CBSA Document Dump: Interesting ATIP finds
BLOG POST posted on February 16, 2012 by infil00p
The CBSA has been listing their ATIP responses for a while now, and this means that I was able to receive existing responses for free. We have files detailing the CBSA's Intelligence Gathering practices, which include information on targets and how they spy on them. The information is quite extensive, and I can't cover it all here, but I'm still going to try regardless.
The first file we have is related to the CBSA entering Women's Shelters to deport people from Canada. This has the basic information that was directly related to the case where the CBSA were entering Womens Shelters in Toronto. The second file is a file that appears to be from Atlas, whih is the CBSA Intranet. This is similar to the RCMP INFOWEB, except that it seems to be more about convincing the CBSA employee that they're doing the right thing, where I haven't seen anything like this from a document from INFOWEB. This seems to be a rough survey of all of ATLAS, and has information from the Intelligence and Targeting Operations.
The main document that we have is the CBSA Enforcement Manual. The manual is 1270 pages in length and is what the CBSA enforcement officers have to read. This is an extremely large manual and there is currently no text search available, which makes this difficult to read. That being said, it seems that both hate literature and obscenity are part of the Intelligence Section. This isn't as clearcut as it sounds, since the sections are really vague and fucked up, as well as the obvious. For example, the CBSA is mandated to prevent goods of a treasonous nature or goods of a seditious nature, which can include certain pieces of Anarchist literature. In addition to this, there is the fact that under the Criminal Code the CBSA is out to prevent obscenity from entering into Canada. However, it doesn't state what obscenity is exactly. It does cite the Little Sister's Bookstore Supreme Court of Canada case.
There are intelligence reports featuring the MV Sun Sea, the importation of Khat, and other border enforcement information. The last file is about the CBSA complaints system, or lack of complaints system. What's strange is that it's comparing something called the IG to SIRC. For those of you who don't know what SIRC is, SIRC is the Security Intelligence Review Committee, and the mandate of SIRC is to review the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
The Enhanced Complaint Mechanism appears to be a Public Safety Canada document, not a CBSA document itself and it goes into complaints against CSIS. The good news from SIRC is that out of all the complaints they reviewed over the past few years, very few (almost none) of them came from the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) or the RCMP. This is most likely because if you aren't already looking into Canadian National Security matters, you would have no fucking clue that CSEC even exists. This document mentions the Mohamed Harkat case and states that CSIS was indifferent to whether the information that it received came from torture or not. Given the fact that Mr. Vic Toews is perfectly OK with torture, this isn't surprising anymore.
Following the SIRC document, which should piss people off is the Commission of Police Complaints documentation which discusses complaints against the RCMP, and information on information shared between the CBSA and the RCMP and their working relationship, or how it is supposed to work.
In addition to that is new information about the Intelligence Branch of Transport Canada. Until now, I wasn't aware that Transport Canada, the people who mandate the "Please buckle your seatbelt" videos on Air Canada and Westjet and the "Liferafts are located on the sides of the vessel" on the SeaBus gather and analyze intelligence. They get intel from the Canadian Coast Guard, DND Intelligence, CSE, RCMP, CBSA and CSIS. It's getting increasingly clear how completely fucked up the web of government agencies that are sharing information is, and based on these documents, as well as the Anti-Olympic documents I've obtained earlier that the Government of Canada may have profiles on everyone in over a dozen different databases strewn all over the place.
This is literally a treasure trove of documents on the Canadian Surveillance State and unfortunately I don't feel that I'm fully qualified or have the time to devote to this particular file. It is definitely shocking how many agencies do spy on Canadians, it makes you wonder why people like Vic Toews want to spy on us even more. As usual, here are the documents:
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