Halfway through a first viewing of Canadian documentary makers Ted
Remerowski's and Marrin Canell's riveting Security Threat it's a
cautionary examination of how America's home security policies and
surveillance initiatives have swept aside long-cherished human rights since
the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks I remembered a package that had
arrived on my desk a few days earlier.
It was a press kit touting a Canadian software program that, when secretly
installed in a target computer's keypad, notifies a snooper's computer in
another location when a file is opened and tracks the text and responses,
stroke by stroke, in a pop-up window. An act of privacy invasion that would
have been criminal not so long ago is, in the new age of
technology-fuelled, neo-Orwellian paranoia, offered up as a simple and
functional appliance to secretly moniter people close to you.
Remerowski and Canell aren't surprised. In preparing Security Threat
they've seen much more sinister devices as the American government hands
out billions of dollars to develop surveillance systems that are the stuff
of science fiction nightmares unseen gizmos that connect us all to a
massive global identification database via the use of millions of
inexpensive, tiny, concealed digital video cameras, by credit card
scanners, by unseen iris and fingerprint monitoring, by encoded information
on our drivers' licences, by the digital examination of facial expressions
and other forms of biometric lie detection ... even by the way we walk.
"We learned that there are two massive studies being undertaken by the U.S.
government into what they call `gait recognition technology'," says
Remerowski in the midtown Toronto office of Paradigm Pictures, the company
he and Canell both grounded in the ancienne rιgime National Film Board
procedures set down by Donald Brittain in the 1960s and '70s started
seven years ago.
"That's worse than Orwellian ... it's Pythonesque. I wonder if they'll call
it The Department Of Silly Walks?"
Security Threat airs tonight at 9 in CBC's Witness series.
What's most terrifying about America's anti-terrorism security and
surveillance procedures, Canell adds, is how easily most people, even
Canadians, have accepted them.
"It's very easy for a democracy under attack to justify the denial of basic
rights and freedoms in the name of self-protection ... but who's watching
the watchers? That's what we're asking in this documentary."
Few in even the most independent media have dared ask that question since
Sept. 11.
The seasoned filmmakers know better than to encumber Security Threat with
liberal cant, or even with a decisive editorial voice. That's not the way
Brittain told his powerful stories.
Their point is made in two unadorned tales about Canadian citizens suddenly
deprived of ordinary rights a man born in Pakistan who was scooped off
the street in the U.S. and held in complete isolation for four months, and
five young Muslim students from Ottawa and Montreal who were detained,
searched, interrogated and held for a day by U.S. immigration, FBI and CIA
agents when they tried to cross the border all with apparent Canadian
Security Intelligence Service approval.
The material the documentary presents so objectively is in itself an
impressive indictment of a mighty political system that has over-indulged
itself with technological gimmickry for too long and has now found a way to
rationalize its use in every corner of human life.
"An agenda for mass surveillance has been in the works for at least 10
years," says Remerowski. "A secret National Security Agency satellite
system has allowed countries to spy on each other but not on their own
citizens until now.
Until Sept. 11, profiling was commonplace, but never admitted to be
official policy. That has changed now, as well. Bills and acts limiting the
rights of certain groups of people weren't just thrown together overnight.
They've been in a drawer waiting for an event like Sept. 11 to happen."
The filmmakers suspect they'll suffer some form of reprisal after Security
Threat airs.
"There's a possibility we may not get into the U.S. again at least (not)
without difficulty," says Remerowski.
"We didn't set out to point fingers and call people names. We hope viewers
will make decisions based on the evidence we've found. We're just
inspectors. What happens next is up to ... well, it's up to you."
Additional articles by Greg Quill
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