In the security state, you're innocent until investigated: Cole
The sad case of Ayaan Farah demonstrates that, in the terrifying surveillance state we live in, you don’t have to commit a crime to be criminalized.

All of us know someone who has been charged with or convicted of a crime. Most of us don’t think this connection could cost us our employment. This is exactly what happened to Ayaan Farah a couple of years ago. She lost her security clearance at Pearson airport, and the job that went with it, after police claimed she had connections to a local gang, and was a potential threat to airline safety.

The RCMP says Farah, now 31, is connected to members of the Dixon Crew street gang in Etobicoke, but won’t name her alleged associates. When Farah couldn’t explain her relationship with people the government would not identify, she lost her livelihood. Her experience shows how racial profiling, carding, and excessive surveillance threaten people who shouldn’t even be on the police’s radar.

The RCMP says two of the three men connected to Farah were passengers in a car leaving the funeral of an alleged gang member in 2014. The car is registered to Farah, but her father is its primary driver. Farah was not in the car when these passengers were spotted. When officials questioned her about the incident, she stumbled to describe an interaction she was not part of. Her hesitation was deemed suspicious and used as evidence against her.

Farah’s father, Mohamed Ali, is a well-respected figure in the Somali-Canadian community. He attends many funerals, and recalls one afternoon in 2014 when he was leaving a funeral, driving the same car identified as carrying “Subject B” and “Subject C,” and was stopped by Toronto police — they never told him why. “They asked me for my license and ownership of the car,” Ali told me in a phone interview — documentation that was later used to ruin his daughter’s career.

Although the RCMP made the security case against Farah, its information seems to have come from Toronto police. Ali’s interaction after the funeral is consistent with the practice of carding, which has targeted black civilians and branded them as either criminals or their associates. “The only thing I have in common with these people is that I’m Somalian, and I used to live in Dixon,” Farah said of her alleged criminal associations.

If the police follow any one of us long enough, they can connect us to crime. The folks they most often choose to follow, document, and share information about — because of race, religion, or social location — are at greatest risk for bad outcomes, even if they are innocent. This is the consequence of racial profiling, carding, and draconian new laws like Bill C-51.