Chapter 5
Knowledge is power
There’s a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think… it’s all about the information!
Sneakers (1992)
I’ve got news for you: fellow activists don’t follow the news nearly enough.
I spent three years as a citizen journalist reporting on protests and social causes, during which I was continually asked by readers how I ‘found’ these hundreds of protests to begin with; they systematically frowned when I told them my primary source of tips was news articles from local media outlets. I came to realize that many advocates and activists don’t read the news at all, or snub mainstream media in favour of alternative outlets and fringe literature. In contrast, I discipline myself to read and watch the news at least one hour every day, and so should the rest of you if you’re serious about taking on the system, because it’s impossible to prevail in the court of public opinion without leaving the comfort of the activist media bubble.
Intelligence gathering and public relations are the government’s greatest assets in controlling the mob, not its military or paramilitary forces and arsenals, nor its gilded institutions and convoluted bureaucracy. In fictional depictions of dystopias, from classics like We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and 1984 by George Orwell to contemporary works like Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, British graphic novel V for Vendetta, and the Japanese animated series Psycho-Pass, the one dominant theme is mass surveillance and media control; the inspiration behind those works goes all the way back to the panopticon prison design as proposed by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century.
At the forefront of civil rights advocates’ concerns is the government’s propensity toward mass surveillance, from warrantless digital device searches at the border to tracking of motorists with traffic monitoring cameras. In the United States, one of the worst scandals to befall the government was Edward Snowden’s revelations of a massive domestic surveillance program conducted in secret by the National Security Agency (NSA) (see Chapter 7); another was the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) enabling its director J. Edgar Hoover to blackmail countless influential figures, including of course public officials and activists, for political purposes.
The US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, has been invoked to counter this phenomenon, in cases such as Carpenter v. United States in which the Supreme Court held in 2018 that tracking cell phone locations requires a warrant.1 This decision forms the basis of a complaint filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) at the Superior Court of California against the city of San Jose’s deeply invasive practice of storing scanned license plates using traffic enforcement cameras into a database, in order to track motorists’ movements.2
Governments need no more to build cases against activists attending protests or observing law enforcement officials. Recent civil rights derives in the United States have sparked conversations about minimizing one’s digital trail and facial exposure among protesters mindful of retaliation by the state,3 whether for offences pertaining to political activity or for whatever bogus felony virtually everyone is guilty of (remember Chapter 1).
This shows both the menace of surveillance and the importance of covering one’s own data trail. Yet most activists jump into the fray oblivious to how little they know about their targets, and contrastingly to how much the government knows about them. For a model, let’s have a look back at Palestine Action, which we’ve discussed in Chapter 2. The organization published a manual outlining its modus operandi, which mostly entailed researching future hits in detail.4 Even though the manual only skims the surface of the topic, it is clear that strike teams didn’t just barge in with sledgehammers, but instead carefully planned each operation for maximum effectiveness. Conversely, the organization went to great lengths to minimize its own exposure by preventing information leaks to the government, going as far as operating in cells so the entire network wouldn’t be compromised in the event some of its operatives were captured.
In the era of mass communications, ignorance is no excuse. This chapter shows how to tap into every information source at our disposal to gain an edge against our foes. While you may presume that lowly activists cannot compete with governments’ and corporations’ intelligence gathering resources, I’ll show you that invasiveness works both ways, as no government nor corporation can compete with crowdsourced research and surveillance by persistent actors like investigative journalists, civil rights advocates, and fact-checkers.
Know your enemy
Names, addresses, next of kin, of the whole Cabinet. They know more about us than our own mothers do.
Michael Collins (1996)
I’ve just mentioned Hoover’s secret files, which allowed him to control American politics for decades. Some might presume, given his legend, that no humble human being can rival that kind of power. What if I told you it worked both ways? It turned out the Mafia had a file on him too, and used it to blackmail him in turn, to the point that he would deny organized crime’s existence altogether.5 They had a lot of dirt on him indeed, including evidence of homosexual activity and cross-dressing at a time society didn’t look upon these kindly. So tell me again that the mob cannot beat the intelligence community at its own game.
Public figures, especially public officials, are most susceptible to scandal. Take for example former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who in 2019 got hit with allegations of crass racism after pictures and videos surfaced of him performing denigrating skits in blackface makeup.6 Think of American President Donald J. Trump, who one day woke up deluged by evidence he was intimately involved with notorious pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and has since been unable to shake off the controversy.7 Or spicier still, remember former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, infamous for his ‘bunga bunga’ sex parties involving minors and prostitutes, so decadent that they would make Epstein blush.8
Previous chapters have illustrated the importance of pleading one’s case in the court of public opinion, and also of building up a campaign with a legal and political strategy. In order to keep the system accountable, however, one needs material to incriminate it. The most effective advocacy campaigns are the best documented ones, so brush up your researching skills already. Take inspiration from this very book, its text littered with hundreds of references from publicly available sources backing up even the most preposterous among its claims, and also from the work of investigative journalists who painstakingly compiled these many reports in the first place. Furthermore, observe that many developments cited in this book occurred in late 2025 or early 2026; that’s because I merely stumbled upon them casually reading the news while drafting this work, I didn’t even have to dig them up—and neither will you if you just keep your two eyes open.
Learn from the police as well, which spends most of its time and resources diligently monitoring suspects—including of course activists—and meticulously gathering evidence, enforcement proper often the result of months- or years-long investigations, and not just due to lack of resources but because it avoids compromising cases or wasting opportunities by being impatient and careless. Certain police departments, such as of course the New York Police Department (NYPD) and the Greater London’s Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), have had entire divisions dedicated to state surveillance of innocent actors’ political activism.9 Even here in Canada, the RCMP hired a private firm to spy on Fairy Creek protesters’ online activities,10 while an Amnesty International report details the police force’s surveillance of indigenous Wet’suwet’en land defenders involved in Coastal Gaslink protests.11 I bet the cops even know what we activists eat for breakfast; to beat the system at its own game, we have to find out what public officials eat for breakfast too.
Fact-checking and disinformation
Before I cover detective work, allow me to state that your first stop should be news outlets, because if you’re going after a notable target, odds are journalists have already done your homework and they were much better at it than you are. So even before looking up a name on a search engine, do it on a news aggregator instead.
There’s a twofold quandary with this approach vector though: not all sources are equal, and even the better ones aren’t completely reliable. We live in the era of fake news, deep fakes, tabloids gaining respectability, corporate-sponsored propaganda, astroturfing, AI-generated clickbait, and state-sponsored troll farms—plus satirical news sites like The Onion and The Beaverton looking so polished that it’s a wonder no dimwit sued them already.12 Even a reputable outlet performing due diligence may get it wrong, as in the case of the Rolling Stone Magazine which faced multiple million-dollar lawsuits for libel over a piece in which a woman wrongfully claimed to have been gang-raped on the University of Virginia’s campus;13 her story was actually borrowed from a Law & Order: SVU episode.14
So you have to perform due diligence yourself instead of swallowing everything you read. Observe from this book’s footnotes that for the Rolling Stone Magazine allegations alone I read multiple news articles, looked up the Law & Order: SVU episode on IMDb, and dug up the court of appeals decision for one of the court cases, even though the story had already been fact-checked ad nauseam. And you better turn that practice into an autonomic reflex if you intend to smear private parties, as I did when I publicly accused several We Unify speakers of being notorious transphobes (see Chapter 2); otherwise you might end up on the wrong end of a defamation lawsuit as well. On the flip side, public officials and entities are fair game, as the government cannot sue for defamation, at least in Canada,15 while in the United States the bar for public officials to meet has been set extremely high by the Supreme Court in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan in 1964.16
So how to proceed, in a world overflowing with unreliable information? There are common sense ways to separate the wheat from the chaff. For starters, look up who owns or funds a given news outlet and where it is located; this way you won’t fall for FOX News,17 Russia Today,18 Rebel News,19 or Daily Mail slop,20 whose factuality are notoriously low and political bias high. Another is to browse sources located outside the country where a given event took place, in order to escape the national propaganda bubble; for American news, why not have a look at Qatar-based Al Jazeera or French newspaper Le Monde for a different point of view. And as a rule of thumb, independent press agencies or nonprofit organizations are more trustworthy than government or corporate mouthpieces.
If you’re not familiar with the media landscape, look for a news aggregator like Ground News, which assembles various sources for a given story and sorts them by criteria like accuracy and political alignment. And in doubt, seek corroborating sources; a good starting point is fact-checking websites like FactCheck.org or PolitiFact.
One source which is easy to neglect is the much-maligned Wikipedia, which took a long time to get its act together but nowadays provides references for virtually every claim it makes while flagging the sparse few which are missing. I sometimes prefer it to news outlets because the latter often neglect to provide references even when used in a given article. Nevertheless, don’t take the encyclopedia’s every statement for granted merely because editors have validated it; occasionally I follow a reference only to find that it does not support a given finding.
Above all, be wary of search engine artificial intelligence summaries, whose accuracy is abysmal, in part because they rely on dubious sources like Reddit, and also because they echo outdated information such as retracted stories and repealed legislation. In fact, the use of AI to produce submissions in the legal system can get parties sanctioned outright because bots have a tendency to hallucinate decisions which do not exist.21
Open-source intelligence
Browsing news websites is just skimming the surface of our global repository of knowledge, which in the age of Google and ChatGPT is available at everyone’s fingertips. No longer does every search begin at the public library riffling through index cards, surveying rows of dusty books, and scrolling through microfilms; nowadays a search engine can facilitate the process with just a few keystrokes from the comfort of our homes. As I’ve just explained however, this doesn’t make the role of researcher obsolete, far from it; even with artificial intelligence, the explosion of accessible information means it requires more skill and patience than ever to sift through, while these technological tools themselves are the subjects of entire manuals dedicated to expert use.
Besides, even contemporary search engines do not index material from every source, therefore manual research is still required. This field of study is called Open-Source INTelligence (OSINT), and once again many books have been written on this rapidly evolving topic. This is where detective work begins in earnest.
There are myriads of public records beyond the reach of search engines. A trivial one is the good old phone book, listing most people’s addresses and phone numbers. The Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) offers a searchable repository of legal decisions. In British Columbia, provincial court registries can be accessed via Court Services Online (CSO) to look someone up for civil or criminal cases, and even traffic infractions; Elections BC publishes campaign finance disclosure records, which include candidates’ personal addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses; the BC Government Directory lists all government employees with their official contact info; The Land Title and Survey Authority can reveal ownership of a given parcel; BC Archives provide a wealth of historical records, some of which aren’t so ancient; and so on. Municipalities may also offer a business registry, a list of permit applications, or floor plans of public facilities. The Victoria Police Department provides a crime map with details of every active case updated in real time. The RCMP has just made its dangerous sex offender database available to the public, and some police departments, like the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, even show exactly where registered sex offenders live. Government sources alone are innumerable, to say nothing of private ones.
Think outside the box and you’ll stumble upon unexpected gems. One that is easy to overlook is freely viewable CCTV cameras, registered with networks like EarthCam, Insecam, or WebcamTaxi, which include cameras monitoring traffic, public infrastructures, or private properties; some municipalities, like Calgary and Edmonton in Alberta, even provide real time access to their traffic monitoring cameras. Another is online emergency radio scanner services such as Broadcastify, which allow eavesdropping on the police. Keep digging and you’ll be amazed by what turns up.
Freedom of information
In Chapter 3 I’ve lamented that the legal system is a rigged casino and taking on the government means beating the house at its own game. Rigged as the game is however, players have one significant advantage, which is the ability to peek at the government’s cards by invoking Freedom of Information legislation.
By law, government entities have to disclose public records upon request, within reasonable parameters. Access is typically free, although the institution may charge fees for extensive requests. Records may come redacted, and some may be withheld altogether for various reasons, such as being an unreasonable invasion of privacy. Nonetheless, FOI requests are a powerful tool to obtain government information far beyond the reach of search engines.
So what kind of records can one obtain this way? Virtually anything, down to scribbled notes pinned to a public official’s corkboard. I’ve tested the limits of what can be requested, and managed to get my hands on elected representatives’ agendas and emails, public contracts, internal documents and statistics, financial records, and references behind public statements. It’s also possible to obtain custom summaries and breakdowns, as opposed to actual records which may take longer to release and prove more expensive.
Each institution provides its own protocol to make requests, usually through a web form or email. The most important is to be able to define the documents you’re looking for, which is an art form in itself. It’s easy to make broad requests without even meaning to, however, and these may turn out to be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, so searches are frequently narrowed down upon feedback from the FOI department. The search begins once the parties agree on the terms and applicable fees are paid, and the request must be completed within a prescribed number of days.
That’s the sanitized description of the process. In practice there’s usually some haggling involved. It’s okay to voice disagreement over excessive fees, or to ask for clarifications if an apparently trivial request comes with a disproportionate time estimate. One can also be a weasel by proposing to break down a request in order to avoid fees, since the first few hours of a given request are usually free.
FOI requests are fishing expeditions, and the results may be disappointing. Sometimes records come almost completely redacted, leaving out legal advice, law enforcement discussions, or negotiations with other levels of government for example. In some cases information may be scarce and summaries unhelpful. Even then, don’t underestimate the worth of even the slightest bit of information, which can form the basis of future queries.
If you’re dissatisfied with the outcome of an FOI request, and you won’t take no for an answer, you may request a review by an independent body in order to compel compliance with the law; here in British Columbia it is the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC), hearing complaints under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA). Don’t be afraid to scrutinize the legislation looking for loopholes, and to scour the jurisprudence for applicable precedents.
I’ve filed a request for review myself, after the City of Victoria decided to withhold employment records pertaining to internal investigations of misconduct allegations against several bylaw officers (see Chapter 4). I’m invoking the public interest clause of the FIPPA, which prevails over the remainder of the Act, on the grounds that one of the complainants went public with his allegations and called for an independent investigation into the department’s workplace practices.22 If I’m successful, it will override outdated precedents preventing disclosure of investigation reports against law enforcement officers, a huge boon for journalists across the province.23
One thing you can request is your own records with a given government body, including the police, which is of course of paramount interest to activists. While records pertaining to active investigations are off-limits, the rest is fair game, and there’s nothing wrong with asking what the cops have entered in your file. Not only that, it is sometimes possible to tell when law enforcement officers have accessed your file; for instance, police accountability blogger Stephen Harrison filed a complaint with the OIPC after he found out that officers of the Victoria and Saanich police departments had improperly looked him up on their Police Records Information Management Environment (PRIME) database.24
Many documents obtained by access to information legislation have been made public. In Canada, the most notable source is Open By Default, a repository provided by the Investigative Journalism Foundation.25 Searching publicly available sources beforehand might save you a lot of trouble, just like contributing your own documents in turn may help others in the future.
Doxxing
An emerging tactic is to reveal a target’s personal information, such as their legal name and home address, in order to intimidate them. This is known as doxxing, a tactic of which protesters may be both the perpetrator and the victim, and is indeed a hot topic on the activism scene nowadays.
While the practice commonly leads to innocent pranks like the classic anonymous pizza delivery, weaponizing personal information can outright ruin or even end a person’s life in extreme cases. For example, being outed as a closet gay, a looming threat on J. Edgar Hoover for many years, can mar a public figure’s career. Revealing someone’s criminal history can ostracize an individual, making it difficult to keep a job or an apartment. Even in a free country, exposing a protester’s activities can subject them to continual harassment and even persecution by foreign governments.
One famous character deathly afraid of doxxing went by the alias of Thomas Kuban. He spent a decade infiltrating the underground neo-Nazi metal scene in Germany, attending concerts which he secretly recorded with a hidden camera. “If I had been caught, the neo-Nazis would have beaten and kicked me—they might well have killed me,” he told GlobalPost.26
Doxxing has been employed to pull the mask off otherwise unaccountable ICE officers in the United States. Groups such as Rose City Antifa have published the personal information of many agents, including their names, pictures, and home addresses, in order to subject them to harassment.27 So far no charges have been filed, in spite of the tactic’s shaky legal ground, most likely over concerns that underlying legislation tentatively restricting the practice might not withstand a constitutional challenge in court.28
While in Canada doxxing might run afoul of privacy, harassment, defamation, or cyberbullying statutes in theory, the jurisprudence lacks persuasive precedents outlawing the practice altogether. I’ve only found two instances of criminal convictions so far. One was that of a minor who’d practiced serial doxxing and ‘swatting’ (spuriously calling emergency services on a target with the intent of getting them raided by the police) on victims in Canada and the United States; the Provincial Court of British Columbia sentenced him to 16 months in custody.29 The other was a case of criminal harassment, distribution of intimate images, and sexual assault charges, also involving swatting and even firebombing allegations, against a Pennsylvania man targeting an Ottawa teenager, before Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice.30 Short of criminal harassment and public mischief, however, revealing someone’s personal information seems to be fair game under Canadian law, and a decision to the contrary would most likely be struck down under Article 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteeing freedom of expression, especially if the information could already be accessed from publicly available sources.
Uncovering hostiles’ personal information isn’t nearly as difficult as you might presume after reading about the above cases, both of which involved computer hacking. I’ve myself doxxed a notorious doxxer who was stupid enough to operate under his legal name, by digging up his home address on the nomination document of a candidate for city council he’d endorsed. I even pushed the envelope by doxxing the entire Victoria city council after finding their home addresses, phone numbers, personal email addresses, and signatures on campaign finance disclosure documents. And I’ve been tipped multiple times by supporters revealing the identities of counterprotesters, including that of a doxxing photographer who neglected to remove his satchel bag’s name tag.
That being said, never forget that it works both ways. For example, the Canary Mission website, which is linked to Israeli intelligence, exposes university students, professors, medical practitioners, and various professionals who espouse pro-Palestinian views, in order to undermine their reputations and careers.31 This public shaming tactic, disguised as combating antisemitism, has long been used to retaliate against advocates for Palestine liberation.32 No wonder so many protesters practice online hygiene and wear face masks even at peaceful rallies nowadays.
Garbology
Since we embrace the way of the cockroach, let’s conclude this chapter with the nefarious practice of searching garbage for information. Think about it: how often did you casually discard a whole bank account statement or phone bill in the recycling bin? Have you ever reflected upon what a malicious actor might do with it? Now try to imagine what you could do with someone else’s discarded information instead. And if your imagination fails you still, time to educate yourself on identity theft and its dramatic consequences—or that of your garbage fuelling the local gossip mill, which may prove even worse.
You may of course find garbology unpalatable. To help getting the pill down, please observe that law enforcement is shamelessly searching through people’s garbage looking for evidence of criminal activity. Worse still, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled in 1988 that garbage left by the roadside off one’s property is not protected by the Fourth Amendment’s clause of the Constitution forbidding unreasonable search and seizure, in an opinion which even overrides local laws:
Since respondents voluntarily left their trash for collection in an area particularly suited for public inspection, their claimed expectation of privacy in the inculpatory items they discarded was not objectively reasonable. It is common knowledge that plastic garbage bags left along a public street are readily accessible to animals, children, scavengers, snoops, and other members of the public. Moreover, respondents placed their refuse at the curb for the express purpose of conveying it to a third party, the trash collector, who might himself have sorted through it or permitted others, such as the police, to do so. The police cannot reasonably be expected to avert their eyes from evidence of criminal activity that could have been observed by any member of the public.
Greenwood’s alternative argument that his expectation of privacy in his garbage should be deemed reasonable as a matter of federal constitutional law because the warrantless search and seizure of his garbage was impermissible as a matter of California law under Krivda, [486 U.S. 35, 36] which he contends survived the state constitutional amendment, is without merit. The reasonableness of a search for Fourth Amendment purposes does not depend upon privacy concepts embodied in the law of the particular State in which the search occurred; rather, it turns upon the understanding of society as a whole that certain areas deserve the most scrupulous protection from government invasion. There is no such understanding with respect to garbage left for collection at the side of a public street.33
The Supreme Court of Canada found likewise in 2009 that roadside trash isn’t protected by Article 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and even cites this precedent in its rationale.34 In fact, it is difficult to imagine a jurisdiction in which refuse would be extended any such protection, or how local statutes declaring otherwise could be enforced against the average scavenger.
It naturally follows that private citizens can legally claim other people’s discards on a similar basis. In fact, pulling it off incognito is trivial; just go out at night with a wagon and scruffy clothing, pretending to be collecting empties, and you can rummage through garbage without attracting scrutiny. Even were someone to be ‘caught’ stealing garbage, the likelihood of legal action or criminal prosecution would look downright comical.
That being said, the distinction between curbside trash scavenging and dumpster diving is worth noting. The latter may be afforded legal protection and be the object of actual lawsuits if the theft results in actual harm; it may also attract charges of trespassing since dumpsters usually sit on private property. In a notable case from 1984, the Court of Appeals of Minnesota confirmed a lower court decision which declared the theft of trade secrets from a competitor’s dumpster not to be fair game, and even doubled down by awarding massive punitive damages.35
Likewise, the Oregon Supreme Court found in 2019 that trash in garbage bins with the lid down remains one’s legal property, protected from unreasonable search and seizure, at least under the state’s constitution.36 Of course decisions stating otherwise are bound to be controversial, the Court itself mentioning a story run by the Willamette Week in 2002 enumerating the contents of Portland public officials’ garbage:37
Indeed, defendants make exactly that point, suggesting that most Oregonians would be outraged were their garbage subject to such examination and citing as support an article first published on December 23, 2002, in the Portland publication Willamette Week. The article catalogued items that its reporters had found by collecting the curbside garbage or recycling of three government officials in Portland then serving in law enforcement roles: the city’s police chief, the mayor and commissioner of police, and the Multnomah County District Attorney. The reporters described what they had done as a “frontal assault” on privacy and reported some of the officials’ angry reactions to having their personal refuse removed from curbside and publicly examined, including the mayor’s statement that she considered “Willamette Week’s actions in this matter to be potentially illegal and absolutely unscrupulous and reprehensible.”
So is it worth the trouble? I’ve searched some of my targets’ garbage bins and found some dumbfounding things, like internal company memos and accounting documents, medication containers and slips, receipts for purchases both online and local, private correspondence with friends and family members, targeted advertisement, beverage containers (with DNA and fingerprints, of course), and more; now I even know what they eat for breakfast (one had Tropicana orange juice, for example). I swear these are gold mines for both identity thieves and unscrupulous activists. So go ahead and help yourselves. And while you’re at it, time to buy a paper shredder if you don’t have one already, before the cops come snooping.
Chapter 6: The mainstream media conundrum