On a December morning a few years ago, Amal’s phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. “It was just a bunch of random names tweeting at me… my inbox was full,” she recalled. Strangers online were telling her she should be deported and that she didn’t belong in Canada.

Amal soon realized she was on a website called Canary Mission. “It had my pictures, it had all my social media handles,” she said. “And that was the day I found out about Canary Mission.”

The anonymous site, launched in 2015, compiles dossiers on students, activists, and academics who speak up for Palestine in North America. The profiles often include names, photos, universities, workplaces, and social media posts, with accusations of antisemitism or anti-Israelism attached. The blacklist’s goal is to ensure “today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees.”

Amal was profiled for her pro-Palestine activism in her university years. 

To protect her from further harassment, Ricochet has agreed to change her name.

In July 2025, Ricochet did an analysis of the website and found 414 profiles from Canada. After accounting for duplicates, 409 remained. The numbers show that Canary Mission’s Canadian profiles disproportionately target women and racialized people. 

More than 62 per cent of the Canadians listed are women or gender minorities. Almost 65 per cent of all those profiled are visibly racialized. And every seven out of 10 women listed are racialized. For comparison, only about a quarter of the adult female population in Canada identifies as part of a visible minority, according to Statistics Canada.

And as Israel’s war on Gaza has intensified since October 7, activists and academics say the site and others like it have become powerful tools of intimidation, surveillance and silencing.

Sheryl Nestel, a retired sociology professor at the University of Toronto, says that Canary Mission can have a serious negative impact on people’s lives and careers. 

Nestel was a founding member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada and has extensively researched the impact of what she calls the “chill” around Palestinian studies on Canadian campuses. 

“Fear of retribution is very concerning… people are being discouraged from engaging in scholarship around Palestine. There’s a chill around that whole area. We need that scholarship very badly to promote justice in Palestine and Israel.”

During her research, students told her landlords wouldn’t rent them apartments after looking them up on Google and finding their Canary Mission profiles. 

For Amal, the dossier came with years of harassment: phone calls to her workplace, Facebook pages calling for her deportation, and missed job opportunities.

But her story is far from unique. Canary Mission now hosts more than 5,000 profiles.

In July, during a lawsuit brought by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent testified that the department had formed a special “tiger team” to remove pro-Palestinian students from the country. The officer admitted that Canary Mission profiles were being used to identify international students and faculty for detention and deportation.

The case followed a wave of arrests. In March, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student in Massachusetts, was detained by plainclothes officers after co-authoring a campus op-ed supporting Palestinians. Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate who had helped negotiate his university’s encampment, was also picked up. Both were listed on Canary Mission.

The testimony confirmed that an anonymous website once dismissed as a smear campaign has now become a tool for government enforcement.

That also has implications for Canadians, who are not immune to its reach.

“All of these big cases… they were literally using Canary Mission documents in order to find their targets,” said Nathan Kalman-Lamb, a professor at the University of New Brunswick.

Kalman-Lamb was listed on Canary Mission last year after signing a statement in support of the University of Toronto encampments.

In January, he was denied entry to the United States at Montreal’s Trudeau International Airport. Customs and Border Protection officers told him to return to Fredericton.

“For most Canadians, especially a white male faculty member, it’s a rubber-stamping process,” he said. “But this time, they intercepted me and said, ‘Sorry, sir, you’re not allowed to enter the United States today.’”

On a later trip, after obtaining a visa, he was detained for three hours. His phone was searched and he was questioned about his views on violent protest.

“And so it makes perfect sense that I, who was also listed on Canary Mission, and I, who was flagged by the U.S. government and denied entry, it’s Canary Mission,” he said.

Canary Mission may be the most well-known for labelling protesters and academics as anti-semitic or terrorist sympathizers, but it’s not alone. Organizations like StopAntisemitism, Betar, Bnai Birth, and HonestReporting Canada mimic similar tactics. 

Ricochet Media gets into some of these and more in its newest podcast, There is a List. 

This is a List is a 5-part series about the surveillance and silencing of pro-Palestine voices in Canada. The show delves into the stories of Canadian students, academics, activists, journalists and healthcare workers targeted by the likes of Canary Mission. We also investigate who’s behind the anonymous website and where their money comes from. 

Tune in every Tuesday for a new episode. You can subscribe to There is a List and listen to the first episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.