Posted: 08/06/2013 5:14 pm
Listening to our phone calls, monitoring our Internet searches, reading our emails, trawling our social media accounts. These things are not only possible, but thanks to government fear mongering feeding our increased tolerance for supervision in a post-9/11 world, they’re also entirely legal.
In Canada, government data mining is administered by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) -- a top-secret federal agency that reports directly to the Minister of Defence, employs over 2,000 people, and operates with an annual taxpayer-funded budget of nearly half-a-billion dollars.
Armed with enough raw computing power to process boundless amounts of information, this “NSA-North” is free to intercept and cultivate all metadata -- essentially a record of who we know, and how well -- coming through the country in order to map out our social networks, patterns of mobility, professional relationships, and even our personal interests.
In conjunction with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) -- Canada’s better-known intelligence agency responsible for disseminating and responding to perceived threats to national security -- CSEC is able to employ this metadata in order to determine which groups and individuals may pose a threat to domestic security.
Unfortunately, the disturbing lack of public oversight -- all CSEC operations are monitored by a single retired judge whose findings are all confidential -- gives the federal government license to deploy their extensive surveillance apparatuses against any and all domestic groups which dare to challenge the status-quo.
As a new report on documents released under the Freedom of Information Act highlights, under the mandate of the Harper Administration, law enforcement and intelligence agencies are increasingly blurring the line between genuine fundamentalists and average citizens -- people whose “terrorist activities” include organising petitions, attending protests, and generally expressing dissension.
Moreover, the report emphasises the fact that agencies such as CSEC and CSIS now view activist activities such as blocking access to roads and buildings as “forms of assault,” while media stunts like the unfurling of banners, non-violent sit-ins, and peaceful marches are now deemed “threats” or “attacks.”
Aboriginal rights advocates, unions, anti-capital factions, countercultural institutions, alternative media outlets, and with increasing fervour, environmental organisations -- they all get lumped together under the category of “terrorists” in order justify the widespread monitoring, detaining, and at times imprisoning of Canadian citizens expressing dissent.
