It seems like Canary Mission, the shadowy pro-Israel doxxing operation that has targeted pro-Palestinian voices for nearly a decade, will finally have its day in court. Last month, the Chicago chapter of the Council On American Islamic Relations (CAIR Chicago) filed a landmark federal lawsuit against the blacklisting website — it is the first time Canary Mission has been sued.
CAIR Chicago is representing Kinza Khan, a 34-year-old Pakistani woman who was doxxed after a tense encounter with Wayne Levinson, who is named alongside Canary Mission a co-defendant in the complaint. In November, Khan and her friend stopped on a busy street in Chicago to examine a light pole covered with “Kidnapped by Hamas” posters. When a stranger, another white man, began to remove the posters with a knife, Levinson targeted Khan and her friend, leaving his vehicle and yelling slurs. He began to film the two, getting dangerously close to their faces. Both parties called the police, and Khan and her friend retreated to a nearby grocery store. Levinson posted his video on Instagram. When she woke up the next day she found she had gone viral. Her Canary Mission profile was up within a week.
The complaint contains over a hundred pages of evidence of the online harassment Khan faced, including many threats of rape and other forms of violence. Zionist users found her workplace, where she represents survivors of domestic violence. They got her phone number, and she received calls non-stop. One ominous DM read: We will find you, don’t worry. “I was scared of going outside,” Khan told me.
Then she began to channel her feelings of helplessness into action. As a victim’s rights attorney, she came across young people who were doxxed every day. So she made a toolkit to provide resources and information on the rights of those doxxed. When she came across a new anti-doxxing law that went into effect just this January, she decided to sue, with the hope that it would set an important precedent of accountability for doxxing. Khan is seeking compensatory damages exceeding $75,000 and attorney’s fees for the emotional distress, substantial life disruptions, and serious economic injury she experienced after being doxxed.
The lawsuit is filed under the Illinois Civil Liability for Doxxing Act, which allows victims of doxxing to bring civil action against those who publish “another person’s personally identifiable information without the consent of the person” with “the intent that it be used to harm or harass.” (When it was considered in the General Assembly, the ACLU of Illinois expressed concerns about the broadness of the statute, fearing that it could lead to a chilling effect, while the Anti-Defamation League, an organization often critiqued for its Zionism, lobbied fiercely for its passage). CAIR plans to file more lawsuits and urges those with stories of doxxing to reach out.
The organization is also representing Laila Ali, a 24-year-old Pakistani woman who was doxxed in a frighteningly similar manner: she was taking down flyers in Fulton Market when two women began recording her. Her Canary Mission profile was up the next day, and she soon got fired from the mental health clinic she worked at.
Ali hopes her lawsuit will weaken the intimidation tactics Zionists use and demonstrate “that you’re not allowed to damage people’s lives for [speaking out against genocide].” The termination from her job did not cow her or her commitment to the Palestinian liberation struggle. “I am not willing to allow them to corner me or make me feel fearful for things that I know are right in my heart and in my mind,” she said.
Since it started posting profiles of students, professors, professionals, and organizations in 2015, Canary Mission has sought to “ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees.” The blacklist relies on compiling all the publicly available information of an individual: every LinkedIn update, X (formerly Twitter) retweet, childhood photo on Facebook. While it seeks to “expose” those it deems antisemites, racists, and supporters of terrorists, Canary Mission has stayed largely anonymous. “It’s very hard to find who to even sue,” Rifqa Falaneh, a fellow at Palestine Legal who is Palestinian, told me. The hope is that this lawsuit will reveal information about Canary Mission’s operations.
Canary Mission has claimed that its namesake “has long been a metaphor for the persecution of a minority that subsequently spreads to the general populace,” referencing the saying which originates from the canaries used as detectors in coal mines in the 20th century; when exposed to toxic gasses, the yellow birds would stop singing and fall unconscious, alerting miners in time for them to get to safety. It is a confused application, then, to describe this noxious doxxing operation.
What is clear is that at this point thousands of students and faculty members have been victims of Canary Mission with their personal information posted online due to their support of Palestine. I spoke to eight people with Canary Mission profiles, four of whom are Palestinian. They painted a picture of the doxxing outfit that, even in this moment of unprecedented repression of pro-Palestinian voices, is quickly losing legitimacy, despite having very real adverse consequences on the lives and livelihoods of their victims.
When Salma Hamamy, a Palestinian American who recently graduated from the University of Michigan, found out that she had been put on Canary Mission, she went out and bought a cake. She celebrated with her fellow members of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at UMich, who were doxxed at the same time. (Canary Mission tends to operate like this, going campus by campus and releasing profiles in batches).
Hamamy knew that doxxing had, for the most part, worked to scare and silence students on campus. “I wanted to change that,” she said. “To break the stereotype of what we’re supposed to do when doxxed: panic, and be distressed. I wanted to break down whatever reaction they think I would have, and instead do the opposite, to demonstrate that it is not going to interfere with my advocacy by any means.”
Palestinians on Canary Mission face more than hateful messages in their DMs: those attempting to enter Palestine have been detained, interrogated for hours, and even banned from entering the country. All four Palestinians I spoke with mentioned a fear of being denied entry into Palestine because of their profiles.
For Jineen Musa, a rising junior at Ohio State University, getting doxxed on Canary Mission felt inevitable. She’d watched every other member on the SJP chapter board get doxxed, and when she finally heard about her profile just a few weeks ago, while exiting a meeting protesting her county’s bond investments in Israel, she felt something like relief. Now she knew everything the Zionists had on her. But she, too, worried about being barred from entering Palestine. Her family had been expelled twice, first in the Nakba of 1948, and then again in 1967. Without a hawiya, a Palestinian ID, it was already hard enough for Musa to enter Palestine without a dossier proclaiming her an enemy of the occupying state. The last and only time she was able to visit her homeland was when she was a baby, just six months old. Musa had desperately wanted to go to Palestine this summer. She looked into study abroad programs or other academic opportunities, which would be her best chance, but with no success.
One 28-year-old law student spoke to me, on the condition of anonymity for fear of further retribution, about her experience of image-based sexual abuse after being put on Canary Mission. Someone else she knew on Canary Mission realized they’d been posted on an Undress AI website, with deepfake AI technology used to create pornography from their images. When she searched her own name and found images of herself, she had a panic attack. “It really puts this hollowness in your stomach,” she said. “This weird anxiety and emptiness, to have the control of your image and the things that you say taken away from you and decontextualized like that.” (When she submitted a copyright infringement complaint against Canary Mission to Google for the use of her image, Canary Mission countered the complaint, under the name of Ashok Kumar, who appears to be a proxy based in Maharashtra, India, by claiming to be a “non-commercial journalistic institution.” For her profile to be delisted on Google, she would need to file an injunction and track the proxy down.)
While students protesting the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza have faced unprecedented crackdowns this year, from academic suspensions to withheld degrees to brutal arrests on felony charges, doxxing has risen with the rising of violent repression. Many students this year face retaliation not only from universities but also from the state — and on top of that, thousands of online trolls.
Rishi Arun had just been released after twenty-eight hours in jail when he found out he was on Canary Mission. A rising junior at Temple University, he participated in the encampment at the University of Pennsylvania, and it was at UPenn where he was brutally arrested on May 17, watching his fellow protesters be tased and have their hijabs ripped off. Before his arraignment, his lawyer told him the state had tacked on three more misdemeanor charges, and a retroactive warrant for his arrest for another demonstration. So after court in mid-June, he turned himself in at the 18th District police station in Philadelphia. He was able to post bail at a whopping $25,000. As the bail was being processed, Arun was transferred to Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, a mega jail complex, and held there in various processing cells.
Though, like other students, being doxxed was something he’d long ago accepted would happen, the timing felt particularly cruel. “It’s really targeted, it’s not good. All of this is happening at once,” Arun said, referring to his being doxxed on top of the still ongoing legal proceedings. “I’m still processing it.” What he was most upset about, though, was the profile photo that Canary Mission had used, which he thought was unfavorable.
For some, including Arun, the actual effects of being put on Canary Mission seem disproportionate to the specter of fear that has been produced around getting doxxed. Hamamy noted a rising trend in those who were doxxed, despite receiving death threats and other forms of harassment, recognizing and resisting the suppression tactics at play. (Those on Canary Mission’s blacklist sometimes call it a badge of honor, and even joke about using it as a dating app). “Being doxxed is not something that we let hinder us or our movement,” Hamamy insisted. “Canary Mission should never be a valid reason or a factor that shuts people down. If anything it should be looked at as a complete joke, because that’s what it is.”
Throughout the years, Canary Mission has lost legitimacy, increasingly being recognized to be, as Falaneh put it, “extremely not credible.” It relies on fear-mongering, on tactics of intimidation, to suppress pro-Palestinian voices. This lawsuit may change that.
“Canary Mission and other similar outfits have long operated to harass, bully and intimidate students and young people who hold different opinions than their own with the goal of chilling their free speech and smearing their reputation for the benefit of a foreign government and its occupational interests,” Joseph Milburn, the CAIR Chicago attorney for Khan’s case, said. “It is our hope that we can protect individual American rights to freedom of speech free of doxxing while raising awareness against these shady practices and campaigns.”
As the lawsuit unfolds, it is the reminders of the ongoing genocide in Gaza that ground those who have been doxxed by Canary Mission in their continued advocacy for the Palestinian liberation movement. “It’s really easy to be fearful, but I don’t have any reason to fear more than the people in Palestine who are losing their lives,” Ali said.
“Our anger, our frustration, and our hope for the sanctity of Palestinian life should supersede and be greater than whatever fear we may potentially have,” Hamamy said. “I don’t think we ever have the right to prioritize our fear over the commitment that we should have to the Palestinian people.” She was one of two protesters who interrupted Kamala Harris’ rally in Detroit earlier this week to demand an arms embargo and a ceasefire in Gaza.
Students imagine not only a future without insidious doxxing organizations, but moreover, a future without the Israeli occupation. “It’s sad that this matters now,” Arun said, thinking of the daunting battles ahead — the Canary Mission case, and his own legal troubles. “But history is going to absolve us.”