Can you redact an entire province?

BLOG POST posted on December 12, 2011 by infil00p

→Dominion Stories

Recently Martin Lukas and Tim Groves exposed the Aboriginal Joint Intelligence Group, which is a part of the RCMP's Criminal Intelligence branch. The article in the Dominion goes over the general information, but has the source documents, unlike other stories. I feel that it's worth picking out parts of the document and seeing how the JIGs are connected, and to get the local Vancouver story if possible.

Right at the table of contents on Page 4, you see a gap in the table of contents for British Columbia. The article that Tim and Martin has an error where it says that there were 18. The fact is that there's 18 that we know of, and that based on the typeface, there's probably closer to 23 First Nations Groups that are hotspots, with approximately four or five in British Columbia alone.

The exemptions used on the document also make things extremely interesting. It appears that the ATIP analyst who worked on this file invoked 20(1)b and 20(1)d. These refer to third-party sources, namely contracting companies such as private investigation agencies. This is purely speculation and could also refer to VANOC, since both VANOC and the Olympic Resistance Network are present in the acronyms on Page 8 of the document.

The next major redaction of interest is on Page 12. This one invokes the most common redaction that I get in my documents, 16(1)(a)(i) about the suppression of crime, and 16(1)(a)(iii) which is actually indicates that CSIS was directly involved with redacting this part of the document. Given the fact that it's the part of the document where British Columbia is directly mentioned, it seems that CSIS is attempting currently to infiltrate First Nations communities in the Province, since the whole province has been redacted out, even though it's obvious that it's BC.

Furthermore, we can confirm without the shadow of a doubt based on these redactions on Page 14 that CSIS was in fact spying on the Olympic Resistance Network. The document then discusses what was in the Table of Contents until it gets to Page 77, which is a big "Oops" moment since it starts to mention the Cheam First Nation and the Neskonlith First Nation.

The document leads to many questions about affiliations, as well as the RCMP's colonial nature. If this was my ATIP request, I would have immediate wrote to the Information Commissioner about how ridiculous it is to redact an entire province, and invoke the CSIS act for something that is prior knowledge. I have no idea whether I would get anywhere with that logic, but the redactions are clearly ridiculous.