Wednesday, September 16, 2026
Biometric Underwear
A field record: how Edmonton's facial-recognition pilot runs on an engine built by Corsight, owned through Awz Ventures, whose advisory committee Stephen Harper chairs. Maps, sources, and a scored soundtrack.
Ten things
- On December 2, 2025 — ten weeks before the trip — the Edmonton Police Service put facial recognition on fifty officers' body cameras, scanning faces in real time against a watchlist of 6,341 people, plus 724 more flagged for serious warrants.
- Awz's advisory committee has been presided over since 2019 by former Prime Minister Stephen Harper , seated alongside former heads of CSIS, the CIA, Britain's MI5, and Israel's Mossad.
- A field record: how Edmonton's facial-recognition pilot runs on an engine built by Corsight, owned through Awz Ventures, whose advisory committee Stephen Harper chairs. Maps, sources, and a scored soundtrack.
- Journalist Jeremy Appel ( The Orchard ), citing documents he obtained, wrote that the itinerary went past meeting "local Israeli police": he reports the chief visited illegal West Bank settlements and met members of an undercover unit tied to a killing in Jenin.
- Two cautions hold: the settlement-visit and unit-meeting claims rest on a single outlet so far, and tying that unit to that specific killing is The Orchard's identification, not independently confirmed — carried here, like the rest of this page, as a claim and not a verdict.
- The face-matching engine is not Axon's own — it is Corsight , a facial-recognition company headquartered in Tel Aviv, whose technology has been documented identifying people at military checkpoints.
- What professional development launders is not a purchase order — it's the relationship : the routine, the access, the normalisation that lets a foreign-built, ethics-board-rejected system arrive as a fifty-officer pilot no one voted on.
- The Abraham Global Peace Initiative , a Canadian charity, runs its own police delegations; a Winnipeg police leader travelled on one in 2023.
- Its parent, Awz Ventures , was built to channel investment into Israeli security technology and has partnered with the Israeli Ministry of Defense research directorate.
- In mid-February 2026, Edmonton Police Chief Warren Driechel joined a delegation of Canadian and U.S. police chiefs visiting Israel.
Five questions
Which term completes this sourced statement? “On _____ 2, 2025 — ten weeks before the trip — the Edmonton Police Service put facial recognition on fifty officers' body cameras, scanning faces in real time against a watchlist of 6,341 people, plus 724 more flagged for serious warrants.”
Which term completes this sourced statement? “A field record: how _____'s facial-recognition pilot runs on an engine built by Corsight, owned through Awz Ventures, whose advisory committee Stephen Harper chairs. Maps, sources, and a scored soundtrack.”
Which term completes this sourced statement? “Two cautions hold: the settlement-visit and unit-meeting claims rest on a single outlet so far, and tying that unit to that specific killing is The _____'s identification, not independently confirmed — carried here, like the rest of this page, as a claim and not a verdict.”
Which term completes this sourced statement? “What professional development launders is not a purchase order — it's the relationship : the routine, the access, the normalisation that lets a foreign-built, _____ system arrive as a fifty-officer pilot no one voted on.”
Which term completes this sourced statement? “Its parent, Awz _____ , was built to channel investment into Israeli security technology and has partnered with the Israeli Ministry of Defense research directorate.”