Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
As an organization that initially emerged out of experiences activists had trying to shut down far right demonstrations and events in Montreal, Montréal Antifasciste has focused on movements and organizations that promote exclusionary beliefs and policies more drastic than the “mainstream” right-wing agenda. This is obviously not a theoretically rigorous approach, just a pragmatic one, and we are aware that there are many circumstances where it might not be appropriate. Furthermore, for reasons having as much to do with capacity as anything else, we have not publicly targeted movements that currently engage in little or no public activities in our city – for instance, the anti-abortion movement or the broader Catholic Right – even though we try to keep them on our radar.
It must be stressed – our focus is a matter of expediency, we do not suggest that it should be adopted by the left overall. We recognize that State policies (like Law 21) and practices (such as police violence and border controls), as well as broader systems of oppression, have a far greater impact than the far right does on its own. Nonetheless, we feel that small focused groups can have a disproportionate effect on wider systems, and that even when they do not they still represent a threat that must be dealt with on its own terms –that’s the task we have taken as our own.
A thorough cartography of the Quebec far right would be the length of a small book; what follows is a rough outline. Our priority will be to explain the characteristics of this terrain and identify some of the more important groups, however we are aware that there is a lot we are leaving out due to simple space constraints. We encourage interested readers to check out our website (http://montreal-antifasciste.info) for a more detailed and extensive examination.
While some of us have been active studying and opposing the far right for decades, our work as MAF has been practical, and practice has shaped both what we have been able to learn and how we have come to understand the situation. Based on this experience, we have found the core beliefs of the contemporary far right in Quebec to be:
Beyond these points that unite the entire far right, there are a number of differences, the most important one being between a much larger and less politically coherent body of activists who share many attributes with the “mainstream right,” and a smaller tendency with more ideologically rigorous positions which explicitly draw on historical fascism and overt white supremacy. In our work we have termed the former milieu “national populists,” whereas we have referred to the latter as “fascists,” “neofascists,” or even “neo-nazis,” as the case may be.
From what we can tell, in both their core beliefs and the political bifurcation we have described, the Quebec far right is staying true to patterns that exist across Canada.
The main national-populist organizations in Quebec are La Meute (founded in 2015) and Storm Alliance (founded in 2016). Whereas the former initially focused on opposition to “radical Islam” and the latter on “illegal immigration,” they are currently indistinguishable in their opposition to both. The much smaller and marginal Front patriotique du Québec has also played an important part in the milieu in a variety of ways; it has repeatedly raised criticisms of La Meute for being “federalist,” and at the same time several of its members or sympathizers have been instrumental in setting up far right “security” groups whose goal is to intimidate their opponents and protect their organizations. Finally, one must mention the so-called Vague bleue mobilization which occurred in Montreal on May 4 of this year, with a second one being held in Trois-Rivières on July 27. Adopting an approach developed by the FPQ, these gatherings have been organized by national populists but have brought together people unaware of the politics involved, together with far-right security groups and even neofascists. While the “Vague bleue 2” was a horrible failure (from 300 participants in Montreal, the numbers were down to 75 in Trois Rivières), the formula of organizing such events will likely be tried again.
The neofascist tendency is much “tighter” than the national-populist milieu, and there are currently only two organizations of note: Atalante (based in Quebec City and active since 2016) and the Fédération des Québécois de souche (decentralized, albeit with a hub in Saguenay, and active since 2007). At the same time, there have been a number of semi-formal and secretive political initiatives by neofascists and neo-nazis over the years; perhaps the most important recent example being the Alt-Right Montreal/Montreal Stormers group whose existence was revealed by The Montreal Gazette in May 2018. All of the groups in this tendency explicitly identify with the traditions of fascism and open white nationalism.
The appearance of La Meute (and to a lesser extent Storm Alliance) signaled an important change in the Quebec far right. These were the first groups since the 1990s that were visibly able to speak to a base beyond their actual membership; in other words, they were the first groups with any real potential for growth. Groups that had been active before them –the Order of Templars, PEGIDA Québec, the Concerned Citizens’ Coalition, the Mouvement Républicain du Québec, etc. – never amounted to more than a few individuals (sometimes just one lone individual) claiming to be an “organization.” The one group that had a certain following that existed prior to 2016 – Les Insoumis – never managed to extend their group beyond the Sherbrooke area, though some members did repeatedly travel to Montreal to participate in other groups’ events. The closest thing we can see to a portent of what was to come was the “Marche du Silence” held in Montreal on September 24, 2015, against the PLQ’s Bill 52 (which was attended by Les Insoumis and certain anti-immigration activists), although various mass demonstrations in favour of the PQ’s Charte des valeurs québécoises in 2013 did serve as earlier warning signs.
The national-populist milieu contains a diversity of views on various questions, this being sanctioned by a frequently voiced desire to privilege “unity” by accepting people with different opinions, so long as they agree with the (rarely explained) “cause”. As a result, this milieu is far less coherent, but also much larger and more potentially mutable, than the neofascist right. To counter the tendency to describe all far right groups as “fascist”, it is worth going over some of the specific attributes of the national-populist milieu:
People who share these beliefs have existed for years on the margins of more “legitimate” political parties; arguably, the main development increasing their numbers has been a series of Islamophobic campaigns orchestrated from the top down by various politicians and media conglomerates since the first “debate on reasonable accommodation” in 2007. This has been an ongoing process, with a central role being played by the Parti Québécois under the leadership of Pauline Marois (2007-2014) and also by the Québecor media empire, headed by Pierre Karl Péladeau, one of the wealthiest men in Canada who himself served as PQ party leader in 2015-16. Quebecor Media Group – the largest media conglomerate in Quebec (and third largest in Canada) – provides a very big platform for right-wing propagandists such as Richard Martineau, Mathieu Bock-Côté, Lise Ravary and others, all the while delivering a steady stream of journalism stigmatizing minorities in Quebec, especially Muslims. Quebecor is essentially unaccountable, having withdrawn from the Quebec Press Council in 2010 and having subsequently sued the organization for continuing to render decisions regarding its media outlets. Added to this media behemoth are the so-called “radio poubelles”, concentrated in the Quebec City area – a type of talk radio that is tailored to a specific segment of the general population (male, working- or middle-class suburbanites between the ages of 18 and 45) and which caters to its nastier instincts, with a constant barrage of materialistic, individualistic, and sometimes violently reactionary talking points on a variety of topics, often demonizing and bullying various scapegoats, including feminists, leftists, environmentalists, students, immigrants, and Muslims. Not only have these radio stations promoted ideas shared by the far right, but they have repeatedly worked to legitimize national populist organizations, inviting their spokespeople on the air and defending their activities when these have been criticized.
Finally, the failures of the social democratic independence movement – both the declining popular interest in sovereignty, and its inability to successfully resist neoliberal austerity measures (which were in fact imposed by sovereigntist provincial governments from 1994-2003 and then from 2012-14) – created both a basis for and a vacuum to be filled by strains of nationalism that bear more similarity to the conservative nationalist movement of the 1920s than the independence movement of the baby boomer generation.
Specific towns and regions have also had their own personalities and issues which have encouraged the development of the national-populist milieu. For instance, in the Côte Nord, an individual like Bernard “Rambo” Gauthier was able to parlay his image as a tough “man of the people” into a pole of limited but real political influence, with which he popularized Islamophobic and anti-immigrant sentiment, framed in classic terms such as «Moé sauver des étrangers au détriment des miens, ben y’en est crissement pas question! On est assez dans marde comme ça pour en rajouter!», etc. Most famously, the city council of the small town of Herouxville made a decisive intervention in early 2007, passing a racist “code of conduct for immigrants” that played on stereotypes about ethnic and religious minorities, particularly Muslims, implying that they needed to be told not to engage in misogynistic practices such as stoning women and genital mutilation. (The municipal councillor behind the Herouxville resolution, André Drouin, was later active in the Canadian far-right group RISE Canada and for a while associated with the openly fascist Fédération des Québécois de Souche, which, following his death in 2017, eulogized him as a “courageux combattant” in the pages of its magazine Le Harfang.)
Despite this sordid context, it was only in 2016, in the context of the political campaigns of both Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, and following the establishment and growth of La Meute, that this amorphous milieu started becoming conscious of itself and first began really attempting to act as a movement. A fateful turning point was the January 29, 2017, massacre at the Quebec Islamic Cultural Centre, where Alexandre Bissonnette entered the mosque, shooting and killing six people, and injuring numerous others. (While this was clearly an Islamophobic attack, Bissonnette himself was not a member of any group.) The Quebec City mosque massacre was the most important factor pushing the far right to a new level; activists felt under attack as police launched investigations of hate speech on the internet, and many of their fears became focussed on Motion M-103, a non-binding private member’s bill condemning Islamophobia that had been proposed the previous December. For many, it felt like a “make it or break it” situation.
2017 was a year of rapid growth for this movement, and organizations repeatedly took to the streets, further elevating the profile of both the groups and their political concerns. While this represented a big step forward for these groups, a look at the numbers involved shows that they remained incapable of mobilizing on anywhere near the same scale as larger social movements, including the radical left:
(It should be noted that all of the above mentioned mobilizations included crews of neofascists, as well as numerous individuals clearly sympathetic to overt white supremacy and neo-nazism.)
National-populist demonstrations continued throughout 2018. Once again the Front Patriotique du Québec managed to bring together a wide range of over 100 far rightists (on April 15) for a demonstration against the Liberals, and Storm Alliance and La Meute continued to cooperate, holding a joint demonstration at the border on May 19 against “illegal immigration,” and mobilizing people to attend a larger June 3, 2018, rally at the border organized by Toronto white supremacist Faith Goldy. It should be noted that in 2018 Quebec national-populist organizations also mobilized to travel to Ottawa for two demonstrations organized by groups in English Canada:
Despite these examples, and unsuccessful attempts by La Meute and Storm Alliance to establish functioning chapters outside of the province, activities of the Quebec national-populist movement have been distinct and largely separate from (though not hostile to) similar political movements in English Canada. (Depending on how things go, Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada may alter this situation somewhat, as the PPC has welcomed national populist individuals into its ranks across the country, bringing them into a shared pan-Canadian framework.)
At the same time, following a period of rapid growth from 2016-18, the national-populist milieu has suffered from burnout and internal difficulties. Its flagship organization La Meute has repeatedly been wracked by crises, and numerous key activists have dropped out citing personal concerns and frustration with the inability of the movement to grow beyond its present limits. Within two years of founding the organization, both La Meute’s founders (Eric Venne and Patrick Beaudry) had left or been expelled in two separate incidents amidst claims of financial malfeasance – although whether a matter of actual fraud or simple incompetence was never established. Then in November 2017 the organization was faced with multiple revelations of sexual assault, including complaints regarding La Meute council member Éric Proulx who was eventually expelled.
In June 2019 La Meute experienced another setback, as most of the group’s leadership (reportedly over 35 out of 40) resigned en masse just prior to the Saint-Jean-Baptiste celebrations following a failed attempt to oust “spokesperson” Sylvain Brouillette, who had served as the group’s de facto chief since Beaudry’s expulsion in September 2017. Members complained that Brouillette refused to share responsibility or information, even though he was obviously incapable of fulfilling all of the tasks required of him. A specific point of contention was his failure to provide financial information in a timely manner, which had led to an indefinite delay in establishing La Meute as a non-profit organization. Brouillette managed to reassert himself within a week and many of his rivals posted videos and photos on Facebook of their destroying their own La Meute flags and memorabilia in protest. While the dust has yet to settle, at the moment it seems that many of the group’s key members may now have opted to join Storm Alliance.
Opposition from antifascists has been a factor in undermining these groups; for instance, La Meute’s last attempt at a “large” demonstration was on July 1, 2018, in Montreal, with less than 150 people attending, and hemmed in (on the hottest day of a nasty heat wave) by a variety of groups from the Montreal left. Following this fiasco a number of people publicly resigned from La Meute, and it switched to far lower profile activities in the Montreal area (leafleting and “mobile demonstrations” that amounted to a few people driving around with signs on their cars). Indeed, there are several examples of far-right organizers pointing to the antifascist opposition when they have stated that they are “taking a break” or stepping back permanently.
The high rate of burnout amongst national populists and the fractious political conflicts within their organizations (often involving accusations of financial malfeasance, sexual harassment, and dictatorial power tripping) also points to one of the characteristics of this movement: for many key players, this is their first experience with political activism. This also partially explains the apparent buffoonery that runs through these groups as well as some of the errors they have made (both tactical and organizational), which their opponents sometimes mistake for stupidity.
Finally, it is worth noting that the overwhelming majority of national-populist groups’ activities take place on social media. While the nature of social media and the broader Internet can lend undue importance to certain people and statements, it remains essential in order to understand the development of this activist milieu and the prevalence within it of completely unfounded and untrue beliefs. The social media echo chamber (especially Facebook) reinforces the worst prejudices and the more ludicrous conspiracy theories, laying the basis for a fairly “inexpensive” political (re)socialization, in a way that would be much more difficult to realize otherwise, for instance in person. Furthermore, social media facilitates the distribution and normalization of hateful rhetoric, enabling people to take content and share it within their network as if it were something they had come up with themselves, rather than being the official position of an activist organization.
Within this digital terrain, certain figures have carved out a niche for themselves as “independent journalists”, playing on the increasing skepticism towards anything that is “official” or “mainstream.” A number of online “newspapers” have been established which specialize in recycling sensationalist (and often simply untrue) stories and conspiracy theories – while their fortunes wax and wane, important examples would include The Post Millenial (run by Catholic far rightist Raymond Ayas), Les Manchettes (run by André Boies, who translated the Christchurch spree killer’s manifesto into French) and Le Peuple. These supplement a larger number of video-bloggers and Facebook users who regularly post “live videos” for their followers – perhaps the most important of which would be André Pitre and Ken Pereira, who produce regular videos detailing various conspiracies for Pitre’s youtube channel. (It is worth noting that both Ayas and Pereira are running as candidates for the People’s Party of Canada in the upcoming 2019 federal elections.)
Alongside the national-populist milieu, but by no means completely separate from it, exists a much smaller number of people with a more rigorous worldview. Drawing explicitly on fascism, white nationalism, Roman Catholic traditionalism, and in some cases on neo-nazism, we refer to these networks as neofascist or fascist.
There are two main poles of the fascist movement in Quebec.
On the one hand, there are people who came out of a number of youth subcultures, and who have often engaged in street violence and other forms of criminal activity, as well as the kinds of cultural activities associated with “underground” or independent music (organizing shows and parties, going on tour, putting out zines). International connections and local organizing was often facilitated if not modeled on these activities, both cultural and criminal, with likeminded activists around the world. This pole dates back to the 1980s in Quebec; by the 1990s members were engaging in numerous acts of violence and intimidation against the left and against racialized and queer people, including several murders. While at a certain point the main scene in question would have been skinheads, more recently one would also have to mention black metal and neo-folk in terms of cultural spaces targeted by neofascists and white supremacists.
The second pole of the Quebec fascist movement can trace its lineage back to the 1920s, however it is a broken tradition with many stops and starts, and which since the 1980s has generally been modest to the point of secrecy. This pole consists of individuals who culturally situate themselves almost as the opposite of the rowdy skinhead pole, who are intellectually and often religiously motivated to support fascist and white nationalist political activism. This tendency was last publicly organized around the Cercle Jeune Nation (1980-90), some of its adherents have also been active in Catholic traditionalist circles, for instance the Société Saint-Pie X, while some have found a home in the right wing of the Quebec nationalist movement. Due to their more respectable (and more privileged) social position, individuals from this pole have a real material interest in being circumspect about their beliefs. That is not to say that they are inactive, however.
Over the past twenty years, there has been a rapprochement between these two poles. While both Atalante and the Fédération des Québécois de souche were started by white nationalist skinheads, for instance, neither one is by any means limited to that milieu today. This organized core also benefits from the sympathy of a larger number of individuals who are sympathetic to fascist and neo-nazi ideas, even if they may choose not to be politically active at this time.
In parallel to this, a more clearly neo-nazi pole seems to have formed over the past few years around the Montreal area, piggybacking on groups based primarily on the Internet like The Right Stuff and the Daily Stormer; due to the secret nature of this group (organized largely in hidden chat rooms and forums online), it could provide a comfortable home to both individuals who aspired to create a political movement IRL, and a number of lurkers, prior to being severely disrupted by antifascists in 2018.
The formation of a national-populist scene in Quebec has provided the neofascists with an opportunity for outreach. While some neo-nazis, for instance those around the Alt-Right Montreal scene, may deride the national populists as “boomers” and express wanting to have nothing to do with them, the existence of a large milieu nonetheless creates both the political space and practical occasions (such as demonstrations) where they can meet and make their own connections. The year 2017 in particular was remarkable for the way in which neofascists repeatedly managed to make a claim to legitimacy within the broader far right. If on March 4, members of Atalante demonstrated separately from La Meute in Quebec City, and implicitly criticized the latter while winking at the left with their banner (which read, “Immigration –The Reserve Army of Capital”), in Montreal members of Alt-Right Montreal were in the thick of it, joining with La Meute and Storm Alliance, and engaging in physical clashes with antifascist counterdemonstrators. Eight months later in Quebec City, Atalante and the Soldiers of Odin staged their own dramatic entrance into the November 25 national-populist demonstration after having taken the ramparts opposite the smaller antifascist demonstration. It is worth mentioning that as they entered the broader demonstration, the neofascists were met with applause from La Meute and Storm Alliance members, many of whom “liked” their Facebook page and congratulated them on social media in the days following.
Some characteristics of the neofascist tendency include:
Compared to the national populists, the neofascists have much more developed and important connections in Europe and the United States, and can in fact be said to belong to an international political and intellectual movement. Members of Atalante, for instance, have strong connections to the Rock Against Communism scene, and have also drawn directly on their connections with the Italian neofascist movement CasaPound, borrowing both elements of discourse (rhetoric that connects anti-immigrant sentiment with anti-capitalism, etc.) and mobilizing tactics (charity initiatives exclusively for “old stock” citizens, etc.). The FQS for its part frequently includes interviews with intellectuals from outside of Quebec in its magazine Le Harfang. One thing that sets the Quebec scene apart from neofascists elsewhere in North America is the predictably greater place that European movements have held in its worldview. For instance, whereas the Alt Right in the United States represented the first introduction of certain texts from the European New Right into the American far right, these ideas have been familiar to many Quebec neofascists since the 1970s and 80s.
The increase in far right activity in Quebec over the past few years can be traced back to a number of factors external to the movement, some of which are international in scope some of which are specific to our situation here: the “War on Terror,” the social media-driven internet, the 2008 financial crisis, the multiple failures of the left wing of the Quebec independence movement, and the Trump presidency, to name just the most obvious.
We don’t expect the process driving this growth to slow down, in fact we expect there to be future “jumps” in a bad direction, as the global financial and ecological crises hit impending tipping points. That said, for the immediate future we predict that the bifurcation of the far right described in this article will continue, with a much larger movement with a wider range of views continuing to expand, and that this growth will also benefit smaller more rigorous organizations with more radical political aspirations. At the same time, these movements are part of a dynamic that is itself pulling the entire political debate in a certain direction, normalizing certain ideas, and legitimizing “less radical” measures; the election of neoliberal populists across Canada, including here in Quebec with the CAQ, speaks to this reality.
Quebec is not an anomaly: today the far right, consisting of national populists but with a strong neofascist current, have a real impact on the political balance of power throughout not only Europe and North America, but has actually been elected to state power in three of the BRICS as well. Contending with the far right and learning how to (re)build new radical liberation movements that can operate and win on this terrain is the task facing us today. Given capitalism’s global crisis, failure to do so would have grave consequences from which we might never be able to recover.
From North Saskatchewan Resistance
The first gun control law passed in Canada was given royal assent in 1886. It applied only to the Territories, inclusive of what is today Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. The scope of this legislation would make even Trudeau blush.
Section 101 of the North-West Territories Act made it illegal for anyone to own, use, transport, buy, or sell any firearms or ammunition for any purpose without the express written permission of the government. The law remained in place until 1905 when Saskatchewan and Alberta became provinces. The reasoning behind this bill, passed into law by the conservative Macdonald government, was to stamp out all remaining dissent against the Canadian state, especially by the Native and Métis inhabitants of the Territories, who in those days comprised the majority. Even with the leaders of the North-West Rebellion all brutally executed or exiled, the heavily-militarized North-West Mounted Police roaming the countryside, and the majority of the First Nations population corralled onto tiny reserves, the federal government felt the need to fully disarm the wild West. From that year on, the history of gun control in Canada has been a long history of the state disarming the people at the first flash of discontent.
In the years that followed, new laws required that Canadian citizens have permits for pistols and that foreigners acquire a permit before handling any firearm. A firearm registry was established. Even still, the rules governing firearms ownership were much more lax than the totalitarian police-state that ruled in the West in the immediate aftermath of the hanging of Louis Riel. As the Trudeau and Turner governments faced pressure from Quebec separatists and the FLQ demonstrated the lengths that they were willing to go to to break free of Canada, new systems of control were implemented first in 1969 with the omnibus C-150 and again in 1977. These laws introduced the FAC system and classified firearms as non-restricted, restricted, and prohibited.
Today’s system of gun control saw its birth in 1991. A gun-control bill had been passed around for months following the massacre of 14 women in one of Canada’s worst hate crimes in December of 1989 at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. Despite a great deal of public support for the bill, it failed to gain much traction in either the Liberal or Conservative Party.
In the summer of 1990, however, Mohawk warriors in Kanehsatà:ke began defending their land against illegal attempts by the Quebec government to build a golf course over their cemetery. After a police officer was killed in the stand-off, a months-long crisis ensued that threw all major parties into an embarrassing display of colonial racism and civic cowardice. A rising star within Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives, Kim Campbell, brought forward a heavily modified version of the previously unpopular gun control bill, and Bill C-17 (1991) passed through the House of Commons with the approval of both the Conservatives and Liberals. The firearm used to massacre over a dozen women in Quebec two years prior (the Ruger Mini-14) remained non-restricted, while the firearms carried by the Mohawk Warriors – all semi-automatic civilian variants of the AK-47 – were reclassified as prohibited.
Just a few years later, not wanting to be out-done by the Conservatives, the Liberal Party passed even stronger restrictions on firearms. Bill C-68 (1995) was again passed on the rhetoric of École Polytechnique, but nothing in the bill’s language would have prevented any mass shootings. Rather, the language of the bill was targeted at enemies of the state, such as the Shuswap and Secwepemc warriors who had held their ground at Gustafsen Lake just a couple of months before the bill was brought before Parliament.
The Canadian government has long claimed that its efforts to disarm its citizens have been in those citizens’ best interest, even while the RCMP return to their militaristic roots and every day look more and more like an occupying army instead of the familiar Dudley Do-Rights we’ve come to fetishize. When next the government comes to take the shotgun hanging on the mantle or the hunting-rifle in the safe, remember the history of gun control in this country, and think twice about thanking the constable for his service as he robs you in the middle of the day.
On August 24, 2019, a small anti-immigrant demonstration was held at the Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle border crossing. The event was coordinated by the Groupe de sécurité patriotique (GSP, literally translated as “Patriotic Security Group”) and supported by an assortment of far-right fanatics, including a well-known neo-Nazi who traveled from Ontario with other Canadian ultranationalists to team up with our local “patriots.”
These demonstrators, who obviously adhere to an alternative version of reality rooted in various conspiracy theories (including the so-called “great replacement” of the Québécois/Canadian/Western/White populations by means of a “mass immigration” plan that is supposedly orchestrated by the “globalist elite” at the UN; this is the exact same racist theory that inspired the Christchurch and El Paso mass murderers), had called for a gathering at Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle in order to denounce the arrival of immigrants and “illegal” refugees into Canada[i].
The August 24 rally was first called by Lucie Poulin, a key organizer with the Parti patriote (Patriot Party), which is currently trying to gather enough signatures to run in the 2019 federal election. The Patriot Party is a far-right, nationalist group in Québec which was present at the recent Vague bleue (Blue Wave) mobilizations, but whose relationship with the Vague bleue organizers has since then taken a turn for the worse following a public freak out from Poulin. Not surprisingly, the Patriot Party’s main issues are opposition to “mass immigration” and “anti-Québécois racism.”
The far-right mobilization on August 24 remained mediocre, despite the announcement made by Robert Proulx, leader of the Groupe de sécurité patriotique (GSP), that his group endorsed the initiative and would be present to ensure its security.
The day after the event, Robert Proulx – discomfited and on the verge of depression – published a video in which he expressed a negative appraisal and overall disappointment with the mobilization. Not once did he address the presence of a well-known neo-Nazi by his side all day…
Groupe de Séurité Patriotique’s chieftain, Robert Proulx, best of pals with Kevin Goudreau, the neo-Nazi leader of the Canadian Nationalist Front.
Among the approximately 40 people who gathered at the border was a small contingent of Canadian “Yellow Vests” from the Toronto and Hamilton areas, as well as Peterborough’s neo-Nazi activist Kevin Goudreau… who was even invited to take the microphone a few times!
Goudreau, the infamous leader of the Canadian Nationalist Front, has a long history of ultra-nationalist militancy, and recently made headlines for calling on his supporters to kill members of the Anti-Hate Network, journalists, and antifascists.
“I’m proud of my heritage; we’ve been here for 400 fucking years. And we don’t need, these fucking… god-dam fucking ragheads (sic) coming here and telling us how to live our life. Our heritage, our homeland. (…) We’re not immigrants. We did not immigrate here. We built this country, from garbage, from nothing.”
Just before, Johane Voyer – presented as the GSP’s head of media relations – made a long speech as delirious as it was disjointed:
« (…) We are Storm Alliance, Les Gardiens du Québec, La Meute… We are Atalante, name it… EVEN, we are the antifas! (…) »
(…) Our political elites want to make Canada and Québec an overpopulated country of immigrants. (…)
Trudeau, among others, between 2019 and 2020, if he is re-elected, he wants to bring in a million. (…) Canada has the highest immigration rate in the world. We are forced back. Mass immigration, refugees, crossing on behalf of a third country, supposedly legal or illegal asylum seekers (sic). For at least 15 years, this country has accepted twice as many immigrants as the United States, and four times more than France. That means between two and two and a half times per capita (sic). If that is not the assimilation of our people, then what is it?”
“There is not a single francophone left in Manitoba anymore.”
The vociferous Michel Malik Ethier, who has previously been mentioned on this site on various occasions, pointed to the UN as the main enemy of the Québécois people:
“It’s the UN that is pushing Trudeau to do that. Trudeau uses a weapon called ‘multiculturalism’ to attain his globalist ends. The remedy, the antidote to that, is what I see before me: it is patriotism. That’s why they want to destroy nationalism altogether. Whether it is Quebec nationalism or Canadian nationalism, our nationalism is a poison for Trudeau. (…) Trudeau, leaving the door open to any migrant, puts us in danger.”
Following the example of Voyer and other speakers, Ethier then inexplicably decided to address the dozens of protesters in English. It would normally be surprising to see so many Quebec patriots demonstrating under a gigantic maple leaf and speaking in English to reach out to Canadian ultranationalists –but for these so-called patriots, the defense of “the people” and of the national territory against the imaginary threat of “mass immigration” now seems to take priority over the aspiration to national independence for Quebec!
Robert Proulx, aka “Bob the Warrior,” the leader of GSP, took the microphone next to defend the group’s practice of dressing up as fake soldiers in military surplus gear to “defend” these ultranationalist protests. True to his habit of lying compulsively, he began by saying that GSP has “ensured security at protests” for five years, even though the group has only existed for a year (at most), and even though Proulx himself only began appearing at La Meute’s protests in 2017. Once full of shit, always full of shit…
“What really hurts is to read comments on Facebook saying that we look like ridiculous dumbasses dressed in military gear.”
Donald Proulx, of the Patriot Party, followed with a series of dubious statistics on “the assimilation of Francophones”:
“[The Francophone nation across Canada] In 1766, we were at 99%; we can say that things were going very well at that time. (…) Today, we are talking about being down to 20%. With massive and illegal immigration, it will continue to drop much more quickly. (…) Nationalist parties are taking off in Europe right now. We need that kind of politics here, and it should have started at least 15 years ago. The Patriot Party is going to be there, not just at the federal level, we are going to be there at the provincial level, and we are going to target the municipal, we are going to be everywhere.”
A discrete antifascist mobilization remained in proximity to, but separate from, the demonstration all day long, observing the bigots from a distance. It was decided on the spot not to engage in a direct counter-protest – given the circumstances, it was better to simply leave them with the rope they needed to hang themselves!
Lucie Poulin and Robert Proulx both boasted about their close collaboration with the police in their respective video reports on the event, stating that the police closely escorted them throughout the day. Police officers were even seen joking and socializing with the bigots.
Most of the demonstrators took several hours to reach the border crossing at Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, but for some, the trip was much shorter.
André Lafrance, a municipal councillor for Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, was present at the rally. Far from dissociating himself from the racists, he joined the small crowd and even published a photo album of the day accompanied by raving commentary.
It also seems that the racists’ meeting point, IGA Dauphinais, was not chosen by coincidence; the owner of the IGA and the attached shopping center went above and beyond to accommodate the rally, and the protesters were warmly welcomed –both in the parking lot and, after their protest, in the mall restaurant. We are observing a clear pattern, here, and will pay greater attention in the future to this preoccupying complicity in Lacolle.
After the fiasco that was the Vague bleue (Blue Wave) in Trois-Rivières, the small national-populist milieu currently rallied around the GSP has just proven that its members are no better than their rivals the Gardiens du Québec (Guardians of Quebec), considering that they went so far as to give a nice platform to a well-known neo-Nazi!
For the record, before the small rally on the 24th, Lucie Poulin had already stirred up drama in the milieu by attacking both John Hex (the main organizer of the Vague bleue) and Storm Alliance for not having immediately endorsed her initiative. Her criticism was then echoed by Robert Proulx and Sylvain Lacroix of GSP, who were still frustrated at having been told by the organizers of the Vague bleue not to come out to the event’s second edition wearing paramilitary outfits (hence Proulx’s comment above). In response, Éric Trudel, the leader of Storm Alliance, stated that “the Stormers” would no longer return to the border, stressing that the individuals behind the demonstration on August 24thare those who are always stirring up shit within the movement.
Speaking on behalf of La Meute, an organization in crisis and full of hypocrites, Wolfric Oullet (dictator-in-chief Sylvain Brouillette’s right-hand man) took a moment to criticize former Meute members and “dissidents” who joined or endorsed the demonstration: “You gang of fools are not worthy to bear our name and wear our colors after having burned them and with what you are now doing with them. Shame on you all, you gang of imbeciles.”
What we are currently witnessing in Quebec is a rise to the surface of all the most pathetic elements of the far-right, in a context where the two main organizations active in recent years – La Meute and Storm Alliance – are withdrawing. All kinds of individuals, a little less skillful and more frank in their racism, are taking advantage of this withdrawal to put themselves forward.
A situation to keep an eye on.
[i] The Lacolle border crossing has become a priority gathering area for the far-right in its opposition to immigration. A large number of migrants cross the border at Roxham Road, close to the Lacolle crossing, to flee an increasingly repressive situation in the United States. Since the Trump regime has refused to renew various agreements allowing people to remain in that country legally, people come to Canada in the hope of finding refuge here. However, because of the hypocritical and deadly “Safe Third Country Agreement,” migrants are denied refugee status if they show up at a regular border crossing. This is why they are forced to cross at an irregular passage. Roxham Road has become one of the most important (and most famous) of these crossing points.
Rather than recognize the situation at the border for what it is – the tip of the iceberg of a global humanitarian crisis fueled by imperialist wars, ecological destruction, and racism – far-right organizations cling to the issue of what they call “illegal immigration” to attract media attention and stir up racist sentiments and behavior. It is important to note that according to the Quebec Bar Association, there is no such thing as “illegal immigration”; it is not a legal category. The use of the term “illegal immigrants” is just a word trick meant to suggest that refugees are doing something wrong or are criminals.
From subMedia
Our societies are heavily dependent on violence to function. While states will attempt to hold a monopoly on violence and constantly find new ways to legitimize their use of force, people struggling against domination can also use violence to confront the hierarchical systems oppressing them. While debates around violence and tactics seem to be revived every time someone decides to fight back, the necessity of physical attacks on power cannot be ignored. So, what is violence exactly, and how does it function in the world?
From Solidarity Across Borders
Montreal, 27 August 2019 — The Superior Court of Quebec has granted Construction Tisseur Inc. a legal injunction against the migrant justice network Solidarity Across Borders. Tisseur was awarded the federal contract to build the new migrant prison in Laval in June. The temporary injunction was sought in response to a festive information-picket, featuring live Klezmer music, outside Tisseur’s headquarters in Val-David last Thursday.
“This sets a very disturbing precedent. It is a huge concern for everyone in Quebec when a company uses the courts to silence critics. We remember Barrick Gold’s legal harassment of Éco-societé for publishing Noir Canada. And we see a clear connection: Canadian mining companies like Barrick Gold contribute to displacing people who then end up in immigration detention centres. We won’t be silenced, there is far too much at stake,” said Jane Doe of Solidarity Across Borders.
Solidarity Across Borders received notice at 6:26 pm on Thursday, 22nd August of a court hearing the following morning. Solidarity Across Borders’ legal representative requested a postponement to allow time to prepare a defence, but the postponement was denied. The temporary injunction, prohibiting Solidarity Across Borders, Jane Doe, and John Doe access to Tisseur’s property at 1670 Route 117 in Val-David, remains in place until September 1st. The injunction could be renewed this week.
“We organized the picket last week to reach out to the workers involved in this project. We believe that detention centres for migrants and refugees, and the immigration system they are part of, undermine labour rights. We wanted to engage with Tisseur workers about this during their lunch hour,” said John Doe of Solidarity Across Borders.
“Tisseur complained that we put up posters on their walls. We taped up silhouettes of friends who had been detained and deported, such as Lucy Granados, a single mother and worker from Guatemala who came to Canada after the US-owned factory she was working at moved to Asia, where labour was cheaper, and “Daniel,” a 17-year old boy who was detained at a Montreal high school and deported alone to Mexico,” said Doe.
“We don’t think Yannick Tisseur was afraid of our temporary posters or non-stick tape, but he is clearly scared of these stories reaching his workers. One of the signs read, ‘Tisseur, would you imprison your kids?’ He doesn’t want his workers to know that this prison will be used to imprison children.”
Tisseur began construction of the new prison, located beside the current Laval Immigration Holding Centre, on 5 August 2019. Scheduled to open in 2021, it is part of a $138 million investment into Canada’s capacity to indefinitely detain and deport migrants, including children. Former detainees report serious mental health problems such as nightmares, depression, suicidal thoughts, difficulty sleeping, anxiety, and other symptoms related to post-traumatic stress syndrome.
From From Embers
An interview with a now Bogota-based member of Projet Accompagnement Solidarité Colombie, a Quebec-based collective that works to build direct solidarity with Colombian communities, organizations and social movements.
Topics include:
– the meaning of internationalism and why and how we frame our struggles in an international context.
– what North-South solidarity looks like.
– political violence and how it relates to social struggles.
– struggling alongside people who are not anarchists.
Links:
SPEECH given at the SOLIDARITY WITH CEDAR & DROP ALL CHARGES AGAINST PRIDE DEFENDERS demo, MONTREAL, July 28th.
Thank you so much for coming – everyone – beautiful queers and trans people, anarchists of all stripes, anti-fascists – allies. It is going to be an amazing night of sending our love and solidarity to our friends in Hamilton and Cedar in prison. To start out with we have a just a few things to say…
We come together today, on the ancestral territory of Anishnabeg and Haudonousanee peoples, more specifically the unceded land of the Kanien’kehà:ka Nation, in order to protest and show our queer and trans rage following the events of the last week. It is important to be stated that the colonial mechanism that stole this land in the first place, allowing so called Montreal to be built, also targeted the cultural terrain of sexuality and gender for hundreds of years. While many of our identities are so different, the concepts and notions of gay or queer or trans that non-indigenous people use are constructed in reaction to, and from white Christian colonial and capitalist culture. The very fabric and fibre of these words, while clearly imperfect, is not new, and pays hommage to the people whose bodies were born into conflict with the heterocolonial project. We recognise that numerous indigenous cultures respected more than two sexualities and genders, celebrating their two-spirited community members. For five hundred years the colonial project of the State has attacked these people, trying to extinguish or assimilate them. But indigenous land sovereignty is inseparable from sovereignty over bodies, sexuality and gender self-expression. We honor the fighters who have struggled long and hard to restore sexual diversity and gender fluidity back into their cultures and we recognize our queer struggle as being intertwined with an anti-colonial struggle as well.
On June 15th, 2019 in Hamilton, “Ontario”, Pride was attacked by a group of far-right homophobes, christian fundamentalists, neo-nazis, and queer bashers. As they did in 2018, they arrived with massive homophobic signs and banners, and immediately began to scream insults and slurs. They aggressively harassed individuals, made jokes about rape, and threatened physical violence. Things quickly escalated as the bigots violently confronted people who were holding a fabric barrier in an attempt to block them from disrupting Pride. Initiated by the far-right activists a brawl broke out – queers who refused to allow their presence to go unchallenged were attacked, but fought back. Several friends were injured and required medical attention. The police did nothing during this hour-long conflict, and only stepped in at the end when there was nothing left to do. The haters knew they couldn’t sustain their presence any longer, and welcomed the police escort out of the park. After being kicked out of Pride, this same group chased and assaulted queer youth in the neighbourhood, and then went on to attack people at Toronto Pride the following week.
Since these events, the Hamilton Police have felt quite threatened – communities that feel empowered to use force to defend themselves undermine their unquestionable authority. Over the course of the last week, the police have consequently been targeting and harassing known queer anarchists in the city as punishment for folks standing up for themselves. Our dear friend Cedar (who wasn’t even present at the event!) was arrested on Saturday, and was on hunger strike for five days. They will stay in jail until a lengthy probation hearing, a vengeful and punitive measure carried out by the police because Cedar publicly criticized the police’s actions. Later this week, two other queer friends have been arrested and charged with probation breaches based on suspicion of being present at Pride. Not a single homophobe was charged all week, despite the widespread circulation of their names, faces and videos of their violent actions, until public pressure finally forced the police to charge Christopher Vanderweide with assault with a weapon. We oppose the colonial prison system, but the repression the police directed to those they suspect as Pride defenders first is once again truly revealing of their age-old position and purpose: protecting racists, misogynists, and homophobes.
Queer might involve our sexuality or our gender, but to us it means soo much more. It’s a territory of tension that we must defend. We stand in solidarity with Cedar and those accused in connection with this event, as well as any queers held in prison for bashing back. As queers and trans people, we know that our existence has been fought for bravely by those who have come before us, not only against homophobes and neo-nazis but also against the police. Queer militancy has a long lineage. We remember, 50 years today, the Stonewall Rebellion, on June 28 1969, as a four-day anti-police riot led by Black and Latina drag queens, kings, and transsexuals, like Marsha P. Johnson et Sylvia Rivera, in New York’s Greenwich Village. It went on to become a rebellion that was both gay and trans, for in the words of Queen Allyson Ann Allante, a fourteen year old participant at the time, “because it was the first time that both came together to fight off the oppressor and it set a good precedent to do it many times since. It was a big milestone for both communities because they were both in unity to fight the common oppressor, which at that time was the police and the mafia, who controlled the gay clubs.” While remembering the flying bricks and high heels exploding from gay trans anger, we can’t forget that the gay liberation movement that blossomed systemically tried to silence and marginalize the participation of trans women of color, trying to centre attention on a white gay respectable narrative. We see this tendancy 50 years later and we know that our communities still have internalized and externalized transmisogyny and racism to work on, and we see the imperativeness of fighting common enemies like the police or the far-right, shoulder to shoulder. We remember police attacks here in Montreal, stemming back to the attack in Truxx Bar when 143 party goers were arrested and charged for indecency in 1977. We remember also Sex Garage in 1990, when the SPVM descended on 400 gay club goers, violently beating them with their batons and the ensuing 36 hour fight. We know that queer and trans homeless youth and sex workers still face police repression constantly on the streets – the only reason that the Gay village of Montreal is now this far East of downtown is that in the lead-up to both Expo ’67 and the 1976 Summer Olympics, the SPVM carried forth a brutal criminalization campaign on the city’s queers – beating up and arresting many people as well as closing down bars. We know that worldwide queer people, especially those who are racialized, are disproportionately attacked, criminalized, incarcerated and even murdered. American transphobic hate crimes have tripled in the last five years and we see a similar trend here – our work is so far from being over! Yesterday the 11th American trans person to be murdered this year was found in Kansas City – Brooklyn Lindsey, yet another black transwoman trying to live her life. We remember Sisi Thibert, who in September 2017, was stabbed in Pointe St. Charles, Montreal. This sadness and pain stays with us always. Our existence will continue to be threatened unless together, we fiercely defend ourselves, our friends, as well as the spaces we create. But marginalized people are doing that on the daily. The far-right group that mobilized in Hamilton is not too different from far-right groups that have been fought against in Quebec. Queers are coming together, like in Hamilton and countless times before, to hold, feed, listen to, and fight for each other. We know that we need to make ruins of domination in all of its varied and interlacing forms and that none are free until all are free. Fighting back is always legitimate. We are going to dance and take up space tonight, be beautiful and revolting together, as a way to blend our queer love and queer rage for the fucked up attacks on our friends in Hamilton and the police’s consequential repression. We know that we are strong together – let’s fucking show it. We are here tonight to say :
Drop all charges against Pride defenders, free Cedar now!
Queer liberation and total freedom.
Statement by The Tower
It’s been a very intense and revealing week since Hamilton Pride. We helped our friends heal, debriefed our strategies, and circulated as much information about the people who attacked us as we could. The videos and statements have gone viral, the outrage is visceral. Homophobic white nationalists attacked Pride, they were confronted by a huge group of queers, the police did nothing and then took credit for stopping the attack, the mayor backed the police despite hundreds of witnesses, and the homophobes walk free. While the helmet-wielding maniac who smashed our faces continued his crusade in Toronto, posing for celebrity pictures with a new helmet and brutally attacking at least one more person (you can watch the video here: http://anti-racistcanada.blogspot.com/2019/06/violence-after-pegida-march-northern.html), the police were busy banging on the doors of known queer anarchists in Hamilton, lurking in backyards, and shaking down our entire community.
On Saturday they arrested Cedar Hopperton for allegedly violating their parole conditions, and later issued a press release that accused them of attending the Pride events and confronting the bigots. This only magnified the outrage, and over a hundred people came together that night outside of the police station to demand Cedar’s release. Others participated in a phone zap that flooded the police station with hundreds of calls demanding they let them go. Social media has exploded with condemnations of the arrest, and people of all political stripes seem to agree on one basic fact: criminalizing people who defended Pride from vicious right-wing attacks is fundamentally wrong.
But here’s the thing: Cedar Hopperton was not at Hamilton Pride. They weren’t masked up, they weren’t there holding a sign, and they weren’t involved in any confrontation. They weren’t there at all. They weren’t anywhere close to Gage Park that day. Instead they stayed home and offered support to those who left the park bloodied, battered, and shaken. As the papers reported, they did come out with supportive statements of those defending pride during an LGBTQ advisory committee meeting in the days after. Standing at a pedestal in city hall, Cedar argued that police are not and should never be part of the queer community, and applauded those at pride who stood up for themselves in the face of violence. Cedar’s arrest is a clear and calculated retaliation for these statements, and an attempt to muddy the waters by equating what happened at Pride with what happened on Locke Street last year.
Because of the way the legal system and the media work, their revenge has already done it’s damage. National news covered the fact that Cedar Hopperton was arrested for their involvement in a confrontation at Pride Hamilton. Even some of Cedar’s supporters carried the narrative (understandably), explaining that “Cedar was only there defending queer people”. The police fabricated a story, and within 24 hours it had become a national truth.
Despite the fact that they weren’t at Pride, Cedar could spend weeks in jail just waiting for a parole hearing in order to make their case. In order to speed this process and apply pressure on the Hamilton Police, Cedar has begun a hunger strike. We don’t have any other details as of now, but we know that since being arrested on Saturday morning Cedar hasn’t eaten anything. We need people to mobilize around this, to help spread the word, and to make sure Cedar’s case doesn’t get lost in the weekly news cycle.
To be clear, this isn’t about Cedar’s “innocence” per se. We know the word “criminal” is only used to devalue someone’s actions or humanity, and we don’t believe that breaking a law makes someone either good or bad. We are putting this statement out because we feel that it is important to state publicly: the claim that Cedar was involved in the events that took place at Hamilton Pride is categorically untrue and unfounded. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that other queers that may be arrested should be supported on the basis of innocence. What folks did that day at Pride was self-defence and they do not deserve to be arrested. We need to be upset at the police for falsely accusing Cedar AND for targeting those of who were there and tried to protect our community.
The police have said it repeatedly to the media, they aren’t finished. They’re almost certainly going to arrest other people who were involved in defending Pride, with or without evidence. Like Cedar, we too will feel the sting of arrest, the trauma of strip searches, the horrors of jail, and the humiliation of a bail hearing. The police will continue to do everything they can to get us fired from our jobs, to terrify our families, and jeopardize our housing. At no point will any of the cops involved be held accountable. That is what the police do. Often they exercise this kind of routine violence without even being seen, but this time all eyes are on them. Queers across the country are watching Hamilton right now to see how this unfolds. Hamiltonians are fuming mad about the naked injustice of this situation. People aren’t as easily tricked or distracted as the police would like us to be.
The most threatening thing to the police are communities that feel empowered to use force to defend themselves because it undermines the thing they hold most dear – their unquestioned authority. The arrests and intimidation being used by them now are punishment for us standing up for ourselves.
This is far from being over. Please stay diligent. Please keep holding the police accountable and watch for updates about others who may be arrested. The amazing feeling of being in this together has been the most validating and important thing to us. And Cedar must have felt amazing hearing the fireworks being set off yesterday outside the jail. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your solidarity.
For Background:
Hamilton Pride Report Back
https://north-shore.info/2019/06/19/hamilton-pride-2019-reportback/
Statement on Police Targeting Queers
Anonymous submission to North Shore Counter-Info
Download Imposed PDF for Printing
Contact the author at signalfails [at] riseup [dot] net
Signal is an encrypted messaging service that has been around in different forms for about 10 years. Since then, I have seen the software widely adopted by anarchist networks across Canada and the United States. More and more, for better and for worse, our interpersonal and group conversations have moved onto the Signal platform, to the extent that it has become the dominant way anarchists communicate with each other on this continent, with very little public debate about the implications.
Signal is just a smartphone app. The actual paradigm shift that’s happening is to a life increasingly mediated by smartphone screens and social media. It only took a few short years for smartphones to become mandatory for anyone who wants friends or needs work, outside of a few scattered pockets. Until recently, the anarchist subculture was one of those pockets, where you could refuse to carry a smartphone and still socially exist. Now I’m less sure, and that’s fucking depressing. So I’m going to stubbornly insist throughout this text that there is no substitute for real-world face-to-face relationships, with all the richness and complexity of body language, emotion, and physical context, and they continue to be the most secure way to have a private conversation. So please, let’s leave our phones at home, meet up in a street or forest, conspire together, make some music, build some shit, break some shit, and nurture offline living together. I think this is way more important than using Signal correctly.
The idea for this zine came about a year ago, when I was visiting friends in another city and joking about the ways Signal conversations back home turn into trainwrecks. The patterns were immediately recognized, and I started to realize that this conversation was happening in a lot of places. When I started asking around, everyone had complaints and opinions, but very few shared practices had emerged. So I came up with a list of questions and circulated them. I was pleasantly surprised to receive more than a dozen detailed responses, which combined with several informal conversations, inform the majority of this text.(1)
I’m not an expert – I haven’t studied cryptography and I don’t know how to code. I’m an anarchist with an interest in holistic security, and a skeptical relationship with technology. My goal with this piece is to reflect on how Signal has become so central to anarchist communication in our context, appraise the implications on both our collective security and social organization, and advance a few preliminary proposals towards developing shared practices.
A Brief History of Signal
25 years ago, the technological optimists among us saw enormous potential in the emerging internet as a liberatory tool. Remember that old CBC segment which praised “a computer network called Internet” as “modulated anarchy?” And while there are still powerful ways to securely communicate, co-ordinate and spread ideas online, it’s clear that state and corporate entities are gradually capturing more and more of the online space and using it to subject us to increasingly intense forms of surveillance and social control.(2)
The internet has always been an arms race. In 1991, cryptographer, civil libertarian and peace activist(3) Phil Zimmerman created Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), an open-source application for file encryption and end-to-end encryption for email. I’m avoiding technical details, but basically the importance of end-to-end is that you can securely communicate directly with another person, and your email service can’t see the message, whether it’s Google or Riseup. To this day, as far as we know, PGP encryption has never been broken.(4)
For years, techies and security nerds in certain circles – anarchists, journalists, criminals, etc – tried to spread PGP to their networks as a kind of secure communications infrastructure, with some success. As with everything, there were limitations. My biggest security concern(5) with PGP is the lack of Forward Secrecy, which means that if a private encryption key is ever compromised, all the emails ever sent with that key can be decrypted by an attacker. This is a real concern, given that the NSA is almost certainly storing all your encrypted emails somewhere, and one day quantum computers might be able to break PGP. Don’t ask me how quantum computers work – as far as I’m concerned, evil fucking magic.
The big social problem with PGP, one that strongly informed the Signal project, is the fact that it was never widely adopted outside of niche circles. In my experience, it was even difficult to get anarchists on PGP and using it properly. There were workshops, lots of people got set up, but as soon as a computer crashed or a password was lost, it was back to square one. It just didn’t stick.
Sometime around 2010, smartphones started to popularize and everything changed. The ubiquity of social media, constant instant messaging, and the ability for telecom companies (and thus government) to track users’ every move(6) has completely transformed the threat model. All the work people put into computer security was set back decades: smartphones rely on a completely different architecture than PCs, resulting in far less user control, and the advent of completely unfettered app permissions has made the idea of smartphone privacy almost laughable.
This is the context that Signal emerged from. Anarchist ‘cypherpunk’ Moxie Marlinspike started working on software to bring end-to-end encryption to smartphones, with Forward Secrecy, working on the idea that mass surveillance should be countered with mass encryption. Signal was designed to be usable, pretty, and secure. Moxie agreed to team up with tech giants WhatsApp, Facebook, Google and Skype to implement Signal’s encryption protocol onto their platforms as well.
The big win for us is when a billion people are using WhatsApp and they don’t even know it’s encrypted” – Moxie Marlinspike
Understandably, anarchists are more likely to trust their communications to Signal – a non-profit foundation run by an anarchist – than they are to trust big tech, whose main business model is harvesting and reselling user data. And Signal has some advantages over these other platforms: it’s open-source (and thus subject to peer review), encrypts most metadata, stores as little user data as possible, and offers some very useful features like disappearing messages and safety number verification to guard against interceptions.
Signal has earned nearly universal praise from tech security experts, including endorsements from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and top scores from the respected Electronic Frontier Foundation. In 2014, leaked documents from the NSA described Signal as a “major threat” to its mission (of knowing everything about everyone). Personally, I trust the encryption.
But Signal only really protects one thing, and that’s your communication as it travels between your device and another device. That’s great, but it’s only one piece of a security strategy. That’s why it’s important, when we talk about security, to start with Threat Modeling. The first questions for any security strategy are who is your expected adversary, what are they trying to capture, and how are they likely to go about getting it. The basic idea is that things and practices are only secure or insecure relative to the kind of attack you are expecting to defend against. For example, you might have your data locked down with solid encryption and the best password, but if your attacker is willing to torture you until you give up the data, it doesn’t really matter.
For the purpose of this text, I would propose a working threat model that is primarily concerned with two types of adversaries. The first is global intelligence agencies or powerful hackers engaging in mass surveillance and intercepting communications. The second is police agencies, operating on territory controlled by the Canadian or American government, engaging in targeted surveillance of anarchists. For the police, basic investigative techniques include monitoring email lists and social media, sending undercovers to events, and casual informants. At times when they have more resources, or our networks become a bigger priority, they escalate to more advanced techniques including longer-term infiltration, frequent or continuous physical surveillance (including attempts to capture passwords), bugging devices, intercepting communications, and house raids where devices are seized and subjected to forensic analysis.
I should note that many European jurisdictions are implementing key disclosure laws which legally compel individuals to give their passwords to authorities under certain conditions or face jail time.(7) Maybe it’s only a matter of time, but for now in Canada and the U.S., we are not legally compelled to disclose passwords to authorities, with the notable exception of when we are crossing the border.(8)
If your device is compromised with a keylogger or other malicious software, it doesn’t really matter how secure your communications are. If you’re hanging out with a snitch or a cop it doesn’t really matter if you take the battery out of your phone and talk in a park. Device security and security culture are two concepts not covered by this text that have to be considered to guard against these very real threats. I’ve included a few suggestions in the Further Reading section.
It’s also worth mentioning that Signal is not designed for anonymity. Your Signal account is registered with a phone number, so unless you register using a cash-bought burner phone or an online throwaway number, you’re not anonymous. If you lose control of the phone number used to register your account, someone else could hijack your account. That’s why it’s extra important, if you use an anonymous number to register your account, that you enable the “registration lock” feature.
Primarily for security reasons, Signal has become the standard communication medium in anarchist circles over the last 4 years, eclipsing everything else. But just as “the medium is the message,” Signal is having profound effects on how anarchists relate and organize together that are too often overlooked.
The Sociality of Signal
Signal is useful to the extent that it replaces less secure forms of electronic communication, but it becomes harmful … when it replaces face-to-face communication.” – Contributor
Most of the social implications of Signal are not specifically about the app. They are the implications of increasingly moving our communications, personal expression, organizing efforts, and everything else onto virtual platforms and mediating them with screens. But something that dawned on me as I started sifting through questionnaire responses is that before Signal, I knew several people who outright rejected smartphones for both security and social reasons. When Signal emerged with answers to most of the security concerns, the holdout position was significantly eroded. Today, most of the holdouts have smartphones, either because they were convinced to use Signal or it became effectively mandatory if they wanted to stay involved. Signal acted as a point of entry for some anarchists to smartphones.
On the other hand, insofar as Signal is harm reduction for those of us already ensnared by smartphones, that’s a good thing. I’m glad that people who were primarily socializing and doing political organizing on unencrypted channels like Facebook switched to Signal. In my life, the group chat has replaced the “small email list” and is fairly useful for making plans with friends or sharing links. In the responses I collected, the Signal groups that were the most valuable to folks, or maybe just the least annoying, were the ones that were small, focused and pragmatic. Signal can also be a powerful tool for putting the word out quickly and securely about a pressing matter that requires a rapid response. If Facebook-based organizing has led too many anarchists to believe that organizing with any element of surprise is impossible, Signal has partially salvaged that idea, and I’m grateful for that.
Signal Fails
I first imagined this project as a short series of comic vignettes that I planned to call “Signal Fails,” loosely modeled on the book Come Hell or High Water: A Handbook on Collective Process Gone Awry. Turns out it’s hard to draw interesting pictures representing Signal threads and I suck at drawing. Sorry if I promised anyone that, maybe in the second edition… Either way, I still want to include some Signal Fails, as a way of making fun of us (I include myself in this!) and maybe to gently prod everyone to stop being so fucking annoying.
Bond, James Bond: Having Signal doesn’t make you bulletproof. Give some people a little encryption, and they’ll immediately subject their entire contact list to the absolute sketchiest shit. Your phone is still a tracking device, and trust is still built. Talk with your people about what kinds of things you feel comfortable talking about on the phone, and what you don’t.
Silence is not consent: Ever go to a meeting, make a plans with others, establish a Signal group to coordinate logistics, and then have one or two people rapidly change your collective plans by a rapid series of texts that no one has time to respond to? Not cool.
Hell is an endless meeting: A Signal group isn’t an ongoing meeting. I’m already way too glued to my phone, so I don’t like it when a thread is blowing up my phone and it’s just a long side conversation between two people or someone’s stream of consciousness that is unrelated to the purpose of the group. I appreciate it when conversations have beginnings and ends.
It Wants to Feed: I especially hate this one. Probably because of social media, some of us are used to information being curated for us by a platform. But Signal is not social media, thank fuck. So watch out because when a big Signal group starts becoming THE FEED, you’re in trouble. That means if you’re not on it and paying attention, you will miss out on all kinds of important information, whether it’s upcoming events, people changing their pronouns, or flamewars that lead to social conflict. People start to forget you exist, and eventually, you literally disappear. Kill THE FEED.
Fire in a Crowded Theatre: aka the panic button problem. You’re chillin in a big Signal group with all your sketchy friends and all their actual phone numbers, someone gets pinched for shoplifting or something, and *surprise* their phone isn’t encrypted! Everyone freaks and jumps ship, but it’s too little too late, because if the cops are going through that phone right now, they can see everyone who left and the social mapping is done. Womp womp.
Mission Creep: Someone created a Signal group to co-ordinate a specific, time-limited event. It’s over, but no one wants to let go. Somehow, this very specific ad-hoc formation is now THE PERMANENT ORGANIZATION that has tasked itself with deciding everything to do about all things – indefinitely.
Towards Shared Practices
If you thought this was a guide to best practices on Signal or chat etiquette, I’m sorry you made it this far without realizing it’s not. This is way more of a “we need to talk about Signal” kind of thing. I do believe in developing shared practices within specific social contexts, and recommend we start having this conversation explicitly in our networks. To that end, I do have a few proposals.
There are some obstacles to shared practices. Some people don’t have Signal. If that’s because they’re building relations without smartphones, I have only respect for that. If it’s because they spend all day on Facebook but Signal is “too hard,” I don’t buy it. If nothing else, Signal is easy to install and use for anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection.
I also disagree with the Orwellian-fatalist perspective that sees encryption as pointless: “The cops know everything already!” It’s super disempowering to understand government this way, and thankfully it’s not true – resistance is not yet futile. CSEC or the NSA do have nightmarish capabilities, including many that we don’t know about yet. But there is also ample evidence that encryption is frustrating police investigations, which is why governments are passing laws to thwart these tools.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to shared practices is a general lack of a “we” – to what extent are we accountable to anyone, and if so to whom? How do we go about ethically constructing shared social norms? Most anarchists agree that it’s wrong to snitch, for example, but how did we get there? I do think that a kind of vulgar liberal individualism is influencing anarchism and making the very question of ‘expectations’ almost taboo to discuss. But that’s a different text for another day.
A Few Proposals for Better Practices
1. Keep it IRL – As one contributor put it, “Communication is not just about sharing information.” Face to face communication builds whole relationships, including trust, and continues to be the most secure way to communicate.
2. Leave your devices at home – at least sometimes? Especially if you’re going across the border, where you can be forced to decrypt your data. If you need a phone when you travel, purchase a travel phone with your friends that doesn’t have any sensitive data, including your contact list, on it.
3. Secure your devices – Most devices (phones and computers) now have the option for full disk encryption. Encryption is only as good as your password and protects your data ‘at rest’, i.e. when your device is OFF or the data is not being used by programs. Your lock screen provides some protection while your device is ON, but can be bypassed by a sophisticated attacker. Some operating systems force you to use the same password for encryption and your lock screen, which is unfortunate as it’s not practical to enter a long password 25 times a day (sometimes in the presence of prying eyes or surveillance cameras).
4. Turn off your devices – If you leave your device unattended, or you’re going to sleep, turn it off. Buy a cheap alarm clock. If your house is ever raided overnight you’ll be glad you did. If your device is off and encrypted with a strong password when it’s seized, cops are far less likely to be able to break into it. If you really want to go the extra mile, acquire a decent safe and lock your devices inside when you’re not using them, which will reduce the risk of them being covertly physically tampered with.
5. Establish boundaries – We have different senses of what’s safe to talk about on our phones and what’s not. Discuss and develop collective boundaries, and where we disagree, respect other people’s boundaries even if you think it’s safe.
6. Agree on a vouching system – If you’re in a group discussing sensitive things, develop an explicit collective understanding of what constitutes a vouch for a new person to join. In an era where anarchists catch conspiracy charges, miscommunications about this can land people in jail.
7. Ask first – If you’re going to add someone to a thread, thereby revealing their phone number to the entire group, ask for their and the group’s consent first.
8. Minimize decision-making – Consider leaving decisions other than yes/no for in person meetings, if possible. In my experience, Signal impoverishes any decision-making process.
9. Defined purpose – Ideally, a Signal group will have a specific purpose. Each new person added to that group should have that purpose clearly explained to them. If that purpose has been served, leave the group and delete it.
10. Disappearing messages – Very useful for housekeeping. Ranging from 5 seconds to 1 week, Disappearing Messages can be set by selecting the stopwatch icon in the top bar of a conversation. Many people use a standard 1-week disappearing time on all messages, whether the conversation is sensitive or not. Select your expiration time based on your threat model. This also protects you somewhat if the person you are communicating with is using less-than-ideal phone security practices.
11. Verify safety numbers – This is your best protection against a man-in-the-middle attack. It’s quite simple to do and easiest in person – open your conversation with the person you want to verify with and navigate to Conversation Settings > View safety number and scan the QR code or compare numbers. Most respondents said “I should do this, but I don’t.” Take advantage of big gatherings to verify contacts. It’s OK to be a nerd!
12. Enable the Registration Lock – Enable this in Signal’s Privacy Settings, so if someone is ever able to hack your phone number used to register your account, they still have to get your PIN to hijack your identity. This is especially important for anonymous Signal accounts registered with burner numbers, since someone else will almost certainly use this number again.
13. Turn off message previews – Keep messages from appearing on your lock screen. On my device, I had to set this on my device settings (not Signal settings) under Lock Screen Preferences > Hide Sensitive Content.
14. Delete Old Messages – Either by enabling thread trimming or manually deleting completed conversations, don’t keep messages around that you don’t need anymore.
Conclusion
I embarked on this project to reflect and gather feedback on the impact Signal has had on anarchist networks in the U.S. and Canada, from the standpoint of both security and social organization. In doing so, I think I hit on some common frustrations people have, especially with large Signal groups, and gathered together a few proposals to circulate. I continue to insist that smartphones are doing more damage than good to our lives and struggles, because it’s important to me. We need to preserve and build other ways of organizing ourselves, especially offline, for both quality-of-life and movement security. Even if we stick with smartphones, it’s dangerous when our communications are centralized. If Signal’s servers went down tonight, or Riseup.net, or Protonmail, imagine how devastating that would be to our networks. If anarchists ever pose a major threat to the established order, they will come for us and our infrastructure without mercy, including suspending ‘legal protections’ we might be depending on. For better and for worse, I believe this scenario to be possible in our lifetime, and so we should plan for resilience.
The techies among us should continue to experiment with other protocols, software and operating systems,(9) sharing them if they prove useful. The holdouts should keep holding out, and find ways to thrive offline. For the rest of us, let’s minimize the degree to which we’re captured by smartphones. Along with a capacity to struggle, we should build lives worth living, with a quality of relationships that potential friends and co-conspirators find irresistibly compelling. It might be the only hope we’ve got.
Further Reading
This zine was published in May 2019. Signal periodically updates its features. For the most up-to-date information about technical stuff, go to signal.org, community.signalusers.org, and /r/signal on reddit.
Your Phone is a Cop
https://itsgoingdown.org/phone-cop-opsecinfosec-primer-dystopian-present/
Choosing the Proper Tool for the Task
https://crimethinc.com/2017/03/21/choosing-the-proper-tool-for-the-task-assessing-your-encryption-options
EFF Tool Guides for Surveillance Self-Defense (including Signal)
https://ssd.eff.org/en/module-categories/tool-guides
Towards a Collective Security Culture
https://crimethinc.com/2009/06/25/towards-a-collective-security-culture
Riseup Security Guide
https://riseup.net/security
Toronto G20 Main Conspiracy Group: The Charges And How They Came To Be
https://north-shore.info/archive/
Endnotes
1. Big thanks to everyone who submitted! I stole a lot of your ideas.
2. Internet-era modes of governance vary from place to place – more authoritarian states might prefer filtering and censorship, while democratic states produce a kind of ‘digital citizenship’ – but mass surveillance and cyber warfare are becoming the norm.
3. Ironically, the U.S. Government would later attempt to charge Zimmerman with freely publishing PGP source code, arguing that he was “exporting weapons.” So he published the source code in a hardcover book and mailed them around the world, the rationale being that the export of books is protected under the U.S. Constitution.
4. Court cases against the Red Brigades in Italy (2003) and child pornographers in the U.S. (2006) have shown that federal police agencies failed to break into PGP-secured devices and communications. Instead, agents have resorted to bugging devices, passing legislation requiring you to surrender passwords, and of course, informants and undercover infiltration.
5. Until very recently, PGP didn’t encrypt metadata (who is emailing who, on what servers, at what time), which was a huge problem. An NSA lawyer once said, “if you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.”
6. Want to read something scary? Look up Google’s Sensorvault.
7. Plausible deniability, forward secrecy and secure data destruction are designed into some privacy tools to try and counter this threat or at least minimize its damage.
8. Fingerprints (and other biometric data) are not considered passwords in many jurisdictions, meaning fingerprint locks are not subject to the same legal protections.
9. On my phone, I recently replaced Android with LineageOS, which is a privacy-oriented, de-Googled operating system based on Android code. It’s great, but it’s only built for certain devices, you void your phone warranty, and there’s definitely a learning curve when it comes to setting it up, keeping it updated and switching to open-source software.
Contact the author at signalfails [at] riseup [dot] net
