#OccupyCanada, Anonymous and the Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre

BLOG POST posted on April 4, 2012 by infil00p

→Dominion Stories, →Occupy

Last year, I requested documents about the #Occupy movement in Canada, as well as documents on Anonymous from the CSIS Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre. This was to determine whether CSIS was monitoring Anonymous or the various Occupy encampments that were in Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal. It seems that they were monitoring it, but there doesn't appear to be much here that they couldn't find on the Internet.

We've had files from ITAC before about the Olympics and the G20, so it made sense to start there. The change in language from "Threat" to "Terrorism" implies that Canada considers the Occupy movement and Anonymous terrorist groups, since why else would a Terrorism Assessment Centre have documents about them.

The Occupy documents first start with the first notice regarding the call-out. It should be noted that this call-out was based on "Open Source" intelligence, which means they saw it on the Internet just like everyone else. Then there's this weird almost totally unrelated document about Muslims Against Crusades demonstrating on Rememberance Day. This follows with the old Anonymous video that threatened Rob Ford if OccupyToronto was evicted.

The final report is about the Occupy The Port protest that happened back in December. What's interesting is the fact that the RCMP is telling ITAC about the fractured nature of "OccupyVancouver", which implies that the RCMP themselves have been also monitoring OccupyVancouver and in fact this may have been part of an Occupy Joint Intelligence Group. I have already sent a request to the RCMP asking for info on the Occupy JIG, but I haven't heard anything about it yet.

The Anonymous one is shorter, but a bit more interesting. It first refers to an operation called Operation Green Rights as a threat to the Oil Sands. It also talks about nuisance activities during Guy Fawkes Day, known as Operation Injustice Awareness, the earlier mentioned Toronto video, as well as an Anarchist call-out against Stephen Harper.

This report mentions No One Is Illegal, NOWAR-PAIX and Convergence des luttes anti-capitalistes (CLAC), and draws on the previous intelligence gathered by the G8-G20ISU-JIG. Apparently there was in invite to Anons and a website filestack.ca that just has a picture of a person wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, and says the usual Anonymous motto "We Are Legion, We Do Not Forgive, We Do Not Forget, Expect Us".

It should be noted that much of this information was redacted or outright withheld by CSIS due to numerous exemptions under the Access to Information Act, however we can gain some information from this, namely that the RCMP were in fact spying on Occupy just like they spied on the G20 Defendants, and Anti-Olympic Activists in the past.

Here are the files:

• ITAC documents on Occupy - SHA1SUM: 6f0a0620fa5e3d789f63b73fe3441ac7f4bc2495
• ITAC documents on Anonymous - SHA1SUM: 2d1e8f066c80c8387c2d25cb3f0df90f85c95e4e