Making up ‘Terror Identities’: security intelligence, Canada's Integrated Threat Assessment Centre and social movement suppression

Abstract

Drawing on analysis of government records obtained using Access to Information Act (ATIA) requests, we examine policing and surveillance projects developed in preparation for three mega-events that recently took place in Canada Á the 2010 Winter Olympics, the G8/G20 meetings and a scheduled (but cancelled) North American Leaders Summit. Based on an investigation of 'Threat Assessment' reports produced between 2005 and 2010 by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), we discuss transformations within Canada's anti-terror intelligence networks including the establishment of Integrated Security Units (ISUs) and the Integrated Threat Assessment Centre (ITAC) which resemble intelligence 'fusion centers' in the United States. These organisations became the knowledge-producing hubs for the classification and categorisation of national security threats. Examining shifts in ISU and ITAC Threat Assessments, we demonstrate how knowledge construction practices in security intelligence networks produce new categories of threat. Specifically, we focus on the newly constructed notion of 'multi issue extremism' (MIEs). Exploring the deployment of MIEs as a category of national security threat, we show how intelligence agencies have blurred the categories of terrorism, extremism and activism into an aggregate threat matrix.

Security Traps and Discourses of Radicalization: Examining Surveillance Practices Targeting Muslims in Canada

“…In Canada, there has been a substantive growth in the field of security and security governance (Murphy 2007;Monaghan and Walby 2012a). One of the major areas of security proliferation has been the growth of public sector security spending: in the decade after 9/11, an additional $92 billion (CAN) in national security spending has been allotted over and above the amount it would have spent had budgets remained in line with levels before September 2001 (Macdonald 2011).…”

“…For Muslims in Canada-and other Western countries-the risks of profiling, harassment, and criminalization are immediate (Awan 2012; see also Elghawaby 2013). Additionally, proliferating apparatuses of surveillance present a significant "chilling effect" across the social field (Boycoff 2007;Deflem 2008), particularly social movements at odds with government policies (Monaghan and Walby 2012a). Worse, the reliance on surveillance practices as the materiality of security traps represents a potential "boomerang effect" (Foucault 2003;Graham 2010) where the policing of Western societies become more militaristic, borrowing heavily from the "cultural turn" (Gregory 2008) in counter-insurgency knowledge developed through imperial warfare (see also Gonzales 2012).…”

“…Contra the claims of Canadian security governance agencies who warn of mounting threats posed by radical Muslims like those associated with "Toronto 18"-but also domestic protest groups, such as environmentalists (Monaghan and Walby 2012a) and indigenous people (Crosby and Monaghan 2012)-security scholars have pointed out the challenges to carrying out coordinated terrorist attack in North America, making the risk of large-scale attacks very remote (Brooks 2011;Vidalis 2009;Wolfendale 2006). In Canada, the threat of coordinated terrorism attacks causing mass civilian casualties is even less serious.…”

Bent into Security: Barrister Contribution to a Skewed Order in Two Terrorism Prosecutions in Australia

“…29 Sources and methods of information interception may remain opaque, non-contestable information or criminal intelligence may be entered into evidence and verified by closed tribunal or ministerial fiat. 30 In precaution there is a normalization of derogations from publicity, equal contest, and the presumption of innocence, a set of derogations that are consistent with the institutional interests of security intelligence.…”

Undercover Research: Corporate and police spying on activists. An introduction to activist intelligence as a new field of surveillance.

“…The monitoring and labelling of dissent is seen as a prerequisite for strategies to hinder civil society activities through ridicule, stigma, and silencing (Ferree 2004). Recent work has highlighted how state agencies identify targets by constructing them as such (Manning 2012;Brodeur et al 2003;Brodeur 1983Brodeur , 2007, and has shown that such constructions are shaped not only by, for example, ethnicity, class, religion or other characteristics of potential candidates, but also by the organisational structure of policing agencies (Monaghan and Walby 2012;Monahan and Palmer 2009;Cunningham 2004). The Church Committee Report (1976) illustrates this in great detail, documenting the FBI Counter Intelligence Programme (COINTELPRO) to undermine and 'neutralise' groups considered an 'enemy of the state' and the dangers of questionable activities justified by such intelligence morality (Churchill and Vander Wall 1988;Churchill 2002;Glick 1999;Donner 1990;Gelbspan 1991;Leonard and Gallagher 2015;Cunningham and Noakes 2008;Boykoff 2007).…”