Byron Sonne gets bail. Finally.

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 59 Comments

Yesterday, Byron Sonne, the only person still being held on G20-related charges, was finally granted bail after spending almost a year in jail. The Crown is prosecuting Sonne aggressively, and will characterize him at trial (to begin no sooner than this fall) as a dangerous radical as they attempt to prove explosives charges against the Forest Hill computer security expert.

Sonne, with whom I’ve corresponded throughout his time in prison, sees himself as a civil libertarian who tested the billion dollar “security theatre” protecting the G20. Sonne says he wanted to see if and how it worked, and to see if any citizen’s rights would be violated in the process.

Details of the courtroom proceedings in Sonne’s case are subject to a publication ban. As such, coverage of his case has been limited. Toronto Life published a cover story giving many details of Sonne’s life and activities leading up to his arrest. But once the ban is lifted, the real questions won’t be about what Sonne did—they’ll be about how the police and the Crown have behaved in this extraordinary case.

The U.S. and Canada—singing in harmony?

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Monday, May 2, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 4 Comments

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

As Target Corp., the mass retailer of trendy housewares and clothing, prepares to open hundreds of stores across Canada in its first non-U.S. expansion, it has started to grapple with the realities of doing business across the border. In a letter to U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, dated April 18, two Target executives bemoan conflicting regulations between the U.S. and Canada in areas such as product standards, testing facilities, customs procedures and documentation. “For example, the safety requirements and test methods applicable to camping tents are markedly different between the U.S. and Canada, making it difficult and cost prohibitive to provide the same product in each country,” wrote the vice-president for government affairs, Matt Zabel, and vice-president for compliance, Canada, Anthony Heredia. “These differences may result in higher consumer costs, or reduced selection.” They called on the Obama administration to focus on “greater regulatory coherence” with Canada that would “increase cross-border investment.”

The Target letter was one of 30 submissions the Commerce Department received after asking for public comments on “regulatory co-operation that would help eliminate or reduce unnecessary regulatory divergences in North America that disrupt U.S. exports.” The request for comments came after a February meeting in Washington at which President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper launched two joint initiatives to ease cross-border trade and travel: an overhaul of border management aimed at creating a system of “perimeter security”, and an attempt to harmonize some regulations between the two countries to help ease trade. The leaders created two working groups, one on border management and the other on regulatory co-operation, led by senior government officials, whom they instructed to hold public consultations and produce detailed action plans for each government.

The stakes are high. Canada and the U.S. have the world’s largest two-way trade relationship, worth $645 billion a year. Three-quarters of all of Canada’s exports go to the United States, and border delays cost the economy billions each year. As well, Canada is America’s largest market, accounting for one fifth of all exports, and Obama is also searching for ways to boost that trade. In his state of the union speech last year, he set a goal of doubling overall U.S. exports in five years in order to spur job creation in the struggling American economy.

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A secure status symbol

By Julia Belluz - Tuesday, April 26, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

China Photos/Getty Images

There are some 960,000 millionaires in China, and they have a few favourite ways to display their wealth: Cartier jewelery, Louis Vuitton watches, Giorgio Armani fashions and Bentley automobiles. Now there’s a new status symbol for the richest in the People’s Republic: the private bodyguard. In April, the Public Security Ministry announced it has sanctioned the first bodyguard agency in Zhengzhou, after lifting a ban on security companies who provide such services last year. This legislation was a response to a booming industry that has grown with China’s economic emergence on the global stage, but has operated in a legal grey area until recently. By the end of 2010, the industry was worth an estimated $1.2 billion, and there were more than 3,000 unregulated bodyguard companies. Top-tier guards often work as drivers or caregivers, hold doors open, and dress well. They are mostly female (less imposing that way), and armed with martial arts skills (citizens can’t carry firearms). The price tag? As high as $45,000 per year.

Without Gmail, I'm nothing

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, March 1, 2011 at 1:12 PM - 8 Comments

Forty thousand Gmail users can breathe easy today: their email accounts, temporarily wiped clean, have been restored. Google worked quickly and openly to correct the meltdown, and assures us that email data was never really in danger. They keep tape backups—lots of them.

I wasn’t among the .02% of Gmail users who briefly lost their mail, but I know how they feel. One drunken evening a few months back, I suddenly became certain that I needed to beef up my personal security profile RIGHT NOW. I stumbled out of bed, changed my banking, Gmail, and Facebook passwords, and then quickly regained unconsciousness.

I awoke to find myself locked out of my mail, friends, and money. I had no memory whatsoever of my new passwords.  I tried every possible combination of my usual letters and numbers, but the algorithms grew suspicious of me for my multiple attempts and put me on timeout. I clicked “Lost your Password?” buttons in vain, knowing full well that recovery emails would be sent to an address I could no longer access.

Waiting for my exile in timeout to pass, I searched my subconscious for answers. Names of old pets, childhood streets and junior high locker combinations churned through my hungover brain, leading to moments of nostalgia, melancholy, then existential angst. Who was this Jesse Brown character? What numbers and words have meaning to him? Without them he had nothing—his friends and employers could not reach him, he was impoverished, and he could not acknowledge the many hilarious Internet memes gaining popularity at that very moment. I was stuck in a bad Paul Auster novel, or a very boring Bourne sequel.

I went for a walk to clear my head and immediately realized I had forgotten a “7″ at the end of my Gmail password. With email access I could restore the other accounts, and was soon feeling like myself again. I spent the afternoon reading emails from old roommates, reviewing Visa purchases from November ’08, and liking every damn thing on Facebook.

The fake bomb squad

By Michael Friscolanti - Monday, February 28, 2011 at 10:37 AM - 1 Comment

Airports have spent millions installing the latest security gadgets, from industrial X-ray machines that peek inside checked luggage to full-body scanners that leave nothing to the imagination. But as the technology becomes more sophisticated, one crucial thing remains in short supply: fake bombs.

In order to test every advancement—and properly teach airport personnel how to use it—researchers need to replicate the chemical concoctions that terrorists may be hiding in their suitcases (or underwear). “The simulants must have the same combination of materials without being explosive: same atomic number, same density, same colour, sometimes even the same smell,” says Bruce Koffler, director of Securesearch Inc., a Canadian company that supplies replicas. “You can’t use live explosives in a classroom, especially the homemade types, because they can detonate without warning.”

The problem, though, is that the popularity of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) has far outpaced the market on fakes. There are so many recipes—and new ones being devloped all the time—that it’s hard to know whether the latest X-ray will spot each variation. In response, the military’s research arm has launched an “X-Ray Simulant Project” and is looking for a contractor to deliver “rapid design and prototyping” of IED replicas. “The availability of suitable, non-hazardous, non-toxic, explosive simulants is of concern when assessing the potential utility of [explosive] detection systems,” the tender reads. “Lack of simulants limits the training opportunities, and ultimately the detection probability, of security personnel using systems in the field.”

Government hit by cyber attacks

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 17, 2011 at 12:45 PM - 1 Comment

Cyber attacks have hit federal departments in Ottawa, including the Department of Finance and the Treasury Board. According to reports, hackers seized control of computers in senior government offices in order to steal passwords and access data. “There are no indications that any data relating to Canadians was compromised by this unauthorized attempt to access the [department’s] network,” said Treasury Board spokesman Jay Denney in an email. The Canadian government launched an official cyber security strategy in 2010 in response to growing threats to their computer infrastructure. It is overseen by the Communications Security Establishment Canada and works with the Department of National Defence and CSIS in monitoring and preventing such attacks. While the investigation is focused on Chinese IP addresses, Canadian officials were quick to point out that there is no apparent link to the Chinese government. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said, “China attaches great importance to computer security and consistently opposes and cracks down on hacking activities according to relative laws and regulations.”

Globe and Mail

That non-weapon sure is pointy

By Colby Cosh - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 9:23 AM - 112 Comments

I am unpleasantly surprised to find Colleague Geddes sowing nonsense in the Quebec National Assembly kirpan debate—a conversation that has quite enough of it already. In his introduction to a Q&A with Liberal Sikh MP Navdeep Bains, Geddes links to the 2006 Supreme Court decision in Multani v. Commission scolaire Marguerite‑Bourgeoys, stating that the court “found that the kirpan is a religious symbol, not a weapon.” Begging his pardon, the court found no such thing. The court’s members are carefully trained in logic: it would never occur to them that an item had to be either a religious symbol or a weapon, and could not possibly be both. That would be a pretty silly conclusion! Justice Charron actually wrote:

There is no denying that this religious object could be used wrongly to wound or even kill someone, but the question at this stage of the analysis cannot be answered definitively by considering only the physical characteristics of the kirpan. …In order to demonstrate an infringement of his freedom of religion, Gurbaj Singh does not have to establish that the kirpan is not a weapon. He need only show that his personal and subjective belief in the religious significance of the kirpan is sincere.

The court didn’t find for the appellants on the grounds that “the kirpan is not a weapon”. Indeed, all parties to the suit accepted the premise “that the kirpan, considered objectively and without the protective measures imposed by the Superior Court, is an object that fits the definition of a weapon.” The court found for the appellant because the school board’s zero-tolerance policy towards weapons, based largely on fears that the presence of a knife would somehow allow spooky negative vibes to propagate throughout the school, did not constitute a minimal infringement upon the rights of a religion that happens to insist upon the carrying of a weapon. (Anyone who has studied the remarkable history of the Sikhs can only be surprised that they don’t carry about five of them.)

I hate to break it to Nav Bains and to admirers of leading comparative-religion scholar Michael Ignatieff, but reciting “It’s not a weapon” won’t give us a magic wormhole we can all leap through to avoid debates over religious accommodation in public services. As I understand matters, and I am perfectly prepared to receive instruction on this point, the whole point of the kirpan is that it’s an avowedly defensive weapon. The reference books, including those written by Sikhs, tell us that it is worn precisely to signify and reinforce the Sikh’s wholly admirable preparedness to protect his faith, his community, and innocent human life. I suppose I could have added the words “just as a handgun might be”, but that would send altogether too many of my readers scrambling for the Preparation H.

Respectable efforts to establish a modus vivendi on the kirpan in secured public spaces can’t begin with evasion if they hope to be successful (and certainly it sets a terrible precedent for evasion to be designated courage). I’ll add that the problems are not really all that thorny for those of us who have never consented to fanaticism about security theatre or to cretinizing “zero tolerance” of blades in schools.

Q&A: Nav Bains on the kirpan controversy

By John Geddes - Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 1:01 PM - 132 Comments

Liberal MP Navdeep Bains is one of the most promient Sikh politicians in Canada, instantly recognizable for his red turban. But it’s a less visible symbol of his faith—the dagger-like kirpan he wears under his shirt on his left side—that is once again the subject of controversy this week.

Four kirpan-carrying Sikh men were denied entry to the Quebec National Assembly two days ago, and in Ottawa the Bloc Québécois quickly pounced on the resulting publicity to call for the federal House of Commons to consider adopting the same prohibition, ostensibly out of concern for security.

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An off day for a royal wedding?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 2 Comments

Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Atlantic Canada: Despite having a higher than average interest in the British royal family, compared to most Canadians, Atlantic Canadians are the least likely to agree (19 per cent) that the April 29 wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton is worthy of a national holiday. On average, 27 per cent of Canadians think they should get the day off to celebrate.

Quebec: Nearly every Canadian (98 per cent) believes that drinking and driving is “unacceptable.” But in the past year, nearly one in four people drove a car at least once despite believing their blood-alcohol level was close to, or above, the legal limit (28 per cent said they drove after having one drink). Four per cent of Quebecers said they got behind the wheel “fairly often” when their levels were above or close to the legal limit.

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The good neighbours

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Monday, January 10, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 2 Comments

Michigan’s Candice Miller has a wealth of experience dealing with cross-border issues. Commerce is one of her top concerns; Environmentalists fear the election of leaders like Shimkus doesn’t bode well | Photograph by Logan Mock-Bunting, Larry MacDougal/CP, Bill Clark/Getty Images

“People in Washington talk about going from Capitol Hill to Georgetown for lunch,” says Candice Miller, a Republican congresswoman whose Michigan district spans the shores of Lake Huron and borders Canada. “Well, I don’t think twice about going from my home to Windsor or Sarnia for lunch.”

As conservative Republicans this month take control of the House of Representatives, a chamber that has often been the source of cross-border irritants, the Canadian government is gaining a few powerful friends. Miller, whose district includes the second-busiest border crossing and its most trafficked rail crossing, will be the new lead lawmaker on border issues. The new chairman of the powerful House homeland security committee, congressman Peter King, a blustery security hawk who in the past has voiced concerns about Canadian immigration policies, could have been a source of trouble on border issues. But he told Maclean’s in an interview that he wants to have a “good working relationship” with Canada. “The tone is going to be very friendly and co-operative,” said King. To that end, he appointed Miller to chair the subcommittee on border and maritime security. “Candice Miller is from Michigan, so we are going to focus on northern border security not in an adversarial way,” said King.

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Was someone after photos of Harper?

By Michael Friscolanti - Monday, December 13, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 17 Comments

Getty Images

Stephen Harper is a law-and-order type of guy, a champion of mandatory minimum sentences and tough legislation with names like Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act. But it turns out that not even the Prime Minister’s own office is safe from the criminal element. Just ask Jason Ransom, his official photographer. Someone stole his computer—right inside the Langevin Block, the PM’s supposedly ultra-secure headquarters.

The heist happened in April 2009, but news of the incident didn’t spread until this week, when Maclean’s started asking questions about an obscure item buried in the latest public accounts of Canada: a $1,298 reimbursement for “theft of personal laptop.”

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JFK's Secret Service agents speak, at last

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 1:20 PM - 6 Comments

George S. Zimbel/Getty Images

For more than four decades, the forces of orthodoxy, from the 1964 Warren commission to Vincent Bugliosi’s 1,648-page Reclaiming History (2007), have insisted that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, assassinated U.S. president John F. Kennedy. But Amazon now lists more than 1,200 titles on the events of Nov. 22, 1963, and the books keep on coming at such a rate that their number will one day (soon) exceed Bugliosi’s page count. The vast majority oppose the official version. In that regard, their authors are solidly in tune with U.S. popular opinion. Forty years of polling have consistently shown that more than two-thirds of Americans simply don’t believe the Warren report.

That alone is enough to make The Kennedy Detail by Gerald Blaine, one of the 34 Secret Service agents on White House service during JFK’s administration, a stand-out assassination book: the surviving agents—speaking openly for the first time (and only because it was one of their own who asked)—are unanimous that it was Oswald, and Oswald alone. But there is also a wealth of detail about the most traumatic day of their lives, and Blaine’s convincing argument that a protective system that worked for Kennedy’s predecessor was stretched past the breaking point by Kennedy himself. Among the many legacies of JFK—the man who single-handedly retired hats from formal male attire—was a revolution in presidential security.

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Don't touch my junk

By Erica Alini - Monday, November 29, 2010 at 1:40 PM - 9 Comments

Some experts believe that tough new airport screening methods are inefficient at identifying ever-changing terrorist threats | Photography Andrew Tolson; Charles Rex Arbogast/AP

As stepped-up U.S. airport security has American Thanksgiving travellers boiling over pat-downs and naked-body scanners, Canada is getting ready to open up some more private records for Uncle Sam to look at. Starting next year, U.S. authorities will be able to collect personal information, which may include passport details and flight itineraries, for the roughly five million Canadians who cross U.S. airspace every year travelling to destinations such as Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean, even if they never touch U.S. soil.

On both sides of the border a new round of government peeking in the name of security is refocusing minds on an old question: do we really need to do this? Increasingly, people north and south of the border are saying no. But the backlash is also raising debate about how we can best protect our borders while also minimizing the impact on privacy rights. Neither Canada nor the U.S.—whose systems are increasingly more closely intertwined—seem close to striking the right balance, experts argue.

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Full disclosure

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 4:54 PM - 139 Comments

Michael Ignatieff, asked by a reporter after QP today to comment on recent concerns about airport security.

If you’re in my business, you live in an airport.  And so I have people touching my private parts all day long.

For the Tories, happiness is a warm F-35

By Paul Wells - Friday, November 5, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Trevor Hagan/CP

So much in modern life is a combination of problems that have already been solved and problems that can’t be solved at all. Take Emirates Airlines Flight 201, which was escorted by Canadian fighter jets through Canadian airspace on Oct. 29 as it flew from Dubai to New York City. The airplane was carrying cargo from Yemen. This was a day when other airplanes were found to be carrying cargo from Yemen of the potentially explosive variety. So Flight 201 found itself sprouting fighter escorts. Out of an “abundance of caution,” NORAD said later.

Dimitri Soudas, who speaks for the Prime Minister, could hardly contain his glee. Here was a chance to show that the Harper government is spending wisely when it allocates $16 billion to buy 65 F-35 fighter planes. Soudas put out a news release: “Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals and their coalition partners would cancel the deal to buy the F-35s. They would rather use kites to defend Canada than fighter jets. Canada’s air force needs the right equipment to protect Canadian airspace.”

In examining whether F-35s would have constituted “the right equipment” on Oct. 29, it may be handy to recall precisely what NORAD was worried about. Cargo on other planes had been found to contain explosive devices. So “the right equipment” would need to sort through the cargo compartments of this plane, at a distance, while airborne, to detect, isolate and remove the explosive.

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Afghanistan: Sorry about the mess…

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, November 3, 2010 at 4:47 PM - 0 Comments

Last week, I was in Ottawa appearing on a panel discussion at UofO that was  about Canada’s future role in Afghanistan. Also speaking were Afghanistan’s ambassador to Canada Jawed Ludin, former ambassador to Afghanistan (and current Conservative candidate) Chris Alexander, and Wahid Waissi, director of the Afghanistan National Development Strategy.  My brief was supposed to be on the “security situation”, but given that pretty much everyone in the room was more qualified to talk about it than I was, I used up my allotted ten minutes to say, in various ways, that “it’s complicated and uncertain”.

I was gratified then when, during the discussion, a Canadian colonel with extensive experience in RC South stood up to say that the reason it the security situation seems complicated and uncertain is precisely because it is complicated and uncertain. The surge was only completed in early September, the crucial operations in Kandahar have only been underway for about six weeks, and it simply is not clear yet how things are going to turn out. There are plenty of negative signs, a few positive signs, and it won’t be clear which way the wind is really blowing until the “fighting season” resumes in early spring. Which is why Canada’s decision to cease combat operations next July 1 is increasingly turning into a big headache for our allies.

In private, American and British military officers have never hidden their disdain for the way Canada is handling this pullout. In February, a British general I was speaking with in Kabul called it “bad campaign work, and bad coalition work”. When I was back there in late September, I asked an American two-star general working at the IJC what they were going to do when Canada left. He sighed, then shrugged his shoulders. After a bit, he pointed at the map of Kandahar that was laid out in front of us, put his finger on Canada’s area of operations, and said that current thinking is the Canadians will be replaced with an Afghan kandak, assuming one can be found that can operate independently. The look on his face made it clear that he didn’t think that was plausible.

If Matthew Fisher’s report in today’s Gazette is accurate, it looks like they’ve decided to fill that vacancy with an American battalion. And the reason it is causing so many problems is not just that those troops have to come from somewhere else in the country, but that the changeover is going to be happening right smack in the middle of the fighting season, making the transition that much more difficult and dangerous. And since it is pretty clear that Canada is definitely leaving, the Americans have stopped keeping their concerns private. Here’s Fisher quoting Brig.-Gen. Fred Hodges, who has spent the last year directing the war in RC South:

The trouble with security

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Tuesday, November 2, 2010 at 4:40 PM - 0 Comments

Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty Images/ Lennart Preiss/AP

On May 2, 2006, a convoy led by Blackwater private security contractors drove over a roadside bomb in Baghdad. An Iraqi ambulance arrived at the scene and its driver was killed by “uncontrolled small arms fire.” A U.S. Army military intelligence unit interviewed witnesses and reported in a classified document that local Iraqis “are saying that the ambulance driver was shot by Blackwater.” But when the investigating soldiers contacted the tactical operations centre of Blackwater (now renamed Xe Services), “to try to confirm details of the incident,” the centre staff “would not confirm or deny at this time.”

This anecdote from the chaos of the Iraq war was contained in the more than 300,000 classified military documents released by the group WikiLeaks last week. Spanning six years of the conflict, they provided fresh evidence that security contractors killed Iraqi civilians, inflamed tensions with local people, and escaped accountability. In another case, the convoy of an American private security company named Custer Battles shot up civilian vehicles on an Iraqi road and then handed out cash to keep the locals quiet. A few days later, a different convoy of the same company fired on U.S. military police. In yet another incident, at a dangerous Iraqi checkpoint, a firefight unfolded when members of three separate security firms—two American and one British—shot at each other. While the documents posted on Wikileaks.org are heavily redacted and do not include contractors’ names, un-redacted versions provided to the New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel and several other news organizations confirmed those previously reported incidents of civilian killings, and brought new ones to light.

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Not exactly Alcatraz

By Nicholas Köhler - Tuesday, November 2, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Payne (left) and Gunn wriggled out of a correctional facility last month

Last month, 33-year-old Mount Pearl, Nfld., resident Rick Bennett pushed aside a ceiling tile in the interview room where he was waiting for his lawyer, pulled himself up into the crawl space and briefly fled into the heavens above St. John’s provincial courthouse. Officers with the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary collared him once he collapsed through the ceiling near the judges’ chambers, then dragged him from the building—but not before he’d forced the courthouse’s evacuation, the deployment of the K-9 unit and, perhaps most worrying, an asbestos assessment of the area disturbed by his escape.

Bennett’s illicit exit was just the latest in a string of escapes and corrections slip-ups that highlight the sorry state of Newfoundland and Labrador’s prison system. Two years after a damning independent report noted the decrepit facilities and lack of security—including cell doors that couldn’t lock and 19th-century jails—the escapes raise the question of just how ready Newfoundland is to implement the federal Conservatives’ plans to expand the country’s jails.

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Afghan detainees sans scandal?

By Andrew Potter - Monday, October 18, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW POTTER

If there is one thing the hysteria over the “detainees” scandal that preoccupied Parliament for most of last winter points to, it is a widespread resolve amongst Canadians to distance ourselves as far as possible from the abuses of executive authority that stained the American record in Iraq and Afghanistan. The names of prisons like Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram will remain synonyms for the moral collapse of the leadership of the West.

We tend to forget, though, that Canadian officials are themselves just as keen to be seen upholding the Geneva Convention and the basic principles of due process. That is pretty much why I found myself in southern Afghanistan last week, part of a journalistic foursome touring the buffed-up detainee centre at Kandahar Airfield, and, a day later, the infamous Sarposa prison in Kandahar City itself.

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What is it exactly that gets you on a no-fly list?

By Michael Friscolanti and Martin Patriquin - Monday, August 30, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW TOLSON

For obvious reasons, Canada’s “no-fly” list is a top-secret document. Only a handful of senior government officials are privy to the file, and even the size (200 names? 2,000?) is considered classified. About the only thing the feds will confirm is that the list is based on “reliable and vetted” intelligence, and if you’re on it, you “pose an immediate threat to aviation security.”

But what does “immediate” really mean? Must an aspiring terrorist walk into an airport with plastic explosives strapped to his chest in order to qualify for the list? Do authorities need irrefutable proof that a hijacker is about to strike? Or is tough talk—on an extremist website, for example—reason enough to ban someone from the skies?

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Self-service flying

By Colin Campbell - Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 2:40 PM - 0 Comments

IATA

Air travel at any major airport involves running a gauntlet of security checks and lineups—none more frustrating than the final chaotic scramble at the gate when an attendant announces general boarding. To help ease the bottleneck, Continental Airlines is experimenting with turnstiles at one of its gates at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport where passengers can scan their tickets on their own as they pass through subway-style turnstiles. The big advantage of the system, says the airline, is that it frees attendants to help passengers who need assistance with things like ticket changes or seat upgrades.

Transportation officials say the system isn’t a security concern, since passengers are already screened at checkpoints before they reach the gate. (Similar systems are already used in Europe.) As airlines continue to push Internet check-in and smartphone boarding passes, so-called self-boarding may just be the next inevitable step in the electronic age of flying.

McCann family searches for answers

By Colby Cosh - Monday, July 26, 2010 at 3:03 PM - 0 Comments

Chris Schwarz/Edmonton Journal

Since his parents went missing, Bret McCann has had his hands full fielding media inquiries and making broadcast appearances on behalf of his family. “For a while there we were going to studios almost constantly,” says the St. Albert, Alta., engineer. “We had to be up at 5:30 in the morning to do Canada AM.” The McCann family has also been busy creating a Facebook page and a stand-alone website devoted to the search for Lyle, 78, and Marie Ann, 77, who were last seen on a security-camera video fuelling up their motorhome in St. Albert on July 3.

Sorting out possible tips from well-intended messages of support is time-consuming, and every word from soft-spoken Bret testifies to his exhaustion. “But what I’m kind of dreading,” he admits offhandedly, “is the day the reporters don’t call.”

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The fallout from Toronto's G20 protests

By John Intini, Julia Belluz, Josh Dehaas and Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, July 8, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Reuters/ Nic Thorne/ Getty Images

As the crowd in Toronto’s Allan Gardens spilled onto Carlton Street, many looked around, as if searching for directions. It was the first official day of G20 protesting, and while the mob eventually headed west, at no point did it feel like any one person or group was at the helm.

Young men at the front chanted, “Free, free Palestine.” Pro-choicers carried empty coffins with coat hangers attached. Others clung to banners. One read, “Animal rights are human rights.” On another: “Defend Iran against imperialist attack.” Tuition and poverty were hot topics. So were maternal health and gay rights. Some were there to denounce Israel. Others, the U.S. When asked what he was protesting, a native man with a long golden ponytail said, simply, “everything.”

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Security theatre

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 2:40 PM - 53 Comments

Turns out the “weapons” “display” was about as straightforward as the “secret” “new” “law.”

The NDP’s Don Davies has now formally requested a recall of the public safety committee to study the security practices around the G8 and G20 summits.