In the ten days immediately following the

September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercia ...

in the United States in 2001, the

Royal Canadian Mounted Police The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP; french: Gendarmerie royale du Canada; french: GRC, label=none), commonly known in English as the Mounties (and colloquially in French as ) is the federal police, federal and national police service of ...

(RCMP) initiated Project Shock which sought to quickly collect and act on any information or rumors related to possible threats posed by Muslims in Canada. The authorities noted that "many of the tangible and intangible barriers were taken down", allowing the RCMP previously disallowed access to government files, permission to give such information to foreign governments and send copies of

hard drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnet ...

s seized in raids to Americans.RCMP
High levels of collaboration continue one year post-9/11
, 2002 It was ostensibly the first time the RCMP had been allowed to mix intelligence gathering and law enforcement since the 1981 '' Royal Commission of Inquiry into Certain Activities of the RCMP'', which had revealed a number of scandals surrounding the

RCMP Security Service The RCMP Security Service (french: Service de sécurité de la GRC) was a branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) that had responsibility for domestic intelligence and security in Canada. It was replaced by the Canadian Security Intellige ...

, and led to the dissolution of the unit. Six years later the

Privacy Commissioner of Canada The privacy commissioner of Canada (french: Commissaire à la protection de la vie privée du Canada) is a non-partisan ombudsman and officer of the Parliament of Canada. The commissioner investigates complaints regarding violations of the feder ...

, Jennifer Stoddart, noted that similar tips proved "little more than public hysteria during a time of crisis", and in 2009 explained the database as "information that they thought might have been of strategic importance", but that it had been closed down.

Role

The RCMP unit acted under the supervision of the National Security Investigations Branch, and

seconded In deliberative bodies a second to a proposed motion is an indication that there is at least one person besides the mover that is interested in seeing the motion come before the meeting. It does not necessarily indicate that the seconder favors th ...

members of local authorities, like the Calgary Police Service, to their division. They were given a $60 million budget,

Asian Pacific Post The Asian Pacific Post is a weekly Canadian newspaper founded in 1993 in Vancouver, British Columbia. The newspaper specialized in reporting Asian issues, and has a readership of 160,000. It has a sister publication in ''The South Asian Post''. Th ...

Editorial: A chilling message to Muslims in Canada
October 2, 2003 and told that "the goals...were prevention first, then intelligence gathering, and lastly, prosecution".Pither, Kerry. "Dark Days: The Story of Four Canadians Tortured in the Name of Fighting Terror", 2008. The project ultimately arrested 20 Canadians and accused them of links to terrorism. It also led the creation of Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams. Many other Canadians were discovered to have entered the country illegally, and some possessed

false identification Identity document forgery is the process by which identity documents issued by governing bodies are copied and/or modified by persons not authorized to create such documents or engage in such modifications, for the purpose of deceiving those ...

.Criminal Intelligence Service Alberta
Semi-Annual Report, April 2002-September 2002
/ref> One officer threatened to launch a lawsuit for the "racist bent and bigotry" he believed his superior was practising.

References

{{reflist, 2 Terrorism in Canada