Tech Against Terrorism Initiative a Further Assault on Right to Conscience in Name of High Ideals
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took part in the "Leaders' Summit" of the Christchurch Call Community in New York on September 20. The Summit brought together "governments, online service providers, civil society, and partner organizations."[1] It was closed to the press.
A statement issued by the Prime Minister's Office on September 21, "Prime Minister delivers action at the United Nations General Assembly," stated, "To confront the rise of hate and violent extremism, the Prime Minister also participated in the Christchurch Call Leaders' Summit 2022, where he underscored Canada's pledge to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online. He announced up to $1.9 million in new funding over three years to Tech Against Terrorism for Phase Two of their Terrorist Content Analytics Platform (TCAP), a secure online tool that helps small and medium-sized online platforms identify and counter terrorist content."
"This funding is made available through the Canada Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence's Community Resilience Fund (CRF), which supports partnerships and innovation in countering radicalization to violence in Canada," a press release issued by Marco Mendicino, Minister of Public Safety, said.
Trudeau tweeted the same day that, "We need to confront the rise of hate and violent extremism. At the Christchurch Call Summit, I announced that Canada will fund a new tool that helps small and medium-size online platforms better identify and counter content related to terrorism and violent extremism."
Tech Against Terrorism is an initiative launched and supported by the United Nations Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate, working with the global tech industry to tackle terrorist use of the Internet while respecting human rights, Canadians are told.
The press release states that the funding targets "verified terrorist
content." The press release says, "With information so easy to access,
the Government of Canada is committed to ensuring that social media and
other online platforms are not used as tools to incite, publish and
promote terrorism, violence, and hatred." Elsewhere Trudeau also refers
to preventing "on-line harm." None of this is discussed with the public.
The additional funding provided by the Trudeau government for Phase Two of the platform will expand the capabilities to identify and assess more types of content across a wider range of platforms, and help develop a content moderation tool to assist smaller tech companies in quickly removing this terrorist content, the press release said. No information is provided as to what is meant by "more types of content."
The issue here is not whether terrorist, racist, misogynist, homophobic acts should be prosecuted and punished. Of course they should, whether committed by individuals, organizations, or the state itself. The issue is who decides, based on accepted definitions, criteria and process, that an act of an individual or organization constitutes terrorism or incitement to terrorism. Further, to conflate terrorism with violence, hatred or harm as if they were identical is a declaration that the TCAP is to be used to outlaw whatever speech state entities and powerful private interests decide. This is the "rules-based international order" in which those who make the rules decide the crime and the punishment, and claim that what are grave violations of the right to speak through arbitrary decisions over which people have no control will keep Canadians safe.
Obscenely powerful private interests such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft are given authority to decide who and what speech should be outlawed based on secret criteria over which Canadians have no control. Even who is being declared an outlaw and on what basis remains secret. There is no appeal, never mind redress for organizations and individuals defamed and wrongly accused of such crimes. To permit such designation using police powers over which the people exercise no control is a serious violation of the right to conscience. To say, as the government does, that this makes Canadians safe and strengthens the rule of law is a travesty.
Tech Against Terrorism
Tech Against Terrorism is described on its website as the second phase of a joint project between the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED) and the Swiss NGO ICT4Peace, with the support of ICT [Information and Communications Technology] industry leaders.
The TCAP website states its purpose as: "We track, verify, analyze and alert terrorist content across the internet. Assembling the world's largest database of verified terrorist content collected in real-time from verified terrorist channels on messaging platforms and apps. Supporting smaller tech platforms improving content moderation....
"The TCAP automates the swift detection and removal of verified terrorist content on tech platforms, through work by our open-source intelligence experts and AI-driven processes. The TCAP primarily focuses on small tech platforms who may not have the capacity to moderate terrorist content through automated processes, meaning terrorist content is more likely to stay online and disseminate further. The TCAP archive seeks to maintain a record of all content to protect human rights and support academic research."
The website states that since its inception, TCAP has issued 20,258 alerts to 72 tech platforms about 34 terrorist entities as of October 8.
Adam Hadley, executive director of Tech Against Terrorism, was quoted in Global News about how the TCAP operates. Hadley stated that terrorists typically share their content on smaller platforms first, and these platforms have limited capacity to handle "terrorist use" of their services. TCAP alerts smaller platforms to this content quickly to prevent its spread before it becomes viral, he said. The platforms will receive an automated alert of "verified" content and can then decide if they want to block the content.
Information is obtained through a team of open source intelligence (OSINT) analysts, and "automated scrapers" who extract data from the platforms the OSINT identify, uploading relevant links to the TCAP.
TCAP archives the content it gathers for what its website describes as "academic and human rights purposes," Hadley stated. In fact there is no access to the archives. Instead the website states that, "In the future, verified academics, researchers, and civil society members will have access to certain TCAP content to support quantitative and qualitative analysis, contributing to empirically grounded counterterrorism research to inform theoretical development and policy decisions.
"Tech Against Terrorism seeks to build bridges between public and private partners, ultimately leading to the development of a normative framework of self-regulation that can guide responses to terrorists' use of the Internet, in compliance with international law standards," it is stated elsewhere.
Such mind-numbing jargon is intended to mislead people as to what is going on. For example, what does it mean to"build bridges" between public and private partners? Behind closed doors, obscenely wealthy and powerful monopolies including Facebook, or Meta as it is now known, Microsoft, Twitter, Google, etc. are entrusted to decide who can be deprived of their right to speak and right to conscience. Under the guise of fighting "terrorism" the Canadian government has added "violence," "online hate," "ideologically motivated violent extremism," "extremism," and even "online harms."
Canadians have certainly not given their consent to the use of police powers by the state, arbitrary powers by the tech giants and now the smaller tech platforms as well, to decide who and what is to be outlawed. It is an absurdity to claim that rule of law exists in Canada in the face of the exercise of police powers, where the rulers get to decide the crime and the punishment.
Facebook, Twitter and others have been thoroughly exposed as permitting bots and fake accounts with the aim of encouraging violence and the destabilization of entire societies, as was the case with the attempts to foment counterrevolution in Cuba. It is well documented, as well as people's experience, that the algorithms Facebook uses serve the promotion and "amplification" of hatred and incitement to violence, including communal violence, racist, misogynist and homophobic content, conspiracy theories and division of the people. Those who fight for the New, those who challenge, for example, the existing narrative that the U.S./NATO forces are defending freedom and democracy in Ukraine, and much more, are banned and cancelled. While the algorithms are secret, people have lots of experience in the results they produce.
Trudeau has repeatedly declared that all who do not accept the existing constitutional order and rule of the cartel parties are "extremists." For example, he declared that he would not introduce a system of proportional representation as promised because it would allow "extremist" parties to win seats in the House of Commons.
Again and again the role of the police and security agencies in Canada in organizing, infiltrating and participating in right-wing extremist organizations has been exposed. Canada, along with the U.S. and NATO, has armed and trained the neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Their Nazi salute, Glory to Ukraine, Glory to the Heroes has been taken up by Canadian official circles. Police and security agencies are equating opposition to NATO with disloyalty to Canada and even subversion.
State violence is used against the Indigenous peoples, today especially against the Wet'suwet'en who are defending their territory and who have been subjected to RCMP violence for more than three years in their fight to stop the Coastal GasLink pipeline. All of this is carried out in the name of "national security" and the "national interest."
The anti-democratic measures being taken by Canada and others violate the right to conscience and the human right of speech, and form part of the broad anti-social offensive against the peoples' fight for empowerment and in defence of rights. They cannot and will not be accepted.
Note
1. The Christchurch Call was adopted following the terrorist killing of 51 people with many more injured in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019. The assaults were livestreamed on Facebook.
This article was published in
Volume 52 Number 8 - November 2022
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2022/Articles/MS520811.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca