The U.S. Wants Canada to Become A Police State
Moments after being sworn in as president of the United States, Donald Trump issued a series of executive orders strengthening border security and undertaking a mass deportation of illegal immigrants. He authorized the military to assist in border security operations and created task forces in each U.S. state to manage and expedite deportations. As a specialist in digital security and human rights, I received a flood of messages from anxious organizations and individuals on both sides of the border. And there are many reasons to be alarmed.
First, customs and border officials, law enforcement and intelligence agencies in both Canada and the U.S. are acquiring a plethora of surveillance technologies in support of the border-enforcement mission. Even before Trump took office, and largely in response to his social media taunts, Canadian officials adopted an aggressive approach to border security. In December of 2024, they committed $1.3 billion in additional spending over six years. So hasty were they to appease Trump that the RCMP quickly procured a fleet of quadcopter surveillance drones—which became unusable because of security risks linked to their manufacture in China. Since Trump took office, Canada has continued these new deployments, adding 15 surveillance towers with high-resolution cameras, alongside new drones, four Black Hawk helicopters and a customized plane for aerial surveillance. Collectively, they deploy infrared, heat-seeking and other advanced detection capabilities. This accelerated shopping spree will bring a raft of risks to populations on both sides of the border.
For example, previous research has raised serious concerns about the widespread use (and abuse) of predictive policing and surveillance technologies by Canada’s security agencies, including those responsible for monitoring the border. Even before Trump was elected, crossing the U.S.–Canada border channelled travellers into a Matrix-like surveillance web of high-tech control systems: biometric profiling, social media monitoring, cellphone data extraction systems, automated licence plate readers. While some of us may waltz through this matrix unimpeded, this type of surveillance web disproportionately ensnares vulnerable travellers, like people of colour and religious minorities, because it’s prone to bias, discrimination and error. Companies may tout AI-powered accuracy, but algorithms are ultimately human creations, embodying all of the discriminatory prejudices that plague modern policing and intelligence practices.
Achieving perfect accuracy is no answer to this problem either. By making those prejudiced surveillance practices more efficient, they become more harmful. It is haunting to consider the U.S. government’s announcement of an AI "catch and revoke" program to search through foreign national students’ social media accounts to find evidence of “support for Hamas or other designated terror groups” as a pretext to revoke their visas and speedily deport them. What will count as support is not defined. It’s likely kept vague to give authorities the widest discretion.
The U.S. government’s use of AI to scour social media raises issues of broader civil liberty that should concern all Canadians. Government officials have said that what they collect through surveillance systems of this sort is mostly “public data” and thus fair game for warrantless acquisition and search. But the tools they use to scrape through social media are highly invasive: they can collect extraordinarily rich and personal information from anyone. I’m the director of the Citizen Lab, a Toronto-based research centre. My team, along with legal experts and human rights advocates, have shown how such uses may violate the Canadian Charter or international human rights law, specifically infringing on the rights to privacy, equality and freedom of expression, among other violations.
Government agencies that will use these tools already operate with limited oversight and records of non-compliance. In Canada, for example, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and its provincial counterparts have repeatedly criticized the RCMP and Canadian Border Services Agency for their uses of commercial surveillance against the public. Recent parliamentary hearings revealed the RCMP secretly used advanced phone hacking for years without public disclosure or privacy assessments, and it had used third-party services to collect personal information from social media, the dark web and other sources. The CBSA, meanwhile, had used digital forensic tools to unlock seized electronic devices at the border.
On the U.S. side, whatever problems there might have been around limited oversight and non-compliance with constitutional safeguards have mushroomed under Trump. The new administration has hacksawed through oversight bodies, including inspectors general and independent government watchdog agencies, in an effort to consolidate executive power and cut federal employees, all the while funnelling billions of new dollars to security agencies to assist in deportation efforts. They have simultaneously expanded Immigrations and Customs Enforcement authority to conduct arrests and detentions while expediting deportation procedures with the help of a new swathe of AI tools. Ominously, the Department of Homeland Security eliminated policies prohibiting personnel from conducting intelligence activities based solely on a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation—in effect, greenlighting discriminatory surveillance practices.
Checks and balances to prevent abuses are eroding, security agencies are being beefed up, and the sources of data that justify mass deportations are quickly opening up. Big tech platforms already collect vast amounts of personal data for advertising and, while some previously resisted government requests, they now seem eager to comply with the new administration. Tech CEOs have practically fallen over themselves to get on board with Trump, and a growing surveillance market—“advertising intelligence,” or ADINT—now sells real-time data on people’s preferences, location and social ties to law enforcement and immigration agencies. Almost all that information is derived from advertising data collected by tech platforms as part of their routine business. In the coming years, this industry will expand rapidly.
By acquiring surveillance technologies, Western agencies fuel a poorly regulated industry and provide authoritarian regimes with new tools to repress people. Even before Trump took office, my team found case after case of authoritarian and even democratic governments using these highly invasive systems to target journalists, human rights defenders, lawyers and legitimate political resisters. Many spyware and surveillance companies have headquarters in Israel and Gulf countries, where Trump has lots of friends. He’s notorious for his chummy relations with dictators and autocrats who most benefit from a poorly regulated surveillance-industrial complex. High-risk individuals, including human rights defenders in exile, will face heightened threats, caught in the crosshairs of two adversaries: the countries that they fled from in fear for their lives and their host countries who first welcomed them, but will now put them under a Kafka-esque spotlight in order to locate and deport them.
Who will be hurt most? As always, immigrants, refugees, political targets, investigative journalists and anyone threatening the new oligarchy’s interests. Support groups, including NGOs, legal aid organizations and academic watchdogs, will also be in danger. The Trump administration has already withdrawn federal funding for universities, such as Columbia, that do not conform to its ideology and has gone so far as to threaten to dismantle the tenure system. Elon Musk has used his X platform to harass political opponents, journalists and democracy advocacy groups, while simultaneously directing his DOGE team to dig through tax records and other confidential federal data systems, opening up the prospect of frivolous investigations against political enemies. Canadians engaged in fact-gathering, public interest research and human rights will not be immune to these rising dangers, especially in light of the outrageous threats to Canada’s sovereignty from the Trump administration.
What to do? We have to acknowledge that we are in for darker times ahead and brace ourselves for that reality. It will be important to use whatever avenues that have not been perverted in North America and elsewhere to challenge unlawful surveillance. The mission of groups like the Citizen Lab, which act as independent watchdogs against abuse of power in the digital arena, has become more critical than ever before. So have those of legal and other civil society support groups, working on the frontlines.
Meanwhile, the Canadian government should avoid hastily dumping resources into our own border and security agencies simply to appease Trump; it’s clear now that whatever we do won’t truly appease him anyway. Nor should we blindly mimic the unrestrained police state that is developing south of the border. If anything, our government should invest in stronger oversight to prevent abuses and discriminatory practices while simultaneously devoting resources to build support systems to migrants and refugees who need them now more than ever.
Persecuted people throughout history have fought and survived the type of doom that many of us are only now feeling for the first time. The world Trump and his coterie of James Bond villains are building is one these groups have spent decades resisting. Joining them in that resistance has been long overdue—but now is better than never.
Ronald Deibert is the director of the Citizen Lab and the author of Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion, and the Global Fight for Democracy.
