Who are Canada's 'freemen'?

When Mika Rasila got pulled over by Niagara police in January for driving his white Pontiac Montana without licence plates, he was ready with a defence: he doesn’t need plates because he’s a Freeman on the Land. A Freeman on the Land, he explained in a letter he tried to hand the patrol officer through the window, is someone who has revoked his consent to be governed. He has opted out of Canada so the laws don’t apply to him. It didn’t work. Police seized his van, arrested him and charged him with six traffic offences, but the incident signaled that the anti-government Freemen on the Land, of which Mr. Rasila is a prominent member, had taken root in Canada.

Across the country, police and officials have been having similar run-ins with “freemen,” also known as “sovereign citizens,” members of a radical movement that does not recognize government authority and consequently refuses to licence their cars, carry government ID or obey police. “We have thousands of members now,” said Mr. Rasila, who writes on the Freemen of Canada Facebook page, which has over 2,000 members. “We have meetings, we’re fairly organized. They’re very casual, usually just in someone’s living room or we’ll rent a hall.”

Canada’s freemen are a loose collection of true believers, ranging from tax protesters to 9/11 conspiracists to fathers whose children have been apprehended by child welfare agencies. What unites them is their dislike of government. Self-declared defenders of individual freedom, they are anti-government extremists in the sense that, rather than opposing specific policies, they deny government has any legitimacy at all and want to be left alone to live according to their own rules.

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Inmate sentenced for running tax fraud operation out of cell

The following article illustrates the need for an effective and wide-reaching intelligence effort in our prison systems. Preventative measures and good intelligence might have stopped this scam and provided law enforcement with much needed information.

Canada Revenue Agency says a man has been sentenced to 30 months for running a tax fraud operation from his Toronto jail cell. Michael Bannon, an inmate in the Toronto Jail, pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud over $5,000. Mr. Bannon participated in a tax scheme that involved the preparation and filing of false tax returns claiming a total of $1.8 million in fraudulent income tax and GST refunds. Investigators found Mr. Bannon assisted in the preparation of 1,431 fraudulent personal income tax returns for 178 prison inmates. Mr. Bannon claimed $704,684 in income tax refunds and filed fraudulent GST returns totalling $1.1 million.

Canada Revenue Agency says no income tax refunds were issued and $90,217 in GST refunds were sent out. Mr. Bannon, who was known as the “tax guy” in prison, advised other inmates that he could prepare and file tax returns on their behalf. He obtained personal information from inmates such as name, social insurance number, date of birth, and addresses, for the purpose of preparing the inmates' personal tax returns. Mr. Bannon usually received prisoner canteen goods as payment for completing the tax returns.

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Terror analysis: The danger of dismissing the absurd

There is endless fodder for jokes, from the RCMP’s name for the investigation — Project Samosa — to speculation about the doctor-terrorism-suspect moonwalking into court. The arrests this week of four men police say were involved in a bomb plot — or in the words of one investigator, were hoping to bring the war in Afghanistan here — seem both chilling and ridiculous. While none of the allegations has been proven in court, even trying to fathom that 28-year-old pathologist and failed Canadian Idol contestant Dr. Khurram Sher could be part of a terrorism conspiracy is difficult. Soon after Sher’s arrest early Thursday, a YouTube clip of him awkwardly singing and dancing across a Montreal stage for the reality show aired around the world.

But those who study or investigate what police common refer to as “homegrown terrorism” caution against dismissing cases that appear too absurd to be true. “On the surface, it appears completely counterintuitive. It appears these people have bought into the Canadian or Western dream, or whatever you call it,” said Michael King, a McGill University PhD student researching the psychology of radicalization. “But for me, as a psychologist anyway researching this, it almost makes sense, because there seems to be a personality characteristic that predisposes people to radicalize — and that is sensation-seeking.”

• "Analysis: How terror came home to roost", Montreal Gazette, 8/28/2010.
  

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Ethnic gangs across the Western Hemisphere

Criminal insurgencies are threatening the security and stability of nations throughout the Americas. In Columbia, Guatemala, Mexico, and Jamaica and most other states in the Caribbean and Central American regions, police and armed forces are engaged in an increasingly brutal war against national and transnational criminal organization for control of the countryside and the cities in their countries. The "root cause" of this insurgency is not the usual combination of poverty, failed governance, and political corruption that fuels insurgencies in other parts of the world, although these factors are in play in the Americas too. Rather, the root cause of this insurgency is the demand for illegal drugs in the United States, Canada and Europe that led to the violent competition between state authorities and gangs seeking to control the supply of drugs flowing from and through their countries to North America and Europe.

The story may seem distant from Canada, but there are worrying similarities at home to the evolution of the criminal insurgency in the Western Hemisphere. In 2009 the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada estimated that as many as 750 national and transnational criminal organizations were active in Canada. In every province except Newfoundland, home-grown, aboriginal, and 'ethnic' criminal gangs are expanding into smaller towns and recruiting more aggressively, creating successor generations of gang members. Earlier this year the RCMP warned that "aboriginal-based criminal organizations" were moving rapidly into northern Ontario from British Columbia and the Prairie provinces.

Expansion, competition for "trade" and new members, and a general sense that they are untouchable -- for instance, because of "the sensitive political optics of aboriginal issues" -- is increasing the number of incidents and the level of violent behaviour across Canada on reserves and in cities and spilling into peaceful aboriginal and non-aboriginal communities. Police forces, the courts, and jails are struggling to address the problem. The RCMP estimates that it has resources to handle a mere 20 per cent of criminal gang activities in Canada. In most provinces, but especially in the West, many prisons are dominated by native gangs and cults. They are very dangerous places which police officers refer to as "gangland community colleges."

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Air India: How a massive intelligence failure led to 329 deaths

In the fall of 1984, three men secretly met to discuss a dark plot, placing a bomb aboard an Air India passenger jet in Montreal. A briefcase full of cash was shown as proof of funding and intent. Not long afterward, two of those three men had independently snitched to police. “There’s a plot to put a bomb on an airplane, right?” a Vancouver police officer asked one of the men during his interview with him. “Yeah…Maybe two,” the man replied. “What kind of airplane?” he was asked. “Air India 747.” “Is this going to be leaving from Montreal?” “Yes.”

With such early warnings and potential inside access, perhaps the most astounding aspect of the Air India tragedy is that it happened at all. Alas, seven month later, on June 23, 1985, a conspiracy of failure unfolded: Air India Flight 182 departed Montreal and exploded mid-fight, killing all 329 passengers and crew. Fumbling the early warnings from the two informants, however, was only the beginning. Many costly and humiliating mistakes — correcting any of which might have saved all on board — are documented in the final report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Air India bombing released yesterday.

“This remains the largest mass murder in Canadian history, and was the result of a cascading series of errors,” the report says. Other advance warnings were similarly ignored or fumbled. It took more than five months for CSIS to get a warrant to monitor telephone conversations of Talwinder Singh Parmar, a man wanted for murder in India who was travelling across Canada preaching violence to avenge the Indian government’s attack on the Golden Temple in Punjab. “What if there had been an additional five months of intelligence?” the report asks. Could it have provided “sufficient intelligence to prevent the bombing?”

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RCMP fear black-market cigarettes could fund terrorism

The black market, cross-country tobacco trade has created an underground economy Canadian authorities fear could be used to finance overseas terrorism, internal RCMP intelligence documents obtained by Canwest News Service show. The materials also indicate RCMP intelligence predicted the expansion of the underground tobacco trade shortly after the federal government shelved plans in the early 1990s to invade several Mohawk reserves. The government chose instead to lower tobacco taxes to undercut the financial incentive for smuggling. The underground tobacco trade now spans the country, with authorities finding Mohawk-made cigarettes from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island, according to an RCMP intelligence analysis from 2008.

Black market tobacco also greases an underground economy in Canada worth hundreds of millions of dollars, supplying money for a range of illegal enterprises that could include terrorism, according to an RCMP Quebec division intelligence report for January and February 2008, obtained under the Access to Information Act “By offering tobacco products at a better price, smugglers stimulate an underground economy within which its profits could be used to finance illegal activities,” said the report. “These activities [include] the smuggling of drugs and firearms, the financing of terrorism, money laundering, among others.” The RCMP claim 105 crime groups are involved, at different levels, in the illegal tobacco trade.

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Failed Canadian actor sent letter bombs for revenge

When Adel Mohamed Arnaout filled out a Toronto model and talent agency questionnaire, he wrote down just one previous role: "hippy," and listed archery and skydiving among his abilities. Today, the 39-year-old man is on trial and being cast as a wannabe thespian who turned his failed aspirations into a campaign of revenge that spanned several years and jurisdictions. The prosecution says he sent letter bombs and water spiked with industrial solvent to alleged targets, including a former roommate, two talent agencies, his one-time lawyer and a Toronto judge.

On Wednesday, Crown attorney James Dunda provided Superior Court Justice Todd Ducharme, who is hearing the case alone, with an overview of the case after Arnaout pleaded not guilty to 11 counts of attempted murder and five offences relating to explosive substances and devices. Arnaout first came to the attention of the public in the summer of 2007 after police arrested him for sending three letter bombs to recipients in Toronto and Guelph. Police shut down the Don Valley Parkway to transport explosive material found in the trunk of his car to the Leslie St. Spit where it was detonated, Dunda told court.

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Canadian E-Mail Fraud Tries to Extract Money

The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) and the Canadian Anti-Fraud Center (CAFC) are cautioning netizens that an "emergency scam" is victimizing more-and-more people by means of compromised e-mail accounts. Police stated that scammers are sending e-mails to the addresses in the contact list of compromised accounts to hunt for possible victims.

In the e-mails, the scammers, pretending to be one of the family member or a family member's friend, state that they immediately need money because some urgent situation has arisen. The situation referred to is commonly imprisonment or hospitalization during the sender's absence from home.

Significantly, while these requests are e-mailed to the contact addresses of the hijacked account, the owner of that account doesn't get to know anything. Said Iain McEwan, OPP Const. in Peterborough County (Ontario, Canada), the scam's success depends on people becoming emotional and taking hasty decisions.

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Cops with cameras future of policing: Vancouver chief

Wearing video cameras will be routine for Vancouver police officers in the next few years, says the police chief in Canada's third-largest city. Chief Constable Jim Chu says he favours the idea, suggesting it would be the ultimate means of preserving the truth in incidents that draw police attention.

“This is a new world. Ten years ago, you would never see video. Now you're going to see it all the time,” Chief Chu said in an interview. “I'll give you the future: Officers will be wearing body cameras.”

Chief Chu, who was appointed chief in 2007, said he expects they will be routine in Vancouver before his term as chief is over. Police chiefs in Vancouver serve five-year terms, although their contracts can be renewed with the agreement of the chief and the police board.

Chief Chu said he expected body cameras would “ensure many more guilty pleas than what we have now,” referring, for example, to domestic-abuse cases. He also referred to cases of causing a disturbance. “The person is yelling and screaming and everything like that. The best evidence is actually a video of what the person is doing, and the crowd around it.”

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Too close to home!

A Peterborough, Ontario, woman and her daughter will appear in court Wednesday morning accused of plotting to murder the man of their household – the woman's husband, and the daughter's father.The alleged plot came close to being carried out but was thwarted after an undercover police officer posed as a killer for hire, said Detective Staff Sergeant John Lyons of Peterborough police.

“It's not a common occurrence,” he said, declining to describe the alleged motive. The mum was certainly in the position of being [allegedly] willing to meet with a potential ... hit man and there's obviously enough evidence to support the charges. There was certainly the wherewithal to go through with it.”

Charged with conspiracy to commit murder and counselling to commit murder are Ashleigh Tinor, 47, and her daughter, Crystal Tinor, 23. They are accused of conspiring to kill Mario Tinor, 48, employed locally and a onetime Scouts Canada volunteer, who knew nothing of the alleged plot until police told him.

“It was a little sobering to say the least,” said Det. Staff Sgt. Lyons, who heads the force's Criminal Investigations Unit. “A bit jolting.”

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Al-Qaeda inspired groups still active in Canada

A secret government list of the country's top terrorist threats says al-Qaeda-inspired extremists remain active in Canada and are willing and able to carry out attacks. "AQ's Islamist extremist ideology continues to inspire individuals in Canada," says the classified Intelligence Assessment. "AQ-inspired groups and individuals present a threat of terrorist attack in Canada." The report indicates that, long after police arrested 18 suspects around Toronto for allegedly plotting "al-Qaeda-inspired" shootings and bombings, such extremists remain a central security concern.

Three terrorist groups are named in the report, titled "Canada: Bi-Annual Update on the Threat from Terrorists and Extremists." Dated last November, the Integrated Threat Assessment Centre report was only recently released under the Access to Information Act. Aside from al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda inspired groups, the document names Hezbollah and notes its leader Hassan Nasrallah has threatened to avenge last year's assassination of its military chief Imad Mugniyah. But the report says Hezbollah "has never attacked a target in Canada" and that "Hezbollah in Canada is primarily structured for fundraising."

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RCMP's new Synthetic Drug Initiative

The Canadian government recently announced the official launch of the RCMP’s Synthetic Drug Initiative. The Synthetic Drug Initiative, the first Canadian drug strategy to specifically focus on a single class of drugs, is an RCMP-led program designed to eliminate the production and distribution of illegal synthetic drugs in Canada, and reduce the overall influence of organized crime on drug trafficking in Canada.

Canada has been identified as a source country of illegal synthetic drugs with organized crime groups playing a leading role in this expanding trade. These groups continue to profit from chemical diversion, synthetic drug production and the trafficking of these substances. The Synthetic Drug Initiative targets the illicit synthetic drug industry on three fronts; enforcement, deterrence and prevention. It also aims to inhibit the diversion of precursor chemicals from foreign and domestic sources.

“As a component on the National Anti-Drug Strategy, the Synthetic Drug Initiative demonstrates our continued commitment to eradicating the illicit drug trade in Canada,” stated Minister Nicholson. “Our Government recognizes that illegal drugs undermine healthy and safe communities, fuel organized crime and foster street-level gangs. That is why we have implemented the National Anti-Drug Strategy with a view to reducing the supply of and demand for illegal drugs, as well as addressing the crime associated with these drugs.”

This information may be of interest to all drug investigators and intelligence officers assigned to counterdrug operations. Included in the press release are contact details for the RCMP.

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Annual Report on Organized Crime in Canada

The Criminal Intelligence Service Canada 2009 Annual Report on Organized Crime in Canada is published to inform and educate the public. The activities and workings of criminal organizations are often complex and can be hidden from the everyday world. With this report, CISC seeks to make the effects of organized crime visible and of concern to every community and region in Canada. Organized crime is a threat to public safety and to all Canadians. With this report CISC solicits help from the public. Law enforcement needs people to recognize the effects of organized crime on their communities and, together with law enforcement, take a stand.

The information has been verified through intelligence and investigation reports from Canadian and international enforcement agencies received by CISC throughout the year. In particular, CISC relies on CISC member agencies across Canada to provide valuable information on organized trends and activities in Canada.

The report covers information from the previous year up to June of the current year. One of the keys to success in the fight against organized crime is partnerships - between enforcement agencies as well as with policy makers and the public. This report is offered as a guide to help our partners with their strategic planning and to encourage them to cooperate to the fullest extent to fight this threat.

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