Protest against anti-terrorism laws in Edmonton, Alberta. Credit: Unknown.

By Matthew Behrens

After 20 years of working with the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group on issues reflecting Canada’s insidious role in perpetrating the worst 21^st century human rights abuses, I remain optimistic and hopeful. My faith is built on a key lesson that can never be learned enough: “We do,” as the late war resister David Dellinger reminded us, “have more power than we know.”

That scares the hell out of secretive state security.

While we’re rightfully concerned about each new iteration of repressive legislation and their increasingly elastic definitions of legality and morality, we seldom conclude that agents of state terror push such laws because they’re afraid of us inspiring outbreaks of democracy and resistance.

That fear is reflected in huge resources devoted to state security surveillance of social movements. During the early 1980s anti-nuclear and anti-cruise missile resistance, the RCMP was incredulous that spontaneous protests were popping up, and their search for a Soviet cell coordinating the whole movement was as fruitless as it was ridiculous. Fast forward to the pre-pandemic uprisings of 2020, and Jason Kenney, Justin Trudeau and John Horgan parroted the same notion that the Indigenous rights solidarity movement had been “hijacked” by evil outsiders.

The late civil rights leader Ella Baker once reflected that her organizer’s job “was getting people to understand that they had something within their power that they could use, and it could only be used if they understood what was happening and how group action could counter violence.”

In 1973, direct democracy and participatory politics led the planet’s leading power brokers (including members of Pierre Trudeau’s cabinet) to form the Trilateral Commission. Their 1975 report, The Crisis of Democracy,¹Michel J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington and Joji Watanuki, “The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the governability of democracies to the Trilateral Commission,” New York University Press, 1975: https://ia800305.us.archive.org/29/items/TheCrisisOfDemocracy-TrilateralCommission-1975/crisis_of_democracy_text.pdf1 shivered with the conclusion that the social movements forcing real changes in those tumultuous times resulted from an “excess of democracy” that had to be reined in by the elites’ viewpoint that “the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups.”

The Trilateral Commission concluded the dangers to “democracy” as they defined it — smooth functioning of Wall Street and Bay Street — come “not primarily from external threats […] but rather from the internal dynamics of democracy itself in a highly educated, mobilized and participant society. […] The problems of governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy. […] Needed, instead, is a greater degree of moderation in democracy.”

The fact that state agencies continually push for more secrecy and repressive tools is a testament to how scared they are of small groups of us who call their bluff, and who question their racism, threat exaggerations and incompetence. State security agencies couldn’t see a threat when a convoy of white supremacists came to overthrow the government because they were too busy trying to find links to Indigenous land defenders or Muslims or pacifists (they were also sharing information with their white supremacist brethren in the streets).

It’s helpful to reflect on our victories, however modest. Security certificates are no longer used because we made it politically impossible to do so: a regime consistently used for decades suddenly dried up. The 2007 Charkaoui Supreme Court of Canada decision was a landmark moment in which stigmatized, demonized, racialized, securitized human beings finally had some of their humanity recognized — they had Charter rights like the rest of us. That was the result of years of organizing and sticking to our principles.

A few years after Charkaoui, the head of CSIS lamented our role in turning these men into “folk heroes.” While this campaign showed we can seriously restrain state power, it also revealed how the hydra drew a few more heads, employing security certificate precedents to systematically integrate secret hearings into the inadmissibility stream for refugees and immigrants.

When we organized an anti-torture caravan in 2008 to support Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin, the RCMP went into overdrive. Given that the state monitors our phones, they knew one of the men was unsure about joining. The night before we started, he learned his mother had been called in by secret police overseas and asked why her son might join the caravan. This act of intimidation angered him so much that he joined for a remarkably healing event as a whole community of non-targeted people provided loving support during the weeks we spent on the road. Later, we learned the RCMP opened a major surveillance and investigation project on the caravan labeled “Criminal Act by Terrorists.”²Matthew Behrens, “RCMP labels anti-torture caravan a ‘Criminal Act by Terrorists’,” rabble.ca, May 17, 2017: https://rabble.ca/columnists/rcmp-labels-anti-torture-caravan-criminal-act-terrorists/2

Labeling our work as “terrorist” is a reminder that, despite government, RCMP and CSIS assurances that they would never consider protests to be terrorism under Canada’s anti- terrorism laws, this remains standard operating procedure³Alex Boutilier, “List of protests tracked by government includes vigil, ‘peace demonstration’,” The Toronto Star, March 29, 2015: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/list-of-protests-tracked-by-government-includes-vigil-peace-demonstration/article_21d103f1-571f-511a-a332-29668ef8623e.html3 inside Canada’s state security agencies, as it has been since long before Confederation. Those assurances didn’t stop the RCMP from monitoring Indigenous rights groups, like Idle No More, as alleged security threats under Project Sitka.⁴Matthew Behrens, “Trudeau’s Trumpishness bulldozes Indigenous rights,” rabble.ca, November 23, 2016: https://rabble.ca/columnists/trudeaus-trumpishness-bulldozes-indigenous-rights/4 Indeed, this equation of protest with terrorism is so ingrained within state security culture that no one even thought to redact the phrase from the caravan surveillance documents.

Ultimately, ICLMG and member groups show that principled resistance and a refusal to compromise on what’s right makes a difference. Far too many organizations still deal out members of the communities they are supposed to represent in the Good Muslim/Bad Muslim dichotomy. But the refusal to be afraid has marked ICLMG with Roch, Monia, and now with Xan and Tim.

I fondly recall an introductory meeting with someone who had borne the brunt of a decade of horrific terrorism slander as they related their case to Tim and Xan. Neither batted an extra eyelash. They listened, they asked questions, and they asked what they could do to help. We can learn a lot from that.

Matthew Behrens is a writer and social justice advocate who works with the targets of state security repression.

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Footnotes

• 1
  Michel J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington and Joji Watanuki, “The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the governability of democracies to the Trilateral Commission,” New York University Press, 1975: https://ia800305.us.archive.org/29/items/TheCrisisOfDemocracy-TrilateralCommission-1975/crisis_of_democracy_text.pdf
• 2
  Matthew Behrens, “RCMP labels anti-torture caravan a ‘Criminal Act by Terrorists’,” rabble.ca, May 17, 2017: https://rabble.ca/columnists/rcmp-labels-anti-torture-caravan-criminal-act-terrorists/
• 3
  Alex Boutilier, “List of protests tracked by government includes vigil, ‘peace demonstration’,” The Toronto Star, March 29, 2015: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/list-of-protests-tracked-by-government-includes-vigil-peace-demonstration/article_21d103f1-571f-511a-a332-29668ef8623e.html
• 4
  Matthew Behrens, “Trudeau’s Trumpishness bulldozes Indigenous rights,” rabble.ca, November 23, 2016: https://rabble.ca/columnists/trudeaus-trumpishness-bulldozes-indigenous-rights/

FLICKR/Kate Kehoe

By David Lyon

The International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group (ICLMG) was founded in response to the aftermath of 9/11, with its global search for terrorists, facilitated in part by massive surveillance initiatives. During the next few years, what was then known as The Surveillance Project, at Queen’s University in Kingston, began a fruitful partnership with the ICLMG, initiated by Roch Tassé, the group’s first National Coordinator. The concern with state and especially security surveillance was maintained throughout several major research projects and ensuing publications.

At Queen’s, we were excited to be working with an organisation devoted to maintaining civil liberties in Canada and to blowing the whistle when such liberties were undermined through inappropriate surveillance activities. The need for such work was patently clear from 2002 when Canadian telecoms engineer Maher Arar was detained at JFK Airport, New York and then transferred to Syria, where he was held in inhuman conditions, interrogated and tortured. Erroneous surveillance information was at the source of the problem.

Roch Tassé, representing the ICLMG, took part in research projects conducted at Queen’s University early on. Workshop contributions by the ICLMG appeared in books such as Global Surveillance and Policing: Borders Security, Identity¹Elia Zureik and Mark Salter, Global Surveillance and Policing: Borders Security, Identity, Routledge, 2005. and in articles such as “Airport screening, surveillance and social sorting: Canadian response to 9/11 in context.”²David Lyon, “Airport screening, surveillance and social sorting: Canadian response to 9/11 in context,” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 2006: https://ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/airport-screening-surveillance-and-social-sorting-canadian Other contributions include participation in Colin Bennett and David Lyon’s edited Playing the Identity Card: Surveillance, Security and Identification in Global Perspective³Colin J. Bennett and David Lyon, Playing the Identity Card: Surveillance, Security and Identification in Global Perspective, Routledge, 2008. and in Kirstie Ball and Laureen Snider’s edited collection, The Surveillance‑Industrial Complex.⁴Kirstie Ball and Laureen Snider, The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: A Political Economy of Surveillance, Routledge, 2013 The ICLMG collaborated with Queen’s University’s Surveillance Studies Centre (SSC) which formally opened in 2009.

In 2015, Monia Mazigh, ICLMG’s newly appointed National Coordinator, worked with the Queen’s SSC on the New Transparency project.⁵Colin J. Bennett, Kevin D. Haggerty, David Lyon, and Valerie Steeves, Transparent Lives: Surveillance in Canada, AU Press, 2014. In 2016, Tim McSorley, ICLMG’s next National Coordinator, became involved as a partner with the Big Data Surveillance (BDS) Project, and presented in a workshop which later became a chapter in the book Big Data Surveillance and Security Intelligence: The Canadian Case⁶David Lyon and David Murakami Wood, Big Data Surveillance and Security Intelligence: The Canadian Case, UBC Press, 2021. published in 2021. The chapter, co-authored by Xan Dagenais, ICLMG’s Communications and Research Coordinator, is entitled “Confronting Big Data: Popular Resistance to Government Surveillance in Canada since 2001”. The ICLMG also presented in the last BDS conference and participated in the final BDS report, which was published in 2022: Beyond Big Data Surveillance: Freedom and Fairness.⁷Big Data Surveillance Project, “Beyond Big Data Surveillance: Freedom and Fairness. A Report for all Canadian citizens,” Surveillance Studies Centre, Queen’s University, May 18, 2022: https://www.surveillance-studies.ca/sites/sscqueens.org/files/bds_report_eng-2022-05-17.pdf

The Big Data Surveillance project was the culmination of many years of working with partners like the ICLMG and focused on the massive growth in “dataveillance” in every area of life. We explored together the use of massive troves of data that became available as social media users unwittingly offered details of their lives to platforms such as Google, which quickly realized there was a profit to be made with the data. Today, data is also sought for policing, national security and other government-related purposes, which raises acute civil liberties as well as data justice and digital rights issues. Big Data—now augmented by AI—also plays a significant role in perpetuating social inequalities along familiar lines of class, race and gender.

Our research partnership findings have had a real impact, not only through academic publications and op-eds or media interviews, but also by contributing to the regulation of platform companies, to popular resistance to some of their most negative effects, and to the quest for alternative ways of handling data – not merely data “on” people, but “for” and “with” those whose data is collected, analyzed and acted on. While our research includes international partners, we’ve always worked to bring home the challenge of today’s surveillance to those living in Canada, through freely available and accessible writings.

The most recent report, Beyond Big Data Surveillance: Freedom and Fairness, for example, highlights the lopsided nature of information, whereby organizations “know” more and more about us, while we know less and less about what they are doing. The report refers to this as “tangled surveillance”, where very complex technologies operate in ways that are obscure to most of us and yet are only met with very weak and inadequate instruments that are unable to limit their negative power. Furthermore, the report indicates which groups are most exposed and vulnerable to “big data surveillance.”

But these are just the technical aspects of our partnership between the SSC and the ICLMG. Being involved in common projects, with like-minded people, is what makes this collaboration magical. The SSC is an academic research group; the ICLMG is a politically active coalition of civil liberties organizations. But we share the common goal of understanding and regulating surveillance which is effectively addressed by working together. It is a worthwhile, mutually beneficial relationship to which we each contribute and for which both parties are grateful. We would each be poorer without the other.

While our respective members do academic and advocacy work, together we work towards the same goals with complementary tactics, and this is what makes the partnership so meaningful and so fulfilling. So thank you, Roch, Monia and Tim—along with those who have worked with you at ICLMG— for being willing to partner with us at the SSC. Our work has been all the more grounded for what you’ve taught us, and we believe that your work has been enhanced by the results of our research.

Best wishes for the next 20 years!

David Lyon is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Law at Queen’s University, Kingston, and author of many books, most recently Surveillance: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2024).

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Footnotes

• 1
  Elia Zureik and Mark Salter, Global Surveillance and Policing: Borders Security, Identity, Routledge, 2005.
• 2
  David Lyon, “Airport screening, surveillance and social sorting: Canadian response to 9/11 in context,” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 2006: https://ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/airport-screening-surveillance-and-social-sorting-canadian
• 3
  Colin J. Bennett and David Lyon, Playing the Identity Card: Surveillance, Security and Identification in Global Perspective, Routledge, 2008.
• 4
  Kirstie Ball and Laureen Snider, The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: A Political Economy of Surveillance, Routledge, 2013
• 5
  Colin J. Bennett, Kevin D. Haggerty, David Lyon, and Valerie Steeves, Transparent Lives: Surveillance in Canada, AU Press, 2014.
• 6
  David Lyon and David Murakami Wood, Big Data Surveillance and Security Intelligence: The Canadian Case, UBC Press, 2021.
• 7
  Big Data Surveillance Project, “Beyond Big Data Surveillance: Freedom and Fairness. A Report for all Canadian citizens,” Surveillance Studies Centre, Queen’s University, May 18, 2022: https://www.surveillance-studies.ca/sites/sscqueens.org/files/bds_report_eng-2022-05-17.pdf