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Calgary's new police dragnet
0 Plays2 seconds ago
Euan Thomson from drugdatadecoded.ca joins us on the pod once again, this time to tell us about his investigation into the Calgary police's use of facial recognition technology.
- Premier’s Office spent nearly $20K on PragerU fundraiser gala
- ‘MAGA performer’ booked to perform at the Legislature is a far-right associate of Artur Pawlowski and the Proud Boys
- Calgary police "image recognition" software identifies individuals in photos & videos posted online
The Progress Report podcast is listener-funded and runs no ads—please consider becoming a patron at www.theprogressreport.ca/patrons
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:12
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to another episode of the Progress Report podcast. It is August 7th. We are recording in Amiskwichi, Waskagen, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta in Treaty 6 territory. I am one of your co-hosts, Jim Story, and co-host, Jeremy Appel, is with us.
00:00:30
Speaker
And today our guest is friend of the show, Ewan Thompson. Fellas, how are you doing today?
00:00:38
Speaker
i'm doing I'm doing pretty good. um how's How's it going on your end, Jim? little sleepy. It's been it's been muggy here in Edmonton. It's been hard to get a good night's sleep.
00:00:50
Speaker
Yeah, things are going good for me as well. um Yeah, um like not not unlike you, not sleeping the best. But um overall, I feel like ah most of that is just worrying about some of the repercussions of stories being put out and so on than anything else.
00:01:11
Speaker
Today, i think we've got a little bit of kind of a news roundup episode. Between the two of you, ah you've got some big scoops.
Focus on Police Surveillance and News Roundup
00:01:19
Speaker
And while I think we want to spend the bulk of the conversation today on Ewan's latest work about police surveillance from CPS, the Calgary Police Service, um before we get into it, I want to highlight a couple of progress report stories that Jeremy has done, just in case any of our listeners out there are regular you know pod hearers, but not website lookers.
00:01:43
Speaker
ah Jeremy, you have had a good week in reporting couple of bangers. I want to start off telling people about the most recent one, the one that you just put up yesterday.
00:01:55
Speaker
So you looked into some financial disclosures around a trip by the premier. So for our listeners, what's that all about?
Premier's Florida Trip and Financial Disclosures
00:02:05
Speaker
Yeah, so um if you remember, the Premier went in March down to Florida. um Her second trip ah to the state um in three months.
00:02:17
Speaker
The first time was to go to Mar-a-Lago and hang out with Kevin O'Leary and Donald Trump. This one was to speak at a fundraiser for PragerU. alongside ben shapiro uh prager u is not a university it is a right-wing propaganda mill ah that produces uh short videos about how uh climate change is fake um slavery wasn't so bad and uh that israel uh has a right to uh you know do whatever it wants um
00:02:52
Speaker
and um i And I did some reporting on that um ah for your brother, Ewan, Jamie, at the ah Canada's National Observer when that event was first announced, or soon after it was first announced in in an early March.
00:03:11
Speaker
um And then um I was just, ah you know, I've done stories before going through the government's expense disclosures. ah For example, I did a piece for Ricochet last year, maybe two years ago, about the provincial delegation to COP28 in Dubai um and how much money they spent on that. um And, ah you know, it's always an interesting thing to go through. Of course, you know, a decade ago, it was a huge scandal and Alison Redford spent
00:03:46
Speaker
$45,000 flying privately to Nelson Mandela's funeral. um And this should be, you know, kind of the opposite. I'm sure PragerU has some interesting beliefs about Nelson Mandela and, you know, whether he was a terrorist or not.
00:04:05
Speaker
um But I found that the Premier's office... ah spent almost $20,000 going to this fundraiser for PragerU, which they justified as, ah you know, just spreading Alberta's message um to, ah you know, an influential audience that does have the ear of ah President Trump.
00:04:31
Speaker
Yeah. And i basically, her entourage was her plus four people, including her chief of staff, Rob Anderson, Sam Blackett, her press secretary, and two tour and advance coordinators.
00:04:53
Speaker
And, um you know, I found that ah Rob Anderson's expenses were far more than anyone else's. Um, back in January, when, uh, they took the first trip to Florida, um, the CDC reported that he had flied, uh, business class one of the ways there. And, uh, he responded by saying that he actually has a rare blood condition that makes it so he has to fly first class, uh, on flights longer than three hours. Cause he needs to keep his legs up. Otherwise he could have like a blood clot and it could be fatal.
00:05:29
Speaker
He could die if he doesn't fly first class. And and and you know in the the travel expense policy that the government has, I mean, there is clause saying that you're supposed to fly economy, but if you have a legitimate medical reason, you can fly business class. Supposedly, he had a doctor's note that says so. But what was interesting is that was for flights over three hours.
00:05:58
Speaker
And so Anderson took four flights, right? There was a flight um to, the first flight was from Calgary to Vancouver, then Vancouver to Miami.
00:06:10
Speaker
And then the flight back was from Miami to Montreal and Montreal
Misuse of Public Funds Discussion
00:06:13
Speaker
to Calgary. So all those flights are over three hours, except for the first one, Calgary to Vancouver, which is an hour, two hours, depending on which way the wind's blowing. This one was closer to two hours.
00:06:25
Speaker
And he still flied business class. even though the flight was ah less than ah three hours. um And it wasn't just, ah he didn't just fly business class. If you look at the hotel expenses, ah expenses um he bought a more expensive room than everyone else at the hotel.
00:06:53
Speaker
ah You know, more expensive by like, um you know I think everyone else is paying $240 night, and he's paying $310, which is like substantially more expensive.
00:07:10
Speaker
And so you see his hotel expense ah in Canadian dollars for two nights was $1,100, and everyone else's were around you know six hundred five hundred So, um, there's that. He also took some really expensive cab rides. We're talking like $170, which I think was because he flew, into Miami rather than Fort Lauderdale.
00:07:36
Speaker
And so going from Miami to Boca Raton, I mean, it's going to be a pretty expensive cab ride. Um, I believe Fort Lauderdale is closer though. I do not have a map of Florida in front of me.
00:07:47
Speaker
Um, It must be really, really tough for him having to spend all this money or having to spend all of other people's money because his blood doesn't work. That must be really frustrating for a small government conservative to have to get all these fancy hotel rooms.
00:08:05
Speaker
Well, yeah. and I mean, if you go back to the the expense, the government's expenses for the Dubai trip, um They were staying at a luxury resort, um right? um That was ah very expensive, which again, the government said, well, it was the closest hotel um to the venue. Again, the policy um is quite vague in terms of that, like the government is supposed to, you know, get the most value for their dollars, right?
00:08:38
Speaker
um while also keeping other things in mind like um proximity, um you know medical conditions or other business in like business reasons, why they might have to you know spend more money. So, I mean, you can get away with that. And I don't think, ah you know I have no reason to believe that the premier ah broke any I'm certainly, or or and or or Rob Anderson or any anyone in her entourage, I'm of course not suggesting that.
00:09:09
Speaker
um But, ah you know, it is telling that the premier's office spent $20,000 to go down to Florida to help a far-right propaganda mill fundraise. And they raised over a million dollars at this event.
00:09:27
Speaker
Now, I'm not saying that was because Danielle Smith was there. I think most people know. you know Florida aren't familiar with her. it was using public funds to benefit a ah private foreign interest. We don't know whether um you know members of the delegation paid out of their own pocket um day for ah
00:10:01
Speaker
a seat at this event, whether they were comped or they had to pay $1,500 for a seat, which is the price. um Or if they bought merchandise, because then that would be a donation. It's using public funds to get to this place where they can donate to Prager. Yeah, that's where really that's what really does it for me on this story. I am generally not too interested in these ah politicians spend too much on a trip Bev Oda, orange juice type stories.
00:10:35
Speaker
ah boom For one reason being that these narratives typically are only useful to right-wing politicians. it it never seems to be conservative politicians who get in trouble for any of this kind of stuff.
00:10:51
Speaker
ah Because I think it's the conservative base that mostly gets mad about expenses. So, I mean, you'll see a big furor over You know, the notly delegation, not all taking buses to a climate conference, but you won't hear the same kind of thing about politician on the right.
00:11:12
Speaker
But this PragerU story is a little different from just like, oh, this guy spent too much money. Like we're effectively talking about a large in-kind donation from the government of Alberta to this organization, PragerU, which, as you described,
00:11:29
Speaker
earlier on is not an educational institution. It's not a charitable organization. This is like a, like a daily wire Breitbart adjacent right-wing propaganda, like far right propaganda outfit that hosts the likes of Ben Shapiro. Like then even if Daniel Smith's appearance may have not been worth $20,000 worth of fundraising,
00:11:57
Speaker
you know if we spent If the province spent $20,000 or more on it, then we effectively donated $20,000 to PragerU. Yeah, and that's, you know, i mean, someone commenting on social media it in the context, like, how many H payments is that, right?
00:12:14
Speaker
la Which, again, $20,000 isn't a lot of money, but it is a lot of age payments. Yeah, like like, you know, um you can make the case uh with uh the first trip she took to mar-a-lago don't agree with it but you could say okay look she's going down she's uh you know ah playing uh good cop and uh hanging out with donald trump and trying to ingratiate herself with him so that he can go easier on um
00:12:50
Speaker
um Alberta, if not Canada, right? And you could say, okay, well, that's diplomacy. um And, um you know, debatable, but um you can't say that for this, right?
Smith's Ideological Affinities and Political Strategy
00:13:04
Speaker
Like PragerU is not a government. They're quite influential towards...
00:13:09
Speaker
words the the Trump government, but um I mean, again, um they make video content. And Keith Brownsey, a ah professor Mount Royal University, um who's been there a while, was saying, like yeah, these expenses, like they're on the high end, but it's not exorbitant, right?
00:13:35
Speaker
The issue is what are they being spent on? Right. And um if you place in the context of, you know the CBC, Julia Long at CBC reported back in about the trip to Mar-a-Lago, the premier's delegation spent like bit over $10,000 on that.
00:13:59
Speaker
And so this is almost double. And at least going to Mar-a-Lago, you're meeting with the U.S. president. um You're not doing that.
00:14:11
Speaker
by hanging out with Ben Shapiro at PragerU, you're hanging out with people who support him, ah people who he takes seriously. But again, this is pretty far removed from ah what should be official government business.
00:14:28
Speaker
This really reminds me of that story you broke a few years ago, Jeremy. like I'm looking at it right now, January 2023.
00:14:37
Speaker
where the Alberta government was throwing money at that North America Recovers organization. And then sponsored it and then scrubbed their name from it, from the photo afterwards.
00:14:50
Speaker
um And so they sent all these people down for it, down to you know Seattle or wherever they held it. And you know this group was was counteracting supervised consumption site um action down in the States. They were trying to prevent supervised consumption sites from setting up.
00:15:07
Speaker
And ultimately, they were they were partly successful. um and And they were literally sponsored by the Alberta government according to you know the sponsor list that was was shown in the original photo for this thing. So another American group, another right-wing American group getting money from the Alberta government potentially.
00:15:25
Speaker
And, um, like my big question around this is, is like, what is the Alberta government doing down in Florida with this? Like, this isn't like oil lobbying really. it seems like something else is going on. And, and what, what's your take on what might be going on with it?
00:15:42
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I actually watched the video of the fireside chat with Ben Shapiro. It's on PragerU's YouTube page. Um, and, I mean, it was pretty tame. ah You know, Smith was on her best behavior, knowing that people were watching her and that this was ah seen by her opponents as quite egregious.
00:16:03
Speaker
um But um
00:16:08
Speaker
what she was, I mean, she did clearly express ideological affinity for the PragerU, Ben Shapiro, ah Daily Wire, you know, sort of MAGA crowd. Right. I mean, she was talking about um her um attacks on trans youth, which is, of course, not how she articulated it.
00:16:26
Speaker
But of course, Ben Shapiro is a vicious transphobe. That's actually how he first came on my radar. um And ah but most of the conversation, of course, talked about oil and gas and how um and and this was um you know reported. um you know Soon after the event, ah you know um National Observer and D-Smog had someone on the ground who went to the event.
00:16:52
Speaker
um And I think CBC got a recording of it. And um you know she was ah essentially saying... um that ah you know Trump's approach to oil and gas is the right one. And it's a stark contrast with that of the the federal liberals. And, um you know of course, the Trump administration isn't even pretending to ah want to reach net zero anytime in in in the near future.
00:17:22
Speaker
um you know When Smith talks to a domestic audience, she'll say, oh, yeah, yeah, I support net zero by 2050, just like the oil and gas companies do. um But, um
00:17:35
Speaker
but um i um you know, they should just be able to do it on their own timeline, right? um But then when she's in the States talking this MAGA crowd, it's then, no, no, no, um this is the right approach. We need to focus on getting oil out of the ground.
00:17:55
Speaker
um and increasing our export capacity and production, um not any of this, ah you know, um net zero stuff. So she did drop like sort of any pretense to really ah caring about CO2 emissions.
00:18:14
Speaker
um But um I think a lot of it is ideological affinity. You know, i mean, Smith is very plugged in to sort of the U.S., you know, sort of alt-right media ecosystem. I mean, you saw her go on Breitbart, for instance, um to talk about how Paul Yev pretty aligned with Trump, which certainly didn't help him during the election. And think...
00:18:44
Speaker
i think um She can't help herself, but to, ah um I mean, this is sort of her social circle, right? And I think Smith very much is less a product of this sort of deep-seated ideology that you could say of someone uh, like Jason Kenney or, um, you know, George Bush, right. And, and, and more of, uh, uh, product of, um, her, her social circles and, um what have when she's been in, you know, corporate lobbying her, uh, own material interests.
00:19:26
Speaker
Um, and I think that is, uh, something, uh, that, uh, is very much in common between herself and Trump. um And like Trump, she's willing to use public funds to, you know, um essentially promote her brand um to a U.S. audience.
00:19:48
Speaker
Yeah, i I don't think ah it is controversial to suggest at this point that the Smith political strategy for the past few years, or like the the Smith plus Rob Anderson political strategy, has been to to just tie themselves to the the Trumpist movement.
00:20:12
Speaker
And, you know, they get a lot of free support, ambient support, you might say, from the the Trump air war, from all of the communications going around, you know, the whole content about about that kind of ideology.
00:20:29
Speaker
ah So, they gain ah they gain a lot from that. You know, it's it's like having this giant media machine doing free work for you all the time, ah with the only cost being that you have to make your political program their political program.
00:20:42
Speaker
And so they know how reliant they are on the Trump machine. And I think part of going down to PragerU was just going down there to kiss the ring and to, you know, ship them a little money and to impress upon them that, uh, the UCP are supporters and part of the movement and that the movement should look out for them.
00:21:05
Speaker
Right. And, and they're, you know, in turn, the UCP base that is watching and consuming all of this media from, from down South is, you know, building their support for Daniel. Yes, they see the affiliation too because they, they're all Trump fans, right?
00:21:21
Speaker
And that's a yeah a large reason of why they like the Smith government so much is because the Smith government is so expressly and, um, openly Trumpist.
00:21:33
Speaker
Interesting. Good scoop, Jeremy. And you've got this second story up, uh, from a ah few days back about, um, Sam Fjord, Fjord, Fjord, the, Christian nationalist activist who's going to be playing the legislature in August.
00:21:51
Speaker
Uh, we kind of talked at length about the Smith story and I want to get to
Ewan's Investigation into CPS Surveillance
00:21:55
Speaker
Ewan's. So, um, Folks, ah rather than summarizing Jeremy's story on FOIC, just going to tell you go to the go to the website and read it.
00:22:04
Speaker
it's a It's fun, dramatic. There's a lot going in on there. And it is similar in theme to this PragerU thing, the the the government supporting the the far right in weird ways. But let's get right into it with with your story, Ewan, because this is what I want to spend the meat of today's episode on.
00:22:26
Speaker
You have been, for the past few months, researching CPSs, the Calgary Police Services, social media monitoring and surveillance programs.
00:22:38
Speaker
And I don't think this has really got the attention that it deserves yet. Can you maybe run people through the basics first? give us Give us a quick summary of what you wrote about this week, and and then we'll get into it.
00:22:52
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. um i think I agree. It's going to be a bit of a slow burn as people get their heads back around the implications of of what this could mean. um Because it's been a few years really since Calgary and and Alberta media has had ah their mind in the game of...
00:23:11
Speaker
of Clearview AI and the the use of facial recognition technology for scanning social media and and you know basically cataloging individuals ah for the purpose of non-investigative police work.
00:23:29
Speaker
And so what I've been fighting for for the last 15 months since March, actually, it took me 15 months to get the documents I submitted originally in March 2024.
00:23:40
Speaker
or After attending a Palestine rally in downtown Calgary and just noticing how many police were hanging out at these things, taking photographs, and this had been going on for months.
00:23:52
Speaker
And so I submitted a FOIP asking for a Freedom of Information request asking for all of the records related to um any surveillance that was going on at these rallies. And so I so i submitted it for for two different dates that rallies occurred.
00:24:09
Speaker
And I wanted all the online surveillance reports ah from, you know, and I listed a whole bunch of companies, including Meltwater and Talkwalker, um And and they they lost the Freedom of Information request. They lost it. And i never heard from them. So in July of that year, I resubmitted another one.
00:24:29
Speaker
And I resubmitted it. And and if this this one took, this one stuck, it got through. And by ah November, I still hadn't heard anything um in terms of a response. Like they hadn't they hadn't fulfilled the request.
00:24:42
Speaker
So I submitted a complaint to the information commissioner. And that took and and another number of months. And by April, um mid-April 2025, I had a ruling saying CPS has to release these documents.
00:24:59
Speaker
And um they gave them 50 days to respond, um and which was great. I was like, okay, 50 days. So so June 3rd, I should be getting these documents.
00:25:10
Speaker
and And that's perfect because that's right before the G7 summit. So the public can be warned if there's a bunch of undue documents social media surveillance or other types of you know so sort should surveillance going on around the G7 summit. And so I was like, perfect. Okay, that's that timing is ideal.
00:25:28
Speaker
So um I waited and waited and waited. And by June 3rd, that came and went. And I kind of got in touch with them and were like, what's going on there? they were like, oh, like yeah you know yeah first you know first they for all this money.
00:25:41
Speaker
um and It was $1,100 in fees. I was like, oh my God, $1,100. Okay, all right, I guess I'll fork over $1,100 to this because like it seems like you're really trying not to give me these documents. So there must be something good in there.
00:25:57
Speaker
um And so... ah June 3rd comes and goes. they They still haven't released them. So they're in violation of this OIPC, and Information Commissioner Order. um I get the documents. I open them up like June 20th. So the G7 has come and gone.
00:26:14
Speaker
and um And I just like, It took me about a month to get through all this stuff because there was just so much. It was 1,500, 1,600 pages worth of documents. I looked at every single page.
00:26:26
Speaker
And um i just like it took me a while to sort of assemble what was going on. it turned out that... They had all these contracts going back to 2015, that they had signed contracts so that that these companies that they were contracting were active from 2016 to 2024, doing social media surveillance of of citizens with with no investigative purpose whatsoever.
00:26:49
Speaker
um So they're they're taking all these people's social media posts and loading them into these like private databases. that are owned in some cases by American companies, by British, ah sorry, by a Luxembourg company, that's Talkwalker, and by a Canadian company named Hootsuite, who who got the big contract in 2023.
00:27:07
Speaker
And Hootsuite had partnered with Talkwalker. And I was like what like, why would they partner? What's the point of that? And so I started looking into what Talkwalker does. It turns out like the entire purpose of Talkwalker is to run...
00:27:20
Speaker
facial recognition. They call it image recognition, but it has the ability. They advertise the ability of their technology to identify like influencers and celebrities posing with your brand.
00:27:33
Speaker
And they kind of tried to like you know run this under the radar of... um of ah brand recognition saying like, oh, we can identify 30,000 different logos. um And so there's kind of saying like, this is all about logo in in their pitch to CPS, because they really don't want to mention anything about facial recognition. So facial recognition doesn't come up in any of these 1600 pages, like verbatim.
00:27:56
Speaker
But you can tell that they're they're interested in certain capabilities that Talkwalker has in particular. And the one thing Talkwalker advertises that it gives that no other company does is that it can look for... It can do this image recognition within videos.
00:28:14
Speaker
So um all this stuff that people are putting online, all the the all these different platforms from Reddit to ah Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and and Blue Sky and everything else...
00:28:25
Speaker
They're all subject to this surveillance where Talkwalker is apparently able to go in and using AI, identify individuals, places, ah you know ah objects, pets, what you name it, from these different um formats of of media, whether it's images or or speech or text or or video.
00:28:50
Speaker
Sure. um You mentioned at the outset that ah this is unique because um this data isn't being collected for investigative purposes, right?
00:29:05
Speaker
ah You know, it's one thing for police to collect data when they have an active investigation ongoing and there are suspects. um But this isn't that. So what is this data being collected for?
00:29:22
Speaker
Well, we don't exactly know. What what I do know is, um and this is from a previous piece that I published, was you know i had asked for all of the times that that my name had been mentioned by the public the media relations department, for example. And I wanted all of all of their internal communications around that. And it out they were collecting all of my social media posts that mentioned Calgary Police and then loading that into this private database. Yeah.
00:29:49
Speaker
which is Hootsuite and combined with Talkwalker. um And so I already had that knowledge. I didn't know that Talkwalker was involved and I didn't know that there was the possibility that facial recognition was going on.
00:30:02
Speaker
um And so Calgary police got in a lot of hot water back in 2021, you might remember, when there was a big New York Times piece that ended up trickling across the border and went to the Ottawa citizen who picked it up and said, oh my God, like it looks like Ontario police might be doing this. And then Calgary Herald picked it up. Alana Smith published a piece saying, like oh holy yeahp look look at this. like Calgary Police is doing this.
00:30:25
Speaker
um And they denied it at first and and then finally had to admit that, yeah, some of their officers had been, like quote unquote, testing out this facial recognition AI technology.
00:30:36
Speaker
ah So like hand on a hot stove in a big way. um And I think that they kind of like tuck their tail between their legs and and and went quiet on this for a few years.
00:30:47
Speaker
And in that intervening period, they started contracting companies that were doing quote unquote image recognition. and um And so the the sort of like The big question I think that people need to be asking right now is like, how many people are loaded into this database? Where is the data going?
00:31:06
Speaker
um Is it being sold off? Is it being given to other police services? Is there a chance that, you know... is Is there essentially like a suspect lineup that is just being developed in perpetuity for um all people who comment on Calgary police or or or, you know, the known critics thing that that progress report broke years ago?
Criticism of Mass Surveillance Practices
00:31:28
Speaker
um Turns out Calgary is not alone in any of this either. Like Meltwater, one of the companies that also does image recognition, ah was named in their branding materials, their pitch documents to Calgary police that Edmonton, Waterloo, Hamilton, Saskatoon, and York, as well as the provincial police in Ontario and Quebec, um police unions in Ontario and Toronto, and every ministry of the Ontario government are also using Meltwater.
00:31:56
Speaker
um So one of these image recognition companies. um So we like ultimately, we don't really know where the data is going. But there's I think we can say with some certainty that data sovereignty has been completely forfeited because this data now is sitting in databases that that could be subject to things like the Cloud Act, where you know the United States government can demand that tech companies hand over the contents of databases um for you know for for whatever reason they want to. They can just kind of order...
00:32:29
Speaker
order that in. um And Microsoft has been on the record very recently saying like they could not stop the United States government from from seizing data from their databases if if they demanded it.
00:32:41
Speaker
It's not hard to imagine a scenario coming up in the next few years where you know somebody tries to go on a trip to the United States and ends up getting hassled at Border Patrol because there's been some data share and, you know, oh, you know, what are what are you doing in coming down to the United States? We saw that you were at a Black Lives Matter protest in Calgary two months ago.
00:33:05
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. that That's a huge concern. And and you know that's the sort of thing that we call dragnet surveillance. So I spoke to Dr. Kevin Walby at the University of Winnipeg about this, and and he's he's a big expert on this kind of stuff. like he he runs or that He's the director of the Center for Access to Information and Justice, CAIJ.
00:33:23
Speaker
um you know he's He's a big deal at the University of Winnipeg, and and he had some really harsh commentary about directed at Calgary police and just police in general around this saying um things like he said, you know, there's no control over police in Canada. They're out of control.
00:33:40
Speaker
um What are they like? Basically kind of like, what are they doing here? He said, this is dragnet surveillance. This is mass surveillance. It's not supposed to happen in a liberal democracy with a charter of rights and freedoms. There is no reasonable, probable grounds for this.
00:33:54
Speaker
um So he's yeah he was he was quite shocked, I think, to hear, especially when it came ah came around that um this could potentially represent a facial recognition workaround that police have been using ah for a couple of years now.
00:34:08
Speaker
ah He thought that was a pretty momentous discovery. It's worrying because once you have a file in the law enforcement system, they all share data with each other. We ran into this a lot when we were researching around carding.
00:34:23
Speaker
several years ago where you know people's like very very cursory like police interactions that data was getting shared with ah Canada Border Services Agency who were then sharing it with American Border Services and so it was like if you had even like one small interaction with with police in your own city, like you got ticketed or you were even, you weren't charged with anything. You were just detained, but they, you know, you showed up in the notes.
00:34:54
Speaker
Like that's it. You are in the international database system at that point.
00:35:00
Speaker
Yeah. And you know, this is something like privacy experts will tell you, you know, facial recognition has been used in airports for a long, long time. And it's like something like half of American citizens have been cataloged in American airports now.
00:35:17
Speaker
ah You know, you you can bet as ah as a Canadian or someone from Canada entering into the United States, your face is also in those databases um from their facial recognition work. And um the the the thing that like...
00:35:30
Speaker
really got under people's skin with Clearview AI, and the company that Calgary Police was initially caught doing this with in 2021, is that you can pretty much just like punch in one photo of one person and um it'll generate like a massive trove of all the other times that that person's face has shown up um anywhere on the internet, any any sort of like what they call publicly available um or open source information. Like that this should not be treated as open source information. Nobody puts
00:36:04
Speaker
photos on the internet expecting them to be loaded into a police database. So I think that that's like, for me, a total non-starter from a privacy privacy perspective. And that's part of why people were so upset about Clearview AI.
00:36:16
Speaker
Another big piece of this is um the racial ah profiling element of it. So like white men, you you can get white men with a fair degree of accuracy um in these systems. But as soon as you go outside of the realm of of identifying white men, um and whether whether it's racialized people or women or or children, um then the the system the the models kind of break down and people are totally misidentified. They're they're very, very inaccurate. And so, um you know, in in
00:36:50
Speaker
something that I think most people are probably familiar with right now. Um, like people are going to be misidentified, because they're racialized and, and can get into a lot of trouble or, or very, very dangerous situations with the police as a result of being misidentified.
00:37:05
Speaker
And you've written, about, uh, Calgary police's use of these, uh, um, you know, tech systems before particularly, uh, HootSuite, I believe.
00:37:17
Speaker
Um, um, What did you learn specifically through this f FOI request that I will again emphasize you paid a lot of money for if listeners ah want to send some money Ewan's way um that um you hadn't previously reported?
00:37:43
Speaker
Yeah. So this is a bit of a follow-up piece to an earlier one that I put out in May. Actually, the very same day that Mark Neufeld, the the former chief of police, resigned, um I was publishing getting ready to publish this piece um on their use of Hootsuite. And I thought it was a big deal that that they had this secret...
00:38:01
Speaker
um public relations department system up and running that had been running for a few years by then, ah where they were just surveilling people completely outside the context of any investigative purpose.
00:38:13
Speaker
there There was no law enforcement context around this at all. And um so, you know, i i got a hold of this other trove of documents that that showed this, and And ah you know the day that Mark Neufeld resigned, I published that piece. I don't think that that's why he resigned. um I think he resigned because of your work showing the the UCP um Calgary police cover-up of the of the May 9th police brutality at the University of Calgary. And I think that a lot of cops inside of ah CPS do not want to be investigated for that brutality, and therefore they pushed out the chief.
00:38:49
Speaker
um But that you know that's my theory. um but But I think that this would be a fireable offense in my opinion. <unk> see Say that again. I mean, I'd like to take credit for it but, you know, I would assume ah it's something else that we don't know about yet or a ah variety of things that that might include its brutality against the Palestine encampment. Because, you know, mean, we both know that people are rarely held accountable.
00:39:26
Speaker
for these types of things. So I would be surprised. Of course, I would love to take credit for, ah um you know, a taking Mark Neufeld's scalp.
00:39:39
Speaker
But um yeah, I'm also cautious about, um you know, taking credit for things I don't have evidence for.
00:39:49
Speaker
But yeah, It would be in character for the Progress Report staff to have yet another police chief nemesis.
Unexplained Resignations and Surveillance Issues
00:39:58
Speaker
Yes. Well, the thing is, if Calgary police wanted to get out ahead of of any speculation, then they could have come out and explained why half of the executive team resigned within the course of three days.
00:40:11
Speaker
They didn't give any reasons for that. And this is these are the highest profile resignations I have ever seen in Calgary. And the public got absolutely no clarity and no transparency on why they happened.
00:40:24
Speaker
um And we're now coming on four months since that happened. And like still no no word whatsoever on ah these highest profile resignations in in like recent history, real recent memory of in the city.
00:40:40
Speaker
So, you know, I think that it's fair to to try and get to the bottom of what might have happened. I think these are both fireable offenses. um Dragnet surveillance ah of citizens, especially after being caught doing so a few years prior previous, especially where it relates to facial recognition, potentially.
00:40:57
Speaker
um I think that's a fireable offense. And I think that that this that the documents that that you reported on um are also the things that the commission should have taken much more seriously in a public way.
00:41:10
Speaker
I suspect that part of the reason this surveillance story hasn't, uh, hasn't gotten a lot of attention right away, uh, is the Hootsuite connection because a lot of people in media are familiar with Hootsuite, um, but are not familiar with it as, uh, like a surveillance technology. Right. So I, I suspect that a lot of media folks saw the initial reporting and were like, Oh, CPS is using Hootsuite. Like they're scheduling their tweets. What's the big deal?
00:41:39
Speaker
They, uh, not aware of this this meltwater connection or something like that. Something that you highlighted in your reporting that I thought was very interesting, though, is that it's not just the police services using this.
00:41:51
Speaker
You also mentioned that the Calgary Police Union is using it. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah. In that initial trove of documents that came ah out um that I reported on in May, it was revealed that there was a channel that they had set up. They set up all these different channels and hootsuite. So when somebody tags CPS or when somebody tags Mark Neufeld in, say, at a Twitter post or something or on Blue Sky, then they'll...
00:42:20
Speaker
ah They'll capture that through Hootsuite. It'll send an alert to their media relations people, and they'll either respond or not, depending on the context. And um what I saw come up in this is is that there was a channel set up for the um Calgary...
00:42:40
Speaker
police association, the CPA. um There was another one set up for like, it was like CPS. There was one related to Mark Neufeld and then the CPA one. And I thought that was very strange.
00:42:50
Speaker
Like what, what would the CPA be doing accessing through public funding, ah like a system that the Calgary police is using for, you know, ostensibly, know,
00:43:01
Speaker
For investigative purposes, according to the policies that they have in place, ah this stuff is all supposed to be investigative. um But but for even for media relations, public relations type um purpose, like why is um why is the police union being given access to this?
00:43:20
Speaker
um And I don't have an answer to that yet. I i did ask like what's going on with that with that channel. um But in this latest trove of documents, um it turned out that um Meltwater is contracted with with multiple police unions, including the Toronto Police Association um and and the Ontario Police Association. So,
00:43:41
Speaker
um This is something that that I think police and police unions are using for public like relations purposes. But um given the potential for for facial recognition, I think it's very interesting that that that these some organizations that are not doing in any investigative work um are capturing potentially people's personal information and and and image information.
00:44:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's a big red flag to me, the the inclusion of the police associations, because, I mean, those are not police departments. As you say, like and police services may be able to claim now and again that they might be using this in the course of their work. But ah the work that the police associations do, like any like any union, even though we don't include these guys in the House of Labor, is political.
00:44:32
Speaker
So, um I mean, they they are surveilling people for political reasons. I don't see any way to come to any other conclusion than that. It's not like there's no precedent for that in Alberta. I mean, you can you can look at the situation with Shannon Phillips, for example, um in Lethbridge, where she was being watched and followed around and all that by by the Lethbridge police.
00:44:55
Speaker
um So, you know, we've we've got precedent for this sort of thing in the province. And it would not surprise me at all to find out that um that there're you know whether it's a few individuals or whether this is a systemic thing within Alberta.
00:45:08
Speaker
ah within Calgary police and and their union. But um ah yeah, I don't find it ah terribly surprising, although it is definitely alarming if if that's what's going on. Could you tell us a bit more about sort of how um this facial recognition works in practice? Like, where are they drawing people on these pictures from? Is it largely social media? Is it also the photos you see cops taking at rallies all the time?
00:45:39
Speaker
Like sort of where, where is their sort of ai getting its inputs from? Well, Calgary police has been pretty open about the fact that they're they're using AI and they're using facial recognition for investigative purposes. They've been doing this for a long time. In fact, in 2014, they came out and said they were going to be the first to use facial recognition technology in Canada.
00:46:01
Speaker
um And so, so they've they kind of been front running this for quite some time. um And for investigative purposes, you can understand why a police service would want to cut down on the amount of legwork to just like, you know, go through photos and identify somebody from CCTV that broke into the bank or whatever it is.
00:46:17
Speaker
and um And so, they're they've been combining like cc CCTV with crime databases for so for quite a while now. Yeah. I get that. I get that from a a policing perspective, sure.
00:46:29
Speaker
um But the the ah problem comes in when they're just like dragnet surveilling people at protests, for example, and um but you know going out with with their um dedicated photographers and and taking you know what looks like thousands and thousands of photos from from rooftops and from down on the ground.
00:46:47
Speaker
um of all these different people who are attending peaceful, like democratic protests, exercising the freedom of expression. and um And then possibly combining that with information that they're capturing from social media. um Like that that seems like um it's non-investigative, first of all. there's There's no crime being committed. There's no crime being suspected.
00:47:09
Speaker
and um And they're taking this information potentially and combining it. So they're they're generating profiles of people. um So that, you know, they know that you and Thompson who who said something mean about Calgary police um was also at these three protests or or organized this one and and attended these other two or whatever it is. um You can really start to generate these, these network diagrams of of how people are connected, how they associate with one another. That's another charter right that we have freedom of association and, um and start to identify, um,
00:47:44
Speaker
You know, how to like in in sort of the the minority report version of this of like how to prevent people from being able to take action against against police or against um ah injustices in society, the sorts of things that police like to like to protect a lot of the time. So um that this is what one area where it becomes really problematic.
00:48:04
Speaker
Even in your research, did you identify any groups that are opposing this? Like who who is around to push back on this? who Who is going to stand up against this kind of thing?
00:48:16
Speaker
Like the civil liberties organizations? Like, has has this been raising any attention from anyone? I have notified um but both the federal and the Alberta um ah Civil Liberties Associations. there They were very active back in the Clearview AI days when when that first broke back in 2021. And so you can find lots of interviews with with them and um their president and so on, the CCLA.
00:48:44
Speaker
And um i you know i think that they will take quite an interest in this. um Again, like we we don't have firm evidence that Calgary Police has subjected people's social media to um to facial recognition. just Just that they are contracted with companies that do this and that they're also dragnet surveilling social media.
Potential Expansion of Surveillance Practices
00:49:07
Speaker
So so it's like they're they're just one step removed. The capability is absolutely there for them to do it. I just can't say for sure.
00:49:14
Speaker
that like my face is in a facial recognition database that Calgary police has, has, um, you know, stuck me into. Um, so that, you know, that's, that's kind of where, where we have to so like, yeah like end this, the speculation, but, um, the, the capability is certainly there that the contract is, is there, the, the, um, paper trail can, can be traced.
00:49:35
Speaker
And, um, ah it's hard to say like what what they're doing with all this, and whether they're whether they're actually actively engaged with with facial recognition or not.
00:49:47
Speaker
Well, I'm willing to speculate one little more thing, which is I wonder if we are also going to see this technology ported over to the new Alberta sheriffs. and like if If CPS is setting the precedent here that this stuff is acceptable, I could see this stuff getting shopped right into the new police service.
00:50:07
Speaker
Yes. um And this is something I didn't touch down too much on, but there there was a mention in in these documents as well, that like other government agencies use these. And and I don't even think that Alberta was specifically named, but I think that just the given that like all of and the, and the entirety of the Ontario government uses this every ministry apparently, um but uses meltwater at least ah that, that suggests to me that, that governments across the country are probably ah engaging with this sort of material. And then the Alberta sheriffs would, would fall under the Alberta government, um,
00:50:44
Speaker
when that time comes. So I think that we we probably are likely seeing Alberta government using this type of technology already for social media management um and surveillance. and And it's really not a far stretch at all to to think that their dedicated police service would be doing the same.
00:51:01
Speaker
I haven't heard a peep about this yet from the NDP opposition, so they better start paying attention. Yeah, I would love to see a little bit more noise around just surveillance in general. I think that um people really fall asleep on the issues of privacy, but but they they they'd need to wake up because like look what what's going on with with immigration detention in the States, for example. like The ICE raids are are being facilitated by facial recognition technology. Yeah.
00:51:28
Speaker
And Israel's genocide in Gaza is is being facilitated by facial recognition technology. Some of the worst things that we're watching play out in the world right now are being facilitated by facial recognition.
00:51:40
Speaker
So um we don't want our police services to to be gaining these sorts of powers without any consent from... the public. um yeah that So far, everything that they've done around this has been non-consensual. there There are no policies underpinning their use of these technologies in a non-investigative manner.
00:51:59
Speaker
um they They break their own policy, in fact. um what threadbare policy that exists within Calgary police um in doing what they're currently doing.
00:52:10
Speaker
um So, you know, there's there's no law enforcement context here and and this dragnet surveillance, it really needs to be treated as the um sort of um like, ah you know, dirt gathering and and network mapping um of of activists and and other people in society, um opposition, for example, um that that it that it is, that that that's what they're doing.
00:52:35
Speaker
And um even without the image recognition, facial recognition side of that, that's the function of this and and it needs to be pushed back on. Okay, well, I think from a surface level, we've probably gone
Encouragement to Read Detailed Reports
00:52:48
Speaker
through everything. So at this point, the best thing that listeners could do is to go read the full story. Ewan, you publish your work at drugdatadecoded.ca.
00:52:59
Speaker
understand you have all the stories up there. Yes, it's there, drugdatadecoded.ca. The title of the story is Calgary Police Image Recognition Software Identifies Individuals in Photos and Videos Posted Online. Bit of a mouthful, but but you can find it there at Drug Data Decoded, ah free to access and... um Yeah, I'd love ah love people to sign up and just just get the newsletter. um i don't publish a lot of stuff, but when I do, it tends to be pretty deep dives into things like this. So anything drug policy related in Alberta and and policing.
00:53:33
Speaker
I'd love people to sign up too. And if you're listening to this, i I would love it if you would consider helping Ewan with that ridiculous $1,100 freedom of information bill.
00:53:45
Speaker
um It's getting very, very difficult in Alberta to get information out of any government agency. They all put us through hell. ah they They all jerk us around. that The bills are ridiculous.
00:54:01
Speaker
They redact almost everything they send you. And this one in particular is is heinous. We're doing okay for fundraising at the the Progress Report this week. So if you were looking to throw throw a couple of bucks at something, please support Ewan today because that bill was was just insane.
00:54:22
Speaker
You can find our work, of course, at theprogressreport.ca. And if you would like to subscribe to our newsletter or to support us there, all of the links are there on the site.
00:54:34
Speaker
And we do most of our posting on Blue Sky. i Trying to get off Twitter, it's pretty bad. And Jeremy, of course, publishes as well on Substack at The the Orchard.
00:54:46
Speaker
Well, um I think that's all for today. ah So thank you, everyone, for listening. Thanks for coming on the pod again, Ewan. Always a pleasure to have you. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me here. It's been great chatting with you both.
00:55:00
Speaker
All right. Well, ciao for now. Bye.