Protecting Whose Security?: Anti-Terrorism Legislation and the Criminalization of Dissent
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The YCISS Working Paper Series is designed to stimulate feedback from other experts in the field. The series explores topical themes that reflect work being undertaken at the Centre. This paper provides a critical evaluation of some of the rarely-considered impacts of legislation that is passed in the name of ‘security, ’ particularly the anti-terrorism legislation that has been passed throughout northern industrialized countries and beyond since September 11, 2001. Since September 11, a growing body of literature has developed examining the impact of anti-terrorism legislation on civil liberties, but very little addresses the impact of the legislation specifically on social movements or on dissent to the current configuration of power in our society more generally. This paper seeks to open space for such a debate. It offers a preliminary analysis of the impact and potential impact of anti-terrorism legislation on social movements and community organizing, focusing on the possible political rationale behind such impacts. The analysis pushes us to ask the question, “Whose security are these acts designed to protect? ” and presents us with a disturbing answer: the beneficiaries of contemporary capitalist relations. 1 Due to the difficulty of analyzing the more indirect and long-term impacts of recent legislation, and in an effort to begin to set the stage for future analysis, the paper takes a historical approach, comparing Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act (formerly Bill C-36) with the invocation of the War Measures Act in 1970. The paper looks at the terrorist acts in each case (the kidnappings of government officials by the Front de liberation du
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".