RCMP looking at ways to identify young people at risk of becoming radicalized

Mubin Shaikh, the former CSIS informant who helped to expose the Toronto-18 terror plot, says it is important for the community to get involved. Photo: Postmedia News/Files

With more and more Canadians taking up arms in far-off conflict zones, the RCMP is embarking on an ambitious plan to try to identify young people at risk of becoming radicalized and exposing them to “positive influences.”

“The signs could be they’re not going to school, they’re feeling isolated, their understanding of geopolitics is not what we would say is the standard. And that’s where positive intervention could be, ‘Let’s get someone, (possibly) a political science university teacher, to maybe put things in context,’” Sgt. Renu Dash, acting director of the RCMP’s federal policing public engagement team, said Thursday in an interview.

Security experts said this week that authorities were wise to adopt one-on-one interventions as part of their counter-terrorism efforts, but they also had key questions and concerns: What criteria will be used to determine who is targeted for intervention? And will the RCMP get enough buy-in from community players, some of whom may be fearful of being labelled as “spies?”

“This is key. If you do not have buy-in from the communities, your plan is dead in the water,” said Mubin Shaikh, the former CSIS informant who helped to expose the Toronto-18 terror plot.

The government laid out its case for the need for early intervention in a report last week on the terror threat in Canada. The report stated that the government was aware of about 130 individuals with Canadian ties who were suspected of being involved in terrorist activities abroad, including about 30 in Syria.

Most “extremist travellers” generally believe that a conflict is justified on moral or religious grounds, the report said. Some may be drawn to conflict zones because of family or ethnic ties, the rhetoric of charismatic leaders, or online propaganda.

The RCMP is heading up a High Risk Travel Case Management Group with a number of government agencies to try to identify extremist travellers and disrupt their travel plans or terrorist activities, the report said.

For those who show signs of becoming involved in violent extremism but who have not yet crossed that threshold, the RCMP is developing an intervention program — set to roll out by the end of the year — designed to link those individuals with community mentors for “advice, support and counselling.”

Dash confirmed that public safety officials have been studying different intervention models, such as the Berlin-based EXIT program, which provides help to Germans trying to leave the neo-Nazi movement. A few years ago, the group created an offshoot program to support families of radicalized Muslims.

Dash declined to say what criteria the RCMP have developed to decide who merits intervention. She did say that someone who expresses extremist views is not necessarily going to be radicalized to violence. “It could be just someone who is being curious. We don’t want to stigmatize anybody.  There’s no one-size-fits-all indicator,” Dash said.

Experts say various “diagnostic tools” have been developed around the world to assess where someone falls on the “spectrum of dangerousness,” but no consensus has been reached on which one is best.

In the U.K., a police-led early-intervention program called Channel saw in its early days referrals of young people simply for wearing what were deemed to be “radical” clothes, according to a 2012 report by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence. “People were not sure what to look for and so they erred on the side of caution,” a Channel coordinator was quoted as saying.

The program has since developed a “vulnerability assessment” framework consisting of 22 behaviours to look out for. They include spending time in the company of extremists, changing style or appearance to accord with the group, loss of interest in friends, and condoning violence or harm towards others.

As for who in the community will be tapped to serve as mentors, Dash said they could include parents, teachers and religious leaders.

Lorne Dawson, a sociology professor and expert on radicalization at the University of Waterloo, said choosing the right mentors will be key. Ex-radicals will make good candidates, as will youth workers who are respected in their communities.

“Sixteen, 17-year-olds don’t really listen to their parents, they’re a little suspicious of teachers, they may be suspicious of imams, they may not be suspicious of a youth worker associated with their mosque who is in the know,” he said.

One problem that could arise, however, is if potential mentors become fearful about being seen working with the authorities. “Are these kinds of people going to be willing to work with government or will they say, ‘Hey man, if I work with you, the RCMP, I lose my cred,’” Dawson said.

While police have played a lead role in the U.K.’s Channel program, police have taken a backseat role in intervention programs in other countries, such as the Netherlands and Denmark, said Lorenzo Vidino, a security expert at the Center for Security Studies in Zurich.

The RCMP, he said, may find that they sometimes have to take a “carrot and stick” approach with people they’re trying to steer away from extremism. Perhaps a religious leader takes a softer approach with a person, while the police might go knocking on their door to let them know “there are consequences to your actions.”

Police have to be careful though that they don’t end up spooking that person and driving them underground, said Jez Littlewood, a professor of international affairs at Carleton University.

Hussein Hamdani, a Hamilton lawyer and Muslim community activist, said he is encouraged that the RCMP is signalling that it’s not just interested in getting convictions in its fight against terrorism.

Too often in the past, he added, mosques have been inclined to kick out someone for developing radical views. The intervention model encourages community members to engage that person, provide them with a better grounding in their faith, he said.

But experts caution that not all radicals are driven by theology; some could be driven by feelings of alienation or unemployment. So while some may benefit from exposure to other religious texts or interpretations, others could benefit from talks with social workers or youth outreach workers.

“Part of the challenge is finding the correct mix for each case,” Littlewood said.

Dquan(at)Postmedia.com

Photos Sept 4: Top images from around the world

This photo shows Leng Yuting, 26, posing underwater for her wedding pictures at a photo studio in Shanghai, ahead of her wedding next year. Her fiance Riyang said they had their wedding photographs taken underwater because 'its romantic and beautiful'. Mr Wedding studio owner, Tina Lui, started providing underwater pictures four years ago. (JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty Images)

The day’s best photos, as selected by editors at Postmedia News, are a stunning collection of the greatest images from around the world.

This picture shows a man taking pictures of floodwater released from the Three Gorges Dam, a gigantic hydropower project on the Yangtze river, in Yichang, central China’s Hubei province, after heavy downpours in the upper reaches of the dam caused the highest flood peak of the year. (PHOTOSTR/AFP/Getty Images)

Afghan man peer through broken window panes following a suicide attack in Ghazni on September 4, 2014. A Taliban attack on a government compound in Afghanistan on September 4 killed 13 security personnel and left at least 60 other people wounded when a truck bomb triggered hours of fighting, officials said.  (Rahmatullah Alizadah/AFP/Getty Images)

A woman pushing her bicycle walks past a non-exploded rocket in Ilovaisk, 50 Kilometers southeast of Donetsk, on September 4, 2014. Russia on September 4 accused Washington of undermining peace efforts in Ukraine, saying the United States supported a pro-war political party in Kiev. (FRANCISCO LEONG/AFP/Getty Images)

Indian Sikh devotees pay their respects during heavy rain at the Sikh Shrine Golden temple in Amritsar on September 4, 2014. Heavy rains, which fell in several areas of northern India, have brought respite from the scorching heat of previous days.(NARINDER NANU/AFP/Getty Images)

Al-Qaida has expanded into India, leader says

NEW DELHI — Al-Qaida has expanded into India, the leader of the terror group said in a video released Thursday, vowing that its militants would bring Islamic law to the entire subcontinent and “wage jihad against its enemies.”

At least three Indian states with large Muslim populations have been put on alert in the wake of the video’s release, local TV stations reported, though there was no indication of an increased security presence.

The new group “is the fruit of a blessed effort of more than two years to gather the mujahedeen in the Indian subcontinent into a single entity,” al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahri said in the video, which was seen online by the SITE monitoring group.

While his comments raised concerns in India, al-Zawahri’s message seemed largely directed at his own rivals in the international jihad movement, and with raising al-Qaida’s profile in the wake of repeated successes by the Islamic State militant group.

Al-Qaida has been increasingly overshadowed by the Islamic State, whose fighters have captured wide swaths of Syria and Iraq and recently beheaded two American journalists.

Al-Qaida “is struggling for its legitimacy in the eyes of the radicalized Muslim world,” said Ajai Sahni, a top Indian security analyst with the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management.

A veiled Indian woman walks on a street in New Delhi, India, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2014. (AP Photo/Saurabh Das)

“Osama bin Laden has been killed and (al-Qaida’s) entire top leadership, apart from Zawahri and a few others, one by one have been decimated by the American drone attacks,” he said.

While al-Zawahri’s statement referred to the “Indian subcontinent” — a term that most commonly refers to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal — his comments were widely seen as directed at India, a largely Hindu nation with a large Muslim minority.

Al-Zawahri said the group, Qaedat al-Jihad in the Indian subcontinent, would fight for an Islamic state and laws across the region, “which was part of the Muslims’ territories before it was occupied by the infidel enemy.”

The leader of the new group, Essam Omar, said in an audio recording released with the video, that Jews and Hindus — who he referred to as “apostates of India” — “will watch your destruction by your own eyes.”

Fighters will “storm your barricades with cars packed with gunpowder,” Omar said, decrying what he called the region’s “injustice toward Muslims.”

An Indian couple rides a scooter through a crowded street in New Delhi, India, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2014. (AP Photo/Saurabh Das)

Until recently, India had largely seen itself as beyond the recruiting territory of international jihadists like al-Qaida. Over the past few months, however, the Islamic State has grown in prominence in India, and is increasingly believed to be gaining followers here. Last month, an Indian engineering student who had travelled to Iraq with friends, and who was thought to have joined the Islamic State, was reported killed.

Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh met Thursday morning with top security and intelligence officials to discuss the threat.

A spokesman for India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party said the statement was “a matter of serious concern. But there is nothing to worry about. We have a strong government at the federal level.”

India, though, has a notoriously underfunded and ill-trained security infrastructure. In 2008, a small group of Pakistani militants attacked Mumbai, India’s financial hub, effectively shutting down the city for days and killing 166 people.

New Delhi also has been trying for years to put down an insurgency in Kashmir, India’s only majority-Muslim state, where militants are fighting to bring independence to the Himalayan region or join it to neighbouring Pakistan. The fighting has left thousands of people dead.

Coyne: Costs skyrocketing at Canada Pension Plan Investment Board

The leading edge of Canada's baby boom is turning 65. Just don't expect their pension plans to blow out the candles. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz) Photo: Postmedia News file

It is increasingly widely recognized that there is something very amiss at the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. What began in 1999 as a lean, tightly controlled fund to invest surplus contributions to the plan has since become a costly monument to empire-building and bloat.

The Fraser Institute is the latest to notice. As the institute reports in a new study, far from the bargain advertised to the public, the CPPIB is now running up costs in excess of $2 billion annually, or more than one per cent of its assets — a fact obscured by the board’s opaque annual reports, which list “operating costs” separately from “external management fees” and “transaction costs,” as if all three were not costs of investment, to be deducted from the returns to the fund’s beneficiaries, the pensioners of Canada (outside Quebec; the Quebec Pension Plan’s funds are managed by the Caisse de Dépot et Placement du Québec.)

The institute also correctly notes the CPPIB’s costs have been “skyrocketing” in recent years. External management fees, in particular, paid to private fund managers who invest on the CPP’s behalf, have shot from $25 million in fiscal 2007 to $947 million in 2014 (the board’s fiscal year ends March 31) — nearly twice the board’s reported operating costs of $576 million, themselves up more than five-fold in the same period. But that’s just the half of it.

CEO of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Mark Wiseman, poses for a photo in this file photo. (Tom Hicken for National Post)

To be sure, the fiscal 2007 reference point is well chosen. That was the year the CPPIB shifted decisively into its “active management” investing strategy — that is, one in which managers make bets on individual stocks and other assets in hopes of earning above-average returns — after several years in which it had largely stuck to its original “passive” investing mandate, where the objective is simply to track the broad averages. (Though as early as 2000 this constraint was being loosened, to the evident delight of the CPPIB’s managers.)

Equally, there’s no doubt that that is the primary reason for the fund’s soaring costs. As the CPPIB says in its 2007 annual report, the shift in strategy meant “the need for investment professionals with the requisite active management skills and experience has increased markedly,” forcing the board into a global bidding war for the sort of “specialized investment talent” this implied.

But to really get a grip on the increase in personnel costs this has entailed, you have to go back before 2007, to the early years of the CPPIB’s mandate. Even before 2007 the board had been on an extended internal hiring spree, growing from five employees in 2000 to 164 in 2006. Today it has more than 1,000. More striking still has been the growth in compensation for senior managers: from $220,000, on average, in 2000, to $1.56 million in 2007, to $3.3 million in 2014.

Has this extraordinary executive bounty been associated with a similar increase in returns to the fund? Hardly. Even looking at the simple rate of return (net of costs), the fund earned slightly less on average after 2007 than before.

But you can’t look at a fund’s returns in isolation. They make sense only in comparison with the market averages. The fund’s managers can no more be blamed for the catastrophic losses in fiscal 2009, the year of the global financial crisis, than they can be credited with the prodigious 16.2 per cent return last year, when markets were flying. As I’ve written before, when compared with the board’s “reference portfolio,” a composite of the averages in each of the major asset classes, the record is mediocre at best: It beat the benchmark in four years, lost to it in four.

But even here the comparison is misleading. The reference portfolio is made up of publicly traded assets: stock markets and the like. But in recent years the CPPIB, like other pension funds, has plunged heavily into private equity — illiquid assets like infrastructure or unlisted companies, which now make up more than 40 per cent of its portfolio. These are inherently riskier investments, as the board acknowledges — that’s why they pay higher returns, or are supposed to. On a risk-adjusted basis, then, the fund is very likely underperforming.

This is not a criticism of the fund’s management. It is simply a reflection of what is by now also widely recognized, among those without a vested interest in denying it: Active management is a crock. To consistently beat the market within a given asset class, a fund manager must not only be smart and well-informed, he must be consistently smarter and better-informed than all the other smart and well-informed managers out there, all of whom are trying to do the same. That’s vanishingly unlikely. To earn above-average returns, you have to take on above-average risk. There’s no free lunch, in investing as elsewhere.

Who knows? Maybe the fund’s bet on private equity, and the high-priced investment talent that goes with it, will pay off. As the board likes to explain, interminably (another measure of bloat: the CPPIB’s annual reports are now five times longer than they were a decade ago), as a public pension fund it can afford to invest on much longer time horizons than other investors; the returns to private equity are hard to measure in the short term; etc., etc. So it’s always possible we’ll find, decades from now, that it was all worth it. Or perhaps we won’t. But by then the managers will have made off with their millions, either way.

How I took out a revenge porn ring

One Toronto man broke up a revenge porn website targeting the gay community. Photo: Fotlia

The massive leak of celebrity nude photos this week prompted a chorus of protests that it was an invasion of privacy, possibly a sex crime, and certainly misogynistic to look at these images, or even revenge porn in general. A hard earned victory for women in a lost battle for these celebs.

But two days earlier, a video of 5SOS bass player Calum Hood’s penis sent over Snapchat was shared with the rest of the internet. The general response was “what a moron” and the clip was posted without abandon or censor on sites like Gawker. Hood tweeted an apology for his “mistake.”

But Hood isn’t the first or the last male celeb to be publicly derided instead of his privacy defended. Last fall leaked nudes of Disney alum Dylan Sprouse prompted a tweet that he “messed up.”

While the situations for these male and female celebrities are only a few shades from each other, the attitudes are light-years apart. These boys are at fault, should apologize for being exposed, and shouldn’t feel like victims — an attitude borne of ignorance that allows these images to be shared and the websites to stay up because it’s only an issue when girls are involved.

The truth is, guys, it can happen to you. I know because it did to me.

At the start of 2014 a friend who was living abroad sent me a frantic message and a link. His nude image had been posted online with his face and name attached. He asked for my help since his English isn’t perfect, and he wasn’t in the country. As I clicked through images of hundreds of guys culled from private e-mail exchanges and sexting, I saw many faces and names I recognized from around Toronto (plus more I didn’t). Then I saw my own dick staring back at me.

I hit the web to find out what to do.

All the stories about revenge porn were about girls and young women. I didn’t see any precedent for blogs targeting guys and worried we wouldn’t be taken seriously while trying to get these images down.

I read the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and contacted the blogging service. I was provided the host’s email address, but it drew no hits on Google. A brick wall.

Google didn’t have many tips for guys dealing with revenge porn (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

As a last ditch effort, I plugged the email address into Facebook. Bingo. The criminal mastermind behind this exploitation blog hadn’t bothered to use a burner email address and suddenly I had a clear view of him, his name, his occupation and his place of residence.

Once again, for most victims out there, this would probably be time to contact a lawyer, but I had an ace in the hole: I knew this loser and I had dirt on him.

I had briefly dated this scumbag the year before — and it should probably come as no surprise that I broke it off when he started to give off a creepy vibe. I knew he was in Canada seeking a refugee claim. So I made a casual phone call to the dirtbag and explained over his denials the awkward predicament that his name was the only one attached to a seedy internet porn ring and I would absolutely hate to get a lawyer involved because I would feel just awful since it would probably lead to his deportation. What a nice guy I am.

It’s not the most above-board of tactics, but neither were his. Plus it worked. The blog he swore he had no involvement with was offline within minutes of our chat.

When the story of this ruggedly handsome folk hero’s takedown spread through friends of mine in the media, I got a call from a producer of one of Canada’s top television newsmagazines. They were interested in doing a segment. After the outrage over the suicides of Rehtaeh Parsons and Amanda Todd I thought this would be a good opportunity for any boys and young men victimized to know they aren’t alone, have the right to their privacy, and have options to help them.

After I had told my story, the reaction of the producer was less optimistic.

So it was just guys? That’s right. No girls? Not that I saw, no.

I knew first hand that revenge pron is a problem for the hundreds of men who were victims of that particular website, and for the thousands more exposed online.

I was told revenge porn against guys wasn’t the story they wanted to tell. The producer said there wasn’t enough information on it and it doesn’t really seem to be a problem.

Of course, I knew first hand it is a problem for the hundreds of men who were victims of that particular website, and for the thousands more exposed online.

Cyberbullying, revenge porn, privacy, and the protection of our own bodies are problems that affect — and can hurt — everyone, from celebrities to normal Canadians, men and women, boys and girls. For those without my good luck and b.s. skills, it can mean thousands in legal bills and a permanent loss of a sense of privacy. And, for boys, it also means being a victim in silence.

— Travis Myers is a freelance writer, editor and graphic designer in Toronto

Follow @TravMyers