It’s a rare thing when a video surfaces surrounding a Keystone XL pipeline when all sides come out looking good. Such is the case in the video above at an event in Boston regarding Obama’s Health Care plan. The protesters bring some much needed publicity to their cause and with his usual glib charm, Obama moves on and comes off as likeable as he always does.

The only people who come across looking bad are the sycophantic over-laughers in the background who can’t control their enjoyment as the President makes his cool jests. Surely they won’t be so happy when it’s 120 degrees in Boston and the pipeline bursts and baby ducklings emerge from their warm shells into a world filled with poisonous ooze. But for today, it’s a win all around. Let’s all share a chuckle. Happy Friday!

https://twitter.com/BarackObama

American politics have always been of serious interest for Canadians. Not only does the American President affect Canadian politics and procedures, but American elections are also just a heck of a lot more interesting to watch than our own. There’s something incredibly exciting about sitting around with your friends and watching the votes come in, as Wolf Blitzer and his associates furiously tap screens that zoom in and out on the states (CNN went very high-tech this year). Last night’s Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney battle was no exception—and as always, in and amongst the surging patriotism and mountains of hope, there was absurdity. Here, we bring you some of the election’s biggest WTFs.

1.)  Mitt Romney, on election day, tells reporters he only wrote a victory speech. That worked out well.

2.)  Mitt Romney takes forever to concede, finally addressing the public early this morning. He was scrambling to write his defeat speech, okay?

3.)  Donald Trump calls for a revolution when Obama wins. Tweeting things like, “We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” and, “This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!” business mogul Trump made it pretty clear that he was upset with the night’s results. Some tweets were deleted, including the outrageous, “More votes equals a loss…revolution!” Trump’s strong dislike for Obama is no secret (remember when he insisted that the President wasn’t American?), but this is ridiculous. What exactly is Trump hoping to gain? Being upset with the election’s outcome is one thing; deciding that it’s proof of an unjust system (and thus cause for revolution) is entirely another. At least NBC’s Brian Williams commented on its preposterousness.

4.)  Karl Rove says calling Obama’s victory in Ohio is premature. Even as CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, and even the Conservative Fox News said the state was Obama’s, Romney advisor Rove said, in an interview with Fox, that with 991 (20 percent) of the state’s votes still uncounted, it was too soon to know. This caused anchor Megyn Kelly to address the network’s number crunchers directly and find out if they, given Rove’s assessment, stood by their projection. They did. And, turns out, they were right. Woo!

5.)  Richard Noyes alleges that the liberal media was biased against Romney. The Media Research Centre’s Research Director Noyes wrote an editorial, published today by Fox News, which listed five reasons why this supposed bias was a major cause in Romney’s loss. Among them were accusations that the liberal media defended biased debate moderators (who were in favour of Obama), tried to hide the truth about America’s poor economy, and attacked “Republicans as liars for statements that were accurate.” If I’ve learned one thing in journalism school, it’s that no media establishment is completely without bias—it’s literally impossible to be 100 percent neutral, in any circumstance—and that goes for both political camps. Also, Noyes should give America more credit than that: it’s a smart country, and its people can tell when they’re being fed nonsense. Plus, the media is an overly used and very easy target when pointing the finger. Why is only the liberal media to blame?

6.)  Ann Coulter is…still Ann Coulter. A sore loser, the Conservative writer tweeted: “The good news is the promise of continued massive unemployment among young people.” Ugh.

7.)  People think Justin Bieber is American and urge him to vote. This caused the Canadian (HUZZAH!) pop prince to take to Twitter, saying, “im 18…but i cant vote…im Canadian.” Sorry to crush the hearts of 14-year-old girls everywhere else, but he’s ours.

8.)  Obama beats Justin Bieber for the most retweeted post on Twitter of all time. Shattering Bieber’s record of over 220,000, Obama’s “Four more years.” tweet (featuring a heartwarming photo of Mr. and Mrs. Obama in a sweet embrace) has been retweeted over 680,000 times. Confession: this is actually a total FTW. Obama FTW!

In case you’ve been living under a rock this year, a presidential election in the U.S. is fast approaching. That means all decorum is lost and the shit hits the fan—or, in the case of some political “art,” the bathroom.

A Republican Party convention in Montana this weekend featured highlights such as Newt Gingrich, a gun/shovel/duct tape raffle, and—oh, right! an outhouse fondly called “Obama’s Presidential Library.”

The portable creative work featured a fake Obama birth certificate stamped “Bullshit”, in reference to the racist and tiresome “debate” over whether he was born in America. Every outhouse has a little graffiti on the walls, and this one was no exception. On the side of the bathroom was written, “for a good time call 1-800-Michelle Hillary Nancy.”

Also, the outhouse was painted to look like it was hit with a slew of bullets.

“That’s So Gay”: Now Okay!

Surprise! It’s apparently okay to use the word “gay” to mean “stupid” or “weak” according to the Broadcast Standards Council.

The response has been split: on the one hand, it’s disappointing that a group of people can agree that “stupid” and “weak” are acceptable synonyms for a queer identity, and not see a problem there. At the same time, censorship has been a tool that often targets the queer community, so it’s generally something to avoid. Besides, people have said awful things on talk radio for a while now, much of which manages to “fit into” broadcast standard—so maybe we should be focusing on changing social norms, instead of policing people’s words.

After all, if we were to write up a “clean language” test, I’d definitely fail—I was just debating whether buying my dad a plant for Father’s Day was “too gay” this weekend.

Speaking of censorship, Google is reporting an “alarming” rise in censorship in the past half-year. The search engine has received more requests to remove political content—including from Western governments like Canada, the U.S., U.K. and Spain.

Question: Can men and women be friends?

Apparently the question is some matter of debate, according to NPR.

After all,

Some of the research indicates that men, in particular, are somewhat likely to both report some level of attraction to their female friends and to believe their female friends feel some level of attraction to them.

I’m not really sure what to say to that. So… we’re not allowed to be attracted to our friends? If we do find our friends attractive, how exactly does that render our bonds disingenuous, anyway? I particularly like Faith and Mario’s “but he’s gay!” argument as to how they maintain their friendship. Right, because no straight girl has crushed out on her gay friend ever.

Either way, I’m counting down the seconds until noon—I just have to hear this one for myself.

@Sweden… Well that was awkward.

Shortly after @Sweden got boatloads of New York Times buzz, the current Sweden started tweeting some very strange screeds. Check out the storify for the whole rundown.

Michael Shapcott is the Director of Affordable Housing and Social Innovation for the Wellesley Institute, an independent research institute working to advance population health and equity through policy development. He is recognized as one of Canada’s leading housing policy experts and is a long-time housing and homelessness advocate.  He took some time to talk with us about the upcoming G20 Summit and what it means for low-income people in Canada and around the world.

Q&A

Jesse Mintz: You are very involved in the housing and income equity struggle on a local and national level. Can you talk a little about some of the issues facing low-income Canadians?

Michael Shapcott: This country has undergone a shift in the last decade. We’ve had all the indicators point to not only a big growth in visible homelessness in Toronto and across the country—this includes people who are living in homeless shelters and on the street—but we’ve also seen a corresponding growth in housing insecurity, that is people who are a little less visible but may be in overcrowded housing, substandard housing or unaffordable housing. So while we’ve seen this huge increase in housing insecurity and homelessness in this country in the past decade, we’ve also seen the face of homelessness change as well. Whereas, say, 20 years ago, by far the vast majority of homeless people were single middle-aged people, most often male, we began to see in the 1990s the rise of family homelessness, youth homelessness, and seniors homelessness. The situation across the country is pretty grim, and it’s not just something that Canadians have noticed. In 2007 the United Nations Special Rapporteur on adequate housing visited Canada on a fact-finding mission and he confirmed how desperate the situation was in the country.

Overall what we have is a very grim and serious picture in terms of housing insecurity. That, of course, affects not only the individuals and their ability to find a good home but it also has a profound impact on personal health. The affordable housing crisis is triggering in turn a health crisis that is affecting individuals. It’s also disrupting communities. We’re seeing an increase in polarization in a number of urban areas across the country between rich neighborhoods and poorer ones. On top of the health and community aspect, the housing crisis is having an impact on the economy on a local and national level. We’re seeing more and more business, such as TD Economics on the national level and Toronto Board of Trade on a local level, come out and claim that attracting and retaining workers has become more difficult as a result of the lack of affordable housing. They recognize that the social dimensions of the affordable housing crisis affect businesses as well as individuals. The housing crisis is directly impacting a national health crisis, disruptions to our urban environments and the economy. So the overall picture of Canada’s housing market is of a steadily deteriorating situation and there are plenty of statistics and personal stories that illustrate what’s happening.

Jesse Mintz: It is obviously a very complex issue but, generally speaking, what factors can you point to as causes for the affordable housing crisis in Canada?

Michael Shapcott: There is no question that there are a number of mitigating factors at play. But the key factor that has been driving things has been the erosion of government support for affordable housing. The simple reality—and everybody in the country knows this—is that housing is very expensive and it’s always been that way. About two-thirds of Canadians have adequate incomes to afford housing and they are able to buy or rent a home and still have enough money left over for food and all the other necessities. The really enduring problem is what about the roughly one-third of Canadians who are low-, moderate-, and in some cases even middle-income who are finding it increasingly difficult to rent housing in this country.

So the number one driver in terms of the deteriorating housing situation has been the high cost of housing. What we’ve seen, though, right up until the start of the recession was that Canada was still producing near record amounts of new housing. So the problem obviously wasn’t that we weren’t building enough housing. The problem was that housing is too expensive for an increasing number of Canadians. Before the 1990s the issue was addressed by a national housing program. There were several versions of it but the most significant version, launched in 1973, created a plan to ensure that people who were excluded from the private housing market would have access to an affordable home. The federal government worked in conjunction with the provinces, municipalities, private sector and non-profits. So from 1973 to 1993 the government funded over 600,000 new affordable homes, mainly non-profit and co-op housing, across the country. While there certainly were housing problems for some Canadians in the ’70s and ’80s, we  didn’t see this sort of mass housing insecurity and homeless for that period because governments were paying attention to people who were excluded from the private housing markets. By 1993, though, the federal government stopped all funding for new affordable housing. In 1996 the federal government decided that it would transfer the administration of most federally funded housing projects to the provinces and territories, and in 1998 the federal government decided to partially commercialize Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which is our national housing agency and the lead agency supporting affordable housing programs in the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s. Virtually every Canadian province in one way or another mirrored the federal moves, downloading funding to municipalities, and the pattern was established of governments not only not creating any new affordable housing but also stopping subsidization of existing affordable housing projects from previous programs. This occurred simultaneously as populations were increasing and poverty and income inequality were growing exponentially in Canada. All these factors together led to the perfect storm of our current and growing housing crisis.

I also want to make clear that the governments in the 1990s didn’t just single out housing programs. Right across the spectrum there were cuts in a whole range of government social expenditures. Income transfer programs, everything from welfare to employment insurance, you name it—all the programs designed to put a little bit of money in the pockets of people who don’t have much money  were dramatically cut.

We see in the 1990s, at both the provincial and federal level, a real determination to cut social expenditures to the point where Canada, which used to be near the top in terms of percentage of GDP spent on public social expenditures  when compared with the other nations of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), more recently we’ve slipped down close to the bottom of the list. In 2008, the OECD released a report called “Growing Unequal” which was focused on poverty and income inequality in the 31 countries that compose the main countries of the OECD, the richest and most developed countries in the world; one of the things that the OECD noted was that up until 1995, Canada was ahead of the rest of the OECD in terms of reducing poverty and reducing income inequality but after 1995 Canada fell behind the rest of the OECD and in some measures Canada is among the worst in the OECD in terms of poverty and income inequality. So what you have is a radical change in political direction in the 1990s which led to wholesale cuts in housing policies, in housing funding, plus a whole related series of government social expenditures and the net impact of all of that is the situation that were facing today.

Jesse Mintz: So if I’m understanding you correctly, directional changes in federal policy have led to a confluence of factors contributing to the housing crisis specifically and to a whole slew of social ills as a result. Is there a connection you can draw between Canada’s domestic policy and the issues facing low-income Canadians and international policies and the issues facing people of the global south?

Michael Shapcott: There’s no question. The politics that led to the massive erosion of housing and other social programs in Canada in the 1990s at the national level are often referred to on the international level as neoliberal policies. The neoliberal agenda is basically to shrink the role of government and enhance the role of the private market. It was explicitly adopted with the Mulroney government in 1984 and it was followed by the Chretien-Martin administration and of course the current Harper government. The neoliberal agenda stands very much in sharp contrast with the previous notion that there is an important and legitimate role for the government in terms of dealing with issues that markets couldn’t satisfy, issues such as equity and access to basic human needs. What has begun with the onset of the recession, which was triggered entirely by a failure of private markets, is that people have begun asking serious questions about the neoliberal agenda of unregulated private markets in terms of its failures to meet people’s needs. There is a talk of a new role for government, of government regulation of the private sector that seeks to ensure that everyone within the country has access to basic needs and basic rights.

One of the issues at the G20 summit, of course, is that you have a number of governments coming—the Canadian government and the coalitions of Germany and England, respectively—that are firmly committed to the neoliberal ideology of small governments and big markets. You have the U.S. government that, while under the Bush administration, was very committed to the neoliberal agenda but has since made overtures under Obama to more regulations in the aftermath of the recession. What we’ll see at the G20 meeting is a very enthusiastic group of cheerleaders for the neoliberal agenda on one side and on the other hand at least a few voices saying that the recession is a wakeup call and that governments have to figure out a new way of working.

Jesse Mintz: So you don’t think that the G20 is prepared or even interested in addressing the underlying issues of income equity on an international level?

Michael Shapcott: I think that it’s hard to say. It’s certainly on the domestic agenda in every G20 country, Canada included. And while the critical issues affecting people internationally are very much there, often times the leadership of a country doesn’t reflect the political will of the people in terms of direction of the G20. There are some interesting trends beginning to take shape in many parts of the world. One of the most important ones, I think, is emerging in Australia, the U.S., Britain and many other European nations, and it’s beginning slowly here in Canada as well. It is the idea of the social economy. The social economy is very complex but in its simplest form it exists between the private sector of business and the public sector of government and uses traditional economic tools geared towards meeting basic human needs as opposed to the private sector mentality of maximizing profit. The best example at the international level are micro credit organizations like the Grameen Bank that started in Bangladesh but has since gone global. It is not simply profit motivated but is organized very explicitly on a social economy basis.  Canada, with the exception of Quebec, lags behind the United States and most of Europe in terms of developing our social economy. Almost certainly the social economy will be nowhere near the radar screen at the G20 because, for some reason, the social sector gets very little attention from governments despite its often disproportionate contribution to the overall economy. In Canada, for instance, the non-profit sector contributes six times as much to the GDP as the auto manufacturing industry. There are literally hundreds of thousands of non-profit organizations providing a variety of services and employing a huge number of people generating economic activity. Yet they’re not on the radar screen.

We would love to see a real dialogue at this year’s G20. Instead of this polarized debate between people on the one side who think that the private sector needs free rein to maximize profits, and people on the other side who want to build big government to deal with the big social and environmental issues of the 21st century, we want to develop a third alternative. We think the most sensible way out of this mess is to address the social economy. It’s neither big governments nor big markets, but a whole range of social enterprises—some of which may look like traditional businesses from the outside but are in fact geared towards social objectives rather then profit. There are examples in Toronto of modest little social initiatives like an organization called Gateway Linens that is run by Gateway Homeless Shelter as an employment project for men who live in the shelter. There are more and more examples like this around the country everyday but, with the exception of Quebec, the social economy is not organized yet in Canada.

Jesse Mintz: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us today. What rallies can we expect to see you at this week?

Michael Shapcott: I’m going to be at the big one that the CLC is part of (the People First rally, on June 26). I’m also working behind the scenes. We know that at summits like this there is a lot of media attention either on the official meetings—which are pretty low key because we know by this point that most of the official communiqués have all been drafted and the meetings serve more as a photo opportunity then anything else—and there will be a lot of media attention aimed at the antics at street level. We think it would be great if there was some media attention both locally and internationally using the summit as a way of focusing on real solutions to move us forward. We’re going to do our best within the “Cone of Silence,” or the “security bubble” to connect with media and try and interest them to report on issues other then the action on the streets or the communiqués flowing out of the press offices of the leaders.

President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and senior staff, react in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, as the House passes the health care reform bill, March 21, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

After over a year of battling it out for a universal healthcare system, President Obama has secured the (diluted) vision he intended for his country.

What, you might ask, does that have to do with Canada and climate change? Many are speculating that this victory has made it that much more probable that the President could also pass a major climate change bill. Since Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s direction on the subject has largely been to adopt whatever the American agenda is (unofficially known as the “I’ll have what he’s having” approach to climate change policy), this may mean we’re coming along for the ride.

Our prime minister has made numerous commitments to follow suit with what our southern neighbours choose to do, largely on the premise that our economy is so tightly linked to theirs that we would poorly position ourselves should we do any more or less on climate change than what the United States is committing to.

Until recently, this looked just fine for Stephen Harper, as it was not looking so good for the American climate change bill. However, two potentially key things happened this week that might affect our own climate policies: The American health care bill was passed, both reinvigorating confidence in the President and wearing down the opposition, and a compromised version of the climate change bill (worked on by the trio of senators: Democrat John Kerry, Republican Lindsey Graham, and independent Joe Lieberman) received support from both industry and environmental groups. Now key contacts are suggesting the senate isn’t up for another fight, which means there could be successful action on this bill in the near future.

Only a matter of months ago, one presumed that by hitching his wagon to the American environmental policies, Stephen Harper was avoiding having to make any action on climate change at all (and indeed his budget decisions seemed to echo this). It seemed uncertain that a health care bid would pass, and confidence in the President’s ability to address environmental issues in a tough, concrete way seemed unlikely. Both leaders had disappointed at Copenhagen, and both had neglected to address the mutual responsibility they have for Canada’s tar sands.

But there were some substantive differences between the two. While Stephen Harper has failed to re-commit to ecoEnergy, and made major cuts to climate research, the United Sates spends, per capita, 18 times as much as Canada does on developing renewable resources. Now they may be on their way to putting their money where their mouth is, if this climate change bill moves forward.

What remains to be seen is whether or not Harper will remain committed to following in the American footsteps now that they seem poised to make some progress. Perhaps President Obama can help grease the wheels by making another friendly wager—in this country, a box of Timbits and a two-four of Molson can go a long way for encouragement.

The Dalai Lama is charged with watching over Buddhist tradition, but on March 29, 2009 The New York Times revealed a shadowy presence was secretly watching him, invisibly sending information about the religious leader to his anonymous attackers. When the story broke, the office of the Dalai Lama believed it was dealing with an ordinary computer virus. It turned out to be something more widespread, organized, and ominous.

Long before The New York Times, Canada’s Citizen Lab was on the case. Based at the University of Toronto, Citizen Lab is a global leader in documenting and analyzing the exercise of political power in cyberspace. The Lab’s 10-month investigation into the virus that had lodged in the Dalai Lama’s desktop revealed it was in fact just one of 1,295 compromised computers in 103 countries, many found in embassies, government agencies, and significantly, Tibetan expatriate organizations. The researchers at Citizen Lab dubbed the network GhostNet, which spread through a malicious software program—“malware,” in technical circles—called Gh0st RAT. Gh0st RAT spread via email to high value targets: diplomats, politicians, the Dalai Lama. Once installed on a target’s computer it provides barrier-free access to an intruder, giving them full control of the system as if it were their own. This allowed the thieves to bring sensitive documents back to four control servers in China. Worse, Gh0st RAT allows its operators to take control of an entire computer in real-time, giving them the unfettered ability to see and hear their targets through the computer’s webcam and microphone.

It’s virtually impossible to determine whether GhostNet was a work of cyber-espionage by the Chinese government or a single hacker who wanted to make it look that way. In January 2010, search giant Google admitted they were one of 30 companies attacked by the latest version of Gh0st RAT and threatened to shut down the Chinese version of its site. Computer security firm Verisign reported it had traced the attacks back to “a single foreign entity consisting either of agents of the Chinese state or proxies thereof.” Beyond China, countries around the world are increasingly using the internet for espionage and intelligence-gathering. Observers report more viruses, more trojan horses, more botnets, more surveillance, more censorship and more denial-of-service attacks. The tactics are being used by governments and independent groups alike for intelligence gathering, terrorism, national security and religious or political propaganda. Most of it happens secretly, obscured by layers of technical complexity. In the early 2000s, China was a leader in cyber-espionage, but it has lately been joined by more players: Saudi Arabia, Russia, North Korea, Iran, the U.S., and Canada.

We are witnessing, the Citizen Lab researchers believe, the weaponization of cyberspace.

“I realized there was a major geopolitical contest going on in the domain of telecommunications,” says Professor Ron Deibert, Citizen Lab’s founder and head researcher. “The information environment today is mediated through telecommunications. So being able to control, access and retain information through those networks are vital sources of intelligence. This was happening, but it wasn’t being talked about.”

Deibert isn’t new to the intelligence game. He worked as policy analyst for satellite reconnaissance in the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but it wasn’t until he wrote a book about major technological shifts in history, and started researching his PhD—documenting how rapid technological changes of the information age affected global politics—that he began investigating the war that would set him on the path to being the “M” behind the Citizen Lab.

“Our technological advantage is key to America’s military dominance,” said U.S. President Barack Obama in a May 2009 speech on his administration’s plans for the militarization of the internet. “From now on, our digital infrastructure—the networks and computers we depend on every day—will be treated as they should be: a strategic national asset. Protecting this infrastructure will be a national security priority…. We will deter, prevent, detect and defend against attacks, and recover quickly from any disruptions or damage.” In the same speech he assured the world his security plan would not infringe on internet freedom or personal privacy. The U.S. Department of Justice, however, argues (though far less publically) it can’t be sued for illegally intercepting phone calls or emails—unless they admit what they’re doing is illegal, which they won’t.

It’s this kind of secrecy (in the name of national security or not) that Citizen Lab exposes. The small team of researchers and benevolent hackers, who work in the basement of the Munk Centre for International Studies at Devonshire Place in Toronto, watch the watchers and document the shadow war most are too busy updating their Facebook pages to notice. But more than that, Deibert wants to see Canada put its peacemaking reputation to work to lead the way in drafting a constitution for cyberspace among the nations of the G8. He believes Canada can be a leading guardian of the free and open internet, a valuable global commons worth preserving, on par in importance with land, sea, air and space.

Average internet users—the ones doing their banking, their shopping, or their FarmVille cultivating on the brightly lit thoroughfares of the web—are relatively safe from the cyber-spooks of the world. But if you challenge your government, expose injustice, or work for humanitarian ends in hostile places like China, Iran, Syria, Sudan, and Pakistan, it can become a dark, threatening place pretty quickly.

Deibert wanted to expose these injustices on behalf of citizens everywhere, but quickly discovered there were places he couldn’t go as a political scientist. So, with a research grant from the Ford Foundation, he launched the Citizen Lab in 2001 and began assembling a team dedicated to his two-pronged mission: monitoring and analyzing information warfare, and documenting patterns of internet censorship and surveillance.

The first major partner for the Citizen Lab was the SecDev Group, an Ottawa-based think tank that engages in evidence-based research targeting countries at risk from violence and insecurity. Its CEO, Rafal Rohozinski, was the man originally responsible for connecting all the countries in the former Soviet Union to the internet.

That meant he knew everyone who was anyone when it came to cyber-espionage in a region known for its deep ranks of hackers. This was the beginning of a vast network of agents who would later prove invaluable to all Citizen Lab operations. In those first days together with Rohozinski, Deibert also developed the methodology from which all Citizen Lab missions stem: A combination of technical reconnaissance, interrogation, field investigation, data mining, and analysis. In other words, the very same techniques used by government intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency in the U.S. and its Canadian equivalent, Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC). But this time, the expertise would be in the hands of the people.

“We wanted to take that combination of technical and human intelligence to turn it on its head,” Deibert said. “These organizations are using these techniques for national security purposes. They are watching everybody else, no one is watching them, and we wanted to watch them.”

Next, Deibert needed a powerhouse legal team. “We don’t break Canadian laws, but we do break the law in just about every other country,” he says. That’s why he partnered with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Based at Harvard Law School, this gives Deibert and his team access to a network of some of the best legal scholars in the country.

None was more vital than the final piece of the puzzle. All wars need soldiers and Citizen Lab needed the very best computer scientists, programmers, software developers and data analysts. All of whom were handpicked by Deibert from an unlikely recruitment pool: his own political science course.

The Munk Centre has all the architectural hallmarks of an English boarding school, left over from its days as a men’s university residence at the turn of the century. Few visitors have any idea what goes on beneath their feet in Citizen Lab’s dimly lit basement headquarters, but two of Deibert’s lieutenants have agreed to let me ride along on one of their online patrols.

Born and raised in Singapore, research associate James Tay has a personal stake in Citizen Lab’s mission. “I came from a country where those in power were willfully blocking access to the net. I just thought it wasn’t right, so when I heard about the lab tracking censorship and finally holding these governments accountable, I was like, ‘Okay, yeah, this is something I want to do.’”

That’s why, when riots broke out in Iran following its corrupted June 12, 2009, election, Tay was at Citizen Lab, keeping Iran’s lines of communication open. The Iranian government was blocking opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi Khamenei’s website, along with Western-run sites such as YouTube and Twitter. Opposition supporters needed a way to stay connected online, to share information and coordinate their response to the crackdown.

The battering ram that broke through Iran’s online barriers is called Psiphon. Developed first by Citizen Lab, the software is now its own commercial entity, helping to fund the lab’s academic research. Through small chinks in the Iranian government’s armour, Tay was able to send a short, crucial message to people inside Iran who needed unrestricted access to the web: the snippet of text he was charged with sneaking over the border through TweetDeck—software that communicates through Twitter without requiring an actual visit to its website— was an encrypted link to the Psiphon web server, a tunnel through the blockaded border that allowed users to see the web unhindered by Iran’s online filters. Once connected, Psiphon is simple to use: It appears as a second address bar in the web browser and delivers internet traffic through proxy sites that haven’t been blocked yet. Block one, and the data simply changes its route to the user. During the crisis, Tay was trusted with making sure Psiphon ran without Iranian governmental interference, allowing thousands of people to liberate their internet connections.

“Psiphon is open-source and free to the user, but the BBC and big media pay us money for the right to spread our proxy to their readers and viewers,” says Tay.

Psiphon isn’t for everyone, though. It doesn’t provide anonymity, for one, something that Psiphon users are made aware of before using it. Even so, many Iranians still used the service, often at great personal risk.

“Some of them were trying to organize rallies,” says Tay. “I saw that on Twitter a lot.”

But even more dangerous research is directed by the lab, just collecting the data risks the threat of imprisonment or torture if discovered by the offending country’s oppressive government. The project is known as The OpenNet Initiative.

If you stumble upon a site a sitting government doesn’t agree with, it may simply look like a problem with your internet connection. But that error page could be a fake. “These governments may publicly claim to block sites to protect the morals of their citizens, then use the same technique to block the site of a politician they don’t agree with,” says Jonathan Doda, Citizen Lab’s software developer for OpenNet. “They set up the error page because they don’t want people to know. The good news is they’re pretty easy to spot.”

“What’s most popular these days is proxy based blocking,” Doda says—in which a country’s internet connection is shunted through a single gateway that allows a regime to filter all the web traffic in and out— “or some American filtering software—the same thing you find in libraries and schools or some private businesses.” In every case, the country’s internet service provider intercepts your connection and substitutes an error page.

Sometimes, the error is legitimate. After all, internet connectivity in many parts of the world can be slow and unreliable. That’s why Doda must gather evidence of governments’ intent through extensive testing. His team accesses sites multiple times and compares what happens from within Canada to what happens from inside the suspected country.

Doda’s been programming since he was a kid, making software in BASIC on his PC Jr. It was fairly easy for him to create “rTurtle,” the software that collects the data, looking for anomalies like dummy IP addresses, weird-looking address headers and missing keywords in the returned page. The lab needed a way to test within the offending countries, but the lists of blocked sites are determined by religious or political elites and implemented by centralized internet providers in target countries—closed systems that are virtually impossible to penetrate as an outsider.

But Rafal Rohozinski’s international reach gave Citizen Lab the ability to recruit agents within those ISPs and other high-value positions in repressive countries’ internet hierarchies. “In Central Asia alone, we have a network of about 40 individuals working for us,” says Deibert. Some of them are literally putting their life on the line—guilty of treason for working with Citizen Lab.

“Going to Burma and running the software that Jonathan developed in an internet café—that’s life-threatening research,” says Deibert. “The person doing that would have to be aware of the risks.” Those risks range from arrest, imprisonment, and interrogation, to torture and death. Deibert knows people have been arrested under similar circumstances, so OpenNet’s work requires a delicate protocol.

“Jonathan might not know the names of testers in certain countries. I might not even know their names,” says Deibert. “They’ll have a key and it’ll be used to unlock that data they need to run the software. We don’t know who they are. There will be a person who mediates their communication with us. If Jonathan were sent to Syria and got captured, he wouldn’t be able to give out a tester’s name.” For everything at stake, you’d never know the risks by stepping into the lab. Among the islands of computer terminals and the big red vinyl couch off to one side, the only thing remotely James Bond-ish is a hollow world globe stocked with contraband cigars and bottles of alcohol from the countries they’ve visited. But for all they do for others, the Citizen Lab largely ignores internet censorship and surveillance at home.

“I’m not worried as much about Canada. We have a government that’s largely accountable. Despite all the problems, we still live in a democracy that includes the benefits of humanitarian law and respect for human rights. If I did this research in Uzbekistan, I’d be jailed and tortured within the hour,” says Deibert.

Canada has cyber secrets of its own that often escape public notice. There are two bills before parliament collectively called “lawful access” meant to aid law enforcement in obtaining information needed to make an arrest. (Both bills were put on hold when parliament prorogued in December, but they appear to be Conservative government priorities and are likely to be reintroduced.)

“The approach we’ve taken is to respect civil liberties to the fullest extent possible by recreating in the cyber world the exact same principles that have been applied in the analog world. In order for police to obtain the content of emails, or intercept phone calls over the net, they will require a warrant,” says Peter Van Loan, Canadian Minister of Public Safety.

That isn’t the whole story, says David Fewer, director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, based at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law.

At the moment, police can’t force ISPs to hand over a customer’s name and address without a warrant, but the lawful access legislation will allow them to do just that.

“It’s bad enough that ISPs can give over that information if they want,” says Fewer. “Obviously our view is it shouldn’t be made available.” For now, there’s an unofficial compromise: for child pornography allegations, most ISPs give up the information, but for other crime such as fraud, police still need a warrant. Fewer says the informal understanding isn’t good enough.

“The system should be formalized, so there’s a formal response across the board,” Fewer says. “Police should be obliged to get a warrant except in cases of imminent harm, akin to a search warrant.” But police forces are currently demanding search warrant standards be relaxed. “There are sliding scales they’re demanding on certain search warrants. Ordinarily, police have to give ‘probable cause’ and they want that standard to be replaced with ‘reasonable suspicion.’”

Canada’s democratic laws don’t keep you immune from the government’s roving eye in cyberspace, either. “We have to start with the assumption that everything we do on the internet is public,” says Deibert, “and then work backwards and say, ‘What of my communication is private?’ Since potentially, at every step along the way, you can be monitored.”

In your terms of service agreement with Rogers or Bell they have the right to retain, store or turnover any information they provide you as a service including web history, web addresses, emails, and chat logs to the Canadian government for intelligence gathering and law enforcement purposes. CIPPIC is fighting various court battles around the disclosure of user identity to thirdparties online.

“We need courts to carve out some mechanism for preserving respect for privacy online,” says Fewer, “because privacy is a human right.”

Deibert wants the nations of the world to establish their own formalized treaty for the internet, one that treats cyberspace as a public commons and halts the aggressive arms race that threatens to further erode our basic rights. But drafting such an agreement will prove difficult, as security concerns continue to override basic rights.

Incidents like GhostNet demonstrate that even when all signs point to a massive national espionage plot, online attacks are difficult to trace, and governments nearly always enjoy plausible deniability.

“Even when we have lots of evidence that indicates a country may be behind it, the government denies any association,” says Van Loan. “Attacks are extremely hard to trace. What would likely happen is wholesome, good players would follow it, but the bad operators would continue to operate outside of it.”

And such a treaty could abuse as much as protect. “Anonymity is viewed [by governments] as a tool of terrorists and hate-mongers and—in the negative sense— whistle-blowers,” says Fewer. He fears any such treaty would inevitably morph into a cyberspace trade agreement, further tightening abusive intellectual property laws and scaling back civil liberties at an accelerated pace. “You need a tragedy for anything good to come out of a treaty like that. The International Declaration of Human Rights was the result of the First World War.”

With six billion people on the planet facing global problems, Deibert says the real tragedy is losing the open and unfettered ability to communicate globally, but Van Loan sees no other choice. “It is really the new arms race. Every time we erect new barriers and protections some smart, tech-savvy individual comes along and finds ways around those defenses.”

For the moment, it will have to be enough to know that Citizen Lab will be watching the watchers. James Tay admits he takes his work a little too seriously. “I don’t sleep,” he says. “This isn’t your typical 9-5 job. I regularly find myself responding to emails in the middle of the night. Ron wants us to sleep, but this isn’t a job for me. It’s something I live and breathe.”

The charter school movement is enjoying something of a renaissance in the United States. Charter schools—which receive public funding but are privately run, thus removing some features of normal public schools, notably established teachers’ unions—are one of President Obama’s priorities.  They are also the cause du jour for New York City’s hedge fund managers. Education policy wonks are understandably interested in whether charter schools really help students failed by the public system.

I am sceptical about the benefits of private sector involvement in public schools, but I’ve still been watching the debates with some interest. There has not been much research on Canada’s only charters, in Alberta, so most of what I read is from the States. That’s why I came across this post on Eduwonk.

In it, Andrew Rotherham observes that charters are over-represented in the U.S. News top 100 high school rankings. Since Rotherham introduced the post with “here’s one way to think about charter performance” I thought he meant this as evidence that charters are better schools in general. He has since responded to my comment, and clarified that he meant to make a narrower point. But I’d still like to explain my original objection, because there is a bigger lesson here.

Let’s imagine that we looked at a ranking of the best 100 schools in the US, and found that all 100 were charter schools. We might conclude that charter schools, on average, are better schools. But it could also be that charter schools are more variable—more likely to be very good, but also more likely to be very bad. Maybe the bottom 100 schools are all charters as well. Since we don’t have the full data set, we can’t tell.

What we’re talking about is the difference between mean and variance. Mean is a fancy word for what you know as the average—an estimate of the centre of some data. Variance is a measure of how spread out that data is. It helps to look at the graphs below.

These curves represent an imaginary data set. The height of the curves shows how many schools are at each level of quality, which moves from low to high along the bottom. On these symmetrical curves, the mean is the same as the mode, or the quality level where the curve maxes out. The variance expresses how wide the curves are.

Now let’s imagine that we’ve taken a sample of the highest quality schools – say, everything to the right of the vertical dotted line. We’ve found that every school in our sample is a charter. In this graph, that’s because the distribution for charter schools is further to the right – they are, on average, better schools:

But in this second graph, we find a similar sample—all charter schools—even though the mean for both types of schools is the same. All our data reflects is that charter schools are more variable. A lot of them are very good, but a good number are very bad as well:

The way an introductory statistics textbook would put this is that you can’t select your sample based on the dependent variable. If you want to know what sort of diet will help you live longer, you can’t just interview your oldest relatives. If you want to know what sort of training will make you run faster, you can’t just talk to Olympic gold medalists. You won’t have the full picture, and everything that is special about these high achievers could be true of other, less successful eaters or runners. Informally, and in the press, we make this mistake all the time.

I said that this data set was imaginary for a reason – you shouldn’t draw any conclusions from my hypotheticals. A lot of different factors make measuring charter school performance difficult, so research is mixed. But there are reasons to believe that the U.S. News data might at least in part be reflecting higher variance. If charter schools have to follow fewer rules, it makes sense that they would vary more than normal public schools.

This isn’t something that charter advocates dispute. As two Eduwonk guest bloggers put it in October: “Say you set out to improve your mother’s beloved spaghetti sauce recipe. […] You try ten different variations.  Despite your best efforts, three are worse than the original.  Five are no better, but two are markedly superior.  On average, the new batches are a little worse than your mom’s. But—would you say your experiment was a failure, or a success? It really depends on what you do next.” Proponents of charter schools want to shut down bad schools, and learn from good schools. As Rotherham wrote in his response, “in practice there are elements of state policy that can move the quality curve substantially to the right.”

This might be why education reformers are so focused on a relatively small number of successful models, like the Knowledge is Power Program and Green Dot Public Schools. These reformers are fine with high variance, and interested in the upper tail of the distribution. But over the long run, they will also need to prove that they can move the whole curve to the right.

A member of an environmentalist group pretends to be dead during a protest demanding a real climate deal during the first day of United Nations Climate Change Conference on December 7, 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark. (Photo by Miguel Villagran/Getty Images)

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK — The negotiations have begun over our climate future here in Copenhagen. Global leaders may decide in the next two weeks the most important choice to be made in our lifetime—even, arguably, in the history of the human race: will we change course?

“This is an extremely important moment in history,” said May Boeve from 350.org. For the first time in history all the major world leaders are trying to tackle the issue of climate change. Each of them is offering targets to cutting their greenhouse gas emissions and planning to finance developing nations who will be the most impacted.

Even more importantly in some ways, never before in history has the world paid so much attention to our climate crisis. Here in Copenhagen, thousands have descended on the Danish capital this week to attempt to make change from inside the conference halls—and outside on the streets.

Yet with so many people affected by the decisions made here—all of us in fact—why is it that so few get a say? Despite it being everyone’s issue (nearly seven billion of us) it is essentially eight men and a woman (the G8 and China) who get to deicide. That seems rather risky, especially when it’s questionable whether they truly have our best interests at heart.

There are so many that are voiceless here in the conference and so many that these decisions affect beyond the G8 and China. Like the Maldives, which is losing land to sea level rises every year: at the current rate, the country is in serious danger of disappearing altogether. The Maldives’ President, Mohammad Nasheed, said himself this week that the decision in Copenhagen will either be heroism or suicide: “The choice is that stark.”

In Copenhagen myself, there is an uneasy feeling of powerlessness in the most terrifying and important challenge we face. As a young person, it is my future that is being decided here and now, and I feel muted, despite all my best efforts at trying to make my voice heard.

The reason I care is because by the time I am in my 60s, in the year 2050, I will be living in a vastly reshaped world due to our lack of response to climate change. If nothing happens in Copenhagen, it will be a new geo-political world I will be living in with 150 million climate refugees. The arctic sea ice at the North Pole and much of Greenland will be gone. And we will be well on our way to passing the crucial 2ºC warming threshold.

Even if the deal does happen during the next two weeks, the world will still never be the same as we know it, as a deal in Copenhagen doesn’t mean success. The deal that is likely amounts to a suicide pact for many countries, since the targets aren’t ambitious enough and the funding for mitigation is well below what we need. The U.S. is only offering a 3 percent reduction by 2020 relative to 1990 levels, when scientists now argue that it should be well over 40 percent. The Obama administration said last week that nations will likely offer US$10 billion for a climate aid fund. Meanwhile, the World Bank (hardly a radical source of information), says that Industralized nations need to offer US$75 to US$100 billion annually.

So is this summit Hopenhagen or Flopenhagen? I’m not sure if I see much hope other than greeenwashed hope here on the conference grounds. But I do see hope from the movement that is trying despertly to make the voiceless—young people, Indigenous people, the Global South—heard.

For example, the students that organized the 350 event last October are here in big numbers, working on the inside to get the voiceless heard and holding a global vigil for survival that all of us can take part of. KlimaForum09, the Danish anti-conference, is writing an alternative climate declaration, made by the people, to let the public be heard. They’ve called the COP15 negotiations a “fraud” and are planning civil disobedience actions in the city and around the world to let their displeasure be known.

This deal may be settled in two weeks time, but the battle for a choice that needs to be all of ours is just beginning.

Emily Hunter is an environmental journalist and This Magazine’s resident eco-blogger. She is currently working on a book about young environmental activism, The Next Eco-Warriors, and is the eco-correspondent to MTV News Canada.

Stephen Harper's grim, digitally aged face stares down at travellers passing through the Copenhagen airport. Greenpeace is pressuring world leaders to take decisive action at the Copenhagen climate summit Dec 7–18.

Greenpeace predicts world leaders will be making a big apology in 11 years if they don’t step up at the Copenhagen climate summit next week.

A new line of giant ads in the Copenhagen airport features Harper, Obama, and 6 other serious looking, digitally aged world leaders saying, “I’m sorry. We could have stopped catastrophic climate change… we didn’t.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s billboard appears next to an advertisement informing travellers of the efforts the airport has taken to reduce their CO2 production. At least someone’s trying.

The project is a partnership between Greenpeace and tcktcktck.org, a hub for mobilizing individuals and groups to urge world leaders for a binding agreement to take bold action on climate change.

“If leaders like Obama, Sarkozy, Merkel and Brown don’t deliver at this summit their legacy will be mass starvation, mass migration and mass famine. If that happens sorry might be the hardest word, but it won’t be enough,”

“Now is the time to act on climate [change] in order to save our future. Not next year – and not the year after. If we want to have any chance of stopping climate chaos, global emissions must peak by 2015.”

Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director of Greenpeace International and Chairman of tcktcktck.org.

Another project allied with tcktcktck.org is Love Letters to the Future. The site asks people around the world to post letters, tweets, pictures, or videos with their thoughts for the people of 2109. The love letters voted into the top 100 will be put in a time capsule in Copenhagen on December 13, to be opened in 100 years.

The messages apologize for environmental destruction, promise to do more, and share images and descriptions of snow, trees, slow loris, and blue skies – just in case the time capsule out lives them. A scary thought indeed.

Supporters of the Tamil Tigers protest outside the U.S. Consulate in Toronto, spring 2009. Photo by Mark Blinch/Reuters.

I can smell chilies and spices in the cool night air. A few Tamil men and women are handing out biryani in Styrofoam containers to protesters gathered in front of Toronto’s U.S. Consulate. It is after 11 p.m. Stacks of bottled water sit next to a barricade. A few women in down jackets are slumped in lawn chairs. There are about 1,000 Tamil men, women, and children standing around. Occasionally, they shout slogans half-heartedly: “President Obama… save the Tamils!” and “Who bombed the safety zone…Sri Lankan government!”

Last winter, I watched tens of thousands of Tamils march Toronto’s streets, protesting the shelling of Tamil civilians in northern Sri Lanka. A vicious civil war had divided the country for decades and was grinding to its inevitable end. The state slaughtered civilians as it regained territory that had belonged to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The LTTE also shot and killed Tamils fleeing the combat zone. Estimates ranged from 7,000 to 20,000 Tamils killed.

On this night in May, Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa has announced victory. The dispirited crowd at the consulate knows the LTTE is finished. Only a few of the distinctive rebel flags are unfurled.

As I walk through the crowd I watch Keerthana Kaneshalingam, age 12. Her lone sweet voice pummels the sombre silence, as other teenagers hold the microphone steady for her. “Recognize…Tamil Eelam!” she calls, referring to a Tamil homeland. “Media, media… open your eyes!”

“I seen a lot of things in Sri Lanka,” she says as she takes a break. “I feel very strong for my country. I feel like I want to stop the war.” She tells me about the terror of interrogation by the army.

I find my friend in the crowd and stand next to him. He tells me someone just took his picture and that he “smiled sweetly.” Do they know he is Sinhalese, the majority ethnic group in Sri Lanka? I am Tamil by descent, but people often tell me I look Sinhalese.

A 16-year-old girl approaches us and says, “So, do you guys support the Tamil Tigers?” I say that I’m a journalist, interested in hearing what people are thinking right now. She explains that Sinhalese people have been trying to disrupt the protests. Someone else complains about us to the police.

Constable R. Manoharan, a Tamil, walks over and begins to ask me something in Tamil. “I’m a journalist,” I say in English (my Tamil isn’t very good). As I talk to him, people start to close in around us and it feels like there is less oxygen in the air.

Different people keep asking me if I’m Tamil. “I am Tamil but I don’t speak it very well,” I say. The protesters are suspicious, likely because I was taking notes and not shouting slogans.

“We can’t tell you to leave,” says Manoharan. But maybe you should, goes unsaid. Another officer suggests we stay on the periphery. There are at least 50 police officers—Toronto cops, RCMP, and OPP—but I’m not reassured.

My friend tells me later that while I was talking with Manoharan, a few Tamil men hissed and swore at him in Sinhala, saying they would “fuck him up the ass.” I decide it’s time to leave. We walk down a side street. Several men follow and try to surround us. “Rajapaksa’s whore,” one of them sneers in Tamil.

I’ve watched the chaos of Sri Lanka’s civil war from a distance for most of my life. As a journalist, I’ve reported on Sri Lankan politics for the past four years, trying to understand the violence between Tamils, Sinhalese and Muslims that has followed us here to the Canadian diaspora. I came to Canada in 1974 as a child. I returned to Sri Lanka for short visits in 1993, just after President Ranasinghe Premadasa was assassinated by the Tigers, and in 2003, during the ceasefire. I’ve gone searching for stories to understand the psyche of this war, to clarify the details of history and revenge, and to understand my own blood and bones. It’s a messy, complicated history. But I’m convinced that it is one we need to understand, especially since the end of the war last spring. In the aftermath, how do we nurture democracy, keep state power in check, and live together in a multi-ethnic society?

On this journey, I have talked to journalists in exile, survivors of LTTE torture and Sri Lankan state terror, human rights activists, writers, academics, students, and politicos young and old from all walks of life.

It’s the former Tamil militants and activists who fled Sri Lanka under threat from both the LTTE and the state that have made the deepest impression on me. They understand, first-hand and at great personal cost, why the armed struggle failed. As they see it—and I agree—the survival of the Tamil community lies in building alliances with the Sinhalese and Muslims, to create security, dignity, and equality for all Sri Lankans.

As we walk away from the hostility of the protesters in front of the U.S. Consulate, I wonder if they would consider the irony of their actions. They assumed I was a Sinhalese spy because, in LTTE politics, there is only one way to be Tamil: unconditional support for the LTTE and its political fantasy of an exclusively Tamil separate state.

Instead of reaching out to all Sri Lankans—Tamil, Sinhalese, and Muslim—to challenge state barbarity, the LTTE hunted down, killed, or chased away the few Sinhalese living in Tamil areas after the war started in 1983. They expelled 75,000 Muslims from Jaffna, the northern peninsula in Sri Lanka, and massacred Muslims in the east in 1990. There is no question that Tamils have very real grievances about discrimination and state terror, but the LTTE’s armed struggle was, in reality, a fascist killing machine that failed to create security for Tamils.

After the British left Sri Lanka in 1948, the Sinhalese majority ruled with policies that discriminated against Tamils. Tamils were killed in pogroms between 1956 and 1983. Sinhala became the sole official language. Tamils had to obtain higher marks than Sinhalese to get into university. And government-sponsored Sinhalese settlements were set up in Tamil areas. When the LTTE killed several Sinhalese settlers, many Tamils were massacred. Finally, Tamil voices were excluded from the political sphere.

Last spring in Sri Lanka, Sinhalese people danced in the streets, celebrating the Sri Lankan army’s victory over the Tigers. But the root cause of the conflict remains: discrimination against minorities. An estimated 100,000 Sri Lankans, mostly Tamils, died during the 26-year conflict. The war ended with an estimated 280,000 Tamils held as prisoners in atrocious conditions in internment camps. The government says it is screening for Tiger cadres.

Tamil civilians now living in Sri Lankan internment camps. Photo by Ho New/Reuters.

But surrendered militants in the camps have no further motivation to fight and no loyalty to the Tigers. In the final weeks of war, they witnessed their leadership’s callous use of waves of cadres in suicide attacks and civilian shields. By not allowing the right to freedom of movement to the majority in the camps, the state is creating a breeding ground for a new militancy. If displaced people in the camps were free to leave—to go back to their homes or stay with relatives—then those who remain could be looked after better and there would be no humanitarian crisis..

Furthermore, the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime is perpetuating the practices that led to the war. The Prevention of Terrorism Act and Emergency Regulations, which were used as an excuse to disappear more than 2,000 people in the last three years, most of them young Tamil men, are being upheld. Despite massacring the LTTE leadership and cadres left in the combat zone, there are plans to increase the number of troops. And, in his first speech to parliament after the end of the war, the president said that there were no minorities in Sri Lanka,  but failed to add that there was no majority either.  As he spoke of patriotic Sri Lankans standing behind the national flag, dominated by the lion that symbolizes the Sinhalese, he implied that Sinhala majoritarianism would continue. Under such circumstances, the minority Tamil population cannot feel that they too are equal citizens.

Tamils are not the only ones suffering under this regime. Journalists and activists of any ethnicity who criticize the state face verbal and physical attacks, both from official sources and nationalist vigilantes. (Defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the president’s brother, is known to equate criticism of government policies with treason.)

But things change fast in Sri Lanka. Four activists I talked to say this is a watershed opportunity to transform Sri Lankan politics and unite its broken civil society. They tell me the strategy of any social movement is to not become paralyzed, but to galvanize the silent moderate majority to take action, for when the right moment in history comes along and change is possible. They believe that moment is now.

On this typical February night, Chinniah Rajeshkumar cooks okra and potato curries at 1 a.m. in a Brooklyn apartment. Other activists and writers are drinking beer and wine, dancing to Bollywood songs, intermittently checking their emails, and, as always, talking Sri Lankan politics. The apartment, which belongs to a Sri Lanka Democracy Forum member, is a war room. During the week, the activists draft an SLDF statement, prepare for their talks, and give media interviews.

I finally get a chance to interview Rajeshkumar, 53, when I accompany him to JFK Airport, the night he leaves New York. He wears a grey wool coat and ties a black-and-yellow-striped scarf around his neck. He is Leonard Cohenesque in his thin-rimmed glasses and close-cropped hair, diffident and understated.

Rajeshkumar speaks slowly and thoughtfully as he tells me about his early years as a militant. As a teenager he used to read Tamil nationalist papers arguing that the fact that Tamils do not have a separate state is the root of their suffering. In 1974, at age 18, he met the Tamil New Tigers, a handful of guerrillas who robbed banks to buy arms. In 1976 TNT changed its name to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and Rajeshkumar became a committed militant; his nom de guerre was Ragavan. But the Tigers’ evolving methods troubled him.

“I opposed internal killings and the killing of people in other militant organizations,” he says. He felt problems should be settled by talking; he says he could see a “continuous pattern” of killing happening. But Velupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the LTTE, thought he alone should be in charge of the entire Tamil population, with the right to punish or kill those who disobeyed his orders. In 1982, while in India, Rajeshkumar left the Tigers.

Then the 1983 riots happened. An estimated 2,000 to 3,000 Tamils were butchered, torched, or beaten to death by Sinhalese mobs armed with voters’ lists provided by the government, which told them where Tamils lived. This anti-Tamil pogrom occurred after the Tigers killed 13 soldiers in Jaffna. It was the catalyst for civil war. Hundreds of Tamil youth flocked to the LTTE and other militant groups to fight the Sri Lankan state. India got involved and began to arm and train Tamil militants in camps all over South India. Dissent was not tolerated and internal killings were common.

The riots motivated Rajeshkumar to rejoin the LTTE. He wanted to change the organization. But it didn’t work. Rajeshkumar says watching unpoliticized youth become militarized scared him. He realized Prabhakaran no longer needed him, as the Tigers’ ranks swelled and cadres pledged unquestioning allegiance to the LTTE leader. He left the LTTE for good in 1984 at the age of 28.

As the lights of Brooklyn rush past the car window, I can see Rajeshkumar’s silhouette in the back seat as he remembers the trauma and heartache of leaving the movement. “I was not able to talk to people. In a normal conversation, I didn’t know what to talk about, whether it was a house or food,” he says. “It was totally alien for me.”

He lived underground in Chennai, in a poor fishermen’s neighbourhood, hiding from the LTTE, doing manual labour and working for a smuggler to support others who had left militant groups, struggling to find food and shelter. He was disillusioned and heartbroken. “I was very angry and disappointed because we believed in certain things. For a while I was not able to come to terms,” he says. “Now I can see what is wrong, what we did.” In 1986, he fled to the U.K., where he continues to live in exile.

We arrive at the airport and say goodbye. On the way back to Brooklyn, Rajeshkumar’s friend tells me a story. After Rajeshkumar left the Tigers and was living in South India, a spy, working for the Tigers, was discovered among the former militants. A few men decided to kill the spy. Rajeshkumar found out and rushed to the place where the murder was to take place. He argued that if they killed the man, then they would be no better than the Tigers, whose violent methods they opposed. He was able to save the man’s life.

When I contact Rajeshkumar a few months after the war’s end, he tells me he fears for the surrendered Tigers in the camps. “The armed forces have no hesitation to kill or torture those suspected of having connections with the LTTE; I do not believe LTTE cadres captured would receive humane treatment,” he wrote to me in an email. “I also fear that senior cadres will be tortured and killed without a trace.” He believes low-ranking Tigers should be given amnesty and support to rebuild their lives, and child soldiers should be returned to their families.

He also says prosecution for war crimes should cut both ways: “If the government presses charges against the LTTE, armed forces that violated the norms of war should also be brought to justice.”

On the Brooklyn-bound Q train, 56-year-old Nirmala Rajasingam begins to sing a Tamil-movement song. It’s close to midnight. Four others, sitting across from her, sing along. Several other passengers on the train stare straight ahead; they don’t even flinch at this group of drunken human-rights activists crooning in Tamil. Rajasingam sits on the edge of her seat, her hair frizzy and wild, brown coat open, and drums the palm of her hand on a metal pole. “All these things that seem immutable and unchangeable can change; do change,” she sings.

Rajeshkumar and Rajasingam met after they’d both left the Tigers. They’ve been partners for more than 20 years and have a 22-year-old daughter and a 19-year-old son. Sometimes Rajasingam introduces Rajeshkumar as “the father of my children.” They’ve had a turbulent relationship at times, but their passion for politics keeps them together.

In 1979 the government was abducting and disappearing Tamils. Rajasingam supported Tamil militants fighting state terror. She began talking to all the militant groups and held discussions in her home. She helped the LTTE with practical tasks.

“We wanted to bring about a socialist revolution. Rajani [her sister] and I wanted to join the armed struggle,” she says. “Whatever we preached, we wanted to practice.”

For working with the Tigers, Rajasingam was the first woman arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act in 1982. In prison, she met poor Sinhalese, Tamil, and Muslim women serving sentences for murder, for female infanticide, for fraud. The prostitutes taught her to speak Sinhala. “The prostitutes were great fun,” she says. “They would get arrested, serve their sentences, and be back in prison two months later. ‘Nirmala, you’re still here!’ they’d say.”

Prison changed her profoundly. “[The other prisoners] had seen the enormity of life’s difficulties in a personal way,” she says. “I was just a romantic revolutionary who was very hard and exacting about people’s commitment to politics. [Prison] mellowed me.”

After she had been in detention for 22 months, the LTTE helped Rajasingam escape from prison to Chennai, India. She was appalled that the Tigers’ leader, Prabhakaran, had just ordered one of his henchmen to kill the leader of another militant group. The attempt failed. “I thought, oh my god, why are we doing this? Who made this decision?”

Rajasingam left the LTTE in December 1984 and hid out in South India until she was able to escape to the U.K. She was still married to her first husband, also an ex-Tiger, but met Rajeshkumar shortly after.

In 1986, the LTTE began to systematically massacre the other militant groups that had formed to stand up to the state. With the help of the Indian government, the Tigers became a huge army overnight. “They were no longer accountable to the ordinary people in Sri Lanka,” Rajasingam says. “They became warlords. They could tell people what to do instead of listening to find out what the people really wanted.”

Tamil nationalists and Tiger supporters often say the non-violent struggle against state terror failed and the armed struggle was unavoidable. But both Rajasingam and Rajeshkumar say Tamil politicians did not attempt to create political discussions with sectors of society such as labour groups and women’s groups. And civil rights campaigns and non-violence were never seriously attempted.

Rajasingam says organizing at the grassroots level would have given the Tamil people tools to rein in the Tigers. “They wouldn’t have put up with all this nonsense that the Tigers trotted out, like killing somebody and saying, ‘He’s a traitor, so we killed him.’” After the LTTE’s rapid rise, such resistance was impossible: they demolished civil society by killing social activists, members of women’s groups, and Marxists.

Indian arms and training launched the Tigers as a ferocious militant force, and financial support from the Tamil diaspora sustained them. Both were toxic as they took away the Tamil people’s control of their struggle for rights. As the LTTE’s power base grew outside Sri Lanka, it could treat local Tamils with contempt: forced recruitment of children, torture camps, assassinations of dissenters. With its link to the Tigers, the Tamil diaspora has acquired far more significance than it deserves, says Rajasingam. “They are removed from the theatre of war. So they really cannot know and understand the interests of people who are suffering.”

Pressure from abroad, including sections of Canada’s large Tamil community, is disconnected from the reality on the ground in Sri Lanka. Tamils in the diaspora should play a secondary role, and that includes SLDF, she says. “The people [in Sri Lanka] have to decide.”

Though Rajasingam does believe uniting Tamils and Sinhalese is the key to lasting peace: “This quest should be an alliance from all communities. The realization of Tamil aspirations will come from that.”

She also says Sinhalese progressives have a leading role to play and mentions Lasantha Wickrematunge, the Sinhalese editor of the Sunday Leader who was killed in January 2009 for his criticism of the Rajapaksa regime. “Lone voices come up and they get crushed,” she says. “Sinhalese progressives must band together and speak up for minorities.”

Early the next morning, Rajasingam and I head down to the Democracy Now news studio, located in a red and white firehouse in lower Manhattan. During an interview, the host asks her whether she agrees that what is happening in Sri Lanka is genocide. It’s a loaded term, one often invoked during last winter’s protests.

Rajasingam answers, saying there were human-rights violations and war crimes by both sides. She explains the term prevents anyone from engaging with the Sri Lankan state, conceals the LTTE’s own atrocities against Tamils, and undervalues the more than 2,000, mostly Tamils, who have been disappeared by state forces in recent years. “Genocide” justifies armed struggle and alienates Sinhalese people from Tamils even more.

On another night, while we are walking back to the Brooklyn apartment after yet another panel discussion, Rajasingam reminisces about the late-night curries, the drinking, the dancing to Bollywood tunes. “It’s an escape from all the horrible things, from the overwhelming knowledge of everything we have to do,” she says. “And the guilt of not having done it.”

Based in Mumbai, Rohini Hensman, 61, travels to Sri Lanka once or twice a year and writes extensively on the ethnic conflict. She is a Sri Lankan Tamil who is part Burgher (Sri Lankan with European ancestry) and came to Toronto in April for an international conference on South Asian solidarity.

Tamil protesters wear masks of LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. Photo by Babu Babu/Reuters.

Hensman is warm and immediately disarming when I meet her at the home of a Toronto Sri Lankan activist, her hair tucked away in a bun, a burgundy shawl over her shoulders. She tells me about the 1958 anti-Tamil pogrom. Her family was living in a predominantly Sinhalese area in Mount Lavinia, south of Colombo. “One of our neighbours came and said she’d heard that gangs were coming,” says Hensman.

Hensman laughs as she remembers that her parents started to make Molotov cocktails. Sinhalese neighbours rallied around them. One young Sinhalese woman close to the family threatened to throw herself in the well if they didn’t run for their lives. Hensman’s family was packed into a car, and, braving the curfew, neighbours took them to another Sinhalese family’s home to hide out.

“That experience shaped my vision,” says Hensman. “It taught me that love crosses these barriers.” She rejects the notion held by Tamil nationalists in the diaspora that Tamils will survive only with a separate state. “If you accept the legitimacy of an exclusively Tamil, and as it happens, totalitarian state, how do you argue against an exclusively Sinhala totalitarian state?” Hensman asks. And she warns Sinhalese nationalists that the culture of impunity that has so oppressed Tamils (fuelled by Sinhala nationalism) will someday be used against the Sinhalese: “If you want to keep the country safe for your children, you’ve got to stop the kinds of atrocities that are being done to Tamil civilians.”

I reach her four months later in Mumbai and we continue our conversation over the phone. Since our last meeting, she has written several articles on the situation in the camps and tells me the majority of Sinhalese people don’t know that Tamils are being held against their will. This is startling to hear. The Sinhala-language papers don’t talk about the real conditions in the camps and the English papers often say that Tamils are being taken care of in “welfare camps,” with food, water, and medical care that the rural Sinhalese poor don’t have, she says.

Hensman says groups fighting for Tamil rights must find ways to communicate with the Sinhalese, in the Sinhala language, in print, and in person. What makes this mission difficult, she says, is the fact that, over the last 30 years, the LTTE has assassinated Tamils who were willing to work with the government, talk to Sinhalese people, and who believed that Tamils could thrive only in a multi-ethnic society. For instance, in 1975, the Tigers killed Alfred Duraiappah, a Tamil and mayor of Jaffna town, because he was willing to work with the Sinhala-dominated state. He believed Tamils and Sinhalese could live side by side and was seen as a traitor.

As moderate voices were silenced, either by exile or murder, a narrative of continuous attacks on Tamils developed, with one massacre after another. But Sinhalese have also been attacked by the state. The Sinhala-dominated government massacred an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 Sinhalese during two Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna insurgencies against the government in 1971 and from 1987 to 1989. The Sri Lankan state has easily killed more Sinhalese than the Tigers ever did.

Tamil nationalists and Tiger supporters ignored Sinhalese suffering, instead of taking the opportunity to join forces to fight the state that was terrorizing them both. “I don’t remember much sympathy toward the Sinhalese youth who were rounded up and massacred at the time,” says Hensman.

The 1983 riots are often seen as the end of the possibility of Tamils and Sinhalese living together. But coexistence has been a fact of life all over the island for hundreds of years as people have migrated and been intertwined through marriage.

From a distance, it is possible to see ordinary Sinhalese people as racist, says Hensman. “If you live among the Sinhalese it’s not the case. Translating political events into the social situation on the ground doesn’t come that easily if you don’t spend time in the different communities.”

Hensman thinks a revival of a strong left is critical for the future of democracy in Sri Lanka. Historically, Sri Lankan leftist politics was multi-ethnic, organizing at a grassroots level to fight for the rights of the working class and all minorities. But a breakaway group of Sinhalese leftists formed an alliance with the state in 1964, abandoning minorities and strengthening right-wing Sinhala nationalism. Many Tamil leftists drifted into Tamil nationalist parties and militant groups.

Right now, says Hensman, remnants of the left feel they have to work with the government instead of working at a grassroots level. Hensman says she thinks the left should go back to organizing among the working class and rural poor—of all ethnicities—to gather a small base with which to challenge the government during the next election.

When Kopalasingham Sritharan left Jaffna in 1990, he was hiding in a truck carrying onions. He could not simply walk out of Jaffna. The LTTE had a pass system; he needed permission to leave rebel territory. And he was haunted by the death of his friend Rajani Thiranagama. The Tigers had just killed her.

Sritharan had been teaching math at Jaffna University. He joined forces with professors Rajan Hoole, Daya Somasundaram, and Rajani Thiranagama to write The Broken Palmyra, a seminal book documenting violations by the Indian army, the Tigers, and the state. “LTTE politics had destroyed the community,” he says. “We needed to bring out the narrative of the people.”

The organization University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) was born. Over the next 20 years, UTHR(J) became the most important organization documenting human-rights abuses in Sri Lanka. And it has captured the voices of the people: Tamils who defied the Tigers and tried to rescue their children from its ranks; and Sinhalese soldiers who risked their lives to save Tamils in the combat zone last winter, among so many other nuances of the war.

Meanwhile, a copy of The Broken Palmyra got into the hands of the Tigers and Thiranagama (Nirmala Rajasingam’s sister) was gunned down by the LTTE on her way home from the university one night in September 1989. After her death, many dissidents fled.

Sritharan, 54, tells me about the stress of standing up to terror. Watching his community disintegrate, years of living underground, his wife’s nightmares, living in fear in Sri Lanka, then in exile in Afghanistan, Nepal, India, uprooting his children again and again, and not being able to stay connected to friends and relatives. “We’ve become very isolated,” he says.

In 2007, Sritharan was awarded the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders, along with his colleague Rajan Hoole, for their work as co-founders of UTHR(J). Through their own investigations in Sri Lanka and with a network of contacts, they have written report after report of human-rights violations by all the actors of war since the late 1980s. Focusing on stories about ordinary people, they’ve documented the heavy price civilians have paid.

For this service, Sritharan has lived under threat from both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan state. He now lives in Toronto with his family and is struggling to live a more open life after decades underground. It is emotionally difficult to reconnect to friends and family he has not talked to in 20 years, he says.

We meet often to talk politics. The only signs of strain are his thin strands of grey hair. Sritharan is soft-spoken and calm despite all that he has endured. He talks about how frustrating it is to be away from Sri Lanka at this crucial time.

“Writing the reports is fine but we are unable to push for change, to organize,” he says. “Unless you’re there and meeting people, it is impossible to get involved.”

While Tamil nationalists who supported the Tigers have taken an all-or-nothing political stance—give us a separate state or we will fight to the death—Sritharan is more pragmatic.

Right now, the government is capitalizing on post-war euphoria to consolidate its power, he explains, and extremist Sinhalese nationalists in the government, who reduced the conflict to a war on terror, have the upper hand. Although the Sinhalese extremists are vociferous, they will not be able to sustain themselves if democratic forces with a broader agenda can act together, he says. The majority of Sinhalese do not support their majoritarian agenda. It is this silent majority that Tamils must reach out to, he believes.

Tamil activists also need to talk to the moderates in the government and challenge them to be more assertive, he says: “Progressive individuals in the government can go to the camps, talk to Tamil people, come out with a confidential report to the government.”

In post-war Sri Lanka, all sides must re-evaluate their past and rebuild a multi-ethnic, multilingual country, but the current regime has shown little inclination toward that, Sritharan says. Tamils are weak politically—made so by the destructive politics of the Tigers— and Sritharan doesn’t believe that now is the time to push for a political solution. The most critical issue is the Tamils in the internment camps. He says people should be sent home to start rebuilding their normal lives. “We need to strategize and push for reconstruction, rehabilitation, allow Tamils to go back to their communities, empower them to engage with the government to do meaningful development—and hold the government accountable,” he says.

Sritharan strategizes on impulse, always thinking ahead, sure that Sri Lanka’s future is malleable, not written in stone by nationalists. The first step, he says, is to create an environment where Tamils can work with, and criticize, the government if they want to, without being killed.

Sritharan says he feels accusing the state of war crimes at this stage would only isolate the Sinhalese people and strengthen the extremists. He says it would be more effective to work on accountability for human-rights violations, like the Action Contre la Faim case where 17 Sri Lankan aid workers, 16 Tamil and one Muslim, were killed execution-style by security forces in Mutur. “It’s not about putting the blame on the Sinhalese people,” he says. “It’s about the state and its degeneration.”

Sritharan gets more specific about his strategy for Tamils now: first, identify who the Sinhalese progressive political and social forces are; second, work with them to poke holes in Sinhala nationalist ideology; and third, ask them to visit Tamil villages and organize public talks to find out what people want, and help Tamils open up and discuss their needs in a safe space.

If this does not happen, then any kind of peace and development that is forged will be too fragile to last. And Sri Lankans will once again be at the mercy of extremism: a world where Tamil nationalists believe a legitimate road to secession is taking away the very rights they are fighting for; a world where Sinhalese nationalists believe that Sri Lanka is only for the Sinhalese.

“Tamils and Sinhalese should constantly challenge each other,” he says. “You don’t wait for things to happen. You play a role and consciously work toward that end.”

This tribe of Sri Lankan-Tamil activists embodies a different kind of philosophy: to work toward peace by creating real justice in Sri Lanka. It’s a vision that moves away from war politics and addresses social injustices that Tamils, Sinhalese, and Muslims have all suffered, and that have been pushed aside for decades. As postwar euphoria fades, the government will no longer be able to blame the LTTE and the war budget for the shattered state of the economy. It’s a void that needs to be filled with a united, multi-ethnic democratic challenge to the state.

But this is not the post-independence Sri Lanka of 1948. LTTE terror has assaulted the Sinhalese psyche for 30 years and an entire generation of Tamils has grown up shaped by the nightmare of disappearances by the state. And the LTTE has been an overpowering force, with its culture of fear, controlling the psychology of the Tamil community. The challenge for democratic forces will be to bring home the message of interdependence: if you are Sinhalese and you don’t fight for Tamil rights, then the totalitarian state you foster with your silence will soon take away your rights too; and if you are Tamil and you do not forge links and understand the tremendous loss of life of Sinhalese soldiers—poor people who enlisted so their families could eat—then Tamil rights will never be achieved.

In a totalitarian situation, most people learn what they have to do to survive. But these four Sri Lankan–Tamil activists have stood up to terror and have paid dearly for it in different ways. Forced into exile, on the run, having lost friends and family to assassinations, they still struggle for the rights of all Sri Lankans. And that’s exactly why their vision is so vital, at such a crucial historic moment.