A Theory of the List

I learned my name was on the list from a Jewish colleague at my university, a woman I hardly know. “I need to tell you something,” she wrote in an email to me. “Do you have a minute for a call today?” A local Facebook group with 47,000 followers, I learned, had posted a list of “Self Hating Jews that are seeking the destruction of our community.” They called it the “kapo list,” a term for Nazi collaborators in the concentration camps that, as of late, has been repurposed to censure Jewish critics of Israel. A few weeks later, I was on a new list: “[trash can icon] Jews.” It was populated with the names of Jewish people who had deputed at the local school board on a report that conflated antisemitism with anti-Zionism. The lister bragged that they had reported us to the Israeli Embassy. This time, several people awkwardly reached out to me: “I saw the list.” It must have gotten around.

The lists I was put on were aimed at anti-Zionist Jews, seeking to police the internal party line by defining them as traitors for speaking out on Israel. But they are long predated by other lists—namely, lists of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims that target the right to tell their histories, organize, and share analysis of Palestine. And though these lists vary in their targets and tactics, they all share a common end: to intimidate the movement for Palestinian rights into silence by denigrating its advocates to the point where their livelihoods and mobility are threatened.

As for the lists themselves, they can tend to be somewhat arbitrary, lazy, and replete with misinformation and hyperbole. Some name U.S. citizens or green-card holders as “foreign nationals.” Others leave key protest organizers off their tallies while dubbing individuals who attended a single march or signed one open letter as dangerous antisemites. But while lists like these seem to rely on a scattershot strategy, driven, in their open-sourced selection, by blunt racial profiling (Arab students, for instance, receive far more visibility on the lists than their white counterparts), others can be particular and directed, like the list of the Canadian medical students who signed an open letter calling for a ceasefire by Israel and denouncing the country’s targeting of health care professionals. When members of the Canadian Jewish Physicians Facebook group came across the list, they advocated that the 271 names appearing on it be shared with directors ahead of residency interviews to discourage the signees’ employment. These days, it’s increasingly likely that if you’re a member of an organization that grants you even a shred of public visibility—a university, a church, a political party—there is someone waiting, pen in hand, to add you to a list of your own.

When I discovered my own name on some lists, I checked the most notorious one, Canary Mission, one of the oldest pro-Israel doxxing platforms. Sure enough, there I was, with my picture, job title, links to a (now-defunct) Twitter profile, and evidence of my ostensible “pro-Hamas” activism—by which they meant my support for the University of Toronto student encampment— catalogued, joining the thousands of other names the group has dredged up over the decades. Many of Canary Mission’s victims have faced serious consequences for being featured, like questioning by the FBI. But for others, the dragnet has proven somewhat more porous. Depending on one’s profession, status, or nationality, being featured on the site might fail to produce any effect at all. A white Canadian national with a tenured professor job, I might have been on the list for several years myself and never known it.

That was six months ago. In recent months, ever since Trump’s re-election and signing of an executive order promising to pursue deportations of pro-Palestine student activists, it’s clear that something in North America has shifted. For the past two decades, the doxxing lists have drawn their power by diffusing an ambient sense of fear through the individuals being targeted and the anxious institutions that employed and educated them—a strategy they pursued to often devastating effect. But now, it’s clear that the list-makers have been granted an expansive new mandate: to serve as a key node in the enforcement of the U.S. government’s new citizenship regime.

In July the New York Times reported that Trump’s Department of Homeland Security had assembled what it called a “tiger team” to comb through data from Canary Mission’s website for information on students who had vocally extended their solidarity to Palestinians. Once it had been winnowed down, this data would then ostensibly be cross-checked against individuals’ migration status for more targeted investigations. List-making organizations have bragged about their success at guiding Homeland Security to students for detention and removal, but until now, there wasn’t solid evidence confirming it. One could just as easily suspect that such claims were a component of the groups’ strategy to inflate the claims to authority central to their ability to spread maximum panic. Now, though, we know that when Canary Mission adds someone to a list, Homeland Security might well be reading it.

This new climate has proven fertile ground for new campaigns. In the last two weeks, after the assassination of right-wing media superstar and staunch Trump loyalist Charlie Kirk, an entire apparatus has cropped up dedicated to ferreting out and punishing those who are supposedly “justifying” or “celebrating” the killing on social media—cheered on, in many cases, by top-ranking conservative politicians. An account on X called the Charlie Kirk Data Foundation claims to have over 60,000 confirmed identities of people who support “political violence.” Right-wing influencer Chaya Raichik, creator of the infamous Libs of TikTok X account, posted screenshots of supposed celebrations of Kirk’s death, while others, among them pardoned January 6 rioter Ryan Nichols, encouraged followers to “tag them, their employers, and make it so uncomfortable for them to even leave their house.” In the coming days they would find their calls echoed by Vice President J. D. Vance, who, in a special guest-hosted episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, all but gave the doxxing campaigns a rubber stamp of approval. (It’s no coincidence that Kirk’s own organization, Turning Point USA, spent years running a “Professor Watchlist” of academics charged with “[advancing] leftist propaganda in the classroom.”)

It might be tempting to see these moves as unprecedented, and in many ways, they are. Doxxing has been going on for decades, but it has never commanded the power it does today: simply put, there has never been such a direct link between it and state policy. In other ways, though, the Trump administration is duplicating a strategy of social rule that has been deployed for centuries: when the state decides who gets to have rights, it deputizes citizens and expands police control to exercise extraordinary new powers against fellow citizens. The state needs us to strip others of their freedom and to remove constraints on its exercise of power. Lists have always been a convenient means of doing that. 

How did we get here? For decades, Canary Mission and groups like it have taken it upon themselves to compile public lists of academics, journalists and artists they consider to be enemies of their political project, with links and dossiers quietly shared with the likes of university administrators, hiring committees, and prize jury members. The doxxing frenzy really took off at the turn of the twenty-first century in the aftermath of the Second Intifada, when the state of Israel and its supporters engaged in renewed efforts to combat the potent pro-Palestine activism that had flourished in its wake—particularly Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS), a Palestinian-led movement created in 2004 that calls for a pressure campaign against Israel to comply with international law. Key to the BDS strategy is encouraging cultural, academic, and sporting institutions to boycott their Israeli counterparts; little surprise, then, that individual advocates within those institutions have been singled out and attacked as antisemitic for targeting Israel.

In many ways, the United States’ adoption of doxxing lists for security purposes is replicating a strategy long used by Israel. Its Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Shin Bet, the country’s internal security service, have long used Canary Mission as a key intelligence asset to monitor the activity of travelers deemed risky. Some individuals have reported seeing documents marked “sensitive” with Canary Mission profiles at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv when detained. Indeed, the doxxing platform seems to have been all but purpose-built for the Trump regime to accomplish similar tasks at home. But even before his Department of Homeland Security started using the site, it proved useful for pro-Israel U.S. policymakers to police dissent, especially on college campuses. Even in the absence of a policy that specifically pointed to Palestine activism as grounds for deportation, international students knew that attending protests—and therefore risking being doxxed—could have serious consequences for their immigration status.  

As it turned out, their fears were utterly warranted. In March, Canary Mission expanded its usual doxxing targets to include “foreign nationals” in its witch hunt for perpetrators of an “antisemitism” that has become a dragnet to ensnare all leftist dissent. Dubbed “Bringing the War Home,” the new campaign links those who desire the “destruction of the State of Israel” as a “gateway to achieving the destruction of America.” Once it was in place, all Trump’s cabinet of pro-Israel hardliners needed to do was to pick up an intricate linkage that had been set up to efficiently carry out the task of picking individuals out for deportation. Unsurprisingly, many of the students and professors pursued by ICE have appeared on the website. And immigration lawyers and experts have long seen “coincidences” in the lists groups like Canary Mission circulate with those targeted for detention. One such coincidence that appeared on its website: Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University doctoral student abducted in broad daylight in Somerville, MA, in March.

Few activists were surprised when Trump made student activists one of the banner targets of his immigration regime—after all, Zionist doxxing’s main focus has always been the university campus. Much of that tactic’s success can be attributed to Daniel Pipes, president and founder of a right-wing think tank, Middle East Forum, and its signature project, Campus Watch. Launched in 2002, Campus Watch claims to be invested in improving analysis on the Middle East, casting its goals in the anodyne language of academic neutrality and unbiased scholarship. But in reality it is little more than another doxxing platform, albeit one that takes steps to pretend it isn’t.

Campus Watch operates mainly by distorting professors’ scholarship to discredit their critiques of Israel. If a professor is recorded speaking on a webinar about the 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin in Palestine, for instance, Campus Watch—which denies its having taken place—will brand them liars. The aim of such attacks is not only to urge the removal of individuals from the academy, but also to discipline scholarship along nationalist lines. As Duke University professor Miriam Cooke writes, “It is the national culture of a newly conceived and symbolically unified nation-empire, and it is driving the kind of knowledge scholars, and particularly Middle East scholars, are expected to produce.” Campus Watch, she writes, has lobbied to dismantle Middle Eastern studies departments that do not toe this line, their major thrust of attack coming against the postcolonial scholarship exemplified by Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. Campus Watch alumnus Martin Kramer was a key architect and proponent of HR 3077, a (mercifully failed) bill that advocated that all area studies receiving funding under Title VI of the Higher Education Act be subject to external political scrutiny to ensure “diverse perspectives” on American foreign policy. And for years, Campus Watch targeted Columbia’s Middle Eastern, South Asia, and African Studies department as a “hotbed” of antisemitism. This is the same department that is currently under review as part of the school’s settlement with the Trump administration.

For many years, Campus Watch was content with simply bullying and intimidating academics speaking in support of Palestine and the universities that employed them (as well as serving as a repository for shoddy scholarship). But now, the project is taking responsibility for the detention of Georgetown postdoctoral fellow Badar Khan Suri after posting a dox piece on his connections to Hamas. Pipes went even further on X, directly linking his group’s “investigative” work to the arrival of masked DHS agents at Suri’s doorstep. “Thanks to her work,” Pipes wrote, referring to Anna Stanley, the producer of the doxxing article, “@DHSgov . . . arrested Suri and plans to deport him.”

More and more groups are cropping up. One of them, Betar—a revival of a century-old Jewish supremacist organization that has long used intimidation and violence—claimed responsibility for the abduction of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil in March. “Our research, our information, the massive amount of video and photos that we have gathered—we create our dossiers and our reports. We hand them over, we make recommendations,” a spokesperson told CNN. Another group, Shirion Collective, relies on AI-driven tools (specifically an Israeli-made one called Maccabee) to identify pro-Palestinian activists from photos or videos to dox them and make them into “liabilities.” So far, Shirion has also claimed responsibility for ICE’s pursuit of Khalil, posting on X that it sent a memorandum to the Department of Homeland Security on January 27 laying out the “legal basis” for his “detention and removal.” “We can confirm @canarymission, Shirion Collective’s Maccabee dataset, StopAntisemites, @terrorwatch613, and other intelligence archives are now inside the State Department and ICE!” the group declared triumphantly in March.

The word “doxxing” calls to mind a distinctly modern phenomenon: shadowy, anonymous actors scouring the internet for clues to one’s personal information. But the underlying methods behind doxxing date back centuries. The first targeted lists in North America might be the ones birthed by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a law signed by president Millard Fillmore that permitted the “return” of runaway slaves from the North back to the Southern states. The bill was ineffective without a means of enforcing it—a way for citizens to identify and keep track of the thousands of runaway slaves making their way from Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia. Enter the list. The names of runaways would appear in local Northern papers, described in unsparing detail—their physical traits, skills and trades, and nicknames exhaustively catalogued—along with reward sums for their delivery back to bondage. Over the years, and especially after the passage of the 1850 legislation, tens of thousands of runaway ads appeared in New World newspapers.

If their name appeared on a list, a fugitive would be hard-pressed to escape their bondage. “Slave catchers,” who earned their living from people’s capture and resale, headed up the campaigns. But every white citizen was expected to enroll in this project too, either by adding to the lists of runaways themselves or by keeping track of them when they appeared in local ads. Slave catching deputized vigilantes to maintain and produce the color line. Even with the eventual establishment of police agencies, white mobs worked and overlapped with law enforcement—an easy chance at collaboration, given that many police were also members of the Ku Klux Klan. In Making Freedom (2013), historian R. J. M. Blackett details how “a group of armed white men would attack the home of a black family while they slept, nab one of the occupants, place the person in a carriage, and race to the Maryland line to catch a train for Baltimore, where they hoped to—and many times did—sell the person to a slave trader.” An extraordinary rendition.

In Canada, during the country’s Residential School era, similar tactics were deployed for different state ends. Sifting through the Truth and Reconciliation archives, a set of records of the period made available to the public, historians have found numerous lists made of Indigenous children that have the power to abduct and imprison them. Each year, Indian Agents who worked for the Department of Indian Affairs made lists in cooperation with the religious orders that ran the schools, tallying the children to round up for removal. Names in hand, authorities would march into Indigenous communities and, as one student described, “[herd] the children onto buckboard trucks . . . or trains like cattle.” Once collected, children would disappear into these institutions for years—some of them never to be seen again—and subjected to horrendous physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. Their parents were under threat of imprisonment if they refused to give their children to the churches.

Those same churches also made lists of the runaways from the schools that the Canadian police were meant to retrieve. The RCMP played a central role in enforcing attendance, but truancy was also the responsibility of school principals and staff as well as Indian Agents and the Chief of a Band (Tribe) who were all deputized to enforce attendance. These partnerships between police, the Church, and the state terrorized Indigenous communities throughout the country. This pattern of colonization has continued for more than a century, with lists still at the center of the strategy to eliminate native land rights and culture. In 2020, for instance, when the Canadian government sought to construct a pipeline that would cut through miles of Indigenous land, it activated a list of Indigenous rights activists it labeled as “criminal threats.”

Perhaps the most well-known list in North America was the McCarthy blacklist, a piece of political theater that wrapped up thousands, including a significant proportion of Jews and Black socialists. What began as a federal loyalty program of reporting communists expanded into state and local workforces, and eventually to private employers and civilian snitching. Individuals on the blacklist were accused of being members of the Communist Party or vaguely and broadly defined “fellow travelers.” Used to prohibit employment in the private and public sectors, to deny veteran benefits, to reject applications for public housing, and to deny the issuance of passports, the blacklists cost people their livelihoods, their social standing, and their very right to reside in the United States.

There were no special police forces or mechanisms to conduct mock trials—just the ordinary institutions of government and members of a civil society that volunteered willingly to flush out commies. In fact, the McCarthy blacklist did not even require civil or criminal prosecution. It was public opinion that could deal the harshest blow to those suspected of “un-American” activities, ostracization alone that could sound the death knell for one’s career, especially when the accused had no opportunity to clear their names. Even when there were formal proceedings, as Mary Washington describes in her book The Other Blacklist, they could drag on for years. And more often than not, they targeted left groups identified as underlying threats to the state: in particular, Black civil rights movements that fought segregation, the Klu Klux Klan, racist violence, and Southern poverty.  

Following the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government saw an opportunity to expand and consolidate lists the FBI had been working on for years into a master “terror watchlist,” used to screen passports and visas, international air passenger travel, immigration applications, and to aid in FBI investigations. By February 2006 there were hundreds of thousands of names in the database, yet no officially published criteria for getting on it. This led to men like Maher Arar from Canada to be placed on a watchlist based on spurious “connections” to non-state parties designated as terrorists. Maher ended up in an extraordinary rendition to Syria where he was tortured for 10 months before finally being released. (A federal commission of inquiry cleared Arar of all wrongdoing.) The best encapsulation of the government’s post-9/11 goals came in a 2002 slogan trademarked by the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority: “If you see something, say something.” Ordinary people had now been officially enrolled in the state’s counterterrorism effort.

Vigilantes enforcing slave laws, churches reporting residential school runaways, McCarthy-era anticommunists: for centuries, the power to police the “national interest”—and the people who stand outside of it—has been readily dispensed to willing citizens. In this light, the Zionist doxxing groups eager to work hand-in-hand with the Trump administration’s immigration forces are less an aberration from the norm than a continuation of it: they are only the latest group to seize a set of reins that has long been ready at hand.

Each of these instances shares a common logic: to unify a national understanding of “the people” with the goals of the state, and therefore to define critics of those goals as less-than-citizens. Those who speak up for Palestine—or more recently, who speak out against Charlie Kirk—are linked to “terrorism,” simultaneously inventing and locating this violence outside the remit of civil society. In turn, the narrativization of danger justifies the suspension of due process. If someone was never a proper citizen in the first place, then the extralegal methods used to locate, identify, and remove them can be retroactively justified. (Already, we can see this logic at work in the witch hunts spurred by the Kirk assassination.)

The list both asks and answers a question: What danger do the people on these lists pose? And to whom? These stories shape how far people are willing to go in turning on their fellow citizens and neighbors. But there have always been other narratives available in times of oppression and crisis. Take the brave resistance in cities across America that has turned monitoring and surveillance back on ICE. Instead of lists of deportees, they keep neighbourhoods informed with lists of ICE vehicles on patrol on any given day so people can avoid them. And despite threats of prosecution by the Department of Justice to local officials resisting enforcement orders, take the courage of K-12 schoolteachers and administrations across the country. For instance, the Chicago schoolteachers have a policy to refuse to open their school doors to ICE. In New York City, the Panel for Education Policy passed a resolution to refuse entry to all federal law enforcement officials from school property. When ICE agents tried to get into elementary schools by claiming to do wellness checks, they were sent away. For teachers, there is one list: every single student in the school they committed to keeping safe.

Even Canary Mission is not immune to this kind of resistance. Reclaiming its list, people have proudly listed their politics on Against Canary Mission, celebrating their work promoting justice for Palestinians in North America and providing careful descriptions of their scholarship and research. Those who have been doxxed in Illinois are suing the group for harassment under the state’s anti-doxxing law, which protects people from having their personal information published without consent and with the intent to harass.

Even more to the point, people are refusing deputization—the axle upon which the doxxing machine’s gears turn. In 2018, the Committee on Academic Freedom Middle East Studies Association of North America released a resource for refusing Canary Mission’s advancements and infringements on academic freedom. While many universities have remained silent on this issue—or worse, offloaded responsibility for doxxing onto students and faculty—some university members have chosen not to meekly comply. When UC Berkeley shared the names of 160 faculty members with the Trump Administration for alleged antisemitism, a group of Jewish faculty at the university hit back with a letter that states, “Let there be no concessions, compromises, bargains, or capitulation. Not in our name.” The more universities, civil institutions, and ordinary citizens do the same—that is, the more they refuse to serve as conduits for a form of power that depends on them to function—the safer we will all be.

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