Hacker says foreign money funding "extremism" in Canada
3 Min Read
A leak shows more than half of donations to the protest came from the US.
A hacker who published the identities and locations of more than 90,000 individuals who gave money to the Canadian trucker convoy protest said it revealed how money from overseas fueled "extremism" in the nation.
The hacker warned The Guardian that Canada was not safe from foreign political manipulation. “You see a huge amount of money that isn’t even coming from Canada – that’s plain as day,” claimed the hacker, a hacktivist from the Anonymous organization.
According to the data, over 90,000 donations were made through GiveSendGo, with the majority of funds originating from Canada and the US. However, individuals from the UK, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Denmark also donated.
A Queens University professor Amarnath Amarasingam, and specialist in extremism and social movements, tweeted that of the 92,844 donations, “51,666 (56%) came from the US, 36,202 (29%) came from Canada, and 1,831 (2%) came from the UK.” Donations from the United States totaled $3.62 million, while Canadians contributed $4.31 million, he said.
According to the hacker, the large number of donations coming from Canada demonstrated that some Canadians had aligned themselves with what they saw to be American-style radicalism.
“Up here in Canada, we kind of lied to ourselves,” the hacker said. “[We were saying] ‘It couldn’t happen here, there’s no way it could happen, we are better.' And now people are kind of faced with the reality that no, actually, we have much more in common with our neighbors to the south than we wanted to admit to ourselves.”
According to the data, roughly a dozen contributors used gov email addresses in connection with donations, indicating that some money originated from government officials in the United States.
Accounts from the US Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, NASA, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and a state transit company were among those included. There was also one Canadian government email address in the data.
The hacker warned the public that fascism and domestic extremism were being focused on by hacktivists.
On Sunday, the GiveSendGo site was moved to a page containing a video clip from the Frozen film.
"Attention, GiveSendGo grifters and hatriots,” it read. “You helped fund the January 6 insurrection in the US, you helped fund an insurrection in Ottawa. In fact, you are committed to funding anything that keeps the raging fire of misinformation going until that [sic] it burns the world’s collective democracies down. On behalf of sane people worldwide who wish to continue living in a democracy, I am now telling you that GiveSendGo itself is frozen.”
After another crowdsourcing company, GoFundMe, prohibited money transactions, GiveSendGo became the primary destination for donations.
Despite the fact that the hackers' message was no longer visible on the website on Monday, the site remained out of service.
