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International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group
Coalition pour la surveillance internationale des libertés civiles
January 28, 2023 - 28 janvier 2023
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ICLMG remembers Quebec city mosque victims and renews commitment to fight Islamophobia | |
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ICLMG 27/01/2023 - Sunday, January 29, 2023 marks the sixth anniversary of the horrific attack on the Centre Culturel Islamique du Québec. We remember Ibrahima Barry, Mamadou Tanou Barry, Khaled Belkacemi, Aboubaker Thabti, Abdelkrim Hassane & Azzedine Soufiane, the nineteen wounded, their families and their community.
January 29th is also the National Day of Remembrance and Action Against Islamophobia. We have seen important developments, including the long-awaited recent appointment of Amira Elghawaby as the federal Special representative on Islamophobia.
But January 29th is also a reminder that more needs to be done to fight violence and hate directed towards Muslims in Canada. For 21 years, we have seen how Canada’s anti-terrorism policies and support for the so-called “War on Terror” are both a cause and consequence of Islamophobia across Canada and around the world. This ranges from Muslim Canadians still being predominantly affected by unproven and discriminatory border policies like the No Fly List, to the ongoing detention of Muslim Canadians in northeast Syria, to Muslim-led charities being disproportionately singled out for surveillance, audits, and punishment.
We join with others in calling for the Canadian government to take further, concrete action by ending the systemic Islamophobia that continues to cause so much harm, and that helps to reinforce and justify individuals in their own hateful acts.
We encourage everyone to join local and virtual vigils on Sunday, January 29th, and to take action:
Trudeau announces Amira Elghawaby as Canada's first representative to combat Islamophobia
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Letter to Minister Joly: It is time to immediately bring all Canadians detained in northeast Syria home | |
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ICLMG 26/01/2023 - Minister Joly,
In an historic January 20, 2023 ruling, the Federal Court of Canada called on your government to repatriate four Canadian men illegally and arbitrarily detained in northeast Syria, in addition to your recent commitment to repatriate 19 Canadian women and children (who were originally part of the same lawsuit). This ruling makes it clear that it is time to immediately bring all Canadians detained in northeast Syria home.
Your government has been asked to act within 90 days of a court decision, and it is imperative that this repatriation occurs without delay. Justice Henry Brown of the Federal Court stated in December 2022: “Canadians are dying or at risk of dying every day.” Every moment of your delay increases the risk for the children, men and women detained in Syria. Canada has already repatriated seven of its adult female and child citizens from the region. It has the necessary contacts on the ground in northeast Syria. It has the support of the US government, which continues to have forces on the ground. Most importantly, it has the consent and clear request of Kurdish authorities who hold the Canadians.
Justice Brown clearly stated that the protections provided under section 6 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom – guaranteeing all Canadians the right to enter, remain in, and exit Canada – means that your government must act to repatriate its citizens, and that doing so is consistent with binding jurisprudence and Canada’s international obligations. These Charter rights apply not just to those represented in this court case, but to all Canadians detained in northeast Syria, making it clear that they too must be repatriated. This should also include the non-Canadian mothers of Canadian children, since you have committed to not separate children from parents.
We are disappointed that the Canadian government has repeatedly used unsubstantiated “national security” concerns to justify its failure to assist these Canadians in coming home. As Justice Brown wrote, “the [government] Respondents do not allege any of the Applicants [detainees] engaged in or assisted in terrorist activities. The Respondents affirmed this position at the hearing.” He also stated there was no evidence before the court that any detainee had committed offenses contrary to Canadian law. Our organization has seen, time and again over the past two decades, how such unsupported allegations of ties to terrorism allow for the grave violation of the rights of Canadians abroad. It is also no coincidence that all these cases have involved Muslim Canadians. Your government has committed to fighting Islamophobia and discrimination in all its forms. Repatriating these Canadians and clearly stating that all Canadians are innocent until proven guilty would be one more step in that direction.
Finally, Justice Brown writes in his decision: “There is no known offense in Canada that carries with it exile or banishment as a penal consequence,” yet both by Canadian actions and conscious inaction, exile and banishment have been the result for Canadians abandoned in northeast Syria. For too long, your government has frustrated and denied the rights of these Canadians. The Court has called on you to bring these Canadians home. We expect you to do so without delay. Source
Matthew Behrens: Federal Court Orders Repatriation of Canadians Illegally Detained in Syria
Repatriating Canadian men from Syria? PM says, 'We're looking at it carefully'
TAKE ACTION: Call/Write to Ensure Ottawa Obeys Court Order to Bring Canadian Detainees Home from Syria ASAP
TAKE ACTION: Canada must repatriate all Canadians detained in NE Syria now!
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Matthew Behrens: How False Labeling Threatens the Lives of Canadian Muslims Illegally Detained in Syria | |
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Homes Not Bombs 25/01/2023 - In the blitz of breaking news coverage regarding the repatriation of 23 Canadian Muslim men, women and kids from prison camps and jails in northeast Syria, Canadian media fell into predictable patterns of Islamophobic labeling, irresponsibly assuming anyone in the camps and prisons was “ISIS-linked,” screaming out unsubstantiated fears about whether these returnees from conditions akin to torture could be prosecuted, and generally ranting about wholly unproven security “risks” even as the Federal Court decision reported that the federal government itself had not alleged any acts of violence or criminal wrongdoing on the part of the detainees. That decision was a vindication of the rights that these long-suffering Canadians have been so long denied because of racial, religious, and political profiling.
This piece calls on journalists and commentators to hold to a higher standard. Such labeling can prove incredibly harmful, as documented by two judicial inquiries into the torture of Canadian Muslims held overseas with Ottawa’s complicity. It also tells the story of one 9-year-old detained Canadian boy who urgently requires life-saving surgery, but Canada has abandoned him and his family. Read more - Lire plus
La France rapatrie 15 femmes et 32 enfants des camps de prisonniers jihadistes en Syrie
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MPs implored federal government to bring former Afghan politician to Canada before she was killed | |
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CBC News 17/01/2023 - Canadian politicians were working to bring Mursal Nabizada, a woman who used to serve as a Member of Parliament in Afghanistan before the Taliban's takeover in August 2021, to this country before she was killed this weekend. The exact circumstances of Nabizada's death are unclear, but police in Kabul said she and her bodyguard were killed by unknown gunmen, and her brother injured, all in an attack that took place at her home overnight on Saturday.
"It was devastating news and very tragic," said Alex Ruff, the Conservative MP for Bruce-Grey-Owen-Sound, Ont., one of six Canadian MPs who have been collaborating behind the scenes since last October to fast-track immigration for Nabizada and eight other female Afghan MPs who remained in Afghanistan after the Taliban's takeover of the country nearly two years ago. "We came together as an all-party group to advocate for their really urgent movement to safety and to come to Canada," said Ruff, a military veteran who served in Afghanistan himself. The group also includes Green Party of Canada co-leader Elizabeth May, the Bloc Québécois' Alexis-Brunelle Duceppe, the NDP's Heather McPherson, and Liberals Marcus Powlowski and Leah Taylor Roy. "We cannot lose another woman that is on that list. We cannot afford that. We have a responsibility," said Brunelle-Duceppe. "This government is supposedly a feminist government. Well, it has to prove it." Read more - Lire plus
Afghan women say they are ‘dying in slow motion’ after killing of former female MP
What the United States Owes Afghan Women
Canada Must Save At-Risk Afghan Women’s Rights Activist Farzana Adell
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End of the Road for Justice in Canada: Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Appeal by Family of Murdered Mexican Environment Defender | |
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MiningWatch Canada 23/01/2023 - The Supreme Court of Canada has refused to hear an appeal from the family of assassinated Mexican environment defender Mariano Abarca, effectively shutting the door in Canada to any investigation into the role Canadian diplomacy may have played in endangering Mariano’s life.
Mariano Abarca, an outspoken community leader in the struggle against the social and environmental impacts of Canadian mining operations in his hometown of Chicomuselo, Chiapas, was murdered in 2009. Believing that the Canadian Embassy’s unconditional support for Blackfire Exploration put Mariano at further risk in the weeks and months before his assassination, his family filed a complaint under Canada’s whistleblower law in 2018. Ignoring over 1000 pages of evidence documenting the Embassy’s actions in support of the company, the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner – whose responsibility is to look into complaints by whistleblowers and ensure confidence in the public sector – refused to open an investigation.
Upon judicial review, one federal court judge conceded that “perhaps Mariano Abarca would not have been murdered” if the embassy “[had] acted in a certain way”. Nonetheless, legal challenges of the Commissioner’s decision failed to elicit an investigation, culminating with the Supreme Court dismissal on January 12 of the family’s application for leave to appeal. With accountability mechanisms in Canada having failed Mariano Abarca’s family, they will now turn for justice to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
“We have exhausted all avenues to get at the truth in Canada,” says Mariano’s son Jose Luis Abarca. “My father was murdered 13 years ago and today, we are no closer to understanding the role Canadian officials may have played in putting his life in danger. While the actions of these Canadian officials go uninvestigated, Canadian embassies around the world continue to provide significant diplomatic support to Canadian mining companies, likely putting the lives of other human rights and environment defenders at risk. It is time we turn to international bodies to hold Canada accountable.” Read more - Lire plus
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Ken Rubin: Canadians’ privacy could take a serious hit this coming legislative session | |
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The Hill Times 16/01/2023 - When it comes to the other main problem that’s festering under the Privacy Act—the growing number of privacy breaches—the government likes to say that there’s been some public reporting of such breaches, and notifications have been sent to those affected.
But what’s not addressed as yet, however, or will unlikely be in any Privacy Act amendments, is that some agencies with substantial personal data holdings are finding ways to cheat, downplay, suppress, and under-report what are considered as privacy breaches or wanting to see their use of digital upgrades as leading to privacy breaches. The federal privacy commissioner has highlighted the problem in annual reports and is currently dealing with at least one complaint.
Canadians will need much more than a “look-the-other-way” house-cleaning in an updated Privacy Act if it’s to become an effective instrument of privacy rights and protection. Other legislation to be debated this parliamentary session will add to the federal government’s digital invasive privacy powers. Bill C-26 on cyber security would, with few restrictions, allow the state to access personal data from telecommunications providers when required. Another upcoming bill, the Senate’s Bill 7, would allow the Canada Border Services Agency greater access to travellers’ personal digital devices.
A recent House Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics Committee inquiry identified yet another digital privacy gap. It issued a report last October urgently calling for legislation on the use of facial recognition technologies (FRT), and a pause in their introduction. The privacy commissioner suggested a potential legal framework towards restricting police use of FRT. Next up for the House Privacy Committee is an investigation into the Canada Border Services Agency’s use of third parties to run the costly and controversial ArriveCan travel app.
Meanwhile, on the private-sector privacy front, the divisive Bill C-27 (Digital Charter Implementation Act) is in second reading in the House, and business interests are hoping for its quick passage. The legislation’s dual goals are, firstly, to have found the balance needed in corporations amassing and using personal data in the digital marketplace, and, secondly, to convince international and European governments that there will be sufficient protection of Canadians’ marketplace personal data.
These protection claims are questionable as Bill C-27 downplays the need for personal consent in such legalized digital corporate collections. It claims to resolve any assault on individual privacy by “de-identifying” personal data, making the collected details allegedly anonymous. The bill’s separate artificial intelligence act provisions build on this and permit the use of AI algorithms in the marketplace’s manipulation of personal data for private gain. As the bill is currently written, it allows for a one-sided set of rather vague privacy safeguards that do not even require public identification of AI’s formuli or for any specifics on AI’s many daily uses.
Mislabelled a “consumer” digital “charter” protection bill, Bill C-27 basically gives businesses legal cover to capture more personal data, and to do more corporate surveillance based on this information. The bill has its many critics and supporters who will no doubt be making presentations to the committee. This is the year that authorities and corporations are looking to Parliament to apply a legal veneer to their desired grab for more digital personal data under the guise of modernization and efficiencies. Canadians should rightfully be distrustful, be prepared to push back against such sweeping efforts to torpedo privacy rights, and to advocate for much tougher privacy protection provisions in the law. Read more - Lire plus
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As deadly protests continue, Peru’s government faces crisis | |
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Al Jazeera 25/01/2023 - Dozens of civilians shot dead by armed forces. The gates of a premier public university stormed by a military tank. Police precincts set aflame. Nearly seven weeks after Dina Boluarte ascended to Peru’s presidency in the wake of her predecessor Pedro Castillo’s chaotic removal, the protests that have roiled the country’s south have metastasised, spreading to the capital Lima where they have met fierce repression.
The demonstrators, many of whom are Castillo supporters, have called for Boluarte’s resignation, as well as for new elections and a revised constitution. An estimated 50 civilians have been killed since the protests began. Now, the burning question on the minds of millions of Peruvians is: How does their nation overcome this deadly political impasse?
In a press conference on Tuesday, Boluarte called for a “national truce” in order to engage in “dialogue and set an agenda” for the country. But she also used her speech to denounce the protesters for failing to organise “a social agenda” and for committing violence and destruction, including through the use of homemade guns. “My country is living a violent situation, generated by a group of radicals with a political agenda,” she said.
Al Jazeera spoke to protesters, political analysts and workaday Peruvians about possible solutions to a crisis that has laid bare Peru’s deep-rooted social inequality — and has academics warning about a possible slide towards authoritarianism. Read more - Lire plus
Peru Closes Machu Picchu Amid Deadly Protests in Lima
TAKE ACTION: Call on Peru to end the repression and seek peaceful solutions
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Israel army kills 10 Palestinians, including elderly woman | |
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Al Jazeera 26/01/2023 - Israeli troops have killed 10 Palestinians in one of the deadliest days in the occupied West Bank since Israeli raids intensified at the start of last year. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, nine of the Palestinians killed were in the Jenin refugee camp, after Israeli forces raided the area.
The other Palestinian, a 22-year-old man, was shot by Israeli forces in the town of al-Ram, north of Jerusalem.
In the Jenin raid, which Palestinians have described as a “massacre”, at least 20 others were wounded with live ammunition. Four of them were in critical condition. The dead included an elderly woman, according to Palestinian officials. She was identified as Magda Obaid by the Jenin hospital authorities. Read more - Lire plus
Israel air attacks hit Gaza, escalation fears after Jenin raid
Israeli forces shoot, kill 15-year-old Palestinian girl in Jenin
Zionist group uses US anti-terrorism laws to sue Palestinian rights & BDS activists
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Georgia police kill a protester and are invoking a 2017 terrorism law against 19 activists accused of little more than trespassing | |
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Grist 27/01/2023 - A burst of gunfire rang through a forest on the edge of Atlanta, Georgia, on the morning of January 18. Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, whose chosen name was Tortuguita (Spanish for “little turtle”), had been shot and killed by police officers, becoming the only known person killed by law enforcement during an environmentalist act of land defense in the U.S.
Tortuguita was part of a loose-knit group continuously occupying the woods to stop trees from being felled by construction of a sprawling police training center known to activists as Cop City. In 2021, with little public input, the Atlanta city council approved plans for the $90 million Public Safety Training Center on the city-owned former site of Atlanta’s prison farm, which the trees had reclaimed and had previously been included in plans for a revamped parks system. (The activists call the area the Weelaunee Forest, a name from the Muscogee people who were violently forced out of the area 200 years ago.)
Although some members of the transient and leaderless group had damaged property in apparent attempts to stymie construction, many just camped, hoping their refusal to move out of the way of the trees would prevent them from being cut down and replaced by firing ranges and a mock city where police would conduct riot training. [...]
On Thursday, Governor Brian Kemp declared a state of emergency in response to protests Saturday night sparked by Tortuguita’s death, during which participants threw rocks, broke windows, and burned a police car. Kemp’s order, effective until February 9, allows up to 1,000 National Guard troops to police the streets of Atlanta.
To allies, Tortuguita’s killing was the climax of an escalation of police and legal tactics meant to stifle the wide-ranging movement to stop construction of the training center, which includes parks advocates, prison abolitionists, and area neighborhood associations. Over the course of December and January, 19 opponents of the police training center have been charged with felonies under Georgia’s rarely used 2017 domestic terrorism law.
But Grist’s review of 20 arrest warrants shows that none of those arrested and slapped with terrorism charges are accused of seriously injuring anyone. Nine are alleged to have committed no specific illegal actions beyond misdemeanor trespassing. Instead, their mere association with a group committed to defending the forest appears to be the foundation for declaring them terrorists. Officials have underlined that an investigation is ongoing, and charges could yet be added or removed.
Lauren Regan, an attorney who is the executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center, which will represent some defendants, said the charges are legally flimsy and designed to scare movement supporters. “It’s so next time a vigil happens, mom or the school teacher or the nurse — or someone that has higher risk of randomly getting arrested — is probably going to think twice about going,” she said. “They’re going to use this to continually vilify and criminalize the wider movement,” added Franklin.
Georgia’s terror law passed in response to high-profile mass shootings including the 2015 massacre of nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, by white supremacist Dylann Roof. The 2017 law expanded the definition of “domestic terrorism” from its original designation as an act intended to kill or injure at least 10 people to one encompassing a range of property crimes. Critics at the time, including the Georgia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that the law was bound to be used against protesters and to stifle free speech. The charges validate civil liberties’ groups concerns and offer a warning signal for lawmakers in both major parties who have repeatedly proposed federal domestic terrorism legislation as a solution to America’s epidemic of mass murder. Read more - Lire plus
The Atlanta Police Shooting Is a Warning Sign for the Safety of Environmental Activists
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Ending Fusion Center Abuses | |
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Brennan Centre 15/12/2022 - For almost two decades, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has supported the development of a national network of 80 fusion centers. Operated by states and localities, fusion centers incorporate federal, state, and local law enforcement personnel, first responders, and select private-sector representatives to collect, analyze, and distribute intelligence. While the federal government initially promoted them as hubs for sharing counterterrorism information, fusion centers quickly expanded their missions to include any crimes or hazards.
DHS provides these centers with funding, personnel, and access to federal intelligence, but it has failed to ensure that they have used these resources appropriately. As a result, fusion centers have long produced flawed analysis, abused their authorities to monitor people engaged in First Amendment–protected activities, and leaked sensitive law enforcement information. This domestic intelligence model has undermined Americans’ privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.
Fusion centers have repeatedly targeted minority communities and protest movements under the guise of counterterrorism or public safety. In their early years, they often singled out American Muslims for unwarranted scrutiny. Their bulletins have regularly painted racial and environmental justice activists as menacing threats. Fusion center reports are widely disseminated to local police and federal law enforcement, likely contributing to their heavy-handed responses to these protests in recent years. The participation of private companies, including some that have been the subjects of protests, in fusion centers raises the possibility that these operations sometimes serve private interests rather than public safety.
Fusion centers continue to be susceptible to abuse as protest movements react to events, creating new targets for unwarranted scrutiny. For example, fusion centers have amplified FBI and DHS threat warnings that falsely lump pro-choice activists together with abortion foes as potential “abortion-related violent extremists,” even though only anti-abortion militants have a history of engaging in deadly violence. As states criminalize abortion, investigations of those seeking, providing, or even just supporting access to reproductive services will fit within fusion centers’ “all crimes” remit, making it likely that fusion centers will heed law enforcement requests for assistance.
At the same time, there is little to suggest that fusion centers have provided meaningful assistance to federal counterterrorism efforts. And even as they have broadened their missions beyond counterterrorism, there is no evidence that they have contributed substantially to reducing or solving serious crime. They do, however, facilitate broad, unregulated information sharing among a variety of public and private entities with little oversight or public accountability, which poses a serious security liability that was realized when hackers breached a fusion center contractor in 2020, exposing hundreds of thousands of sensitive records from the FBI, DHS, and other law enforcement agencies. Read more - Lire plus
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A bored hacktivist browsing an unsecured airline server stumbled upon national security secrets including the FBI's 'no-fly' list | |
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Insider 25/01/2023 - The FBI Terrorism Screening Center's secret "no-fly" list just got a lot less mysterious thanks to a bored Swiss hacker exploring unsecured servers in her free time. Maia arson crimew, described by the Department of Justice as a "prolific" hacker in an unrelated indictment, said she was clicking around on an online search engine full of unprotected servers on January 12 when she accessed one maintained by a little-known airline and found the highly sensitive documents, along with what she called a "jackpot" of other information. The Daily Dot first reported on Thursday that the server, hosted by CommuteAir, a regional airline that partners with United Airlines to form United Express routes, contained among its files a redacted 2019 version of the anti-terrorism "no-fly" list.
The file "NoFly.csv," found by crimew, contains over 1.5 million entries including names and dates of birth of people the FBI identifies as "known or suspected terrorists," who are prevented from boarding aircraft "when flying within, to, from and over the United States." A second file, titled "selectee.csv" contains 251,169 entries of names of people who are subject to additional screening while flying. The lists contained alternate spellings and aliases for included individuals, making the total number of unique entries lower than the total number of included names. A spokesperson for the airline confirmed the authenticity of the files to Insider and said personally identifiable information belonging to employees was also found in the hack, but declined to answer detailed questions about the hack itself. [...]
"It's disturbing to see such information revealed to people that are not with the need-to-know for that," Kenneth Gray, a retired FBI agent who served for 24 years, told Insider. "There's a number of reasons why a person on that list may not actually be a terrorist. [...]" "Looking at the files, it just confirmed a lot of the things me, and probably everyone else, kind of suspected in terms of what biases are in that list," crimew told Insider. "Just scrolling through it, you will see almost every name is Middle Eastern." Edward Hasbrouck, an author and human rights advocate, wrote in his analysis of the documents that the lists "confirm the TSA's (1) Islamophobia, (2) overconfidence in the certainty of its pre-crime predictions, and (3) mission creep." "The most obvious pattern in the data is the overwhelming preponderance of Arabic or Muslim-seeming names," Hasbrouck wrote in an essay published Friday by Papers, Please, an advocacy group dedicated to addressing creeping identity-based national travel rules.
Though the recent news about the list has prompted a resurgence of accusations of Islamophobia levied against the FBI, the "no-fly" list has long faced criticism and legal challenges from civil rights groups over its targeting of Muslim and Middle Eastern people.
The targeting of people from Arab nations was not limited to federal restrictions on travel, as the entire nation faced a spike in anti-Muslim discrimination and hate crimes across the country following the 9/11 attacks, according to the DOJ. "It's no secret to anyone that the years following 9/11, measures that the government claimed were in the name of our national security wrongly, unfairly and discriminatorily impacted Muslims and people who appear to be Muslim," Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU's National Security Project, told Insider. "That's the very definition of bias and it appears to be the case, the list that you have continues to reflect that bias and it just shows the need for reform and change is as urgent as it ever was." [...]
"This was part of the US government's response to the tragedy of 9/11," Shamsi told Insider. "And from the beginning, we were gravely concerned about the civil liberties and rights impacts given how watchlists have been used in this country's history in the past. And, unfortunately, virtually all the things that we warned against have happened and are becoming entrenched." She added: "What that means is that we've got a massive and ever-growing watchlisting system that can stigmatize people — including Americans — as known or suspected terrorists, based on secret standards, secret evidence, without a meaningful process to challenge government error and clear their names." In the years since the original "no-fly" list was formed, it has gained official federal recognition and grown from just 16 individual names, according to the ACLU, to the 1,807,230 entries of names and aliases contained in the documents found by crimew. [...]
Despite the existing ombudsman process, Shamsi and Gray said it is difficult to navigate and remains challenging to remove your name from the list, causing substantial trouble for people who have not committed an act of terrorism. "What problem is this even trying to solve in the first place?" crimew told Insider. "I feel like this is just a very perverse outgrowth of the surveillance state. And not just in the US, this is a global trend." Read more - Lire plus
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Robots in the Age of Digital Surveillance, Digital Surveillance in the Age of Robots | |
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Stop Killer Robots 2023 - While they are still rare, robots often present police or private entities hoping to outsource some patrolling to machines with the advantage of novelty. Not many people know yet what their capabilities are or what kind of data they collect.
Take Knightscope robots, for instance, autonomous rolling machines that are already out in the world patrolling parks, malls, and parking garages. While the company makes it a point to talk about the good press the robots engender through selfies and media mentions, a more concerning element is their ability to collect a massive amount of data. In addition to video and audio, the robots are also capable of reading license plates and have wireless technology “capable of identifying smartphones within its range down to the MAC and IP addresses.”
“When a device emitting a Wi-Fi signal passes within a nearly 500 foot radius of a robot,” the company once explained on its blog, “actionable intelligence is captured from that device including information such as: where, when, distance between the robot and device, the duration the device was in the area and how many other times it was detected on site recently.”
The truth is when autonomous robots–or even autonomous vehicles–are expected to traverse the world, they must rely on an untold number of cameras and sensors to make sure they don’t bump into anything or hurt anyone. In some cases, these sensors are very explicitly deployed by authorities to conduct surveillance. That’s why the Department of Homeland Security is currently considering deploying robot dogs loaded with sensors to patrol remote swaths of the U.S.-Mexico border as part of a much larger infrastructure of border surveillance. But in other cases, the sensors and cameras that enable autonomous movement became part of the police surveillance apparatus as a kind of happy accident.
We often say, if you collect enough data about people, eventually police will come asking for it. That is certainly the case with autonomous cars which are capable of cruising around cities collecting footage from multiple angles like a roving surveillance camera. This was true of the now-on-the-road self-driving cars currently cruising through the streets of San Francisco. Reporting from mid-2022 showed how the San Francisco Police Department has already requested footage collected from those cars “several times.”
As if fleets of rolling cameras with untold amounts of video footage sitting on servers accessible to police was not enough of a privacy nightmare, what happens when all of the footage from autonomous machines becomes searchable through biometric analytics? We’re not far off. Tesla has already experimented with facial recognition both inside and outside of their vehicles.
Whether it’s an autonomous car rolling through a neighborhood, a patrol robot logging your phone’s presence in a park, one benefit robots present is their access to people without arousing suspicion that police may not be able to get. This is one major concern about household drones and robots being sold commercially. What happens If police want to search a person’s home–and rather than presenting the warrant to the homeowner, they present it to a company in exchange for remote access to a household drone or robot? Household devices like those may present a brand new scenario in which police can search homes without ever entering them–and potentially without the companies letting you know your device has been commandeered.
The rise of robotics is not happening coincidently with the exponential rise in digital surveillance. The two are inextricably linked. That means not only are robots aiding the erosion of your privacy–but the vast amount of data being collected on you is also a chief enabler in the expanded use of police and commercial robots. [...]
Proposals for armed robots, especially robot-controlled armed robots as a response to crisis situations or alerts provided by surveillance technologies are surfacing every day. In 2022, Axon had to back away from a plan to deploy remote-controlled drones armed with tasers as a solution to school shootings when a majority of its ethics board resigned as a result of the proposal. Given the rise of proposed uses of autonomous weapons systems around the world, allowing weapons–be it guns, tasers, or bombs, on remote-controlled robots and drones might just be the green light needed for authorities to start consider automating those systems. And while some robot makers like Boston Dynamics say they will never arm their robots, other popular companies like Ghost Robotics, the company working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, seems to be much less squeamish about armed robots. Read more - Lire plus
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Meta Sues Surveillance Firm That Worked with Police | |
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Brennan Center 26/01/2023 - Meta is suing a social media surveillance company that offers its services to police with promises that it can determine whether someone might be dangerous based on information collected from social media. The lawsuit alleges that Voyager Labs violated Facebook’s terms of service by creating more than 38,000 fake accounts to scrape information — including posts, likes, friend lists, photos, and comments — from more than 600,000 Facebook users. Those users included employees of nonprofits, news organizations, and government agencies, along with parents, retirees, and union members.
The charges raise concerns about who ends up using this information, and to what end. In light of repeated reports of police turning to online monitoring to target people of color and First Amendment–protected activities, the accusations against Voyager are a reminder that when law enforcement employs tools to facilitate unbridled social media surveillance, civil rights and civil liberties are at risk. Voyager has strong ties to law enforcement. The company touts these connections on its website, and they were brought into stark relief by documents obtained through the Brennan Center’s freedom of information lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department. The documents, which Meta’s legal complaint draws on heavily, revealed that the LAPD tried out Voyager’s services for four months in 2019 to assist with both real-time intelligence and investigations. The materials offer a window into how the company’s technology can be used for law enforcement and national security purposes.
Some of Voyager’s marketing pitches to the LAPD, for instance, mirror the allegations in Meta’s lawsuit: one letter it sent the LAPD advertised its ability to provide “anonymous” “traceless” data collection from social media networks using “multiple proxies” to “reconstruct[] closed profiles based on publicly available information.” In layman’s terms, this appears to mean using secret accounts that cannot be attributed to police to draw inferences from public data that users may be trying to keep private, if not secret.
But the company doesn’t stop at clandestine data collection. Rather, it claims it can use social media information to determine whether a person poses a potential risk to public safety. It bases this in part on assessing how much “passion” a person displays about a given idea. In one case study, it suggested that simply posting about “pride in... Arab heritage” can indicate dangerous “extremism.” Voyager also offers clients a Friendship Report — a “fully exportable ‘deep dive’” on the connections between users, such as who their mutual friends are, when their connection was established, and how frequently they interact.
Beyond the obvious discriminatory implications of flagging people as potential criminals based on their religious beliefs, ethnicity, or online associations, data scientists have repeatedly refuted the accuracy of these predictions. Claims that artificial intelligence can be used to gauge someone’s criminal intent have been deemed unscientific, and relying on this kind of pseudoscience to conduct police investigations can lead to real consequences for individuals who wind up in gang databases, forced out of a job, or even on trial based on flimsy digital evidence that is notoriously easy to misinterpret.
Of course, the data these companies gather is publicly available on social media platforms. Still, it is hardly the same data that police officers and other individuals could access on their own. The services offered by Voyager and others in the social media mining ecosystem allow their clients to collect and crunch far more information at a much higher speed and much lower cost than any one person could accomplish by manually checking individual profiles. And when the client is the police, the stakes are far higher, with risks including the targeting of marginalized communities and constitutionally protected activities, invasions of privacy, and a lack of public transparency. When these tools supercharge law enforcement’s access to online data, they may also supercharge the associated dangers.
Notably, the LAPD is far from the only law enforcement agency using questionable social media monitoring technologies. Last year, the FBI contracted with Babel Street, which similarly promised to collect personal information using fake accounts and analyzing online relationships — the same activities for which Meta is now suing Voyager. Given that the Brennan Center has identified over half a dozen other surveillance-for-hire companies that have either pitched their services to or contracted with law enforcement agencies, the risks can’t be ignored. Read more - Lire plus
German Constitutional Court hears case on automated data analysis by the police
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A review of The Secret History of the Five Eyes | |
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The London Review of Books 19/01/2023 - The existence of the Five Eyes wasn’t officially acknowledged until 2010, but accounts of its activities have been circulating for years. The sheer extent of the global surveillance system overseen by the US and its allies made it difficult to hide. The physical infrastructure alone operates at a Promethean scale: a network of satellite monitoring facilities shielded by radomes stretching from Point Barrow on the Arctic coast of Alaska to the Rideau River in eastern Ontario to the Hartland Peninsula on the north coast of Devon to Kojarena in Western Australia to the Waihopai Valley on New Zealand’s South Island. An NSA analyst sitting in an office in Fort Meade, Maryland, receives signals from radio interception antennae in Tangimoana and taps on subsea internet cables on the bed of the Sea of Okhotsk.
The system collects a massive volume of information: phone calls, satellite communications, emails, internet traffic, webcam images, billions of mobile phone location records and tens of billions of text messages every day. This global data collection wouldn’t be possible without the collaboration of the state intelligence agencies of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The Five Eyes members share listening posts and much of the signals intelligence they collect. A reader of a Five Eyes brief may not know which state has collected the information they’re looking at without consulting the technical data. The NSA is by far the most powerful signals intelligence agency in the world, but global surveillance is a shared effort of the Anglosphere.
The birth of the Five Eyes is usually dated to 1941, when US military intelligence officers visited Bletchley Park, bringing with them a ‘Purple Machine’ used to break encrypted Japanese communications. British cryptanalysts had already broken Enigma (though not yet the more sophisticated naval version). The Bletchley meeting became the basis for a wartime agreement between the US and UK to share codebreaking methods. In his history of the Five Eyes system, Richard Kerbaj goes back to 1938, when an MI5 officer decided to tip off the US embassy in London about a minor German plot to steal secrets from an American colonel in New York. After the culprit was arrested, another MI5 officer, Guy Liddell, travelled to the US to discuss the case with American officials and to push for more co-operation between British security services and the FBI. But as Kerbaj’s account shows, he didn’t get very far. It was the Bletchley meeting that led to the BRUSA agreement, which codified the ‘exchange and dissemination of all special intelligence derived by cryptanalysis of the communications of the military and air forces of the Axis powers’.
Many of the early efforts at transatlantic co-operation were less about intelligence-sharing than about drawing the US into the war. MI6 tried to improve links with American security officials with the help of the Canadian-born pilot turned industrialist William Samuel Stephenson. The plan was for American and British intelligence agencies to share the burden of monitoring the world by drawing up zones of influence – a version of the principle still applies today. In 1940, William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the head of the OSS, the wartime intelligence agency that preceded the CIA, visited Britain. The British wanted American money, radios and boats. Donovan’s visit led to the ‘destroyers for bases’ deal, under which Britain received American ships in return for the leases to some imperial outposts. The deal was celebrated in the UK because American support was critical to the war effort, but the US didn’t do badly out of the arrangement. Given the speed at which American naval yards were churning out ships, fifty old destroyers was a price the US could easily pay. And the land it received in return came with benefits. The bases in various outposts were later used for tracking Soviet submarines, as stations for Strategic Air Command’s nuclear weapons and for launching reconnaissance flights during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Neither Washington nor London saw any reason to end intelligence co-operation at the end of the war. Besides, the US had bigger plans. The UKUSA Agreement – the official name of the Five Eyes founding document – was drafted as a permanent replacement for BRUSA in November 1945. It became an important part of the postwar security architecture established by the US at the height of its power. What the US needed was territorial reach. Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the three colonial territories granted dominion status by Britain in 1907, were to play a significant role. In the 19th century the British Empire had compensated for the loss of most of its American colonies by expanding eastwards. Capital from London had been poured into the Anglo-settler projects in the Antipodes (and what remained of its North American possessions: in the 1840s Toronto tripled in size).
As James Belich showed in Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World (2009), more British investment went to the Australian colonies in the 1870s and 1880s than anywhere else in the world. In 1835, Melbourne had no permanent residents; fifty years later its population was almost half a million. Within two generations, Sydney grew from a village to a city of 400,000. In the 1880s, Victoria was richer and more populous than California. The settlers were building Gladstone’s ‘many happy Englands’ at a furious pace. The Anglo colonies were imagined as a transcontinental cultural system, much like the one the Mongols had built on the steppe, with the connections supplied by steamship instead of by horse. As British primacy faded, the US put these connections to use in the postwar architecture of surveillance.
Signals intelligence is supposed to be shared seamlessly among the Five Eyes members, but that’s not the way it always works in practice. The NSA automatically receives the feed from other stations, but sometimes withholds what it knows. On occasion it takes in intelligence from another Five Eyes country and then reclassifies it as NOFORN, revoking the access of the ally that originally collected it. The greatest hits of Anglo-American intelligence work are well known: the NSA’s monitoring of Egypt and Syria, the 1953 coup in Iran, a failed attempt at a redux in Syria in 1957, the Anglo-American operation to tunnel under East Berlin and tap its telephone lines, covert support for the mujahedin in Afghanistan, the false claim about the existence of Iraqi WMD. Kerbaj adds little to the histories of these cases. But his account contains useful information on some of the ruptures in the alliance. Read more - Lire plus
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In Guantanamo cases, is the government trying to profit from torture? | |
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The Hill 11/01/2023 - [...] President Obama officially ended the CIA torture program and formally repudiated the legal reasoning that justified it. President Trump promised to bring back torture but was soundly rebuffed — including by then-House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — and never did. For his part, President Biden twice has publicly affirmed the United States commitment to the prohibition on torture and “pledge[d] the full efforts of the United States to eradicate torture in all its forms.”
Hoping that what happened in the military commissions was a grave error resulting from lax oversight, the senators wrote to the Attorney General, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of State seeking clarification. The Department of Justice responded by explaining that, while it agrees torture-tainted evidence is prohibited in some instances, it might not be in others and so the department would wait for aspects of the issue to play out in the commissions and “articulate its position in future fillings.”
That ambivalent response has had foreseeable consequences: There are now multiple cases pending before U.S. courts raising questions that should not need asking — such as whether torture-obtained evidence can be used when sentencing a defendant in the military commissions; whether such evidence can provide part of the justification for referring criminal charges against the person who was tortured; and to what extent the government can admit evidence discovered as a result of statements extracted through torture, even if not the statements themselves. We are among a group of scholars, former United Nations Special Rapporteurs on torture, retired military and intelligence officers, and human rights advocates who have filed friend of the court briefs in several of these cases.
Up to now, the government has come down on the wrong side of these questions, whether affirmatively or by trying to duck the issue. When it comes to an obligation so fundamental — respect for the prohibition on torture — the latter is no better than the former. The good news is that it isn’t too late to change course. All it requires to get this right is take a step back, stop searching for wiggle room where none exists, and follow the law. Read more - Lire plus
Top UK Court Takes CIA Detainee's Case Against British Intel
Guantanamo Is Who and What We Are as Americans
Witness Against Torture: 21 years later, Guantánamo is still open — and we are still protesting to shut it down
British ex-Guantanamo detainee dedicates his life to other prisoners
Guantanamo: Covid-19 cases rise to one-third of detainee population, report says
TAKE ACTION: Release cleared men from Guantánamo
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Free Julian Assange: Noam Chomsky, Dan Ellsberg & Jeremy Corbyn Lead Call at Belmarsh Tribunal | |
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Democracy Now! 23/01/2023 - Former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, famed linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky and others gave testimony Friday at the Belmarsh Tribunal in Washington, D.C., calling on President Biden to drop charges against Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks founder has been languishing for close to four years in the harsh Belmarsh prison in London while appealing extradition to the United States. If convicted in the United States, Julian Assange could face up to 175 years in jail for violating the U.S. Espionage Act for publishing documents that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Friday’s event was held at the National Press Club and co-chaired by Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman. We spend the hour featuring compelling excerpts from the proceedings. Read more - Lire plus
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Rights groups ask Sri Lanka to free student arrested for protests | |
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Al Jazeera 18/01/2023 - Human rights groups have urged Sri Lanka to release a prominent student activist who was arrested five months ago during anti-government protests triggered by the country’s worst economic crisis. Wasantha Mudalige, who is being held without charges under a harsh anti-terrorism law, was brought before a magistrate in Colombo on Tuesday who ordered him to be remanded until January 31.
Seven human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, said under the powerful Prevention of Terrorism Act, which has been used since 1979, courts routinely deny bail if it is opposed by the attorney general. Mudalige is the convener of the Inter-University Students’ Federation and was involved in months of anti-government demonstrations last year. The protesters demanded wide-ranging reforms to resolve the economic crisis that caused severe shortages of essential goods, fuel and medicine.
The protests culminated in the flight and resignation of then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa after thousands of people stormed his residence in July. His successor, Ranil Wickremesinghe, initiated talks with the International Monetary Fund for a bailout package that is contingent on reforms and debt restructuring. Wickremesinghe’s government also gave sweeping powers to the authorities to crack down on the protests, arresting many activists. Rights groups say the military has sought to curtail protests through intimidation, surveillance and arbitrary arrests since Wickremesinghe took office in July.
Many of those arrested have been released on bail, but the rights groups say authorities have used extraordinary powers to keep Mudalige in detention without producing any evidence of his “involvement in terrorism”. The groups said in a statement on Monday that for much of the time, Mudalige has been held in “solitary confinement and poor conditions, which can violate the prohibition on torture or other ill-treatment under international human rights law”. Read more - Lire plus
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Erdoğan does not permit workers to strike on grounds of ‘national security’ | |
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Nordic Monitor 25/01/2023 - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan again prohibited workers from going on strike for reasons of “national security” with a decision published in the Official Gazette on Tuesday, making it the 20th strike that his government has banned since 2003. Erdoğan announced that the strike called by the United Metal-İş Union at the European multinational Schneider Electric Company in the Çayırova district of Kocaeli province was postponed for 60 days, since it was seen as posing a threat to national security.
The workers and the company could not come to an agreement in their collective bargaining negotiations, and the union decided to call a strike. Political observers criticize the fact that the president decides to allow or prohibit strikes on the local level, claiming that this is an indication of one-man rule. According to the Turkish constitution, the right to strike is protected, but since 1963 the state has had the right to ban or postpone walkouts. Without doubt the government that has banned the most strikes so far has been run by Erdoğan. A total of 20 decisions to go on strike that involved 250,000 workers were vetoed by the government. [...]
It looks as if Erdoğan’s approach to strikes has changed over time. Serving at the time as the Istanbul chair of the now-closed Welfare Party, Erdoğan in 1988 supported a strike by printing press workers and wore a smock with words of that support printed on it. A photograph taken during the strike was used in party publications as proof of Erdoğan’s favorable view of the workers. Visiting the workers on the 28th day of the strike, Erdoğan also signed the workers’ memorial book. “In our country, especially after 1980, the governments are indifferent to workers’ rights and human dignity. As a requirement of our religion, we consider it a duty to be with them,” he wrote. Read more - Lire plus
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NEW Canada must repatriate all Canadians detained in NE Syria now!
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On Jan. 20, 2023, Federal Court Justice Henry Brown ruled that Canada must repatriate Canadians illegally and arbitrarily detained in northeast Syria. Brown wrote in no uncertain terms that the government was in breach of section 6 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom – guaranteeing all Canadians the right to enter, remain in, and exit Canada – and must act “as soon as reasonably possible” to bring Canadians home.
Given the long delays taken by the government to repatriate Canadians so far, it’s important to send them a strong message to act quickly. Every day the government fails to bring these Canadians home, it places their lives at risk from disease, malnutrition, violence, and ongoing military conflicts, including bombing by Turkey’s military. United Nations officials have even found that the conditions faced by Canadians in prison are akin to torture. Please click and send a letter to urge the federal government to repatriate all Canadians illegally and arbitrarily detained in northeast Syria without delay.
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20 years of fighting deportation to torture: Justice for Mohamed Harkat Now! | |
Take Action for Justice for Hassan Diab! | |
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Since the Taliban takeover of a year ago, Canadian aid organizations have faced barriers in sending aid to Afghanistan due to Canadian sanctions and a restrictive interpretation of the Canadian Criminal Code’s anti-terrorism provisions. This is despite the US, the UK, the EU countries and even the UN taking action to ensure sanctions do not interfere with crucial humanitarian assistance.
ICLMG has teamed up with other Canadian organizations to call on Prime Minister Trudeau and the Canadian government to act immediately to remove barriers to the provision of humanitarian assistance. This includes ensuring that sanctions and counter-terror finance and criminal law restrictions do not impede the provision of lifesaving humanitarian aid. This issue isn’t limited to Afghanistan, either, which is why we are also asking the government to address the long-standing issue of ensuring that anti-terrorism laws and sanctions do not interfere with humanitarian assistance. Version française
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Canada must protect encryption! | |
Canada’s extradition system is broken. One leading legal expert calls it “the least fair law in Canada.” It has led to grave harms and rights violations, as we’ve seen in the case of Canadian citizen Dr Hassan Diab. It needs to be reformed now.
Click below to send a message to urge Prime Minister Trudeau, the Minister of Justice and your Member of Parliament to reform the extradition system before it makes more victims. And share on Facebook + Twitter + Instagram. Thank you!
Regardez la vidéo avec les sous-titres en français + Agir
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Protect our rights from facial recognition! | Facial recognition surveillance is invasive and inaccurate. This unregulated tech poses a threat to the fundamental rights of people across Canada. Federal intelligence agencies refuse to disclose whether they use facial recognition technology. The RCMP has admitted (after lying about it) to using facial recognition for 18 years without regulation, let alone a public debate regarding whether it should have been allowed in the first place. Send a message to Prime Minister Trudeau and Public Safety Minister Bill Blair calling for a ban now. | |
OTHER NEWS - AUTRES NOUVELLES | |
July to December 2022 - Juillet à décembre 2022 | |
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In case you missed it, we've published our biannual summary of activities last month. Here are the legislation and issues we worked on from July to December 2022:
- Bill C-20, Public Complaints and Review Commission Act
- Bill C-26, An Act respecting cyber security & amending the Telecommunications Act
- Bill C-27, Digital Charter Implementation Act, 2022
- "Online harms" proposal
- Countering terrorist financing & prejudiced audits of Muslim charities
- International Assistance and anti-terrorism laws
- Justice for Dr Hassan Diab & reform of the Extradition Act
- CSIS accountability and duty of candour
- Facial Recognition Technology (FRT)
- Canadians detained in Northeastern Syria
- Justice for Moe Harkat and abolish security certificates
- Canada’s armed drone purchase
- Listing of Iranian Canadians
- Ongoing No Fly List problems
For more details on each issue, click here. And here are the issues we plan to work on in the first half of 2023:
- Advocating for changes to anti-terror laws that prohibit Canadian organizations from providing international assistance in Afghanistan and other regions in need;
- Ensuring that the Canadian government’s proposals on “online harms” do not violate fundamental freedoms, or exacerbate the silencing of racialized and marginalized voices;
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Protecting our privacy from government surveillance, including facial recognition, and from attempts to weaken encryption, along with advocating for privacy law reform;
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Fighting for Justice for Mohamed Harkat, an end to security certificates, and addressing problems in security inadmissibility;
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Ensuring Justice for Hassan Diab and reforming Canada’s extradition law;
- The return of the 40+ Canadian citizens indefinitely detained in Syrian camps, including more than 20 children;
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The end to the CRA’s prejudiced audits of Muslim-led charities;
- Pushing for Canadian government action on behalf of Iranian Canadians negatively and unjustly impacted by the US terror listing of the IRGC;
- Greater accountability and transparency for the Canada Border Services Agency;
- Greater transparency and accountability for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service;
- Advocating for the repeal of the Canadian No Fly List, and for putting a stop to the use of the US No Fly List by air carriers in Canada;
- Pressuring lawmakers to protect our civil liberties from the negative impact of national security and the “war on terror”, as well as keeping you and our member organizations informed via the News Digest;
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And much more! Read more - Lire plus
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Les opinions exprimées ne reflètent pas nécessairement les positions de la CSILC - The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the positions of ICLMG. | |
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THANK YOU
to our amazing supporters!
We would like to thank all our member organizations, and the hundreds of people who have supported us over the years, including on Patreon! As a reward, we are listing below our patrons who give $10 or more per month (and wanted to be listed) directly in the News Digest. Without all of you, our work wouldn't be possible!
James Deutsch
Bill Ewanick
Kevin Malseed
Brian Murphy
Colin Stuart
Bob Thomson
James Turk
John & Rosemary Williams
Jo Wood
The late Bob Stevenson
Nous tenons à remercier nos organisations membres ainsi que les centaines de personnes qui ont soutenu notre travail à travers les années, y compris sur Patreon! En récompense, nous nommons ci-dessus nos mécènes qui donnent 10$ ou plus par mois et voulaient être mentionné.es directement dans la Revue de l'actualité. Sans vous tous et toutes, notre travail ne serait pas possible!
Merci!
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