Sunday, June 18, 2006

Long hours of shadow work precede Canadian arrests


Posted By: Chris Mathers
Email Address: info@chrismathers.com
Related Web Link: www.globeandmail.com

 

The arrests of 17 suspected Islamic extremists capped thousands of hours spent examining intercepted conversations and e-mails, long surveillance stakeouts and countless conversations with informants.

And the key task in such a huge investigation is stitching all that data together, said Toronto-based crime and risk consultant Chris Mathers, who spent 20 years as an undercover RCMP officer and now specializes in countering international fraud, money-laundering and organized crime.

"All the bits have to be funnelled back to one source to be analyzed," he said. "There's just so much information that it's impossible for the investigators to absorb all of it without it being filtered."

Synchronizing that blend of facts and guesswork with input from foreign law-enforcement agencies -- which in this instance was considerable -- poses a further challenge.

Liaising with authorities in the G8 countries generally works well.

"But in other parts of the world -- Pakistan particularly comes to mind -- stuff like surveillance information can be very questionable," said a police source who requested anonymity.

Among the cutting-edge forms of surveillance sold by Calgary-based Stragitek Monitoring is remote technology that keeps track of vulnerable industrial installations or suspicious employees.

But the best information often comes from informants, and cultivating them is an art form, Mr. Mathers said.

Sometimes they speak willingly, sometimes not.

"Because terrorism and other criminal activity are so closely related, quite often you might pinch someone on a criminal matter, such as heroin or alien-smuggling, and if they are able to provide information on a terrorism issue, you apply pressure."

That's with a view to cutting a deal.

Other informants may approach police because they have stumbled across information that disturbs them. Still others help investigations without even realizing it, Mr. Mathers said.

"Maybe by just saying, 'These people are acting strangely.' That looks to be what happened here at [Mississauga's Al-Rahman Islamic Centre] mosque," which six of the suspects attended.

Wiretaps and other types of intercepts -- microphones installed surreptitiously in suspects' homes, cars, boats or even in airplanes -- comprise the second core plank in building criminal charges, and police have listened in on criminals' conversations for decades.

To do that in Canada, a judge must approve the intercept with a renewable 60-day authorization after examining what is usually an extremely detailed police affidavit that names the targets and explains why they are under scrutiny.

Harder, but still doable, is monitoring electronic communications, also covered under such judges' authorizations.

Sophisticated software and other tools encompassing counterencryption and the analysis of key "red flag" terms, code words, or perhaps nicknames, are deployed through the Communications Security Establishment in Ottawa. Those programs can also pinpoint the computer that is the source of the information.

In this case, the task would have been enormous, complicated by the fact that some of the intercepted material may have been in languages other than English.

And just as Quebec's Hells Angels became skilled in countersurveillance and police intelligence-gathering techniques, so too have some terrorists.

"They get trained in it," said Mr. Mathers, whose work often takes him to the Middle East.

But of all the components of the two-year investigation that produced the weekend arrests, physical surveillance was assuredly the most complex and time consuming.

In an old Cheech and Chong movie, undercover police worked out of a vehicle decked out as a dry-cleaning van. Every time the two hippies came in range, a camera poked out and snapped a picture.

Undercover police who helped bring down the leaders of New York's big crime families during the 1980s used similar props, such as a plumber's truck.

That's not the way things work these days, said Mr. Mathers, who is reluctant to discuss the specifics of what is used, beyond saying that watching, photographing and filming suspects still requires large numbers of rented cars, lest one vehicle become too familiar to the targets.

In this case, keeping an unseen eye on the suspects' alleged rural training camp north of Toronto would have been particularly difficult.

One effective car-surveillance trick -- which Mr. Mathers did not mention -- involves not tailing the suspects from a discreet distance but driving ahead of them.

Low-flying airplanes are also used.

Whatever the techniques, physical surveillance often involves weeks of boring work that yields nothing and eats holes in police budgets.

That's not the case with the gear sold by Stragitek, whose president, Tim Spielman, describes it as the only business of its kind in the world.

The cameras and microphones his company sells to the private sector are for monitoring what are deemed Canada's prime targets -- its pipelines, hydro towers, oil and gas wells, electricity stations, coal mines and oil-sands plants.

The technology allows a security manager not only to watch the facilities from a desk that may be thousands of kilometres away, but also to control their operation.

"You want to shut down the engine of a truck?" Mr. Spielman said. "You want to lock down something from your desktop computer? Or turn on a refrigeration unit? No problem."

 

Timothy Appleby

The Globe and Mail