A view of Gaza City from the harbour on Sept. 8, 2009. (Flickr / Olly Lambert)

CTV .ca

More than 30 Canadian activists are preparing to sail for the Gaza Strip as part of a controversial international flotilla protesting Israel’s blockade of the Palestinian territory, a year after nine people were killed in a similar undertaking.

A group called The Canada Boat to Gaza says it’s raised more than $300,000 and has purchased a ship — dubbed the Tahrir, after the uprising in Egypt — which is docked at an eastern Mediterranean port they will not disclose.

At least 10 such ships are planning to set sail for Gaza later this month, carrying aid supplies and around 1,500 protesters from dozens of countries, according to organizers.

Ehab Lotayef, a spokesman with the Canadian group, said that several protesters from Australia, Belgium and Denmark will also be onboard the Tahrir, along with between $30,000 and $50,000 worth of medical supplies they hope to deliver to Palestinian doctors.

“Our main objective is that Israel should not have jurisdiction over the waters of Gaza,” Lotayef said from Montreal. “This is the least we can do to try peacefully to break the blockade they’re living under.”

When six ships carrying pro-Palestinian activists, humanitarian aid and construction supplies attempted to travel to Gaza last year they were boarded by Israeli commandos in international waters. Clashes erupted onboard one vessel, the Mavi Marmara, in which eight Turkish nationals and a Turkish-American were killed.

The incident damaged relations between Israel and Turkey and deepened international pressure on Israel to lift its naval blockade.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his government hopes to head off the new flotilla through diplomatic means, but will resort to force again if protesters disobey orders from the Israeli navy and try to reach Gaza’s shore.

Border controls

At issue is an embargo that Israel imposed on Gaza after Hamas seized power in a 2007 gun battle. Hamas had unseated Fatah in elections there a year earlier, but a number of countries including Canada, the United States and members of the European Union consider Hamas a terrorist group.

Last year, the International Committee of the Red Cross said the blockade violated international law due to its impact on Gaza’s 1.5 million residents. Israel says the blockade is necessary because it prevents Hamas from obtaining weapons with which it could attack Israeli troops or civilians.

In the wake of the Mavi Marmara raid last year Israel eased its embargo on Gaza, allowing in things like biscuits and soft drinks. Last month Egypt announced it was reopening its border crossing with Gaza, further loosening the embargo.

Kevin Neish, a retired marine engineer from Victoria who has been fundraising across Canada for the Tahrir, said he doesn’t believe those developments go far enough toward improving living conditions in the Palestinian territory.

The protesters want the blockade lifted so that more aid can flow into Gaza and its dense population can trade freely with other countries, Neish said.

“If the people of Gaza have the blockade lifted then they won’t be firing rockets at Israel,” he said from Vancouver. “They’ll have a normal life.”

Neish, 54, was onboard the Mavi Marmara when Israeli troops boarded it in the last flotilla and he witnessed the deadly clashes that ensued. He was taken into Israeli custody and says he was subjected to “brutality” before being released a few days later.

Israel has banned Neish from visiting the country for a decade, but he intends to return to Gaza onboard the Mavi Marmara again this month.

Controversial strategy

The new flotilla has gained a number of high-profile supporters including three Nobel Peace Prize laureates, author Alice Walker, a former Israeli Air Force captain and a Holocaust survivor.

But the protesters have drawn criticism from officials in Canada and abroad. In a statement last month Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird called the flotilla “provocative” and “unhelpful.”

“I strongly urge those wishing to deliver humanitarian goods to the Gaza Strip to do so through established channels,” Baird said, citing “Israel’s legitimate security concerns.”

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has indicated he would like governments to discourage activists from staging flotillas bound for Gaza because they could “escalate into violent conflict.”

The Canadian group is also reportedly the focus of a million-dollar lawsuit, filed by a dual Canadian-Israeli citizen in an Ontario court, which claims that it is providing material support to Hamas.

Lotayef would not comment on the lawsuit. But he said medical supplies the Tahrir will transport, such as baby aspirin and blood pressure medicine, are intended for hospitals and clinics in Gaza that aren’t associated with Hamas.

Organizers will provide non-violence training to those who will sail on the Tahrir, he said, and are seeking an independent organization to inspect the boat before it leaves port to show that it’s carrying no weapons.

Emanuel Adler, an expert on Israel at the University of Toronto, said the protesters’ strategy is to court international support for Gazans on humanitarian grounds, by prompting Israel to confront the flotilla.

He believes the best way for Israel to respond is by inspecting the ships for weapons and allowing them to proceed to Gaza’s shore.

“If the other side wants a response, the logical thing is not to respond,” Adler said from Tel Aviv.

But he’s afraid that domestic pressures in Israel, including from the country’s formidable military, may lead to a different outcome.

“There’s always an aspect of deterrence, that if we don’t stop the flotilla this time, they’ll send one three times as large.”

www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20110611/canadians-sailing-in-gaza-flotilla-110611/

Vint Cerf, one of the pioneers of the Internet and a vice president at Google, at a meeting of the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers in Los Angeles, October 2007. (Joi Ito)

CTV.ca

Officials from 18 countries held an impromptu, late-night meeting earlier this month at the United Nations office in Geneva, and made a decision that rattled Internet technocrats around the world.

Autocratic governments like China and Iran attended the meeting, as did several democratic ones. Despite protests by Portugal and the United States, they voted to staff a working group on the future of the Internet Governance Forum — an important theatre of discussion on matters of cyberspace — by governments alone.

The seemingly arcane move reverberated through a community of technical experts, academics and civil society groups who felt they had been unfairly excluded.

Fourteen technical organizations that help oversee how cyberspace runs wrote an open letter asking the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development (UNCSTD) to reverse its decision. Meanwhile the Internet Society, an umbrella group that helps manage technical standards online, posted a petition to its website in protest.

“A significant fuss has been kicked up about it,” said Byron Holland, president and CEO of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, which manages the .ca domain.

Even Google waded into the fray. Vint Cerf, a vice-president at the online behemoth and one of the pioneers of the Internet, added his name to the petition, alongside 2,600 others. He also attacked the UN decision in a Dec. 17 blog post on Google’s website.

“We don’t believe governments should be allowed to grant themselves a monopoly on Internet governance,” Cerf wrote. “The current bottoms-up, open approach works — protecting users from vested interests and enabling rapid innovation. Let’s fight to keep it that way.”

Eleven days later the UNCSTD buckled under the pressure, according to the Internet Society, and agreed to include up to 20 non-governmental groups.

The episode underscored what has become an uneasy relationship between organizations that have helped gently steer the Internet since its infancy, and UN bodies that came to focus on Internet governance during the 2000s as cyberspace continued to unfurl across the brick-and-mortar world.

“The root of the debate here is a philosophical difference between how you approach the future governance of the Internet,” Holland told CTV.ca by phone. “Everything that goes forward from that will have a very different tone or direction.”

Technocrats like Holland have also been hinting at a specific threat: that the UN could become a forum where authoritarian governments who are riled by the free flow of information work to put the breaks on its superhighway.

Cyber peace treaty

A second UN body — the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which manages the world’s radio frequencies and orbiting satellites — has been debating who should govern the Internet for years.

Its secretary general, Hamadoun Toure, would like to spearhead the creation of a “cyber peace treaty” to prevent the Internet from becoming another domain in which countries wage war against one another, as they do by air or at sea.

“Cyber threats can reach critical infrastructure of any country, the nerve centre of any nation,” Toure said by phone from Geneva. “A sophisticated attack can bring even the most powerful nation to its knees.”

There have been several recent examples of such events. During a dispute with Russia in 2007, Estonia was hit by widespread cyber attacks that knocked out bank, newspaper and government websites. Similar denial-of-service attacks struck Georgian media and government websites a year later as Russian tanks rolled into South Ossetia.

Then last July, the discovery of the Stuxnet worm led to speculation that a foreign government was trying use malicious software to cripple Iran’s nuclear program.

But there are a number of hurdles to creating an international agreement that would discourage such attacks. One is who would forge it.

“If we were to have a roundtable on this, you would see not only governments around it. Are we mentally prepared for that, to have around the same table private sector, civil society, consumer groups and governments?” Toure said. “That is what it will take for meeting the challenges of a cyber peace treaty.”

Risky business

Critics of Toure’s proposal worry that non-governmental groups would not be given an equal seat at the table, and point to the ITU’s plenipotentiary conference in October.

There, delegates discussed a Russian proposal to take over managing Internet domain names. Currently that task falls to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a private organization whose president and CEO was barred from attending the meeting.

Others say the ITU’s government-to-government approach is too slow and clunky to manage something as fast-moving as the Internet, or that it could pave the way for less open regimes to introduce new online controls.

“We have to be careful about what institutions take the lead,” said Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab and the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies at the University of Toronto. “The Chinas, the Irans, the Saudi Arabias of the world want to impose a territorial vision of control over cyberspace — and if the ITU got its wishes, that’s essentially what would happen.”

In future, the debate over who should govern the Internet would do well to bear in mind its success stories like Google and Facebook, said Olaf Kolkman, director of NLnet Labs and chair of the Internet Architecture Board.

If the ease of accessing an unfettered online world helped those billion-dollar corporations evolve from tiny start-ups in garages or university dorm rooms, he suggested, then closing off the Web could lead to stagnation. It might also wall off opportunities for everyone who has yet to set foot in cyberspace.

“If we can preserve the spirit of openness moving forward,” Kolkman wrote in an email, “we will see much of the innovation coming from developing countries, and the billions of people who have yet to come online but who will change the shape of the Internet when they do.”

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20101228/un-governments-future-of-the-internet-101230/

Internet users at a cafe in China.

CTV.ca

“All stuffs delivery instant after payment,” the cyber-crook has written in broken English. “I dont sell by 1 Card, if you need ask me I will give you some free.”

Below this offer, logos of HSBC, Lloyds and a few other major banks are aligned in a row. Far from acting on behalf of these financial institutions, however, the person who runs this website is selling stolen banking information in bulk to miscreants interested in defrauding their customers.

The prices for credit-card numbers range from $15 to $40 depending on the type. Buyers choose from five payment options, including Western Union. The stolen numbers are then transmitted by instant message or email.

Although they keep a low profile, similar websites abound online. Another offers TD Bank Visa Classic numbers for 10 euros apiece (just add them to your virtual shopping cart and check out). A third stocks “Canada Classic” numbers for $20 and “Canada Platinum/Gold” for $33.

Welcome to the shadowy world of cyber crime, where swindlers face such remote risks that they sell stolen information in plain view on the Web, yet their payoffs can be staggering.

In one recent case, the FBI alleges that more than 100 people in the United Kingdom, Ukraine and the United States stole US$70 million by using a strand of malicious software known as Zeus to uncover Internet users’ banking details.

No wonder business is brisk. By all accounts the industry is big and getting bigger, but exact measurements have proven elusive. Estimates of annual losses from online crime during 2009 ranged anywhere from $100 billion to $1 trillion.

“It dwarfs the size of the illegal drugs market but it’s impossible for anyone to accurately come up with numbers,” said Steve Santorelli, a former detective with Scotland Yard’s computer crime unit who now works with Team Cymru, a non-profit group that monitors Internet security.

“There’s advertising. There’s return on investment. There’s a lot of branding,” he told CTV.ca by phone from Burr Ridge, Illinois. “This is their living.”

Growing threats

Nearly two decades after the Internet’s popularity caught fire, two billion people around the world have moved online. But now there’s talk that cyberspace as we have come to know it — an inclusive, global network of networks — may be in danger from a range of threats including by online criminals and restive governments.

Legitimate Internet users jostle with ever more prolific, tech-savvy crooks. Other culprits launch political cyber attacks at the behest of governments eager to use criminal groups as proxies, according to many experts.

Adm. J. C. Harvey Jr. and Vice Adm. H. Denby Starling II cut a cake commemorating the establishment of the U.S. Navy Cyber Forces on Jan. 26, 2010. (U.S. Navy / Spec. 3rd Class Nina Hughes)

China, Russia, Israel, France and the United States have also developed “advanced” capabilities with which to wage war online, according to a 2009 report from Internet security firm McAfee.

“There’s a general climate of an arms race in cyberspace that I think is a major threat to an open Internet,” said Ron Deibert, co-director of the Citizen Lab and the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies at the University of Toronto.

“Part of that feeds into techniques of cyber crime and encourages privateering,” Deibert said. “You see many more instances of hacking and denial-of-service attacks directed at political targets” such as human rights and opposition groups.

Over the past several years, Deibert and a small clique of colleagues in Toronto, Ottawa and at Harvard have helped expose a global cyber-espionage ring, document Internet filtering around the world and dismantle a Russian criminal group that was making millions off a Facebook advertising scam.

He also advised Google after the company discovered last December that it had been targeted by China-based hackers. The attacks affected at least 20 large American companies, Google said, and allowed the perpetrators to access Gmail accounts belonging to Chinese human-rights activists.

Another major cyber attack came to light in July, when a Belarusian antivirus company discovered a new malicious computer program known as the Stuxnet worm.

It mainly infected computer systems in Iran and appeared to have been designed to target nuclear centrifuges. Those findings led to speculation that a foreign government created the virus, or hired a criminal group to do so, in an attempt to shut down the Islamic republic’s contentious nuclear program.

No silver bullet

Whether such events are driven by profit or by politics, the question of how to discourage them looms large.

“Any new technology can be misused,” said Igor Muttik, a senior architect with McAfee Labs in Slough, England. “It’s such an evolving and rapidly changing thing, governments and legislators are frequently behind.”

A number of fixes are needed, Muttik said, from educating Internet users about online threats, to creating software that will better protect them, to passing new legislation that can keep cyber criminals from stealing with impunity.

Complicating things, many of the governments who would institute those fixes are trying with greater success to rein in the Web.

Sixty countries experienced “some form of Web censorship” in 2009, twice as many as in 2008, according to Reporters Without Borders. The group singled out democratic countries such as South Korea and Australia as well as authoritarian ones like China.

“The World Wide Web is being progressively devoured by the implementation of national Intranets whose content is ‘approved’ by the authorities,” it warned in a report last March.

Similarly, Deibert believes the Internet is entering a dangerous new phase. After growing from a research tool in academic and military circles to a sort of global shopping mall, he’s convinced that a contest is now underway to determine who will control it.

“You’re finding elaborate doctrines now in how to fight and win wars in cyberspace, and proposals that would seek to re-engineer the Internet. These are coming from very powerful actors,” he said.

“People may look back at the 1990s and the 2000s as a brief window where we at least came close to this open, global commons of information and communication,” he added. “But right now we’re headed in a much different direction.”

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20101228/internet-cybersecurity-hackers-101229/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

An image from video of the February 2003 CSIS interrogation of Omar Khadr, six months after he was captured by U.S. troops in Afghanistan at age 15.

CTV.ca

When a pair of federal intelligence agents visited Guantanamo Bay seven years ago, they met Omar Khadr in a small neon-lit interrogation room and said, “I guess we’re the first Canadians you’ve seen in a while.”

“Canadians? Yeah, finally!” replied Khadr, who had been captured and detained by U.S. troops six months earlier, at the age of 15.

One of the interrogators then offered the teenager a Subway sandwich and a Coke, and asked Khadr to describe his life beginning with his earliest memory.

So begins “You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo,” a documentary film built around seven hours of grainy surveillance footage depicting Khadr’s February 2003 interrogation by a Canadian Security Intelligence Service agent and another federal intelligence official.

The Supreme Court ordered the video released to Khadr’s lawyers in 2008, but the public has only seen about 10 minutes of the footage until now.

In the full video, the interrogations begin cordially but take an unfriendly turn after Khadr apparently realizes the Canadians have come to gather information rather than help repatriate him. At one point Khadr breaks down in sobs, saying “nobody cares about me.”

The next day, interrogators continue pressing their subject about everything from his relationship with his father, to what he knows about Osama bin Laden, to how he wound up in an Afghan compound on July 27, 2002, as Taliban-linked militants fought to the death against American troops.

“I didn’t do anything,” Khadr says of the battle, in which he was badly injured. “I was in the house when the fighting started, then I didn’t have any choice.”

The U.S. government has accused Khadr of killing an American medic named Sgt. Christopher Speer by throwing a grenade in that firefight, and of supporting terrorism.

Khadr’s lawyers argue that their client’s father, a suspected al Qaeda financier who had ties to bin Laden, indoctrinated his son to take up violent jihad.

‘Bigger picture’

The 99-minute documentary paints a sympathetic portrait of Khadr as a child soldier who has lived in a legal black hole, and has allegedly endured torture by U.S. authorities since his capture in the Afghan mountains eight years ago.

Khadr, now 24, remains the youngest inmate at Guantanamo Bay and the last Western citizen imprisoned there. He is also the first to face trial by U.S. military tribunal since President Barack Obama was elected — and the first person in more than half a century to face war crimes charges for alleged acts committed as a juvenile.

As such, his saga has received ample media attention. But Canadian filmmakers Luc Cote and Patricio Henriquez wanted to pull together different aspects of Khadr’s case in the hopes of generating awareness about what they call a miscarriage of justice.

“Everybody knows a little bit of information here and there,” Cote said in a phone interview. “But when you look at it all together and you have the bigger picture, I think you understand a little bit better what’s going on.”

“We’re just trying to say, ‘Open your mind, open your heart to another point of view and perhaps you’ll learn something here.’”

To do that the film presents evidence, including a photograph of Khadr immediately after the 2002 firefight, which suggests he may have been too badly injured to lob the grenade that killed Speer.

It also scrutinizes international law regarding the case, noting that Canada has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, under whose terms Khadr would be designated a child soldier because of his age when the gunfight occurred.

Several unexpected characters plead for Khadr’s repatriation to Canada in the film. They include a retired psychiatrist with the U.S. military who assessed Khadr at Guantanamo, and a former American interrogator named Damien Corsetti who was stationed at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan while Khadr was held there.

Former detainees also make appearances, such as Moazzam Begg, who met Khadr while he was imprisoned at Bagram.

“He’s spent his entire adolescence in Guantanamo and clearly knows nothing other than that,” Begg, who now works for a human rights group in Britain, said by phone. “That’s a big stain on the United States of America, but an even bigger one on Canada.”

Political reaction

The film premiered in Montreal earlier this month, and got a strong reaction Wednesday on Parliament Hill when it was screened for MPs from the Bloc Quebecois, the Liberal party and the NDP.

Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe said the federal government “should be ashamed” for not requesting Khadr’s repatriation, while New Democrat MP Wayne Marsten called Ottawa’s treatment of Khadr “appalling.”

“This is one of the most shameful events that we’ve had in this country,” Marsten said later in an interview with CTV.ca. “The government should have been shouting from the rooftops to end this.”

The film will premiere in Toronto this week and will debut internationally next month at the world’s largest documentary film festival in Amsterdam. Amnesty International also hopes to hold screenings as far away as Hong Kong.

But the documentary’s most important audience may take in the film at Guantanamo.

According to reports, Khadr could accept a plea deal with the Pentagon as early as Monday, which would see him serve a year in a U.S. prison and seven more in Canada.

Regardless of whether a deal is struck, his lawyers say they intend to play “You Don’t Like the Truth” at trial or during his sentencing.

They have also shown Khadr the film twice. He was “initially sad at revisiting the painful experience,” Dennis Edney, one of his Canadian lawyers, wrote in an email.

Edney played the film for Khadr a second time this week and wrote that, “he was pleased to hear that people cared for him.”

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20101023/omar-khadr-documentary-101024/

An official from Sudan's National Elections Commission (left) helps a voter at a polling station in Juba, Sudan, Apr. 12, 2010. (UN Photo / Tim McKulka)

CTV.ca

In less than six months, Sudan will hold a referendum that experts say could produce a new country or spark a regional war. And as they prepare for the crucial vote, politicians from Africa’s largest country are seeking lessons from Canada.

Eight members of President Omar al Bashir’s ruling National Congress Party and three members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, which governs the country’s semi-autonomous south, visited Canada this week to learn how Ottawa conducts plebiscites.

Those two parties represent opposing sides of a now quiet civil war, which was fought mainly in the south of the country and claimed more than two million lives. (Another war in the western Darfur region has killed several hundred thousand more.)

Southern Sudan sits atop the country’s vital oil resources, and followers of Christianity and traditional African faiths there have resisted attempts to impose Islamic customs and beliefs on them by the Muslim north.

A 2005 peace agreement helped quell decades of fighting between the two sides. Under its terms, Sudanese authorities must hold a referendum by Jan. 9, 2011, to determine whether the south will secede.

Ottawa hosted the Sudanese delegation as part of an offer of “technical support” for the referendum, Foreign Affairs spokesperson Lisa Monette told CTV.ca in an email.

Over five days, the group stopped in Quebec City, Montreal and Ottawa. They heard presentations from a number of organizations including Elections Canada.

Nelson Wiseman, a politics professor at the University of Toronto, said Elections Canada is often asked to provide advice on democratic processes abroad. Canada is seen as having “a lot of expertise in electoral administration,” he said, and has participated in several hundred electoral missions overseas.

In the case of south Sudan, Ottawa hopes the delegation’s visit will make the outcome of the pending referendum “more likely to be accepted by all parties involved, to produce legitimate outcomes, and thus avoid unnecessary violence,” Monette said.

EJ Hogendoorn, the International Crisis Group’s project director for the Horn of Africa, applauded Ottawa’s offer to share its expertise on secession referendums (Quebec has held two votes on sovereignty).

“Any attempt to try to make this vote as transparent as possible — meaning that the people believe the results are in fact the will of the voters — the better it will be for stability in the country,” Hogendoorn said by phone from Nairobi, Kenya.

Sudan was the largest recipient of Canada’s humanitarian aid in 2008-2009. Ottawa has spent at least $760 million there over the past four years. That represents a “significant” financial footprint in the East African country, Hogendoorn said.

A few dozen members of the Canadian military are stationed across the south, the western region of Darfur and the northern capital of Khartoum as part of United Nations and African Union peacekeeping missions. Eighteen Canadian police officers are training local authorities, and troops deployed from nearby African states drive 105 armoured vehicles borrowed from the Canadian military.

About 60 countries are involved in humanitarian and security work in Sudan, under the auspices of the UN and the African Union. But Hogendoorn said the international community is still doing too little to help the country avoid another war.

“This is the largest threat to regional stability in Africa at the present time,” Hogendoorn said. “And if you were to compare the assistance going to Sudan to the assistance that’s gone to other war-torn countries, such as Bosnia and Cambodia, it’s not nearly as much.”

A months-old national election may hold clues about what to expect from the referendum. Bashir’s National Congress Party won the April vote — a process that election monitors from the Carter Center deemed “chaotic, non-transparent and vulnerable to electoral manipulation.”

More recently, a July report by rights group Global Witness warned that Sudan remains “alarmingly unprepared” for the referendum. Government authorities have yet to pinpoint where the new country’s borders would lie if the south opts for independence. No agreements have been reached on how to divide Sudan’s debt or share its natural resources. Meanwhile the Sudanese armed forces and the Southern People’s Liberation Army are said to be rearming.

www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20100806/sudan-comes-to-canada-100808

A group advocating for Tibetan rights protests the Toronto visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao at Queen's Park on Saturday, June 26, 2010.

A multitude of groups gathered at Queen’s Park early Saturday afternoon, from Greenpeace, who said they mustered close to 200 members, to a collection of Tibetans protesting the Toronto visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao.

When the anti-G20 Peoples First march set off, the mood was festive, even family-friendly. The main concern for thousands in attendance seemed to be how to stay dry in the rain, rather than how to stay safe.

Toronto resident Kathryn Charm, who brought her seven-year-old son Joe along, said she came to protest issues such as global poverty and environmental degradation.

“In the short-term, I’m also enormously pissed off about the expenditure of $1 billion that could have been used for so many other things,” she added. “That was what really sent me here today.”

Riot police line the demonstration route in Toronto's Queen Street West shopping district on Saturday, June 26, 2010.

The demonstrators got their first view of statuesque police in black riot gear as they passed by the heavily guarded U.S. Consulate. By the time the crowd turned west down Queen Street, the atmosphere grew more tense. Riot police were lined up down side streets and protesters began chanting “no G20 on stolen native land.”

Moments later, a group broke off from the main march and charged south through a line of police, towards the security fence and the summit. A brief stampede stopped just short of a second row of police, these ones in riot gear.

Black-clad protesters appeared at the front and tried to smash through the police line. But after a brief skirmish they were forced to retreat to the approved demonstration route on Queen Street and continued west.

Masked protesters clad in black attempt to push through a line of riot police in the direction of the G20 summit on Saturday, June 26, 2010.

Several people were injured in the altercation, according to a paramedic who declined to give his name because he was treating demonstrators without the consent of his employer.

While most of the protesters turned north at the next main intersection and returned to Queen’s Park, several hundred people attempted again to break through police lines to the south, the direction in which the summit was being held.

Jamie Getgood was resting steps from the second standoff with riot police, wearing black and carrying a gas mask. The 21-year-old University of Toronto student said he came to the demonstration because he wanted to see what the government was spending $1 billion on.

“I don’t plan on looting or rioting or anything like that. It’s just if I’m tear-gassed,” he said, explaining that his clothes were made of synthetic fibre that could help keep his skin from becoming irritated if police deployed tear gas.

Around the corner, police on bicycles had formed a circle edged by a cruiser with several broken windows, after the protesters in black backtracked quickly east down Queen Street, smashing windows as they went. (They had used the crowd and the police confrontations as a diversion to help launch their rampage elsewhere.)

Riot police surround a damaged police cruiser in downtown Toronto, Saturday, June 26, 2010.

“Get in position, they’re coming!” one of the officers yelled. Riot police soon arrived on the scene to keep people back from the damaged vehicle.

By early evening, riot police marched on Queen’s Park. The designated protest site had been declared a riot zone, barring ambulances from entering as armoured police on foot and on horseback charged through the crowd.

Sunday

The streets were eerily quiet Sunday morning. More businesses had boarded up their windows in the city’s Queen Street West shopping district. Many had posted signs saying that they were closed for the day. And there were very few pedestrians on the streets.

Police were trying to conduct “investigative searches” on as many suspected protesters as possible, roaming the downtown in vehicles or on bikes, or standing in groups on street corners in the hope of confiscating anything a person could use to cause further damage.

A woman is searched by police in downtown Toronto on Sunday, June 27, 2010.

A small group of demonstrators and reporters were waiting outside the temporary detention centre where those taken in mass arrests were being held. An hour earlier, police had used tear gas to disperse a group that had gathered to hold a vigil outside the centre.

Bridie Wyrock, a 20-year-old student from Cleveland, Ohio in a tie-dye t-shirt, had just been released and was waiting for a friend she was staying with to come through the gates.

Wyrock had been arrested Saturday evening at a demonstration in the city’s financial district and was held for 19 hours, she said. During her detention, someone came around with cheese and butter sandwiches once, and she was given water three times.

“It was like a hamster cage,” she said.

Wyrock was placed under arrest, charged with breach of the peace, mischief and obstruction of traffic, she said. But police dropped the charges before she was released.

Later Sunday afternoon, a man who gave his name as Dionysos Savopoulos was travelling on foot to the Toronto Community Mobilization Network’s “convergence space,” a hub for protesters during the anti-G20 demonstrations on the city’s west end.

He was wearing a black sleeveless T-shirt with a red bandana around his neck, and a pink bracelet around his wrist indicating he had been detained by police.

Anti-G20 protester Dionysos Savopoulos is detained for a second time by police in Toronto on Sunday, June 26, 2010.

Savopoulos said he was taken into custody with dozens of others at a protest in front of a Novotel hotel on Saturday night. His cell contained bystanders as well as protesters, he said. He was held in handcuffs for 17 hours and given three butter and cheese sandwiches and a cup of water.

“I don’t like the fear that’s been invested into the security,” he said. “I feel very intimidated.”

“There were people with the agenda to cause destruction but they were a very small minority,” he recalled, before being detained by police again minutes later.

Neighbourhood reaction

Across the street, police on bicycles had penned in a number of people who had gathered near the protesters’ headquarters to watch what was going on.

Police "kettle" or surround and detain a group of bystanders in downtown Toronto on Sunday, June 27, 2010.

One of them was Riali Johannesson, a criminal defence lawyer with blonde hair and wearing a baby blue dress, who had agreed to represent a woman taken in the Novotel police sweep.

“I’ve been speaking with the officers at the processing centre pretty much non-stop since around 11 o’clock last night, and they’re not able to give me any information as to where she is,” Johannesson said.

Another of her clients was arrested on Thursday while taking photographs downtown and was charged with assault.

“It sounds to me as though the charges won’t stand up in a criminal court” in that case, she said. “We’ll certainly be pursuing civil action.”

Further down the street, people began chanting at the 50 or so police on the street: “Leave our neighbourhood.”

Officers were subjected to a steady stream of colourful insults from less well-mannered demonstrators from the time they blocked the march from moving to the G20 security fence on Saturday afternoon.

But after the mass arrests began, the most common word hollered at police on Sunday was “shame.”

John Clarke, an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, speaks at a press conference about next month's G20 summit protests in Toronto on Thursday, May 20, 2010.

CTV.ca

On Wednesday, five organizers involved with planning the upcoming G20 protests were visited at home or at work by security officials in Toronto.

The officials identified themselves as Canadian Security and Intelligence Service agents, according to Syed Hussan, an organizer with the Toronto Community Mobilization Network, which is coordinating next month’s protests.

“It’s random targeting,” Hussan said. “We’re talking about young students, we’re talking about people who are retired.”

Each was asked about “their political work and affiliations” and their views on protest tactics, said Macdonald Scott, a member of the network’s legal team.

A spokesperson for CSIS said that the agency could not comment on anything to do with its intelligence gathering operations. But the questioning sessions appear to represent the latest episode in a game of cat and mouse between security officers and protesters in the lead up to the G20 summit on June 26-27.

For months, Toronto police have been trying with mixed results to speak with protest organizers. The network maintains that CSIS, the agency responsible for rooting out threats to Canada’s national security, is now also approaching them.

Rights issues

The network calls such encounters “police harassment,” and Hussan said the group plans to publish a list of at least 27 documented instances of them next week.

The unannounced police visits have also caught the attention of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, a legal agency that promotes respect for “fundamental freedoms.”

On Friday, the CCLA met in a private law office with the Integrated Security Unit, a hybrid of police and military forces that’s planning the enormous security operation for the international summit.

In a statement released hours later, the CCLA said it was concerned about the “unprecedented” security arrangements being planned for the G20, including “pre-summit interactions with potential protesters.”

“There are powers of the police that should not be used to undermine a legitimate and peaceful protest,” said Nathalie Des Rosiers, a CCLA spokesperson.

The CCLA is also concerned with how sonic weapons will be used during the demonstrations, and under what conditions protesters could be arrested en mass. It’s also worried about the size of the security perimeter around the summit and the creation of a “designated demonstration area.”

“The role of the police is also to protect the right of freedom of assembly, not to see this right as an impediment to the meeting or an impediment to security,” Des Rosiers said. “It’s like the Santa Clause Parade. It causes some inconvenience, but it’s a good thing.”

Meaghan Gray, a spokesperson for the Security Intelligence Unit, said that Toronto police are working on guidelines about the use of sonic weapons, which can blast audio messages or emit a painful sound that can immobilize a crowd.

Focus on causes

While many details about the summit’s security have yet to be released, protest organizers held a press conference on Thursday to outline why they want to hold demonstrations.

“After many months of planning, this is sort of our coming out party,” said Claudia Calabro, a spokesperson for the the network.

Nine independent groups who are planning to join in the protests spoke about a range of issues.

Anna Willats, an organizer with Gender Justice for All, criticized the exclusion of abortion funding from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s maternal and child health agenda for the G8.

A spokesperson for an environmental group noted that Ottawa has refused a request by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to address climate change at the G20 meeting.

Organizers were then asked about the recent firebombing of a Royal Bank branch in Ottawa. But they declined to comment on the incident.

“We’re not here to talk about what happened in another city,” said Lesley Wood, who answered questions on behalf of the network.

That firebombing took place overnight on Monday and caused $500,000 in damages. A group identifying itself as “FFFC – Ottawa” posted a video online of the bank in flames, and claimed responsibility. RBC’s funding of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games and of the oilsands prompted the attack, the group said, adding that it plans to visit Toronto in June.

But the groups involved with planning the G20 demonstrations have a peaceful reputation, according to Janet Conway, the Canada Research Chair in Social Justice at Brock University.

“They have absolutely no history of this kind, and nobody in any activist circle that I know is aware of who this group is in Ottawa,” she told CTV.ca on Friday. “If there’s some window-breaking, or some kind of violent encounter with police, this will be the work of a tiny minority if it happens at all.”

Whatever uneasiness there is among protest groups about the firebombing, organizers of mass demonstrations often agree not to publicly criticize the tactics that other activists use, Conway said, in the hopes of pushing issues they’re concerned with to the forefront.

“That’s not the main story from the point of view of the organizers,” she said. “There’s a sense that national parliaments are not reflective of popular will, and even less so at these gatherings.”

“The growing protests over the last decade reflect that all over the world.”

Demonstrators stand behind a line of riot police in Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. (Kris Krüg)

CTV.ca

While the opening ceremonies of the 20three10 Winter Olympic Games unfolded at BC Place on Feb. 12, about 1,500 people marched through Vancouver’s streets, ushering in days of demonstrations.

Those events are largely remembered with fondness among Canadian protesters because they helped push community issues, such as homelessness and unsettled indigenous land claims, onto the international stage during the Games.

“It was not just to protest the Olympics, it was about tying them to local concerns,” said Harsha Walia, who was an organizer with the Olympic Resistance Network.

“We saw a convergence of social movements,” she said. “The same thing is happening in Toronto.”

Walia added that she and and 50 to 100 other Vancouver residents plan to travel to Toronto for demonstrations against the G20 summit, which is due to be held there on June 26-27.

Activists in Toronto have been meeting for more than a year to plan mass protests aimed at the international meeting. And they say they’ve learned from Vancouver’s anti-Olympics demonstrations.

“There’s a lot of inspiration we’re sharing from there,” said Syed Hussan, an organizer with the 200-member Toronto Community Mobilization Network, which is coordinating the G20 protests. “That was a very successful model.”

Organizers created the TCMN in December to help recruit like-minded groups for the upcoming demonstrations, which are expected to draw protesters from across Canada and the United States. They’re organizing meeting places, booking transportation, setting up lines of communication and gathering food to keep demonstrators energized while they’re on the streets.

As with Vancouver’s Olympics protests, their plan is to “do the local and the global,” Hussan said. Organizers hope to connect popular causes in Toronto’s activist scene, such as poverty and migrants’ rights, with decisions being made by the world’s 20 largest economies.

“The G20 is now a mode for everyone to come together and work towards a concrete point,” Hussan said. “We’re all joining forces, and it’s going to be a major turning point for the city.”

Security concerns

Like the Olympics, a special police unit is heading up security for the G20. It’s staffed by municipal officers, Ontario Provincial Police, RCMP and the Canadian Forces. And it’s responsible for staging what’s being described as the largest security operation in Canada since the Second World War.

For two weeks in June, most of Toronto’s financial district will sit behind kilometres of fence as police work to bolster security around the Metro Convention Centre, where the summit will be held.

“An event of that international size and scope lends itself to a very significant security presence,” said Meaghan Gray, a spokesperson for the Toronto Police Service’s G20 planning team.

“We anticipate that most of the groups that want to protest will do so in a peaceful and responsible way,” she said. “We’re planning of course for any eventuality.”

Police have been trying to talk to protest organizers for the past few months, Gray said. They hope to learn more about what they’re planning, so that the demonstrations and the security operation can work together “seamlessly.”

But many organizers have refused to speak to police, and complain that they’re being harassed.

“Sometimes when you give in to intimidation, it encourages further intimidation,” said Macdonald Scott, an immigration consultant and a member of the protesters’ legal team. “Nobody in Canada is under obligation to speak to the police, unless under arrest.”

Scott travelled to Vancouver during the Olympics to provide legal support during the demonstrations there. In Toronto, he said 40 to 60 “legal observers” will be on the streets to protect protesters. At least six other legal staff will work in an office away from the security zone, and there will be two-dozen lawyers on call.

The job of the legal team will be “to monitor police misconduct,” but also to provide “proper defence” to those who are arrested, and to bail protesters out of jail if need be, he said.

Organizers are also concerned that the scale of the security operations could discourage people from attending planned rallies.

“It’s a fear tactic — people are being scared to shut up,” Hussan said. “And I think the only way to organize in that is to have hope, share, and build community.”

Changing tactics

The expansive security operation being staged for the G20 summit is part of an international trend, according to Lesley Wood, a professor at York University who studies globalization and social movements.

“At any of these demonstrations, the vast majority of people are not arrested or hurt in any way,” she said. “But the optics of it are that it’s going to be a war.”

“The tactics of the protesters are not really radicalizing, and yet you’re seeing this constant militarization of the policing.”

The focus of mass protests in North America has evolved too, she said. During the height of anti-globalization demonstrations from 1999 to 2001, activists took aim at multinational corporations, and the idea of “summit-hopping” was in vogue.

Today, big protests tend to be more concerned with attacking governments for failing to deal with local problems, and with building networks of groups that want to address those problems.

Since the 1960s, social movements have come in waves that typically last a few years, she said. The fallout from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks largely quashed the protest movement that had been on an upswing on the continent since 1999.

“I think that may have worn off,” she said. “There hasn’t been a lot of mobilization against the economic crisis. Looking at history, one would expect much more outrage.”

“Perhaps this is going to be the time when it emerges.”

A boy sits on a piece of rubble somewhere in or near Gaza City, February 2009. (Andreas H. Lunde)

CTV.ca

After flying to Cairo and bussing a few hundred kilometers eastward, Montreal engineer Ehab Lotayef will try to enter the Gaza Strip from a border crossing at Rafah, Egypt, on Dec. 28.

For months, the 52-year-old Canadian-Egyptian has been helping to organize a massive trip to the Palestinian territory that will include some 1,300 people from 42 countries.

The trip, which is the brainchild of American peace group Code Pink, has won celebrity endorsements from the likes of Alice Walker, Oliver Stone, Gore Vidal, Naomi Klein and Alexandre Trudeau.

Organizers hope to hold a demonstration in Gaza City on Dec. 31, alongside thousands of local residents, to commemorate the war last year and to demand Israel lift a blockade against the movement of goods in and out of the territory.

“It’s an accumulated problem,” Lotayef said by phone. “No one is really supporting the Palestinians’ rights as they should be, to guarantee peace for both sides.”

Lotayef’s concern has been echoed by a number of rights groups and United Nations agencies over the past year, which have called attention to worsening living conditions inside the 10-by-40-kilometre strip.

In September, the UN Environment Programme issued a report warning that the aquifer that 1.5 million Gazans drink from, and grow crops with, is failing. Overuse is making the water supply saltier, it said, and pollution from sewage and fertilizers is high enough to put young children in jeopardy of nitrate poisoning.

Last year’s fighting — in addition to killing 1,300, injuring 5,300 and creating 600,000 tons of rubble – “exacerbated environmental degradation that has been years in the making,” the report stated. Repairing the water system will require US$1.5 billion over two decades, the agency estimates.

According to Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights Watch for Middle East and North Africa, such difficulties are made worse by the Israeli blockade because it keeps vital goods such as cooking oil and diesel fuel from reaching Gazans.

Stork said the blockade represents a violation of international law because it punishes Palestinian civilians as well as militants.

“There’s been next to no allowance for construction materials to get in,” he added. “So you have people in some cases still living out in the open, in the sense of not being in any kind of permanent shelter.”

The Red Cross has been equally critical of Israel keeping humanitarian and reconstruction supplies out. In a June report, it said neighbourhoods in Gaza that were badly damaged in the war, “will continue to look like the epicenter of a massive earthquake unless vast quantities of cement, steel and other building materials are allowed into the territory.”

Canada’s role

Last January, Ottawa pledged $4 million to help rebuild Gaza, and issued several statements expressing concern about the war’s effect on people living there.

But New Democrat MP Libby Davies, who travelled to Gaza in August as part of a Parliamentary delegation, told CTV.ca that many people she spoke to during the trip were worried Canada would cut aid to the Palestinians this year.

Women and children in a Gaza Strip refugee camp named Karama (Dignity), February, 2009. (ISM)

“When we spoke to various representatives in the West Bank, they were very concerned that Canada is going to in effect default on its spending commitment to UNRWA,” Davies said, referring to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which assists refugees in the territories.

An official at the Canadian International Development Agency told CTV.ca in an email that, as of Dec. 14, the agency had approved $20 million for UNRWA in 2009. That’s 28 per cent less compared to the 2008 total of $28 million.

Critics charge that, because the blockade is contributing to harsh living conditions, cutting aid to Gaza would leave Ottawa’s record on human rights open to criticism.

Tom Woodley, who heads a national non-profit group that’s been lobbying Ottawa to change its policies on various Middle East countries, said protecting that record in Gaza and elsewhere is key to protecting Canada’s international influence.

“Diplomatically, Canada needs to firmly support international law,” Woodley said. “It’s not just because we’re nice guys. It’s also because it’s in our best interest. On the world stage we’re a little guy. If someone tries to infringe on Canadian rights in the far north some day, we’re not going to be able to oppose them militarily. We’re going to have to call on international law.”

Similarly, Lotayef sees the trip to Gaza this month as an opportunity to press Ottawa to change its position on the conflict.

“Our government should take a more objective, more balanced position,” Lotayef said. “At this point in time we should increase our funding and at least contribute what we committed to contribute, to the Palestinian people.”

A strip coal mine, location unknown. (Stephen Codrington)

CTV.ca

The Cerro San Pedro mine in central Mexico stopped digging for gold Wednesday, on orders from the country’s environmental enforcement agency.

Earlier this month a federal court ruled that the environmental permit of Minera San Xavier, which operates the mine and is owned by Vancouver-based New Gold Inc., was “null and void.”

The court decided in favour of a Mexican environmental group, which argued Minera had violated local conservation laws and was detonating explosives too close to inhabited buildings.

In a news release, New Gold said it “has been operating in full compliance with required permits and government authorizations. The mine has had excellent operational performance in 2009 and has an enviable record of meeting its environmental and social responsibilities.”

The company is appealing the ruling, and will continue leeching gold from the piles of crushed rock it has stockpiled. But the open-pit mine, which employs some 340 workers and takes its name from a centuries-old village dozens of metres away, has been forced to stop excavating.

Closer to home, a debate is intensifying about whether Ottawa should have a say over how Canadian mining companies operate in developing countries.

At issue is a private members bill that proposes:

• the Department of Foreign Affairs investigate any alleged misdeeds by Canadian mining firms in developing countries and publish what it finds;
• Export Development Canada withdraw financing from mining projects that are found to violate corporate social responsibility standards in poor states;
• mining companies found to breach those standards become ineligible for investment from the Canada Pension Plan.

Bill C-300 passed second reading in April by a slim margin, with the Conservatives voting against it and MPs from the other major parties voting for it, or abstaining. A final vote could happen as early as March, and stakeholders are digging to try to influence whether or not Parliament will make it law.

Contentious issue

Amnesty International has launched an online petition to garner support for the bill, citing concerns over human rights violations by Canadian mining companies operating in other countries. MiningWatch, an industry watchdog, says at any given time it is monitoring several dozen cases of accidental or intentional misconduct by Canadian mining firms working abroad.

“We can’t keep up with them all, is the problem,” said Jamie Kneen, a spokesperson for MiningWatch.

Kneen argues that Bill C-300 would boost government accountability, by placing conditions on federal support to Canadian mining firms that work in developing countries such as Guatemala or the Philippines.

The United Steelworkers Union has also been campaigning in support of the bill. Many of its 250,000 members work in the mining industry. Last week, it sent a delegation to Ottawa to lobby MPs.

“We’re trying to raise the floor for workers in other countries,” said Stephen Hunt, the union’s director for Western and Northern Canada. “They should at least follow basic standards.”

But industry groups and Export Development Canada say that attaching strings to public investment money would make the country’s mining industry less competitive internationally.

The proposed rules “are so out of step with the rest of the world that they would only hurt Canadian companies and take them out of the game,” EDC’s senior vice president, Jim McArdie, told a Parliamentary committee that’s reviewing the bill on Oct. 27.

Tony Andrews, executive director of the Prospectors and Development Association of Canada, told the same committee that the bill amounts to “naive and misguided grandstanding.”

“If our politicians decide to insert themselves uninvited into the internal affairs of developing countries, Canada will do more harm than good,” Andrews said.

Global implications

Both sides of the debate say that mining companies should aim for international standards of corporate social responsibility, and avoid causing undue environmental damage or harming anyone who lives near mines in poor countries. But they disagree on how to do that.

“The real solution is to build the capacity within developing-country governments to manage their environmental regulations to protect the environment, and to strengthen their legal processes to protect human rights,” Gordon Peeling, president and CEO of the Mining Association of Canada, told CTV.ca.

Liberal MP John McKay, who proposed the bill, said he’s in favour of any measures to help developing countries strengthen their laws. But he would also like to see social responsibility rules that come with repercussions if corporations break them.

He said Bill C-300 would create “a modest set of consequences” for mining corporations that receive support from the federal government, if they violate international standards, McKay said.

“A company can carry on doing whatever it’s doing, however egregious,” he added. “It just can’t ask for the taxpayer, or the pensioners of Canada for financial support.”

Other countries have been known to withdraw public investment from mining projects for environmental or human rights reasons. Last January, Norway’s public pension plan sold the $200-million stake it held in a Papua New Guinea mine owned by Toronto-based Barrick Gold.

“Pollution from the Porgera mine will potentially have serious negative consequences for human life and health,” it said. In particular, it said the risk of polluting the local environment with dangerous heavy metals, such as mercury, was unacceptably high.

Whether or not Ottawa adopts similar guidelines, the fight over the bill is sure to continue until it reaches final reading, which could happen within four months.

In the meantime mining industry representatives will descend on Parliament Hill Tuesday to meet with political decision makers, as part of an annual event. And Bill C-300 will likely be a popular conversation topic.

“It needs to be defeated — it’s just a debilitating waste of time,” Peeling said. “We should be getting on with more important issues.”