response teams advancing on them through the grass with sniper rifles. 

There's something very wrong with this picture.
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Get Your NSA On - Five Eyes and an Ear and A Mouth

The NSA is breaking the internet

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The Washington Post reveals that the NSA spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year paying private companies for access to large fiber optic communications backbones - part of the agency's Corporate Partner Access Project.

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If everything is under surveillance ...

A powerful two minutes with Jacob Appelbaum of Tor Project and Der Spiegel. 
Mr. Appelbaum has been flagged and detained many times like Glenn Greenwald's partner David Miranda was at Heathrow three days ago. An American citizen, he no longer travels to the US.

Wall Street Journal, Aug 20 2013 :

"The NSA, in conjunction with telecommunications companies, has built a system that can reach deep into the U.S. Internet backbone and cover 75% of traffic in the country, including not only metadata but the content of online communications."

The Guardian, Aug 1 2013

"The US government has paid at least £100m to the UK spy agency GCHQ over the last three years to secure access to and influence over Britain's intelligence gathering programmes. The top secret payments are set out in documents which make clear that the Americans expect a return on the investment, and that GCHQ has to work hard to meet their demands. 

Ministers have denied that GCHQ does the NSA's "dirty work", but in the documents GCHQ describes Britain's surveillance laws and regulatory regime as a "selling point" for the Americans.

Appelbaum transcript:

"I think at its core what is at stake is the ability for a human being to have dignity and for journalists to have integrity with their sources, and from that I believe that it threatens the whole concept of a free democracy.

This is I think in a sense being shown in the last 48 hours to the extreme and I don't mean that as hyperbole but if everything is under surveillance, how is it that you can have a democracy? 

How is it that you can organize a political function or have confidentiality with a constituent or with a source or with a friend or with the lover?

That's fundamentally an erasure of fundamental things that we have had for quite some time.

And planetary surveillance has very serious concerns, not the least of which is economic espionage and not the least of which I think for me personally is about journalistic source protection.

I mean how is it that we will be able to protect our sources if there's no way to securely meet, no way to communicate about having a meeting, no way to actually communicate about basic facts? 

There's no such thing as on or off the record when in fact you don't control the record.

And it's not merely a matter of whether or not we have something to hide because it is not us that will decide whether we have something to hide - it is an analyst somewhere, it is a machine learning algorithm somewhere. And this is the thing that is perhaps the most terrifying : because people are flagged, then other people are dispatched. Each person plays their role and more and more a machine plays that role, a machine that does not understand constitutional protections, does not understand the Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights, does not understand humanity. It's a machine and the humans they behave like machines too - which is a great fear - that humans will start to behave like machines. 

And so what is at stake is in fact democracy where we still have it."

Pink Floyd, 1975
"Welcome, my son, welcome to the machine.
Where have you been? It's alright we know where you've been."

h/t West End Bob for Democracy Now link.

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UK destroys The Guardian's "Snowden" hard drives

Just as we are absorbing yesterday's news that Glenn Greenwald's domestic partner was detained at London's Heathrow Airport for 9 hours under Schedule 7 of the UK's Terrorism Act while they asked him all about Greenwald and whistleblower Edward Snowden ?!?! ... comes this column today from the Guardian's Editor-in-Chief, Alan Rusbridge :
David Miranda, schedule 7 and the danger that all reporters now face

In it he describes how two months of visits from "senior government officials" demanding he hand over the Edward Snowden material culminated in an ultimatum a month ago :  

"..hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. "You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more." 

And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred – with two Government Communications Headquarters security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement ..."

 "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro."

Extraordinary. This is tantamount to the Inquisition taking away Galileo's pencil.
Thumb drives and crowd sourcing be damned! The truth will only revolve around whatever the surveillance state says it is.
Rusbridger : 

"It felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age. We will continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents, we just won't do it in London."

The smashing of the Guardian's hard drives and the detention of Greenwald's partner under UK terrorism laws is not about containment or security or catching members of alQaida, is it?  It's about laying down fear of the state into any reporter or publisher who would embarrass them. 

"One U.S. security official told Reuters that one of the main purposes of the British government's detention and questioning of Miranda was to send a message to recipients of Snowden's materials, including the Guardian, that the British government was serious about trying to shut down the leaks."

So the UK gave the US a heads up on Miranda?
Yeah, well, good luck with your whole confiscating the pencils thing.

Related : Did Canada spy on journos at the Toronto G8/20 summit?
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1am Update : Most of the over 1600 comments under the Guardian editor's article are both outraged at the gov's actions and grateful for the editor's courage, but hundreds of them challenge the Guardian on two questions to which Rusbridger occasionally responds :

1) Why didn't the Guardian publish news of this hard drive smashing immediately?
Rusbridger: "we had our reasons. can't go into everything."

and 2)Why didn't the Guardian force the gov to take them to court rather than capitulate, thereby driving the gov's actions into the open?
Rusbridger : "UK would have gone to law (as threatened). From that moment the court would be in charge of the Snowden material. The penalty for destroying it or refusing to hand it over could be extremely punitive. I mean, unlimited fines - not jail ."

As to why Rusbridger buried his lede 9 paragraphs into the article : "sorry, couldn't help that"
the destruction of the data? : "er, well, not quite. We destroyed something... of which we had had least two other copies."

And most interestingly, why didn't the gov confiscate the drives to inspect them instead of destroying them?
Rusbridger : "They never touched the hard drives, so, no they got nothing from them. I don't know what they know..."
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Wait. Police lawyers write up officers' notes for them?

From a partial transcript of Ontario Ombudsman and former Special Investigation Unit Director Andre Marin's interview on CBC yesterday regarding how systemic obstruction from the police will affect the Sammy Yatim investigation: 

"The director of the SIU has written 82 times to the Chief of Toronto Police, reporting issues of evidence tampering on the scene, failure to notify the SIU of an incident, one police lawyer representing multiple officers, police lawyers writing the notes for the officers - you know the police lawyer wasn't on scene."

Although Mr. Marin was talking about the Toronto Police, his remarks made me remember the Robert Dziekanski incident. 

The four RCMP officers in the 2007 police-slaying of Dziekanski are on trial for perjury because they all had nearly identical but absurdly inaccurate "notes", as Paul Pritchard's video eventually revealed. 
They all maintained that Dziekanski came at them screaming and brandishing a stapler, that they had to wrestle him to the ground, that to varying degrees they feared for their lives. 
At the Braidwood Inquiry, Justice Thomas Braidwood played Pritchard's video frame by frame as they read from their prepared notes to the accompaniment of muffled laughter from spectators in the courtroom.

So were those "notes" the RCMP's version of "one police lawyer representing multiple officers, police lawyers writing the notes for the officers" ?
Is that why they were so similar, so resolutely CYA, and yet so preposterously wrong?
I know the officers were specifically asked if they were "coached" for their testimony - a charge they have all denied -  but did anyone think to ask junior RCMP Constable Bill Bentley at his perjury trial last month if he had any input into the writing of his notes at all?
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Aug 3 Update - relates only to Ontario
Andre Marin : Police-Involved Deaths : The Need for Reform

"The SIU's practices around delayed officer interviews also served to undermine the regulatory requirement that witness officers be segregated to insulate their evidence from outside influence. Given that witness officers were usually permitted to leave an incident scene and that long periods went by before they were interviewed, the potential for conscious or unconscious tailoring of evidence was substantially increased. This risk was also compounded by the fact that many officers spoke with counsel before writing their notes and before speaking with the SIU, and quite often, the same counsel represented all officers involved in an incident, increasing the chance of contamination of their recollection of events, since lawyers are bound by the rules of professional conduct to share information among clients in a joint retainer situation."

Ontario Ombudsman 2012-2013 Annual Report 

In April 2013, the Supreme Court of Canada heard an appeal of an Ontario Court of Appeal case dealing with the issue of police association lawyers vetting officers’ notes before submitting them to SIU ... The Ontario court ruled in 2011 that officers cannot have a lawyer vet their notes. The Supreme Court’s decision is pending. ... 

Later on in the report he notes : 

" ... officers refuse to answer questions about whether they consulted with a lawyer before writing their notes"

In March 2013 at a speech at Carleton University, Andre Marin again called for legislation to bolster the SIU and "prohibit police lawyers representing multiple officers and interfering with notes."
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Ontario Ombudsman and former SIU Director on Sammy Yatim investigation

Yesterday on CBC Metro Morning, Ontario Ombudsman and former Director of the Special Investigations Unit Andre Marin spoke about the SIU investigation into the Toronto Police shooting death of 18 year old Sammy Yatim on an empty streetcar and the systemic lack of police co-operation with the SIU.
Excerpted transcript : 

CBC : The Chief of Police has said that he and his officers will cooperate fully with the SIU. Yesterday Mike McCormick the head of the police union said that his offices always cooperate and collaborate with the SIU.  

Marin : The cooperation of the police with an SIU investigation is the exception and not the norm. When you hear the police say we always cooperate, it rings hollow. We've done in-depth investigations, two reports. The director of the SIU has written 82 times to the Chief of Toronto Police, reporting issues of evidence tampering on the scene, failure to notify the SIU of an incident, one police lawyer representing multiple officers, police lawyers writing the notes for the officers - you know the police lawyer wasn't on scene. That's not co-operation and all these 82 letters haven't been answered. Last year - we reported in an annual report we released a few weeks ago - last year the director wrote 19 letters all of which have not been answered. 

CBC : Does the fact that this is an incredibly public investigation, in part because this incident was caught not just on one but on multiple videos, change that? 

Marin : I think there's a greater degree of question. As well the incident depicted raises issues. But you know if I recall correctly during the G20 SIU investigation, Chief Blair was on your show promoting the fiction that the videotape of Adam Nobody had been tampered with until the director of the SIU called his bluff. Now is that co-operation or is that undermining the investigation? And the worst part here is - I don't oversee the Toronto Police Service; I do oversee the SIU, I oversee the provincial government. Provincial government committed to strengthening the role of the SIU to make sure the evidence they get is untampered and it's obtained readily and early because SIU's conclusion will only be as good as the evidence that it's gathered. The province agreed to bring change but then from documents we found changed their mind because of "vehement police opposition". And that's a direct quote from the ministry's correspondence. So you know it's all great to see these commitments of 180 degree change in direction in co-operation with the SIU, but the police have to stop playing cat-and-mouse games and the SIU needs to be able to do its job independently and without distractions.  

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The Combating Terrorism Act vs Justin Trudeau

On Thursday, three days after the Boston Marathon bombings, the Cons still had scheduled an opposition day for Monday - a day on which the opposition parties set the day's agenda. But then on Friday, an hour after learning that Justin Trudeau would spend it introducing his Backbenchers' Spring motion, Government House Leader Peter Van Loan suddenly announced that opp day was cancelled due to the vital national importance of debating the Combating Terrorism Act on Monday instead ... because of the Boston Marathon bombing.
Sure, whatever.

Notable that the S-7 Combating Terrorism Act would have passed already in its previous incarnations as Bill C-17 and C-19 if Steve hadn't prorogued Parliament. On September 22, 2010 the entire Liberal Party but one voted along with the Cons to pass C-17. Then on October 23 2012, the entire Liberal Party save 5 voted in favour of S-7.

Dear Libs : and this is why you can't be taken seriously as a credible opposition to Steve or a partner in any coalition against Steve. Prior to the last election, you expected to be given a pass for voting along with Steve hundreds of times owing to the fact you couldn't afford to bring down the government because you weren't ready to have an election. You don't have that excuse any longer. Really looking forward to hearing your cautious mousy noises against innocent citizens being incarcerated without trial before you all vote along with Steve once again, just so no one can call you soft on terrorism :

Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia said that the Liberals will be supporting Bill S-7 and noted that many of the original measures were first introduced by the Chretien government in 2001.

S-7. Let's suppose you know someone, perhaps your landlord or a colleague at work, that the government suspects may one day in the future commit an act of terrorism. You can be detained for up to 3 days without charge while being questioned. You don't get to hear, let alone challenge, any evidence given against you or your colleague, even if it's tortured out of someone you've never heard of in Syria, and you can be held without trial for a year if you don't co-operate.

Sure, you're a model citizen but are you sure you don't know any of these suspected terrorists for instance? ...

Building Resilience Against Terrorism : Canada’s Counter-terrorism Strategy
Public Safety Canada 2012 , introduced by Vic Toews :

"...domestic extremism that is “based on grievances – real or perceived – revolving around the promotion of various causes such as animal rights, white supremacy, environmentalism and anti-capitalism."

which is merely a rehash of the language in :
2010 G8 Summit - Integrated Security Unit Joint Intelligence Group 
but minus the reference to "First nations' resource-based grievances" :
1a The Terrorist Threat
     1b The Public Order Threat

"The 2010 G8 summit in Huntsville ... will likely be subject to actions taken by criminal extremists motivated by a variety of radical ideologies. These ideologies may include variants of anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, nihilism, socialism and/or communism. These ideologies may also include notions of racial supremacy and white power ... 

"The important commonality is that these ideologies ... place these individuals and/or organizations at odds with the status quo and the current distribution of power in society. 

In addition to these generally held tenets, a variety of grievances exist: These grievances are based upon notions/expectations regarding the environment, animal rights, First nations'(sic) resource-based grievances, gender/racial equality, and distribution of wealth etc."

 The G8/G20 - in which thousands of people got locked up for days for no reason whatsoever.

So who wants to see the G8/G20 pilot project experiment in "terrorism" law enforcement expanded into law right across Canada? 

The Cons have had this version of the terrorism bill lying around for months, just waiting for a day when they needed to change the channel, and today is that day - they've decided to have the third reading on embedding preventative arrest and secret trials in law for no other reason than to change the channel on Justin Trudeau. 
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10:45 Update : 
After watching the proceedings for an hour and a half now, I must apologize for writing re the Libs:

Really looking forward to hearing your cautious mousy noises against innocent citizens being incarcerated without trial before you all vote along with Steve once again, just so no one can call you soft on terrorism.

I take it back - they are not even bothering to do that much. 
Aside from the two Lib MPs questioning the timing of bringing this bill forward now to offset Trudeau's backbencher freedom motion, the only debate going on is among NDP MPs regarding provisions of the act. After opening remarks from Con Public Safety parlsec Candice Bergen, the Cons have not responded once. 

2pm Update : So "Operation Smooth", carried out by Homeland Security, FBI, and Canadian law enforcement, thwarted the Trainspotter Two without the benefit of the Combating Terrorism Act. Huh.
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Wednesday April 24 2013 Update : S-7 passes into law.

Libs and Cons - 183 Yes     vs      NDP, Bloc and Green - 93 No

Feb 2 2014 Update : C-44 - An Act to amend the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act and other Acts   Passed
Libs and Cons - 174 Yes       vs        NDP, Green - 81No
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Another thrilling episode of Beyond the Border

In this week's episode, Steve lays a cunning trap for Barry. In exchange for agreeing to pass travel and "informal" info about Canadians on to Homeland Security, Steve gets Barry to promise to maybe match $1-billion in Canadian taxpayer dollars to fund some pilot projects sometime in the future that will principally benefit the 40% of Canada-US corporations that rely on a cross-border supply chain. Will Barry take the bait?

Well you can clearly see the advantage to Canada here. If US security dudes are openly operating in Canada, never again will the RCMP suffer the humiliation of delivering a Canadian citizen to the US border so he can be tried and jailed in the US for acts committed and not considered criminal in Canada.  So there's that.

And "informal information exchange", ie unsubstantiated spook-thinks about brown Canadians with funny names like Abdelrazik and Arar, has clearly worked out really well in previous informal information exchanges.

From the Canadian Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness Action Plan:

Canada and the United States have a long history of working together to defend the freedoms and rights of our citizens and to deal with threats to our collective way of life. Cross-border cooperation and information sharing are crucial to these efforts.

See how that works?
None of that old "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety" nonsense. It's all the same thing now - it's "collective". And if we have to pitch a few more hippies/troublemakers/brown peoples into the gaping maw of US security paranoia, well that's just a price we're willing to pay to keep those trucks rolling back and forth over the border.

Most of the TV and print media commentary in favour of this latest episode of Beyond the Border has come from Canada-US Project luminaries Derek Burney, Colin Robertson, and Fen Osler Hampson, whose Blueprint for Canada-US Engagement appears to be the blueprint for Steve and Barry's deal. They say it will be very good for Canada and is in no way a threat to our sovereignty, a defence which would be rather more reassuring had Hampson not made a pitch to the Foreign Affairs committee in 2009 in favour of dropping the national border altogether.
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G20 investigation: RCMP spies vs conspiracy group

The JIG is up. 
An RCMP 'joint intelligence group' - comprised of federal, provincial and municipal police - infiltrated activist groups prior to the G20 and Vancouver Olympics in what they call "one of the largest domestic intelligence operations in Canadian history".


Constable Bindo Showan of the Ontario Provincial Police, one of the two principal undercover Ontario spies, is a stunning example of their intelligence at work.

Earlier this fall, Showan told the court about how he attended a meeting prior to the Toronto summit. There, a protest-planning group that included several of the 17 main G20 defendants was discussing whether to lend their support to a First Nations rally.
Adam Lewis, one of the 17 accused conspirators in the G20 case, interjected, “Kill whitey!”   The group chuckled. Lewis, like all but one of his co-accused, is white.

When a Crown lawyer asked the officer what he thought Lewis meant, Showan said in complete seriousness, to "kill white people." 

Apparently we do not have the right not to be spied and reported on by morons or covert operatives pretending to be morons.


This 2009 RCMP 'joint intelligence group' statement defines their mission :

"The 2010 G8 summit in Huntsville ... will likely be subject to actions taken by criminal extremists motivated by a variety of radical ideologies. These ideologies may include variants of anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, nihilism, socialism and/or communism. These ideologies may also include notions of racial supremacy and white power ... 

"The important commonality is that these ideologies ... place these individuals and/or organizations at odds with the status quo and the current distribution of power in society. 

In addition to these generally held tenets, a variety of grievances exist: These grievances are based upon notions/expectations regarding the environment, animal rights, First nations' resource-based grievances, gender/racial equality, and distribution of wealth etc."

And it is apparently still in operation :

RCMP records suggest that the reconnaissance continues. Report logs indicate at least 29 incidents of police surveillance between the end of the G20 summit and April 2011 — more than nine months after world leaders departed Toronto.

The same document indicates that the RCMP-led intelligence team made a series of presentations to private-sector corporations, including one to "energy sector stakeholders" in November 2011.

Good to know.


After millions of dollars and 70,000 pages of Crown evidence, conspiracy charges have been dropped against the 17 activists held in jail or under house arrest for the last 18 months, but 6 of them will serve jail time for counselling mischief, with an additional charge of counselling to obstruct police leveraged against Alex Hundert and Mandy Hiscocks. 


Toronto Star : Behind the G20 plea deal 


A Message from the So-Called "G-20 Main Conspiracy Group" below. 
Their written statement regarding the charges can be read here. 

G20 : Caught in the Act

An interview with Andre Marin, Ontario Ombudsman and author of the G20 report "Caught in the Act", sheds a little light on the blackout surrounding who was responsible for ordering kettling at the G20 a year ago.

Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, as we have previously heard, had not heard of the term kettling before he saw it taking place before his very eyes on TV at the G20. A whole year later he still claims not to know who ordered it.

Paul Jay reads from Marin's report :

"The former RCMP official who was in charge of ISU security at the time advised us that by June 24, which is, what, two days before, the Toronto Police Services representative on the ISU steering committee had left the ISU building, and that by noon on Saturday, June 26, when all hell's breaking loose, communications between the ISU and the Toronto Police had broken down. By 4 p.m., the Toronto Police Services had completely gone off the ISU radar.

These guys had months to prepare, like, an unlimited budget, like, a billion dollar budget, and it seems like what they told you is that the communication had broken so down that the RCMP had no control over the events that were going on in Toronto."

And where was Blair during all this? At the Intercontinental Hotel meeting President Obama.
Now that's what I call an alibi.

According to Marin, the ISU responsibilities were divided up between: "the RCMP responsible for security within the fence; the Toronto Police responsible for the security outside the fence."

On CBC's As It Happens last night, Blair made this statement about his relationship to the RCMP-led Integrated Security Unit :

"Quite frankly I was not involved in much of the planning. I was aware of some of the things that were being planned, I was being briefed, but I was not the Operational Commander, I was not on the Unified Command Team or in the steering committee."

Well that's handy, isn't it?
Blair's in charge of the streets but is not inside the ISU command loop.
Then while he's off receiving his thank-you-masked-mans from Obama, someone uses the power vacuum at ISU to suck people at Queen and Spadina up as extras in a police crowd control exercise under martial law.

Blair declined to appear before Marin's investigation and does not support the idea of a public inquiry.
One year later, although the Toronto Police have pledged not to use illegal kettling again, the extraordinary powers of the "Queens breach" and the Public Works Protection Act remain in effect.
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Extra reading : When police stick to phony script : the Miami Model from Catherine Porter in the Star
h/t Nadine Lumley in comments
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Stacy Bonds "special constables" cleared

The Ontario Provincial Police has finished investigating the Ottawa Police Service for their assault of Stacy Bonds and announced no charges will be laid. You're shocked, I'm sure.

"I would like to thank the Ontario Provincial Police for conducting this investigation in an objective, thorough and professional way," said Ottawa Police Chief Vern White in a news release.

The Ottawa police officer Steven Desjourdy who cut off Bonds' shirt and bra was charged with sexual assault by the the Ontario Special Investigations Unit in March; the SIU however has no jurisdiction over the other "special constables" involved who are not officially police officers.

When the case came before Justice Richard Lajoie in October 2010, he described Bonds' arrest as "unlawful", "appalling", "a travesty" with "no reason apart from vengence and malice", and "an extremely serious breach of Ms. Bonds rights".
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