CORE-outsourcing/Amanda Lang/iGATE - on the milk carton

On Saturday I posted a screencap of CBC's 'senior business correspondent' Amanda Lang as keynote speaker at the upcoming CORE-Outsourcing's 8th Annual Conference : Fast Forward - What's Next for Outsourcing?.
CORE displayed Lang's bio above the logos of their 'Corporate Sponsors' - which unhappily included iGATE.  My link to that page subsequently went down over the weekend:








"Oops! The page you are looking for cannot be found."

This seemed most unlikely for an "annual global conference" about to open in 6 days so I fixed it. It went down again. Go ahead - try it yourself. It's gone.

CORE's helpful Oops! advice to try looking for the page in their menu links brings up no mention of the conference at all.                                                                                                                                                                 
    
                                                                         


Their most recent twitter entry on March 13 which provided a link to the conference is also "Oops", while links to it from various conference participants like Everest Group are also pining for the fjords.





The whole CORE-outsourcing April 23 conference page is all just one great big Oops now apparently.

In the course of looking for it, I ran into a CORE page from their 2011 conference advertizing Lang as the Conference Moderator :

as well as iGATE's proud corporate  sponsorship there in presumably happier days :

But the page at CORE-Outsourcing's 8th Annual Conference : Fast Forward - What's Next for Outsourcing? , featuring Lang and C.J. Ritchie "Assistant Deputy Minister of the Strategic Partnerships Office, Government of British Columbia, which provides leadership to BC’s $5.8-billion portfolio of strategic outsourcing contracts" is nowhere to be found.

Did they just go indoors?  Are they making corrections?  
All I know is that CBC has visited that Creekside page upwards of 20 times in the last 24 hours.

If anyone knows what happened, please let me know. After all - it's CORE's 8th Annual Outsourcing Conference - practically a Canadian tradition now.

2pm Update : Frank at Back of the Book found another way in :
http://www.core-outsourcing.org/events/event-directory/Archive/Conferenc2013/index.php

Thursday update from comments below :
Saskboy said : Ombudsman tweeted me that Lang is off the CORE event.

Mystery Solved !          CBC Ombudsman, May 3, 2013
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RoboCon Time Capsule

Seen from today, one of the more startling aspects of the RoboCon live and automated calls story is just how much we already knew about how widespread it was nine months ago.
How did we come to forget/accept all this? The depressing election results appear to have swept it all away.

May1, 2011 CBC : "....voters are being told to go to the wrong polling stations — some up to an hour away from their homes" in Winnipeg-South Centre and Kitchener-Waterloo.

May 2, 2011 Media Co-op : 

"Residents from Prince George, BC, to St. John's, NL, are reporting receiving calls informing them that their local polling stations have been closed or have been moved.
According to the CBC, Elections Canada was first contacted about the issue on Saturday. Since then, people from across the country have been reporting such calls, many saying they are receiving automated "robo-calls."  

... Guelph, Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton &  Prince George." 

May 2, 2011  CBC : 

"Elections Canada has reports from at least 3 provinces (Ontario, Manitoba, and BC) of misleading phone calls, claiming to be from Elections Canada. They tell voters to go to other polling stations than the ones listed on their voter information cards, "due to high turnout." 

CBC News has done some digging and when they called the 1-800 number left on the message, they got a recording saying the number was out of service. But CBC News traced a caller ID to an unlisted Montreal area code. It rang through to a pre-recorded message that said, 

"Pierre?? (Inaudible) Uh oh. There's no room to record messages. Please hang up and try your call again later. Bye." 

May 2, 2011 The Star  "Elections Canada receptionist Adele McAlpina said she had received about 100 complaints by mid-morning." From one district.

May 6, 2011 London Free Press
London Lib MP reports calls from people saying the polls had been moved.

"His campaign office received complaints about the calls that "call display" features showed originated in Florida and the Dakotas, he said"

May 11 2011 CBC posted a recording of robocall purporting to be from Elections Canada about a bogus polling station change in Guelph. They also reported live harassment calls made in the middle of the night targeting "Oakville, St. Catharines, Haldimand-Norfolk, Simcoe Grey, Guelph, Eglinton-Lawrence, St. Paul's and Mississauga East-Cooksville. The calls were also made in Egmont, P.E.I., and St. Boniface, Man".

May 22, 2011 G&M :

Bogus phone messages that mislead voters about their polling stations have caused widespread disruptions in at least two provinces: Ontario and B.C. The false messages appear to be clustered primarily in ridings where close races are anticipated, meaning a small swing in voting preferences could mean the margin between victory and defeat. 

 Elections Canada returning officer said he received hundreds of complaints about it.

There are scads more of these news stories from the time of the last election. Note they contain peoples' names and statements and the many ridings they live in - thus making the Con strategy of calling it "a few mistakes" and trying to contain it to just Guelph more than a little ridiculous. 

Bonus : Yesterday, an anonymous commenter linked to what MP Garth Turner had to say about the Cons' CIMS voter database back in October 2007 : Someone is watching you

"Conservatives were required to use the system to not only track a constituent's allegiance to the party, but also to collect personal information about constituents that might come to light when the constituent contacted the parliamentarian.
"Any time a constituent is engaged with a member of Parliament, they get zapped into the database," Turner said. "It's unethical and it's a shocking misuse of data." 

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RCMP coup d'etat ; CSIS soup de jour

Yesterday my co-blogger Bob at the Beav posted the first part of this Postmedia story about the RCMP's intent to return to an emphasis on "national security" :
RCMP warn against threat of coup d’etat

He titled his post Canadian Coup de RCMP because the second part of that news story was about an alleged attempted coup against Lester Pearson perpetrated by the combined efforts of the RCMP and the CIA.
Shortly thereafter the Postmedia story disappeared off the web but has since reappeared this morning almost word for word at the Montreal Gazette : RCMP identify coup d'etat as threat.

I'll pick up the second part of that story where Bob left off in case it disappears again :

Over the past year, the Mounties have signalled a renewed emphasis on national security issues that have been pushed aside by law enforcement's preoccupation with global terrorism since 9/11.

In a major speech last fall, for example, RCMP Commissioner William Elliott said while transnational terrorism and "homegrown" radicalization remain big threats, so too are economic espionage by foreign states, transnational organized crime, proliferation issues, illegal migration and other border-security issues.

While hyperbolic, the mention of a coup threat appears to reflect the force's return to a broader operational approach to guarding national security.

It's also not the first talk of a government overthrow.

The 1999 book Agent of Influence alleged the U.S. CIA plotted a de facto coup of Lester B. Pearson's government in the early 1960s.
Canadian author Ian Adams claimed that after the 1963 assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy, CIA counter-intelligence branch head James Jesus Angleton became convinced Pearson was an agent for Russian intelligence and supposedly had information from a Soviet defector backing him up.

"The CIA took great personal offence at Pearson's independent stands in foreign policy, his grain trades with the Soviet Union, his antiwar positions on Vietnam, and especially his friendly stance on Cuba," wrote Adams.

To get at Pearson, the CIA set its sights first on Canadian diplomat James Watkins, Canada's ambassador to Russia in the mid-1950s and a friend of the prime minister.
After 27 days of interrogation by the Mounties, the 62-year-old Watkins's troubled heart gave out and he died, apparently without supplying the confession the spymasters hoped could bring down the government.

Chilling if a Canadian ambassador died under RCMP "questioning" at the behest of the CIA. A defacto attempt at a Canadian coup de RCMP.
Although the story references "James Watkins", Holly Stick correctly noted the mistake at Bread and Roses - reporter Ian Macleod actually meant "John Watkins"

While RCMP Commish Elliott seems to be signalling that the RCMP wants a budget to return to handling national security intelligence issues, CSIS was created in 1984 precisely to separate domestic policing from spying.

Yesterday CSIS policy on torture-based evidence was muddied up again.

Much was made back in March 2009 of CSIS testimony before the public safety committee in which CSIS lawyer Geoffrey O’Brian admitted there is no absolute ban on using intelligence that may have been obtained from countries with questionable human rights records on torture.
Not possible to tell whether a particular piece of evidence was obtained through torture, he explained, allowing that Canada continues to share intelligence info with Egypt and Syria.

The following day CSIS Director Jim Judd explained that O'Brian was "confused" and Van Loan issued a statement to the effect that CSIS does not knowingly use any information obtained by torture, which is in effect pretty much what O'Brian originally said anyway.

Not noted in the media at the time was that 24 minutes into that committee meeting, when the same question was put to him, RCMP spokesman Gilles Michaud, then only eight months in the job, backed up O'Brian's comments on torture-derived info :

"I want to be clear here - there is no absolute ban on the use of any information by the RCMP."

which should come in pretty handy should the RCMP expand its scope back into the "national security" business .
The G20 police state shenanigans are looking more like a practice run all the time, aren't they?
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Down the memory hole : Two accounts of domestic terrorism

Out of the many many published accounts of Canada's newest domestic terrorism case, two appear to have disappeared down the memory hole.

Last night the Globe and Mail published a story on authorities apprehending the child of the so-called fourth terror suspect, Awso Peshdary. He's the one who was arrested Friday and interrogated for six hours, released, and immediately re-arrested on domestic assault charges dating back to April as a result of police having bugged his house for the last six months. That G&M story read :
Authorities seize child of man targeted in terror probe

The six-month-old daughter of Awso Peshdary is in custody of Children's Aid Society after police, unable to make terrorism case, lay charges of domestic assault.

The G&M included a link to a blog supportive of Peshdary which gave an account purportedly of Peshdary's wife going to the Elgin Police Station to inquire after her husband, being interrogated for five hours without a lawyer present, being coerced into making statements against her husband, and having her child apprehended. Is all this true? We don't know. 660 News reported the child being apprehended today.

But even if Peshdary is accused of assault and uttering threats to his wife, I thought, why apprehend her child from her while he is locked up?

I posted a link to both the G&M story and the blog account on the Bread and Roses forum last night where it was read and commented on by regulars, but by 11:26 this morning deBeauxOs reported at BnR that the G&M story was missing.
Gone. 404ed down the memory hole.

Now the G&M is notorious for rewriting their online copy so we waited for the new version to appear. Dr Dawg reported a new version, which incidentally is minus the phrase "unable to make terrorism case", but now it too is gone, as is the blog post purporting to be Mrs. Peshwary's account of events. Dawg has cached copies of the revised G&M story and the missing blog post : Abuse.

Last night at BnR, Pogge quoted the following from the original G&M account :

After al-Qaeda’s attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, Canadian police were given extraordinary powers to temporarily arrest suspected terrorists when a solid criminal case failed to materialize. Police were also given powers to compel individuals to testify against alleged terrorist associates.

Parliament voted against extending those powers in 2007. Now, the Conservative government hopes to revive them, meaning MPs are about to embark on a renewed debate as to whether counterterrorism agents have sufficient powers to deal with people on the periphery of a suspected plot.

As Pogge said last night, this is today's installment of Things That Make You Go "Hmmmm".
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