Canada has 3D-printed ‘ghost guns’ in its sights
When Canada’s public safety minister, Marco Mendicino, was here this week for a cross-border crime forum, he visited the FBI’s storied Quantico training academy nearby in Virginia. There he got to see Herbert Hoover’s reading room, watch a live training session of FBI agents and visit Hogan’s Alley, a replica town where FBI agents train by acting out high-stakes scenarios.
But what stuck out to him was a forensics lab, where he got to see a “ghost gun” being manufactured. “I saw, with my own eyes, a 3D printer create a gun,” he said. The printer used melted plastic “with laser-like precision” to manufacture the components of a gun.
3D printing has become commonplace, but its use to make illegal guns is, Mendicino says, one of the biggest rising concerns of law enforcement in Canada and the U.S.
“What struck me about this technology is, first it’s cheap. The apparatus itself only costs a few hundred U.S. dollars,” Mendicino said. “Second, it’s fast. You can create these ‘ghost guns’ literally in about a day or day and a half.” And those firearms are virtually untraceable.
Gun smuggling from the U.S. has long been a major crime-fighting problem in Canada — and stopping it is a major part of Mendicino’s assignment as a cabinet minister. The change represented by 3D printing technology, with software available on the internet making a potential gun dealer out of anyone who owns a printer, makes it all the harder.
“That to me, really sort of brought home that this is going to be the next frontier of gun crime that we’re going to have to really work together and co-ordinate on,” Mendicino said.
He was discussing the creation of a Canada-U.S. firearms task force to share intelligence, co-ordinate investigations and “leverage new technologies specifically around tracing” to fight gun smuggling across the border. Mendicino says it will tackle both the traditional smuggling of handguns and assault rifles, and also consider new threats like the one he saw at Quantico. “We need this task force to co-ordinate on those trends, so that we can address all these issues.”
This, Mendicino says, was one of the “concrete take-aways” of the cross-border crime forum — the first such set of meetings in a decade — during which representatives of the two countries discussed cybercrime, the rise of potentially violent extremism (including, Mendicino said, the threat demonstrated by both the Jan. 6 riot in the U.S. and the “Freedom Convoy” blockades in Ottawa and at the border) and terrorism, and access to justice for marginalized people.
Another such takeaway announced this week by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland was the launch of formal negotiations on an agreement to share digital data across the border by co-ordinating the two countries’ privacy laws. The goal is to bring Canada under the umbrella of the U.S. CLOUD Act, which governs when digital service providers can be compelled to provide data to investigations. The U.S. has already established agreements to share such information with Australia and the U.K.
“Such an agreement, if finalized and approved, would pave the way for more efficient cross-border disclosures of data between the United States and Canada so that our governments can more effectively fight serious crime, including terrorism, while safeguarding the privacy and civil liberties values that we both share,” Garland said, announcing the news.
“We talked about finalizing negotiations on an agreement there to ensure that we are sharing intelligence information, but always — and I want to emphasize — consistent with charter and privacy rights, according to Canadian and American law,” Mendicino said. “That agreement will advance our mutually shared national security interest by dealing with, for example, national security threats, be it cyber attacks, be it through terrorism, be it through the illicit transferring of foreign currencies, including new non-conventional currencies like cryptocurrencies.”
In addition to getting to visit interesting sites like the often-dramatized Quantico and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s “C3” cybercrime centre — and, in personal time, take a jog on the National Mall while the cherry trees were in full bloom — Mendicino said the revival of the cross-border crime forum was an important step in working together as laid out in the Road Map to a Renewed U.S.Canada Partnership agreed to by President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in early 2021.
“The reboot of the cross-border crime forum is an incredibly significant milestone in the road map,” he said. “It shows the resolve and the commitment of the two closest of allies and friends, to do the work together in fighting crime at the border, so that we can have trade and travel that is firing on all cylinders, and getting our economy going.”
In the decade since the last of such meetings, crime has evolved, he says, including cybercrime, the nature of terrorist threats, the use of technology in human smuggling and child exploitation, and other areas — like the “ghost gun” technology he saw demonstrated at Quantico. “The visit and the observation of this technology really drove home that crime is always evolving, and that governments and law enforcement have to meet the challenge by staying ahead of the curve,” he said, “and the crossborder crime forum really allowed us to dedicate our energy towards doing just that.”