VANCOUVER — Sarah Teich was supposed to prepare for a federal human rights case, but instead of organizing her arguments, she spent the four days leading up to the hearing primarily trying to protect her devices after a cyberattack.
Teich, an international human rights lawyer, says she had been on the receiving end of hacking attempts for months. But days before a judge heard his arguments in a case that argues that Canada’s Border Services Agency has the authority to ban items made in China’s Xinjiang region, the attacks turned especially aggressive.
“Someone had access to my iCloud email address and my iCloud password,” Teich said, “and I was trying to remotely clone or erase my phone or something.”
He changed all his passwords and got a new phone number and managed to organize his case on time. By mistake, you did not change the password for your Zoom account. The next day, during the court hearing on the case via Zoom in early December, she was removed from the call.
She was the only one expelled and once she was back online, the judge did not stop her at any time to present her arguments.
Teich believes that his hacking attack was related to the court case and linked to the Chinese Communist Party, although he has no hard evidence, but believes the timing is more than coincidence.
“If it’s the CCP or a CCP sympathizer who interferes in a court case,” he said, “that’s the next level.”
But Teich became even more discouraged when he tried to report the hack to various Canadian government agencies and it became clear to him that there is no strong mechanism for people in Canada to report suspected harassment or hacking by foreign regimes.
He took his complaint to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the RCMP and even the Toronto police, and neither agency offered a clear way to help or even investigate the case, he said. Only the Communications Security Establishment said it could help her, but it was not firm.
His plight is familiar to other human rights activists in Canada who say the country’s authorities are ineffective when it comes to dealing with the intimidation, misinformation and digital hacking attacks that activists regularly face.
Teich is one of the attorneys representing the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project as an intervener in a court case in which a refugee advocacy organization tries to get a judge to declare that the Canada Border Services Agency has the authority to stop items from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. entering Canada.
Human rights defenders are concerned about rampant forced labor in the region as part of an ongoing genocide of the Uighur people. Some reports estimate that up to two million people have been held in internment camps in the region in recent years. Reports of forced labor, torture and forced sterilization come from Uighurs who have left.
Beijing has denied the allegations.
Last month, the US formally banned the importation of items made in Xinjiang, making it a responsibility for importers to prove they were not made by forced labor. The case Teich is working on ultimately wants the same policy to apply in Canada.
When she asked Mehmet Tohti of the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project what to do about cyberattacks, he told her not to expect much from the authorities.
He has been the target of hacking and threats since around 2003 and despite submitting reports and presenting evidence, the authorities have not been very helpful, Tohti told the Star. Like Teich, he had also been hacked in the days leading up to the court hearing. .
“You can’t get any results,” Tohti said. “There is no particular unit that addresses these kinds of problems.”
He said part of the problem is the Canadian government, his political arm, does not seem to understand the threat.
Almost a year ago, CSIS director David Vigneault warned that China and Russia, in particular, are in the crosshairs of critics in Canada. CSIS has also published reports in the past about attempts by foreign governments to interfere in Canadian affairs and institutions.
Public Safety Canada said the government takes threats to people in Canada “seriously” and that the RCMP is aware of interference from foreign threats. But he would not elaborate on the steps he takes to combat it.
“There are various methods and techniques to combat interference from foreign actors within the RCMP’s mandate,” said Tim Warmington, a spokesman for the department. “For operational reasons, we cannot speak at length about this, however foreign interference activity is monitored.”
Warmington said such threats are within the mandate of the RCMP and that the agency has a “multidisciplinary team” to deal with the intimidation attempts.
But two researchers question whether anything is being done to combat these attempts.
Noura Aljizawi and Siena Anstis are University of Toronto Citizen Lab Researchers at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. The laboratory focuses on information and communication technologies and how they intertwine with human rights.
The duo have interviewed 18 human rights activists in Canada about their experiences with cyberattacks, harassment, and disinformation campaigns against them. It’s called transnational digital crackdown and they said Canada isn’t addressing it.
“Clearly, the Canadian government’s response has focused on more limited issues, such as threats to critical infrastructure or to our democratic institutions,” Anstis said. “So this issue of transnational digital repression, I think, is completely lost.”
The harassment doesn’t stop at cyberattacks, they said. Disinformation campaigns are also part of efforts by foreign regimes to silence their critics of human rights in Canada.
It is even worse for women, Aljizawi said, because they are often targeted by harassment campaigns of a sexual nature. Harassment against defenders or whistleblowers can be felt even on the street with people who feel they are being physically watched, and some of the researchers they spoke to say that their patterns have changed because of that.
“It’s a huge concern and something doesn’t always happen in the digital sphere,” Aljizawi said. “Canada’s silence is giving attackers more room to launch an attack.”
The researchers say that while the problems are complex, there are some ways to address them, including mental health resources for people in refugee communities and finding ways to stop the export of Canadian-developed technology to countries that use it for cyberattacks. and harassment.
Meanwhile, Teich said he would like to see an office dedicated to receiving complaints from human rights workers about such harassment.
“I think there should probably be a dedicated team, a dedicated hotline, people trained in this to deal specifically with foreign regimes that target human rights defenders,” he said.
“Whether it falls to CSIS, CSE, RCMP or TPS I don’t think that particularly matters that much. People who know what they are doing about this. “
Reference-www.thestar.com